Discordant sounds frayed Caleb's nerves and a harsh chorus of jeers echoed from the far end of the bar. He realized Polly wasn't really listening to what he was saying. Her attention was elsewhere; on the football match playing on the big screen television, or maybe on the people gathered in front of it. As if sensing his scrutiny, she returned her gaze to him and said, "I'm sorry, Cale. It's just that I thought we could, you know, talk about something else."
"Something else?"
She sighed. "We don't often get the chance to go out for a night. We've both been under a lot of strain lately, I thought it would do us good to be alone together."
Caleb frowned, frustrated at what he perceived as a lack of concern. "You don't think we owe it to Jack to —»
"Please don't play the guilt thing on me," she snapped. "Of course I'm concerned, but Jesus Christ, Cale, we just have to be patient."
"I think we should take him to see a specialist."
"If they continue, yes, maybe we should take him back to Dr Morgan and get him to refer Jack to someone. But just for tonight, can't we talk about something else?"
It was a reasonable request, he knew. Jack's problem had taken its toll on them both. And yet, he was wary of looking away. "All right," he said. "Let me just say something, then we'll talk about whatever you want."
Polly's lips tightened and she leaned back in her seat, away from him.
"The common thing is a stranger," Caleb said. "Think about what that means. For a kid it signifies danger, right? What are kids told all the time? Be wary of strangers, and this is drummed into their unconscious." He spoke quickly, trying to flesh out his still sketchy interpretation, how Jack's fear of strangers was manifesting itself in his dreams as someone coming to kidnap him.
Stories were in the papers and on the TV about kids being abducted and murdered. That young girl found strangled in the woods outside Cardiff a couple of months ago, and more recently, the teenage boy whose naked body was found beaten to death on the sands along Swansea foreshore. Kids weren't impervious to things like that, he said. They made connections, even if they weren't conscious of doing so. In bad dreams, the most irrational things became real.
Polly finished her bottle of Corona. She tried to sound reasonable but Caleb could hear the frustration in her voice. "It's not that what you're saying isn't plausible, Cale. Maybe it is, I don't know. I'll read up on it. But I think you're becoming obsessed with this. What chance has Jack got of forgetting the bloody dreams if you keep on about them?"
"Ignoring it isn't going to make it stop."
"It sounds to me like you don't want them to."
"Shit, Polly, what the hell is that supposed to mean?"
She got up from her seat. "I want to go," she said. "I can't talk about this anymore."
Caleb grabbed her arm and said, "This is Jack we're talking about."
She pulled her arm free. "No it isn't. It's you." She hurried from the bar.
He sat there for a few moments, immobilized by panic and fear. How could she not sense the threat to their son? Slowly, his panic subsided and he followed her out onto the street. He saw her crossing the main road to the car park. A mild rain was falling and the lights of Mumbles flickered on the dark bay like fragile memories. Caleb felt alone as he walked after her, distanced from everything he held dear. How does a man get back what he's lost, he wondered, puzzled at the question. He wasn't even sure what he had lost. Some memory, or maybe some part of his self-belief.
Anna, the babysitter, was watching The O.C. when they got home. Jack was fine, she said. Not a peep since she'd put him to bed at nine. Polly asked Caleb to check on him while she ran Anna home.
Alone, Caleb headed upstairs. A wave of relief swept through him when he saw Jack was sleeping soundly. The muscles in his legs quivered, and fearing he would collapse, he went and sat on the edge of his son's bed.
Wan light edged into the room through the open door, falling on Jack's slippers and a couple of Play Station games at the foot of the bed. A Manchester United poster was on the wall over Jack's head, and other posters around the room depicted Bart Simpson and scenes from the Harry Potter movies. Caleb felt a surge of tenderness. The sight of The Wind in the Willows on the night table filled him with sadness and a deep sense of regret.
I'm sorry, Jack, he thought, as he stood up to leave. The boy stirred and rolled onto his back. Caleb's breath caught when he saw Jack's eyelids were flickering crazily. His lips moved as if he were trying to speak, but no words came out, only the muted sibilance of dreams. "Jack," Caleb said, but the sound was less than a whisper.
He turned, saw the small armchair beneath the dormer window. He pulled it a little closer to the bed and sat in it. Jack continued to make soft, indecipherable noises on the bed, one hand above the sheet, the fist clenching and unclenching.
Caleb wondered what his son was seeing. He tried to will himself inside Jack's head, to witness the slow unfurling terror. "Stay with it, Jack," he said to himself. "Be strong."
Jack began to toss and turn on the bed, his legs kicking sporadically beneath the sheets. His voice grew louder, but Caleb was still unable to recognize the sounds as words.
His movements became more agitated, more violent. Caleb leaned forward in the chair, peering intently at his son. He anticipated some kind of revelation, as long as he didn't weaken and let his attention falter. That was the mistake he had been making, he realized, as Jack started to scream. Waking the boy too soon. Have to let him go further into it, see what he needed to see. Maybe then it would end. Recalling it in the daylight hours, his reason would overcome the nebulous fear.
Jack was writhing now, his lips pulled back in a rictus grin as scream after scream tore from his throat. As awful as it was, Caleb felt he had to let it go on, for Jack's sake, he told himself, his vision blurring through tears.
The only problem was Polly, standing in the doorway, screaming at him to make it stop. He tried to explain what was happening, but it was no good. She ran to the bed, gathered Jack up into her arms, and carried him from the room. Caleb sat there, appalled at what he had done. At what he had failed to do. The terror wasn't Jack's alone, he felt. It was his nightmare too.
Throughout the day Caleb struggled with his fears, barely able to keep his mind focused on his students. Their demands oppressed him, their need for reassurance wore him down. He grew more irritable and short-tempered, so that for the final session of the day, forewarned by the morning's students, fewer than half the afternoon group turned up. Afterwards, he sat alone for an hour in his office, trying to make sense of what was happening to him.
The persistence of Jack's nightmare scared him and his need to make sense of it had become an obsession. He had come to feel connected to it in some way, to believe that the key to deciphering it lay somewhere in his own past.
All day he'd dredged his subterranean memories but had come up empty. As he left the building after 6:00pm, he wondered if in fact he was afraid to probe too deeply. Maybe there was something there he wasn't ready to deal with, some secret he didn't want to discover about himself.
He stopped in the Joiner's Arms on the way home, but found neither relief nor pleasure in the two pints of Three Cliffs Gold he drank, nor in the company of the few regulars who acknowledged his presence but who, faced with his patent desire for isolation, left him to his fretful ponderings.
Jack was watching TV in the living room when Caleb got home. He glanced in at his son then walked by the door and on through to the kitchen. Polly was reading a book at the kitchen table, sipping a glass of red wine. She looked up as he came in and managed an uneven smile. "You okay?" she said.