dreaming of you

Dr Fleming wiry frame always seemed to fit comfortably around his open neck shirt and loafers although I supposed he was getting older; set in his ways. His balding head bobbled up and down like his Adam’s apple, on his thin neck, as he made point after point, emphasising each with a wag of his finger, as if he was conducting my life. He would not allow self-pity. That was for the weak. The cowardly even.

‘I’m in the car,’ I tell him, ‘Robbie is in the seat next to me. I know we’re going to crash, but he won’t listen to me. He just turns the music up, and makes that face he makes, that means you’re a grump, and I’m not listening. And it’s that song, Perfect Day. I can’t move to turn it off, and then I can no longer speak. The car behind us has shot over two lanes to get in front, but there is nowhere to go. I can see the boy’s laughing faces, passing by, mocking us, in that triumphant adolescent way, before their front wheel hits and locks against ours.’

‘Look, you’ve been through a lot,’ said Dr Fleming. He is looking at me, and over my head at the clock behind him. ‘It’s not just your physical injuries…’

Dr Fleming let’s that trail off, whether to sympathise, or allude to me being over the allocated time, I m not sure. But there is no one else. ‘It’s not just that,’ I can’t help sounding exasperated, and my voice is choked off, balanced between crying and not crying. ‘I’m lying in my bed. The bedroom window is open, even though I know I closed it. And the photo of Robbie, smiling over my shoulder, is sitting on our dressing table, even though I’ve put it in the bottom drawer, underneath his socks. He’s saying something to me, but I can’t hear what it is. Then there’s a sound like a wood saw and my heart starts racing and I try to get up, but can’t move. And it’s always the same. This thing comes and sits on the end of my bed. I can’t see it. But I know it’s watching me. And I want to get up, but I can’t move…’

I jumped when the phone rang.

'Excuse me,' said Dr Fleming, turning away and holding his hand over the receiver, as if that screened what he was saying.

I knew it was Mattie Holland, his receptionist. She was young enough to be his granddaughter.

‘Sorry,’ he said, almost looking shamefaced, ‘where were we? Oh, yes. You were talking about having a bad dream.’

I’m sorry to say, I hissed at the poor old man, ‘it’s not a dream. The thing has moved from the end of my bed and is sitting on my legs. I can feel the weight of it, but I still can’t move. I keep thinking I’m going to have a heart attack. I’m surprised I’ve not had one so far.’

‘Don’t worry,’ said Dr Fleming, staring over my head, jumping up from his swivel chair to help me on with my jacket, even though I hadn’t made a move for it, ‘I’ll give you something to help you sleep.’

‘I don’t want something to help me to sleep,’ I said, ‘I want something that will help keep me awake’.

‘Look, we’ve been through all this before,’ said Dr Fleming.

My eyes couldn’t hold my tears. At least I didn't make that blurbing sound. They slid silently down my face. I said, ‘Thanks,’ to Dr Fleming when he handed me a paper hankie, out of the box he had waiting on his desk, and bundled me out the door, like a discarded tissue. I used to think that I’d be so brave. Asked myself why people would allow themselves to be like that. I wanted to be that angry and cosseted person I was, again, even just for a while.

In a way, I thought, I’d brought it all on myself. At Robbie’s funeral people had said I’d been marvellous; didn’t know how I’d coped. Now, I wasn’t so sure those were words of comfort. They seemed sharper, lying in my mind, waiting to cut me. I’d coped by not coping. I mean, I knew he was dead. But some part of me thought that he wasn’t dead. Not really. But I did nothing to save him.

I’d be sitting on our couch, with my feet scrunched up underneath my legs, some rubbish would be on the telly and I’d looking at that photograph of us, and the whole evening would have passed. I’d go to bed. But I wasn’t tired. It was just habit. Something my body had to do. Like a hiding place from life. I don’t even know if I slept. I’d look up to check where the photo was. And Robbie would always be smiling at me, with that rueful grin, as if he was saying, it’s going to be ok.

The first time Robbie’s photo went missing I looked everywhere, even taking the lids off the pots in the kitchen, I now never used, and looked inside them. I was frantic. It felt as if I’d killed him again. I don’t know what made me look underneath the mattress. Robbie was still smiling at me, but there was a crack in the Perspex glass. I looked up and saw myself reflected back in living room window, the roots showing in my long blond hair, spilling out, covering the frame of a scarecrow. I seemed caught by that image, didn’t recognize my eyes. I looked at the photograph, and then at the reflection, to see if it was me.

I couldn’t eat and I didn’t sleep and felt as if it was me, rather than Robbie, that was the ghost. The first time I’d heard the buzzing sound I was sitting on the couch. I was awake. I’m sure I was. I didn’t know what the sound was, but could hear the vibrations. But I couldn’t move. It was as if I was ready to go in for an operation, and the surgeon has started up a buzz saw, but my eyes were open, and I could feel everything, and see every mote in the air, every bit of dandruff in the carpet, but my throat wouldn’t work and I couldn’t cry out. I don’t believe in God, but I prayed, prayed that I’d die, because there was something stirring on the outskirts of my senses, that had no face or form, but simply was. I didn’t pass out or anything like that, but I did scream, and my voice gained leverage, and eventually pulled me out of non-movement. I don’t know what the neighbours thought. They probably thought I’d flipped. And they were right.

I tried to take some pills, but somehow, I botched it. I wrestled my head up from the pillow. My first thought was I needed milk down at the shop. Then I couldn’t find any clean pants, or anything to wear, and that put me into such a fuss that I just started crying and couldn’t stop. The shopkeeper was really nice. I’d never noticed him before.

