Nemonymous Night (4 page)

Mike’s office was only round the corner whence he had just turned. It was an Advertising Agency with some really creative people—but Mike worked in Administration and only allowed creative jobs from time to time. One would never have known it was an Advertising Agency, because the building was a plain Sixties-built tower block with nothing to recommend it. It wasn’t like that open-walled Eastern European market that plagued Mike’s dreams as his real workplace but one he could never find afterwards. He wasn’t paid much—hence the need to work overtime, as he had tonight. He shivered as the rain set in—and he wished he had caught the bus despite the vision of the freshly topped one that had disappeared from his memory by placing a street corner between it and him.

*

That evening, Mike returned to their home. It wasn’t the top flat that some people dreamed about—with all those feelings of forbiddingness and sexual peccadilloes that shouldn’t be entertained. It was the same flat, perhaps, as the one in the dreams—but now with redecoration apparent, nicer fillings and a slightly better position in the building, and a slightly better building itself.

“It’s been a helluva day,” said Mike. “Did you hear about the incident on the underground?”

Susan nodded as she placed his dinner on the table. He was red-faced from climbing the stairs from floor to floor (the lift being left unattended if not out of order)—and she was red-faced from the stove. They were apparently in their middle years, not yet having reached the bruised look that old age had in store for them, given a glimpse into the future. They had lost the youthful sparkle and any body-hair was tarnished with discolour or no colour at all. Mike was—and, probably, still is—a forthright man, but kept his distance and downplayed any passions. Susan, equally, but her eyes often sparked with anger for some, and anguish for others.

“Yes, terrible wasn’t it?” she said as she sat down. The wireless played softly from the kitchen as she had forgotten to switch it off.

“That station that looks like an open market, round the corner from the office…”

She nodded, having previously heard Mike’s description of it, although she never visited Mike in the area where he worked. Sometimes, she wondered if his description of it was the result of a dream, and it was merely a coincidence that it fitted in with the news report she had heard on the wireless.

“Well, when they started coming out the sides from under the roof... they were covered in blood. Even the walking wounded were terribly bloody, as if they should have been on stretchers. Soon, it was a whole army of them. We did what we could, till the ambulances arrived.”

A crimson infantry, was not an expression that came easily.

“Did the air ambulance come?” Susan asked.

“At least one did but the roads are so narrow round there for landing. Its rotors were inches away from the office’s back wall—and actually sliced through the open empty edges of the station itself.”

Coincidentally, last night, he had had a dream of being flown in a helicopter. It was unclear now but he had not before been in one in real life, but it was just as he imagined it. He was normally afraid of flying and, in his dream, the dreamer vaguely recalled this fear from real life... as the helicopter slanted close to some trees, almost entering amongst their branches—and he fully expected it to crash, but it landed in the grounds of some Italian Villa.

The air ambulance, that day, near his office, had also looked precarious as it landed between the buildings and really huge compared to its air size.

“They took away some of the wounded but I couldn’t see how they decided which patients would go by air and which by road.”

“First come, first served,” she suggested.

*

Later that night, Mike lay awake trying to imagine sleep away whilst sleep itself imagined him awake. He got up for a sluice; and saw that the floorboards in their living-room were bare. The floor itself was several floors up but, tonight, the instinct was different. They were very close to the ground without even space for ratruns or airflows. This was no dream. It was so real.

He wondered if a burglar had stolen the carpet. But why? All the furniture was still in place.

He found himself delving into the wood of the floor as if he had found an opening in human flesh—a natural vent, rather than one he had forced open with his fingers.

That babies were to emerge, one by one, not twins, but multi-aged siblings, did not occur to him until he discovered himself delivering them... through the floor. The ground was speaking by giving birth. Thinking, too. And he felt its thoughts as if they were his own thoughts.

*

When Mike and Susan suddenly found themselves with children, they thought they had always had children... ones named Amy and Arthur... hauled to the surface from the coal-face of the world’s creation.

