Daniel's Dream (3 page)

Such was the impact of the photographs that in one fell swoop they simultaneously alleviated Daniel’s itinerant subject-hopping, staunched the flow of existential angst caused by his lack of focus and direction, and provided the means by which he would clothe and feed himself for the rest of his life.

From that moment on, Daniel knew what he wanted to do. It was simple. He would travel the world and capture it on film. The fact that the closest he had ever come to any serious camera work was having his passport photo taken in an automatic booth was neither here nor there, and for Daniel certainly no obstacle. Photography was a skill, therefore it could be learnt. Artistry - which he never doubted he possessed - would express itself later, once he had mastered the practical aspects of the medium.

In the meantime he would equip himself with all the necessary skills to be able to take perfect photographs in all and any conditions. He laid his hands on a reasonable single-lens reflex camera - a sturdy if rather unwieldy East German Praktica - which he purchased second-hand using an indecent chunk of his grant. With sketchy knowledge but boundless enthusiasm, he loaded the camera with fast black-and-white stock and took to the streets, intent on discovering if (without the aid of the experts to whom he would inevitably refer) he had “an eye”.

By the time Daniel received his third roll of film back from the developers it was clear that here was something at which he was not merely adept but manifestly skilled. Even in those early shots, naive, repetitive and sometimes over-exposed, it was apparent that he had a natural talent for composition. Frames were filled, shapes unearthed, textures explored. Without consulting the required texts he had already chanced upon a few of the laws of composition, such as the ‘intersection of thirds’, whereby images frequently impact most dramatically if points of interest are located not in the centre of the frame but a third of the way from the edges, giving dynamic balance to what might otherwise be stilted or stultified compositions.

He had no notion then of how he would make the great leap from happy, enthusiastic amateur to hardened professional, but he knew that sooner or later the day would come.

Daniel learnt everything he could from the fanatics at the university’s society, and the rest of the world now beckoned. After showing a portfolio of his best black-and-white work to the editor of a local rag, he fulfilled his first photographic assignment, covering a Remembrance Day parade in Brighton, for which he was paid fifty pounds.

His images - quirky and offbeat but oozing potential - caught the eye of the owner of the town’s only photographic gallery and he was invited to exhibit in the following year’s summer exhibition. It was the big break he had needed.

Daniel’s freelance work garnered great admiration from many quarters, and before long he was making a decent living, particularly from magazines looking for exotic overseas shots. He took to foreign travel as easily as a duck to water, and his crowning glory came when, aged twenty-six, he received a commission from National Geographic. In just six years Danial had made the transition from viewer to contributor, and his professional reputation was made.

A sudden, sharp twinge in his left shoulder made him wince reflexively, a cruel reminder that he was still not fit enough to return to the job he loved. Damn the accident, he thought, angrily. How much longer do I have to suffer?

In the bedroom upstairs Lisanne was still fast asleep. It was about now - just after dawn, an hour before the alarm clock shocked her into consciousness - that her own dreams were at their most vivid and most bizarre. She did not suffer from nightmares - at least, not the sort of dramatic descents into hell that seemed of late to have characterised Daniel’s night-time joumeys - and yet there was always something puzzling and disturbing about her dreams. She assumed this was only natural; whenever she spoke to other people about dreams they described similar experiences.

For Lisanne, the most disturbing and distressing aspects of dreams were not the specific contents (although she had once spent an entire night in the company of nothing but dead babies and animals) but the way in which dreams metamorphosed from one scene to the next without any logic, how visions changed randomly from one set of indecipherable images to another, and how people came and went without apparent reason or purpose, their intentions never clear.

It was this nebulous, random character of dreams that most disturbed her. In real life one thing led to another and effect followed cause in a prescribed manner, but in dreams nothing ever seemed to follow from anything else, and you could be whisked from one incomprehensible scenario to another without rhyme or reason. It was very unsettling.

Still, as she had concluded on numerous occasions, she would rather suffer these unnerving discontinuities than experience, night after night, the sort of torments that Daniel had to undergo.

As Daniel was finishing his second mug of tea, Lisanne woke with a start, the disturbing images from her most recent dream still in her mind’s eye, though fading fast, descending back into her unconscious, disappearing like a footprint cast in wet sand. She rolled over and stretched out her arm in order to caress, gently, her husband’s brow, as she had done every morning since the accident. It was a habit now, ingrained through months of repetition, and perhaps no longer carrying the unsullied, unconditional care and tenderness that had originally motivated the gesture.

Every morning for six months she had woken to the muffled, pathetic sighs of a man in distress. She knew the misery that Daniel suffered, knew the details of his nightly ordeal. Her caresses had always calmed him, reduced his whimpers to a soft moan, and she had persuaded herself that this small gesture, this gentle caress which reached across the boundary between wakefulness and sleep, in some way helped to ease his distress. Of course, she did not know for sure if it did; she just had to believe that in some way this simple human act brought an element of reality, security or comfort into the surreal, repetitive world of Daniel’s dream.

But this morning when she reached out, her hand met only cool, ruffled pillowcase. She opened her eyes and was alarmed to discover that her senses had not been fooling her and that Daniel was not in bed. Her immediate response was panic. She sat up abruptly, rubbed her eyes and gazed anxiously around. Her gaze was drawn swiftly to Daniel’s bedside table, and she recognised immediately that something was wrong, that something had changed. There was the glass of water, which, like some magic flagon in a fairy-tale, was always being drained but was somehow never empty. There too was the spiral-bound notebook that Daniel, on the instructions of Dr Fischer, used to record the contents of his dream.

