Pamela's Dream - Opening

PAMELA’S DREAM

I am waking with a smile on my face. I’m having the most sublime dream and, though I can hear the birds outside and feel the sun’s warmth on my skin, I don’t want to leave it, so in my dream birds sing and the sun shines.
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 and the tears coursing down my cheeks. 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 nightmarish sleep that failed either to cure my tiredness or banish my demons. 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 darkness, my heart roaring like the waves of the angry sea I’d just escaped and I said it out loud, 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’
I closed my eyes tight and willed the dreams away. And 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 as if they’d been washed up on the shore. A few times I even woke in the bath with no recollection of how I got there. But wherever I woke up 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 allow myself a few hours’ sleep every night, so that from the moment I closed her eyes to the moment they snapped open, every single second was spent asleep, without residue of the day before or worry of the day to come.
This morning is different. Three hundred and sixty five days 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 1st 2011 is the day I wake from a dream. Still walking through sleep, I smile and keep on smiling as I swing through the sunlight on a wooden swing secured to the branch of a huge apple tree by flower garland ropes; green twists of lush soft leaves intertwine with bursts of waxy white blossoms. The swing moves through air that cools the skin on my thighs and sings caresses onto the soles of my feet, air that carries with it the smell of spring flowers and melted chocolate and crisp cold Chablis. The swing creaks as I point my toes out in front of me then bend my knees to pull it back and straighten them again to push it forward. As I glide I let my head fall back so my body is a straight arrow and I can see the sun dappling through the leaves above me. Doves nest in the branches, families of white birds cooing and preening, bending to feed their fluffy chicks from golden beaks. Squirrels scamper up the pitted trunk, acorns clamped in red fuzzy paws, bright eyes gleaming and bushy tales twitching this way and that. One of these creatures pushes open a tiny green door at the top of the trunk, just below the voluptuous spread of verdant branches, and ducks inside closing the door behind it with a little bang so the tiny brass knocker attached to it flickers on the wood. At the muted pock noise the door makes as it shut thousands of apple blossoms fall from the tree hovering on the breeze and then folding their petals into wings to fly down to me, landing ticklishly on my legs as tiny gossamer-winged fairies. I study the nearest one, a beautiful pixie face, a flower bell for a hat over tumbling curly locks, tiny rose coloured lips and lightning quick eyes. She has a pale naked body somewhere between a child and a woman and she smiles an infectious smile that is instantly returned.
A little way off I hear children laughing and look towards the meadow. The boys are there, crouched on grass covered in daisies, dressed like angels, thin honey-hued legs shod in golden scandals, shining harps discarded on the luscious swaying carpet. Close together, I can’t see their faces. They both have the same hair, spiralling white-blond curls topped with daisy-chain crowns. They are holding out their hands to a fox, its fur as bright as an orange and its throat as white as snowflakes. It says something to them and they giggle and then it steps towards them, lowering its quivering black nose to their hands each one in turn to take whatever treat it is being offered. They laugh as it eats and when it steps back it has purple berry juice around its mouth and seems to thank them with a nod before turning and walking away towards the cornfield that covers the horizon. I follow its progress as I swing through the light and on the hill where the blue sky meets the swaying corn I see a figure walking towards me. I slow the swing sitting upright and looping my arms around the flower ropes, the fairies take off and fly back up into the leaves collecting in clusters around suddenly ripe apples. The figure comes closer; a man dressed in loose white clothes and a straw hat. As he walks through the corn, black birds emerge from the yellow and fly behind him disappearing into the blanket bright of the sky, as if his footsteps are banishing them, as happiness banishes brooding thoughts. Though I can’t see his face I know who it is. I bring the swing to a standstill and stand, the grass is warm and soft underfoot and I walk across it as if it isn’t there. 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 smile simultaneous smiles and look out across the corn to the figure as it approaches. He’s closer now. So close I can see his smile, see his fingers brushing across the corn.
‘Mummy?’ says one of the boys and they too stand and take each other’s hands. I run towards the figure out across the grass and through the threshold of the corn. As I break through it he begins to run too, his hat picked from his head by the happy breeze, his hair flowing in curls over eyes as blue as the sky above. Time slows, and we run together in slowly so that the seconds it takes to reach each other 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 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 passed bedtime and I walked down to them to tell them it was time to go. The sun was low, vibrant orange spread from it across the canvas of sky. She 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 as if anchored to the pebbles as if I’d been halted by an unseen barrier and Seth had looked worried and run up to me. ‘Hey,’ he said stroking her 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. That Seth is the one who is in my dream. Come back to me from the past and he is luminous with love.
I rush at him, 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 me. 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 in 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.
The boys are beside us, one tugs at the flow of my dress, the other giggles.
‘Mummy?’
Birdsong floods 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 high-pitched sing-song voice. 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 rubbing away the sleep creases. I look at my eldest son, whose face says he knows already, that Mummy 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 over like a lemur into his usual position on the window side of the bed – into the space which 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 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 before.
‘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, little lines crossing 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.’