Improved Pamela's Dream opening

PAMELA’S DREAM

I haven’t dreamt for a year. I let the dreams go six months after he died. Back then it was too terrible to dream. Back then my dreams were full of waves crashing over my head, of being spun endlessly in malevolent whirlpools, crying out silently and flailing my arms until I could no longer fight for breath and the water filled my lungs. The dreams were all the same. My ankles were always bound tightly in ropes of seaweed and anchored to the seabed, and the more I tried to wriggle free the more I was pulled downwards. Just as life left me and the water claimed my spirit, I would rush back to consciousness and wake spluttering into tangled sheets soaked with sweat, tears coursing down my cheeks.
Each dream brought with it the knowledge that it was something I had known before, something familiar, resurfacing from a long interned memory. These dreams were so vivid, so unfathomably realistic, that soon I was afraid to sleep. After endless nights trying to stay awake I was so tired I inevitably fell back into the nightmares. After one such night, when I woke with rattled nerves and dark circles under my eyes, I made the decision never to dream again. To my surprise it was as easy as that. I sat up in bed in the pre-dawn silence, my heart roaring like the waves of the angry sea I’d just escaped, and I said it aloud, talking to my dreams as if they were real people,
‘You haven’t won. I’m just not playing anymore. You can’t come back’
From that day on I didn’t dream again, or at least I didn’t remember if I did. It could be I was drowned in my sleep on every one of the three hundred and sixty five nights between that one and this, but if I was I don’t remember it.
Sometimes I’d wake curled at the bottom of my bed, shivering with cold having thrown off the covers. Sometimes, I’d wake on the floor by the door with pillows littered around the room like driftwood on the shore. A few times I even woke in the bath with no recollection of how I got there. But wherever I woke, I just got up and got on with the day, as if it were the most natural thing in the world not to dream. After a while I forgot I hadn’t dreamt. I went to bed tired, exhausted physically and mentally. I made sure of it. Leaving off going upstairs until later than I should have, only allowing myself a few hours’ sleep every night, so that from the moment I closed my eyes to the moment they snapped open again I was truly unconscious, without residue of the day before or worry of the day to come.
This morning is different. A year after I willed myself not to dream (though I’m not yet aware of the precise elapse of time) I am waking with a smile on my face. Saturday September 9th 2011 is the day I wake from a dream.
It is the most sublime dream and, though I can hear the seagulls cawing outside and feel the sun’s warmth on my skin, I don’t want to leave it, so in my dream gulls call and the sun shines. Still crawling through sleep, I smile and keep on smiling as I cling to the golden pole of a carousel pony circling slowly through piped organ music so jolly I can see the notes dancing before my eyes. I am the only one on the ride and there’s no carney to take money; this one’s for free. I sit side-saddle, my long white dress flowing behind me as the carousel speeds and the air rushes past my ears. The breeze is cool on my legs and on the soles of my bare feet. I throw my head back and look up onto the mirrored ceiling with its rows of flashing light-bulbs. I see myself in reflection, spinning effortlessly with the other animals, the gilded swans and the prancing deer and the endless rows of ponies painted in ice-cream colours, as we all shift up and down on the golden ropes and the world spins around us in a blur.
The organ keys lift and fall unmanned, drawing out their holiday tune. Mr Sandman.

Mr. Sandman, bring me a dream
Make him the cutest that I've ever seen
Give him two lips like roses and clover
Then tell him that his lonesome nights are…

