At school he spoke to the children about patriotism, and the comfortable virtue of loving your country. The English could not conceive of anyone born there wanting to destroy its tolerant sanctity, so it was a perfect arena for the oppressed to do their work in. The children listened quietly to his sermons because it was the only time he went into a rage if they disturbed him.
While he spoke he believed ardently, otherwise how could they? But when he went into action for the Cause he was equally in thrall, and had neither tears nor audience for that. He became part of a plan on receipt of a coded message, kept to it no matter how circumstances might turn against him, decisions from Brigade HQ seeming to have been his own.
Fate got him moving, luck pushed him through. He drifted along so as not to interfere with the issues his subconscious laid out, his subconscious being more familiar with the unadulterated simplicities of life. Trusting his subconscious was a way of testing himself, controlling a mind that might otherwise be careless, the one-time sloppy faculties that had led him in a pub to mouth the sentimental fact that he was proud of having had an Irish grandmother.
His wife joked about it when he told her, but he always took seriously what others laughed at. Two years later she fled for ever from the tight-packed darkness of his aura, a flight he had known to be inevitable because with her, after the first few months of telling their dreams, it had become as if every day they met for the first time, unable to reach that second day of familiar relaxation, though he had never stopped hoping it would become possible.
If they had attained that phase, and then split, he might have been less tormented by her memory. Or maybe not. He knew nothing except that he had never been able to replace anguish by love and peace, survival in such a situation being the hardest of all to achieve. His senses became vague, he was unable to think clearly, and he only felt alive when motoring to a rendezvous in some lethal vehicle, thankful of his offhand remark in the pub when he wasn’t to know that McGuinness stood by his elbow and would later talk to him about it.
Momentous events happen whether you want them to or not, for why else would you get into something so thoughtlessly? You could betray your mother, but not the grandmother whom you had never known, and who propelled you towards your destiny. A wonderful concept — destiny. Who would be born without one? There was no other way to explain such action except to say that you must have been born with one, and given such thoughts by the purity of white fleeing towards his windscreen and obliterating names on the signposts.
Maybe they would give him a few words of thanks, as if to a soldier like the rest of them, after he had struggled through, though there was no danger as long as he followed the map photocopied into his brain. The aptitudes required for the Cause fell into place and never abandoned him, and he was a harder man than to need praise, which was for children, as well he knew, just as hurry was for idiots. Intelligence must keep the passionate conviction under control, and you altered the course of history by combining the patience of the snail with the cunning of the fox.
Two cars had collided, tank traps to his direction, half obscured by steam and smoke from metal entrails. One driver battled with the steering to disentangle. Spinning wheels dug into the ruts, and help was needed to push.
Hearing shouts above the noise of his engine, he eased through the gap. At top speed the wiper blades performed too slowly to beat the blizzard-and-a-half, if ever he saw one, but he spat a curse at the pinkboned menacing fist in his rear mirror, and saw his way onwards. They could not know their luck, because any fool rounding the bend at fifty into the back of his van could send all of them heavenwards.
The engine laboured at thirty miles an hour, lace-curtain flakes descending, the air so fudged he got a window down and a towel of cold air lapped his cheek. A long pull of breath cleaned his lungs, but the damp chill set him shutting it out. To jack up speed would be to show a panic which was not part of him. As long as the tyres bit and the wipers went he would soon make up time.
He remembered childhood pictures, they were printed on the myriad snowflakes before being swept off the windscreen. His father came home from clerk’s work at the bank and talked to his mother while six-year-old Daniel played on the floor with a long-armed crane, swinging the hook over redcoated soldiers on the crenellations of a wooden fort. His mother was crying, mutely so that he might not notice, and he didn’t see his father again because he was sent to prison for taking other people’s money. Then Daniel and his mother lived in rooms where there were no new toys because she worked in a shop and saved all the pennies so that he would stay at school and one day go to training college.
She stopped him playing with scabby street kids, and drummed him through one exam after another, treating him as harshly as if he were his father. Or she coddled him because he was part of herself and she wanted him to work where no temptation could ruin him, a pendulum which robbed him of knowing who he was till after she was dead from cancer at fifty.
Then came his marriage, at the beginning of which his wife told him that if you didn’t dream you had no spiritual life, implying that you were an inferior person, and he loved her so much that even though he hardly ever dreamed (except for one terrible recurring nightmare which he would never be able to describe to anyone) he decided to make up dreams rather than have her think so little of him, so that at breakfast he would say: ‘I dreamed I was smoking a big Havana cigar all night.’ Or: ‘I dreamed rain was pouring through the roof and saturating packets of banknotes.’ Or: ‘I went out to the car because I was being chased, and all the tyres were flat.’ Or: ‘I was walking through a forest on fire and didn’t get hurt.’
‘It’s good you’ve started dreaming,’ she said. ‘I’m getting to know you a bit more.’ Her dreams were no more or less vivid than the ones he fabricated, so that he wondered whether she wasn’t making them up as welclass="underline" ‘I dreamed I met a tiger in a wheatfield and it chased me across a railway line where a train nearly ran over me.’ Or: ‘I was at a circus and an ape escaped from its cage and turned into a woman in tights, and then the tent fell in.’ Or: ‘I was in an aeroplane and the pilot said I am now going to peel off the roof so that you can see the stars.’ She had one every morning, and he felt it a matter of honour to match them. When he ran out of dreams and used some of the early ones again, with slight variations, she didn’t seem to notice. ‘You have a rich dream life,’ she said. ‘That’s nice.’
‘It’s only since I married you. You’ve done me a lot of good.’ He kept a notebook at school in which to put down any ideas for dreams which came to him, tried to concoct one a day, but on good days made up two or three. The ‘Dreambook’ stayed in his desk because it would never do for Evelyn to find it, though if she did he would explain that they were notes of dreams he’d already told her, and he had written about them because — ‘and forgive my vanity in saying this — I find them very interesting.’
But he still couldn’t remember the dreams she really wanted to hear about, because they were the totally uncontrollable sort that controlled him, which vanished back into the swamp of his subconscious on opening his eyes every morning.
After a few months the stream of his imagination ran dry, and Evelyn also lapsed in the telling of her dreams — for reasons unknown to either of them. With little else to talk about, the marriage deteriorated into a contest of mutual insult and spite, and when that phase burned itself out there was nothing to hold them together.