“All right! All right! I did go back there as a matter of fact. I didn’t want to go. In fact I tried bloody hard not to go. I spent night after bloody night fighting to keep it away. But it was too strong. It got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night, because I knew what was going to happen. I used pills to stay awake for three or four days, and then when the inevitable happened I didn’t have the strength left to resist it.” He turned to face Lee across the room. “You wouldn’t recognize the old place now: they’ve got penny arcades and fat lady shows, and hot-dog stands and end-of-pier comedy acts. It’s quite a tourist pull these days; you should get Ella to go down there with you for the bank holiday.”
“You’re scared, Cousins.” Lee stood up. “You live ankle deep in shit and you’re scared. I can smell it on you, even through all the booze.”
“And I don’t even owe you the time of day!”
He turned back to the window. Lee was at a loss. Swaying uneasily against the unlit fireplace, he rubbed his hand along the dusty mantelpiece, waiting for resolution to materialize out of nothing. Cousins nodded at the crumbling cottage across the yard. “She’s out there. I’ve seen her.”
Lee stepped across to the window. He could see nothing.
“Who? Who are you talking about? Ella?”
“Noooo,” waving a finger at the dereliction. “Not Ella. Her.”
“There’s nothing. Nothing.”
“Did you see that? Did you see that light there—just a flicker. You couldn’t have missed it. Did you see it?”
Cousins’s gluey eyes were pressed against the window. He stank. Lee stepped back, looked around at the filth and debris of the room, wondered what he was doing there. There was no trace of light in the other cottage. He had had enough.
“To hell with it. I didn’t see anything. And I’m going. I shouldn’t even have come.”
It was as if a spell had been lifted. He was appalled that he had allowed Ella to pack him off on this fool’s errand. This confrontation disgusted him. But what really vexed him was not that Brad was a sot but that there was something about Brad’s slither into alcoholic slush that was only superficially different to his own dash for stiff conformity. Both of them were casualties—Ella’s word for it: men whose souls leaked through the corrosion which followed brilliant dreaming.
Now Ella had got him scurrying down here rattling chains and locks that were turning to dust in his hands. He felt alone, he wanted his neat home, his hermetically sealed box, wanted not to be confronted with this degenerate version of himself where the only distinction between them was a full set of buttons and a splash of cologne.
“You can… put your head down here for the night…” Cousins said, suddenly sheepish.
“What?” A mirthless laugh. “Is that a funny? Thanks, old friend, but no thanks. I’ll take my chances of roughing it at The Plough, back down the road.”
Back behind the steering wheel, he turned his headlamps up full on the derelict cottage. He had let Cousins spook him. He could still see him watching from the window. Turning the car around rapidly he drove back on to the road, switching on the wireless for the comfort of a Radio 4 voice.
At the Plough, with barely more customers than staff, he had no difficulty in getting accommodation for the night. He was shown to a room with an uneven floor and heavy Victorian furniture. Before turning in, he opened a window and looked out across the moonless, starless valley, wondering why he had bothered to come, but already knowing the answer. In the comfortable bed he fell into a fitful sleep; a seamless patchwork of dreams crossing easily from past to present and back again to the past.
PART TWO
April 1974
ONE
Remember not the sins and offences of my youth.
LUCID DREAMERS
Lucid dreamers are subjects who, while dreaming, are also capable of becoming aware that they are dreaming and in certain cases capable of controlling the direction of their dreams. Volunteers who have experienced this phenomenon are required to participate in practical research experiments under the supervision of the Department of Psychology.
The poster, hand-written in bold red marker pen, was displayed in the main university concourse, and Lee was pretending to read it. He was pretending to read it so that he could stand next to Ella, the girl with the spray-on blue jeans. She was also studying the poster, and he had to strain to hear the words she was speaking to her friend. Lee stood close enough to take in her scent of patchouli, baby soap, unruly pheromones and warm apple-blossom skin. He had spotted her once before, in the university library. He’d been dozing over his reading, and his first sight of her had been enough to make him leave tooth marks in De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater. How was anyone expected to study? So when he’d seen her here he’d had to go and stand behind her. He still hadn’t thought of anything sparkling to say, when she turned from the poster and walked right into him.
“Sorry,” he said. It was his best line.
But she and her friend had gone, leaving Lee defeated and slumped against the noticeboard. When he recovered he was able to read the poster for himself. He thought he was probably not a lucid dreamer (whatever animal that might be), but he had heard Ella saying that she was going and guessed that he could always do a good job of pretending; at least until he was found out, or for as long as it took to get on coffee-bar terms with Ella, whichever came first.
So why not? He set off across the university lawns. Spring was on him like a drug, as if the air was full of music, there until you tried to stop and make it out. Spring in the air, like the confirmation of a rumour.
Lee arrived at the small seminar room in a state of high anticipation. About a dozen people, none of whom he knew, sat around in a rough circle. Ella wasn’t there. They sat whispering to each other while on one isolated chair, hands folded on his lap and gazing with expressionless interest at the floor, sat the Head of the Department of Psychology, Professor L. P. Burns.
Now nearing retirement, Burns had led a distinguished but unspectacular academic career, making a number of suitably perplexing contributions to educational psychology and parapsychology, although he always maintained that the latter interest ranked only as a hobby. He wore a drab mottled green suit. His hair was thin and his skin stretched like parchment across his face, but his eyes were alert, and the angular characteristic of his features dissolved easily when he smiled.
Lee was already thinking about how he could get out of this when the professor suddenly spoke as if he were addressing a full lecture theatre. “It is some five minutes after the appointed time. I don’t think we are going to be joined by many more, given that we compete with the thousand and one delights offered by the university on such a spring evening, so we will make a start. But even as I speak I see I am to be contradicted. Come in, ladies, do come in.”
Two girls hovered doubtfully behind the open door—Ella and her companion. They stepped into the room. Ella wore a black beret and black tights, and took a seat opposite Lee, crossing her legs as she sat down. Lee crossed his.
“Excellent,” declared the professor, passing a list around the circle for everyone to sign. “This is almost a better turn-out than I get at my lectures.” A polite titter went around the circle.
“Are any of you psychology students? I don’t recognize anyone.” If any of them were, they didn’t own up.