Mike listened to their crying from the cots in another room. Susan was off working in Ogdon’s pub. Mike had never visited the pub because he didn’t really want to see the conditions of her work... he’d feel guilty. Working in an open-air market was far below his own original ambitions as a child. He had the ability to get a far higher paid job, even it were in an office. Once his creative abilities had almost allowed him to secure quite a high position in an Advertising Agency. His CV had let him down however and allowed someone else (similar to him) through the back door, leaving Mike with a destiny he would not normally have chosen.

Tears came to his eyes as he looked back at the various paths he could have picked on... chipping away at the cornerstones of Fate so he could make the turning towards the goal he had once set himself.

In the distance, he heard the lonely sound of a helicopter—vanes clacking lugubriously—followed by the equally lonely drone of an air-liner as it passed empty over the city. It was the deep echo that made it sound empty.

Air-liner? Hmmm. He laughed.

Susan wouldn’t be home for some time. Pubs had funny hours these days. No licensing restrictions—and Susan mainly served the night people.

*

Arthur remembered his father, with tears, too. None of the families at this stage in their trees could recall the names of forebears, none of which were written down. Nobody cared to dig into the past to find their roots. That had grown deeply unfashionable with the genealogical obsessions fizzling out into inexplicable mass suicides. Such family research was now banned, naturally.

Arthur looked across at his wife Amy. A mere coincidence that it was his wife because having sisters was not a recognised relationship any more, following the genealogical obsessions. Arthur’s hands were covered in his own tears as they had brought his fingers too carelessly near his streaming eyes. He felt utterly nemonymous.

*

Mike woke from a dream. This had been a real dream. Others had not been dreams. They had been visions thrust upon him by some narrative trickery with a wild weirdmonger trying to force him down byways which his destiny had no right to encompass.

Mike knew a real dream from a false dream. The former often contained words he’d never use, words he didn’t understand. Or was it the other way? Distinction was clear, if not the terms of the distinction.

He straightened the direction-finder of his reality, although this was a subconscious act as he shrugged off any aberrant forces working on him. He was a worker, a drone. He worked in a hive. He laughed. He worked at an Advertising Agency, he had a lovely wife, two lovely kids and plenty of money—and lived on the ground floor of a palatial block of flats on the edge of the city. His wife was homemaker. This was the truth. All else was dream and subterfuge. The compass point pointed steadily at it.

Until the next time.

*

The ceiling was quite ordinary, plain white, with a central rose whence the electric flex dangled towards its own pendant lampshade and bulb. In ancient days, before ceilings were invented, they would have had strange beliefs about ceilings, no doubt. That they were ghosts in disguise would have been the strongest and strangest. Some even believe that today.

John Ogdon—landlord of the pub where Susan worked—was dreaming of over-flying his own pub in a helicopter, except the roof was hidden by the large overhanging buildings in the same street. Either warehouses or tall covered markets, the dream didn’t allow him to remember. He did remember, however, another dream when he was at a family dinner, believing himself to be one of the adults, so it was quite a surprise to find himself placed with the children on a lower table adjacent to the main table. It was only later he had lost touch with himself and, after a period of being literally a down-and-out, had struck a patch of good luck and been given the job of managing a downtrodden pub in the city.

He thought he saw his old friend Crazy Lope, a tiny figure negotiating the ratruns and back doubles: and at this time of day it was not surprising that he was one of very few individuals en route between two ends of their own business... hardly a time to be
idly
wandering, Ogdon thought, as his dream helicopter banked and disappeared further into the dark horizon of his sleep.

*

There was some kind of race through the house, but it was unclear who was racing whom and whether it was me or him or her or us or you being chased—but certain was it that the house was a palatial one or rather a large stately house through the ornate rooms of which visitors would normally be guided. All I knew (if it
was
me) was that I seemed to possess far more stamina than I expected myself to possess at my age—
and
nimbleness. As the painting-hung walls sped past, I managed to keep well ahead of my pursuers, negotiating the various corridors and, even, the ups and downs of trapdoors, oubliettes and attics. Yet most of these areas were well lit and it remains unclear (even today) whether the race was in earnest, life and death, or merely a game.

