I pointed over to it.
“Why are you pointing over to that dog? I thought you wanted to hear more about my dreams?”
“It’s a fox … It’s not a dog …”
“Yes it is. It’s clearly a dog.”
The fox continued to look for food, oblivious to us both watching it on the other side of the canal. It was definitely a fox. I wasn’t sure why she thought it was a dog. I never asked her. My hands were trembling. I wanted to put them on her thighs; I wanted to hold her. I felt foolish, like I was in some sort of dream, or caught up in some sick prank.
“You know, aside from my dreams … These modern suicide bombers are the dark side of the moon. We can never truly see them, be them, understand them … Yet they are constantly with us, only ever surfacing when the time is right. It’s funny.”
“What is?”
“Sometimes their actions are my dreams — their actions have been exiled into my unreality, my world beyond.”
“Tell me about your dreams, about them, what happens in them?”
“I’m turned on, of course … Is that what you want to hear?”
“No … You’re turned on by what they do? By their actions?”
“Just by them. They are in a room with me and I am watching them bathe and wash and prepare … I watch them as they calmly pack everything they need. I touch them, stroke their skin. I wake up every time, distressed, the sweat dripping from me, my heart beating. This dream returns to me over and over again … I cannot stop it …”
I was finding it hard to control myself as her warm breath caressed my neck, under my right ear.
I’ve never been able to fully remember my dreams. In fact, I was always jealous of those that could, to such an extent I would make mine up so I could be like those people who tell you their interesting and meaningful imaginings from the previous night. If I did remember my dreams they were usually images of random colours, roads, faces, sounds, and feelings. Nothing was ever coherent enough to piece together into a narrative. Over the years I began to accept these fragments as pieces of me that didn’t need to be unravelled, or put back together to form a whole. The whole doesn’t exist. I rather like them, my dreams, as they are: meaningless and nonsensical. I must have had dreams about people along the way. Private dreams. Dreams that I would never tell a soul. It must have happened to me, but I can’t remember any of them. Even the embarrassing dreams of my teenage years have left no mark upon me — it’s like they never existed.
A couple of years ago I got talking to a stranger in a pub on Kingsland Road. He had just sat himself down next to me. At first, I felt extremely uncomfortable, but his presence soon began to calm me down. I had had a busy day at work and I was trying to relax with a warm pint of Guinness. At first he pulled out a book from his bag and began to read — I have no idea what this book was, but it was thick, with a very light blue cover, possibly of clouds. Thinking back it was his movements when reading that annoyed me — the pauses, the hand on his chin, and the slight nods of the head — and I was quite relieved when he actually put down his book and began to speak to me. He had a northern accent, although it was soft and lilting and not as abrupt and thick as they can sometimes be.
“One of those days.”
I glanced up from my pint of Guinness and feigned a knowing smile in the hope that that would be the end of it.
“I said, one of those days …”
“Oh … Yes … I suppose so …”
“I’ve given up …”
“Oh … Given up what?”
“Everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes. I’ve given the whole lot away.”
“What do you mean?”
“My possessions. Best thing I ever did. The greatest day of my life was the day I gave away my car …”
“You gave it away?”
“Yes, to a friend. I’d had enough of it. I wanted myself back … my life back.”
“Sounds like a good plan.”
“All my life I have had this recurring dream …”
“Really?”
“I am alone on an island in the sun. Not even the wind to keep me company. When I was a child I used to wake up in cold sweats from this dream. But as I got older it began to make sense. It got to the point that I would lie in bed hoping that I would soon drift off to that island. And when I did I never wanted to wake up again. Waking up was just another disappointment … And now …”
“And now what?”
“And now I spend all day thinking about that island. It’s all I think about. It has taken me over.”
I wanted to be on that island, too — but not alone. I wanted to be on that island with her. Nothing would be able to interrupt us. She wouldn’t have those dreams. She wouldn’t have those thoughts. We’d exist together in sheer, unadulterated bliss.
Boredom would be ours.
She had stopped talking and was, again, staring straight ahead towards the whitewashed office block. In the silence, something about her gaze made me suspicious; I wasn’t sure she had been telling the truth. It felt like she had been testing me, like I was her little pupil or something. It felt like she was revealing something to me for the very first time — something that had not yet happened, something that was obvious to her, but not yet to me. Maybe I had misheard everything she had told me? Maybe I didn’t understand? The things she had said to me unnerved me; such things aren’t normal. At least, I didn’t think they were. But she spoke with such conviction, such vim, such heartfelt emotion that even if it was a lie, a test, I didn’t care. I wanted to keep listening to her, by the canal, on the bench. It was like I was envisaging some present that could only be found in a future that could never exist … a future that was being reinvented by her.
I used to think about the future a lot: what it would be like, what we would be doing, what everything would look like. I used to ask anyone who would listen: what do you think the future will be like? They almost always mentioned space travel and exploration in their not too dissimilar answers; technology, computers, micro-thin TVs and other extensions of ourselves. It seemed to me the future had already been mapped out by us, like it had been invented by us, for us, that we already had a clear idea about what it was going to be like. Yet when she spoke to me that day, on the bench, it felt like something had happened, like a new future had be revealed to me, there on the bench beside the towpath and the murky water, the coots, the two swans, and the office workers. It felt like only she knew what was going to happen, what it was going to be like for us. She didn’t look in the least bit surprised when I asked her what she thought the future was going to be like. It’s funny, I may have imagined it, but I am certain the faintest flicker of a smile crept onto her face, a faint curl of the top lip as she turned her face towards mine. I had to ask her.
“What do you think it will be like?”
“The future?”
“Yes, the future … What do you think it will be like?”
“Well, it all depends on what you mean by the ‘future.’ ”
“I mean exactly that … the future … Everything that is ahead of us. What do you think it will be like?”
“It’ll be just like it is now, only things will look different.”
“What do you mean?”
“Just that. Nothing more.”
She turned back to the whitewashed office block across the murky water. The canal became silent apart from a police helicopter hovering over the city towards Moorgate, hanging in the air like a dragonfly over a dead rat.