I got the key in the door and the phone rang. I picked the receiver up cautiously, holding it like a seashell, and letting the ‘hello, hello’ wash over me, before I put it to my ear.

‘Hello,’ I croaked out.

‘It’s Margaret,’ she said, with a pause, as if I was meant to know who that was.

‘Margaret, the vicar…who did the service for your partner.’

My memory of her was like a fruit machine, reeling together random images. She had black hair. Was heavy. Wouldn’t like to call her fat. Wore a black trouser suit, with a delicate little silver cross, over her white Rev collar. I’d wanted a humanist ceremony. Robbie never believed in all that rubbish. But his old mother had insisted on ‘a proper burial’. I didn’t want to argue, especially since she was paying, and a lesbian minister, somehow, seemed like a compromise. She seemed nice enough, apart from all that endless chatter about god. That just popped into my head. I wasn’t sure she was a lesbian.

‘Oh, yes,’ I said.

‘Just wondered how you’ve been.’ She left it there, hanging. She sounded breathless, asthmatic even.

‘Fine. I’ve been fine.’ She’d probably go away now, I thought, to get her inhaler.

‘That’s good,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I’ll pray for you.’

I wanted to ask what that mean, but instead I said, ‘I’ve been having these dreams.’

She was on it, right away, pouncing, like a fox terrier at a rabbit hole. ‘What kind of dreams?’

I found myself telling her a little and she just kept me talking, pulling me along, nipping at me, with little short-sharp questions, and unravelling all the things that had happened.

‘I’ll be right over,’ she said.

‘But you don’t know where I live, and the house is a mess,’ I said feebly.

‘I’ll be right over,’ she said. It was like a different voice, as if her breathlessness was gone and she was going to sprint over. I expected the door to go at any moment, and I started picking up plates and stacking them in the sink.

She sat in Robbie’s chair. And I sat across from her, nursing a cup of tea. I’d no biscuits, and there was no milk, but she said she liked it black.

‘I’m no expert,’ she said, ‘but these dreams, are quite normal in other cultures. The Hmong people who were displaced from their culture and religion when they came to America, suffered many of these same traits. Norse mythology had the Old Hag, which was meant to come to get you in your dreams. I suppose,’ she added, clinking her cup down on the floor, ‘the nearest we have to that is the Cerne Abbas Giant in Dorchester…You mind if I smoke?’ She looked about for an ashtray.

‘I don’t smoke,’ I said, frowning, ‘what happened to the Hmong people?’

‘Oh,’ she said, shrugging her shoulders, ‘I think… I think they became integrated into American culture and their problems stopped.’

‘But I don’t even know who they are. Why would it effect me?’

‘Shock. Displacement. They’re much the same thing,’ she said, putting her cigarettes away.

I pushed her teacup back across to her. ‘You can smoke if you want,’ I said, ‘The Old Hag, that thing on my legs. It feels like that. I think that’s the right name for it.’ And that felt like a discovery, knowing its name, maybe something I could use.

‘But, somehow, I think it’s moving up my body. And when it gets to my heart it’ll stop. But I still don’t understand.’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, ‘when you’re body goes into shock it externalises it, so that we can deal with it.’

I clung on to that. It was our problem. I was quite happy to let her deal with The Old Hag. I reasoned, in a way, that it was her job. ‘What do we do now?’ I asked.

‘Do?’ she said, ‘I don’t think we do anything? I think the fact that we have agreed that your experiences have some foundation; the fact that we have vocalised them, may just be enough, so that they don’t happen again.’

I didn’t say anything. I just rocked on my heels thinking. It was certainly easier to think about it with someone in the room with me, but I was already thinking ahead, and that part of me wasn’t so sure that the Old Hag could be so simply reasoned away.

‘Anyway,’ said Margaret, in that bright- breezy false voice that is taught at God school, ‘we’ll need to get you to a hospital.’

‘Hospital?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I think you should see a psychiatrist. Obviously, with you making an attempt on your life they’d have to treat you as a priority. I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve already spoken to someone.’

‘But you said it was a…’ I couldn’t think of the word, ‘a cultural problem. Now you’re saying it’s a psychiatric problem. Do you think I’m nuts?’

‘No. No.’ she replied, ‘I’m just saying that you’ve been under a terrible strain. One that would break many others. And I think you’ve been very brave, but now you should see a psychiatrist because I think you need a bit of help.’

‘But what are you for then?’ It didn’t come out right, sounded more like a grunt.

The meaning, however, was clear. It hit her like a blow. And she sucked in breath; reverting back to the asthmatic person I’d spoken to on the phone. ‘I’m here to help you dear.’ She leaned over and touched my hand. ‘Your hand’s cold,’ she said, as if that was part of my symptoms, as I snatched it away.

I tried one more time. ‘Can’t you just say a prayer, do an exorcism, or something and make it go away?’ I looked around the room. Everything seemed normal.

‘That’s the Roman Catholic church your thinking of dear,’ her lips allowed themselves a little self satisfied grin, ‘you’ve probably seen it in some film. We don’t do that sort of thing. If you can get some stuff together I can drive you down to the hospital.’

I wanted to have a shower and time to think, but sprayed myself with some Channel, took my time dressing. I smelt cigarette smoke from the living room and felt a brief spark of anger. How dare she, without asking. But I smothered it. It was stupid. Just stupid. All this fuss, for nothing. But I no longer wanted to be alone with the Old Hag so I put some clean pants in my bag; allowed myself to be convinced it would be for the best.