The helicopter hovered about the country house, it seemed, for hours, hanging from the white ceiling that was the sunless sky. It was reconnoitring or spying for forces that remain mysterious until this very day. At points, one could even just discern the goggled pilot sitting stiffly in his bulb.

*

John Ogdon looked up from his paper, as Susan walked into the bar for her turn of night duty. Despite his down-to-earth occupation (
if
supplying processed alcohol via a pub was indeed down-to-earth rather than spiritual by intoxication), he had been day-dreaming about floating above the sparkling sea in the early morning, upside down in a helicopter or balloon (more likely the latter as there seemed to be no noise) where the scintillating waves’ expanse between four identical wall-to-wall horizons was a ceiling or watery underside of some far firmer roof beyond it. Day-dreaming was quite different from doing it during the night. Less control.

Ogdon shrugged. He needed to get back to the state of the bar’s surface—preparing himself to get his own hands dirty. The pub’s cleaner was missing—hauled off to attend to some personal morbidity, apparently. He laughed at his own turn of phrase. He would also need to persuade Susan (officially a barmaid) to get stuck in.

“How’s Mike?” Ogdon’s voice failed to disguise his own irritation at the happenings of the day. The inner laughter at the wordy surrealism of his mood was already wearing off. His face looked more like a policeman’s than a pub landlord’s. His stomach flatter than that of his own caricature.

“OK. But the roof’s leaking. That’s why I’m a bit late.” Susan never questioned her own state. Life was to be accepted, whatever what. She was half attractive, half determined to accentuate the other half.

“Children?”

Susan had to think for a moment. Life sometimes took you by surprise, even with its own ingrained acceptance of fixtures and habits. How could one forget one’s own children? It was their bedroom that was leaking.

“A bit damp.” She laughed.

Without explaining her quip—but, depending on previous information she had given Ogdon, she looked out of the pub window before embarking on the cleaning which she didn’t really need to be told to do.

She caught a glimpse of a figure of a caped man disappearing into the black backdrop of a huge liner in Dry Dock, as if he had nearly been caught ear-wigging their conversation. The cranes on the liner and its gantries reminded her more of an old-fashioned coal mine where chains hauled up and down the man lifts. She knew it wasn’t that, but it seemed more appropriate that it should be. She heard the distant clanging of heavy-duty engineering—and she wondered, perhaps for the first time, how the liner had been transported here (so far from the river or the sea) and for what reason. This area had, she knew, been the site of a Dry Dock for several generations.

*

Tonight, Susan’s sister was coming in together with her husband, Susan’s brother-in-law, but at the moment there was just one solitary pub regular talking about a dream he had had the previous night. He was talking to himself, in truth, but Susan pretended to listen to enable him to believe that he was not just talking to himself, although he was.

“I was part of a crowd coming into the pub—a special rough cider was being offered at cheap price from a wooden cask. I wasn’t me in the dream but someone else. Good job as I don’t usually like cider and even though it was just a dream, I could really feel the bits of real apple with my tongue…”

Susan nodded as she proceeded to polish the bar, ready for the 2 a.m. rush. Why there was always a rush at that time was mysterious. Probably because various parties threw out their guests roughly at that time.

The regular nodded, too, as in agreement. He was not invited to the parties in the first place.

It was at this point that Susan’s brother-in-law swaggered into the bar.

“The road’s hairy!” he shouted, as if his sister-in-law would understand.

“Where’s Beth?” she asked anxiously.

“Oh, following on—she’s got a loose hair to clip back into place,” he announced sarcastically: his way of saying she had gone straight to the loo.

“Hairy road?” queried Ogdon from the other side of the bar, where he was emptying the fruit machine.