Lisanne peered at the table top with mounting apprehension. Where was the bottle? The bottle that contained his sleeping tablets?

In that moment her worst fears - dormant for the past few months, but always lying just beneath her conscious thoughts - rose to the surface. She scrambled across to Daniel’s side, leant half out of the bed and franticly searched the floor around the bedside table. Nothing.

She leapt out of bed and ran to the door, stubbing her toe on the way.

‘Daniel!’ she yelled. ‘Daniel!’ She waited anxiously for a response which, although it came no more than seconds after her call, seemed to take for ever.

‘I’m down here!’

Lisanne closed her eyes, steadied herself against the door jarnb and took a deep breath, He would be the death of her. She bit her bottom lip; her toe was agonising. She looked down; no blood, but the beginnings of a bruise for sure. What was he playing at? He never got up before her, never; at least, not during the last six months. And where were those blasted tablets?

It wasn’t that she thought Daniel would ever do anything as silly as... well, she did not actively think about it. lt was just that Dr Fischer had told her she had to keep an eye on him; she had to be alert. His behaviour would be unpredictable, the doctor had told her; all manner of things were possible, He had had a traumatic experience; he was suffering from terrible fears, even worse guilt, misplaced or otherwise. It was all real to him, and there was always the chance that he might take it into his head to... 

Oh God, thought Lisanne. Why had Fischer said that to her? Why hadn’t he kept it to himself? Life was difficult enough as it was, living with a clinically depressed husband, without having to contend with the possibility that at any moment, for any reason, he might top himself. Fischer was a good man, and had been her family doctor ever since she was a little girl. She had no doubt that, even though he was getting on a bit now, he was a first-class doctor.

But why had he mentioned suicide? It had made her life hell; absolute hell.

‘Daniel!’ she called out again. ‘What are you doing?’

She heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs and waited patiently until he appeared. She could see the top of his head as he plodded relentlessly from one step to the next, his head bowed as if in penitence. As he rounded the top of the staircase he looked up and saw her standing there, naked, leaning against the door. He smiled weakly.

‘Very tempting. Is this a new ploy?’

‘What?’

Daniel made a brave attempt to look her up and down approvingly, but Lisanne wasn”t interested in playing this particular game. Apart from anything else, it wasn’t funny any more. They hadn’t made love since the accident, had barely touched each other. Initially this had been perfectly understandable; Daniel’s injuries had precluded any activities that might aggravate his neck condition. There were certain exercises that his osteopath had recommended, but none of them involved the sort of movements normally associated with making love.

For the first three months Lisanne had been understanding about this, but recently she had come to the conclusion that there was more to Daniel’s lack of interest in sex than met the eye. He had, for the most part, studiously avoided any physical contact with her save for the occasional kiss, and even then the kisses had been singularly lacking in passion. The doctor had suggested that sex was no longer proscribed, but Daniel had not taken this particular piece of advice to heart.

Lisanne avoided thinking too much about the possible reasons why Daniel was avoiding her, as the prospect of having to contemplate rejection on top of everything else was too much to bear. She had entered a little pact with herself, which involved avoiding the subject rather than confronting Daniel with it. In time, she was sure, things would revert to normal. Of course they would. They had to.

‘What are you doing up? I woke up and you weren’t there.’

Daniel was clearly nonplussed. ‘Oh. Sorry,’ he muttered, his brow creasing, bemusement contorting his expression into a question mark.

Lisanne was not to be appeased so easily. ‘You never get up before me,’ she said, rather more petulantly than she intended. Her toe was still sore, and she considered it Daniel’s fault.

Daniel frowed. ‘What can I tell you? I woke up, I felt like getting out of bed. I haven’t broken any by-laws, have I?’

Lisanne realised that her complaint sounded foolish, but she knew she was not being stupid, that she had genuine reasons for concern, She wondered whether she should ask him about the sleeping tablets, but decided against it for the time being. She would have a good look round before sounding the alarm; there was probably a perfectly good, perfectly simple explanation.

She sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a short pause, ‘I’m being silly.’ She attempted a conciliatory smile, which elicited a small response in kind. 

There followed an awkward silence as they stood there, opposite each other, neither of them sure what to do next. It was the sort of awkwardness that one might have witnessed between two adolescents on a first date rather than between two adults who had been married for five years and known each other even longer.

It was Daniel who broke the impasse. Unable to sustain eye contact and silence simultaneously, he allowed his head to fall forward, as if he had dropped something on the floor and needed to find it. There was something irredeemably sad about the gesture, and Lisanne, who both felt her own pain and isolation and also sensed Daniel’s deep anxiety, felt her heart go out to him. She wanted to reach out to him, to put her arms around him, to tell him how much she still loved him, But she knew the gesture would make him bristle with discomfort, and for all her sympathies she didn’t think she could cope with that additional snub just now,.

‘I’ll uh... I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Daniel, pleased to find an excuse to get away.

Lisanne nodded. ‘I’ll be right down,’ she said, and turned back towards the bedroom. Suddenly, and quite against her better judgement, she found herself calling out after him, saying out loud the question that had been circling around in her head since she had woken up, the question she so desperately wanted to ask.