It slows, the space between notes longer, winding down as the ride begins to stutter. The world around us comes into focus. A beach. A long stretch of sun-bleached sand bordered by grass topped dunes, heat haze rising above a calm sapphire sea. I can see the boys a little way off, sitting under three curving palm trees. They are naked angels, shining harps discarded on the flat carpet of sand. They are looking out to sea and I can’t see their faces only their backs, the sandy soles of their feet tucked under their buttocks. They both have the same hair, spiralling white-blond curls topped with daisy-chain crowns. They are playing with a sea lion, as slick and as black as night, its whiskers twitch as it stretches to hit the beach ball they are tossing to it. Each time it knocks it back to them it claps its flippers and barks excitedly. The boys mirror it laughing and clapping. Something catches my eye in the sea behind them – a figure emerging from the waves.
The carousel slows to a halt. I get down my horse and watch him walking through the blue. I can’t see his face but I know who it is. I step from the platform and onto the sand, warm and soft underfoot soothing my toes as I walk across it. I draw level with the children and look down at them stopping to rest my hand on Matty’s head, but it could be Joseph’s because both my sons are, in this dream, mirror images of each other. Amalgams of their features have been copied and pressed into two identical beings. Their ages have averaged so that they are no longer four and nine but somewhere in between. They are identical twins made from the sum of their beings and divided into two perfect wholes. They look up into my face, smile simultaneous smiles, and then look out across the sea to the figure as it approaches. He’s closer now. So close I can see his smile.
‘Mummy?’ says one of the boys and they too stand and take each other’s hands. I run towards him, out across the sand and through the lightly fizzing breakers, splashing up to my knees in the tepid water. He begins to run too, his white clothes sticking to his skin, the water to his waist, his hair flowing in curls over eyes as blue as the precious sea. Time slows, and we run towards each other through the weight of the water so that the seconds it should take to us meet pass in hours. But these are not frustrated hours, hours of longing and thwarted love; these are hours of supreme delight filled with the glowing anticipation of that first touch. We are so close to each other now I can see every feature on his face. It is young and smooth, not like I remember it on that last morning when I left to get the train and he was struggling with wakefulness in the bright summer dawn. But it isn’t him when we first met either, barely out of boyhood when his flesh was hardly enough to cover his bones. This version, the one smiling as he stands just feet away from me is his perfect self, somewhere just past thirty when he had grown into his handsomeness and had not yet started to decline away from it. This version of him is the past and the future rolled into one. It is the face that had caught me by surprise one day after years of becoming accustomed to him. He was on the beach playing with Joseph, chasing him into the sea so that he squealed as the icy foam touched his tiny toes, turning at that moment to run giggling back up the stones. It was way past bedtime and I, six months pregnant and longing for home, walked down to end their fun and tell them it was time to go. The sun was low, vibrant orange spread from it across the canvas of sky. I called them and Seth turned, his face shadowed by the glow. He waved to me and he looked so uncompromisingly beautiful my breath caught in my throat and I struggled to either let it in or out. This man was my husband, but how could he be? How could little Pamela Evans, the shy and plain child who wasn’t even kissed until she was seventeen, how could she have managed to get a man like this?
I stood cemented to the pebbles, as if halted by an unseen barrier and Seth, choosing that moment to look up from his game, frowned with concern and ran up the stone shelf towards me. ‘Hey,’ he said stroking my forearm with soft fingers, ‘Are you Ok?’ I threw my arms around him and held him as tight as I could. ‘Thank you,’ I said, ‘Thank you for choosing me.’ He laughed and kissed my shoulder placing his hand over the bump that was growing into Matty.
That Seth is the one who is in my dream. That Seth is the one who has come back to me from the past, and he is luminous with love.
I rush the final steps, crossing space in a sliver of a second, throw my arms around him and hold him as tightly as I can.
‘Thank you,’ I say, ‘thank you for coming back to me.’ He laughs and kisses my shoulder and then he holds my face in his hands and kisses my lips. His kiss tastes like sunshine. I smile as we part and touch my lips with my fingers hoping to keep the feel of him there. He kisses again, deeper this time, insistently, his hands move down my body, lingering over its curves as he pushes against me, his own body swelling and arching. Mmmm. Not so much a word as a basic utterance, a throaty combination of air and saliva, the articulation of pleasure. I feel rather than hear our hearts beating, a duo of drums that fill every sense, pounding together in an orgiastic beat. I bend into him and he lifts me up onto his hips, his hands on my buttocks, his tongue probes. Mmmm.
Our boys splash up to us, one of them tugs at the flow of my dress as it balloons in the sea, the other giggles.
‘Mummy?’
The rising scales of the gulls flood into the room and I open an eye into painful sunlight; too bright to see through. I lift my right hand from my breast and shield my eyes with it, dazed by the sudden departure of sleep. Both boys are standing at the side of the bed. Matty looks at me suspiciously, squeezing his bear’s paw with his left hand, his right thumb in his mouth. Joseph is smirking, his lip a thin and wavy line, his eyes wide with amusement. I realise my hand is under my nightshirt and between my legs.
‘Fuck,’ I think, ‘what a great day to start the day, caught masturbating by the kids.’
‘What were you doing?’ asks Joseph in a voice pitched higher than usual. I move my hand up over the covers and prop myself up on my elbows. I rub my eyes and try to wake my face by smoothing away the sleep creases. I look at my eldest son, whose face says he knows exactly what Mummy was doing already, that she was touching herself - like he does in secret - and that it’s hysterically funny.
‘Dreaming,’ I say and pull back the duvet so they can climb in next to me. Matty flops forward with his chest on the bed, his thumb doesn’t leave his mouth and he doesn’t let go of Tricky’s paw even for a second. Without the use of his hands he hauls himself commando-like into the space next to me and snuggles against me. His feet are like tiny blocks of ice and he tucks both under my knees instinctively seeking my body heat. I put my arm around him and stroke his straw-coloured curls. His mouth puckers noisily around his thumb and he strokes his nose with the same hand.
Joseph leaps over both of us, his right foot touching the mattress for the briefest moment as he springs like a lemur into his usual position on the window side of the bed – into the space that once belonged to his father. He stretches his legs out in front of him. They are almost the length of my own now, his enormous feet point upwards from the heels midway down my calf. He’s nearly ten, but I never realised the speed with which he would change. I never imagined my baby would become lanky and big-toed, a clumsy mass of limbs too unwieldy to control, getting ready to over-balance into the hormonal hell of adolescence. All grown up – but not quite.
He too wriggles against me, laying his head on my shoulder as I cradle him with my right arm, his thatch of orange hair tickling my chin. I smooth it flat and kiss his head.
‘What about?’ he asks.
‘Hmm?’
‘What were you dreaming about?’
‘Daddy.’
He looks up at me, his face taking on the awe of the five-year old Seth left behind.
‘I thought so. What was he like? I mean, what does he look like now?’
His face is still a child’s but it’s broader and longer than before, the cheekbones are settling into diagonals under the fleshy cheeks, the nose bone is asserting itself and the eyes, which were always Seth’s eyes, are bigger and shorter lashed than they were.
‘You won’t remember this, but I was dreaming about him on one day in particular. Before Matty was born, we were on the beach and he was chasing you into the sea…’
Joseph frowns at my hesitation, our taboo word, the sea, little lines cross his smooth forehead.
I smile.
‘He looked like you darling. He looks like you.’
Joseph nods and moves closer to me.
Matty takes his thumb out of his mouth.
‘Biscuits!’ he says, ’biscuits and milk.’