Dream a Little Dream (4 page)

PWNsleep message board:

Tenzeds: I want to just sleep without my brain talking to itself. Dreams are vivid and weird right now.

Inthebatcave: Lucky you! I get dreams that are mainly dull
But dropping really quickly into REM sleep is what makes our dreams difficult to tell from reality.

His new alarm clock was shrieking,
beeee-beeee-beeee-beeee
. He slapped at the black plastic box until he hit something that stopped the racket.

In the silence, he jumped up, threw on a sweatshirt with his boxers and padded along the landing to where a small white goat watched him with malevolent eyes. Natalie stood with a hand on the goat’s curling left horn, staring, her hair a sheet of silk over one shoulder. Every nail on every finger was inches long and bleeding. Apprehension broke sweatily on his chest and put pressure on his lungs. His breathing faltered—

Brrrrrrrr
! The next alarm. Ringing. Drilling into his ear. ‘Shit.’ Landing, goat and Natalie flickered as he dragged himself towards wakefulness. The weight on his chest stood up and became Crosswind, and Dominic tamped down the now familiar wave of frustration as he realised he’d sunk back into sleep after the first alarm and not jumped out of bed at all.

He tried to haul an un-cooperative arm free from a ton-weight quilt. A snuffling cold nose touched his chin and the prospect of being French kissed by Crosswind gave Dominic the incentive to heave his upper body sideways from the bed. Gravity took over and he banged uncomfortably onto the carpet. Crosswind landed lightly beside him, giving him a ‘job done’ lick on the ear and running to the bedroom door. Rolling onto his side, Dominic fought against the warm fuzzies coming back to shove him under. The alarm was still blaring. The carpet had grazed his knee. But, on some level, he was awake.

A knock fell on his bedroom door. ‘Dom?’

‘Um up,’ he managed, thickly.

‘You’re up? OK.’ Then, ‘But your alarm—’

He forced his arm into the air and finally landed it on the big blue clock button with all the dexterity of a baby trying to play Pin the Tail on the Donkey. The
brrrrrr
stopped. ‘Goddit.’

A pause. ‘Are you still up?’ Miranda’s voice was muffled, through the door.

‘Yeah.’
Just leave me alone a minute for FUCKSAKE!
But he didn’t let the anger become real words. It wasn’t Miranda’s fault that mornings could be so miserable. Crosswind scratched the door and whined.

‘Shall I let him out into the garden?’

Slowly, his stone legs began to flex. ‘I’ll do it. Thanks.’
In a minute
. Gradually, Dominic forced himself to his knees and onto his feet, checked that he was really wearing boxers, pulled the sweatshirt he’d left out last night over his top half, and fumbled with the blister packs he kept on a shelf out of reach of Ethan for his first tablets of the day, one yellow, one white. Swallowed the yellow one, dropped the white one on the bed. Sucked it up directly from the sheet. Waited, whilst his head cleared some more, and opened the bedroom door. Crosswind whipped past and galloped downstairs.

Miranda was lingering on the landing, her eyes smiling through her specs. ‘I don’t mind letting him out for you if—’

Battling the impulse to snap, ‘I’LL DO IT!’, when snapping would probably be impossible, anyway, he managed, ‘Um fine. Ull do it.’ And, ignoring his own need for the bathroom, he followed Crosswind past where the last tendrils of his dream still wanted to put the goat and Natalie, holding on to the handrail as he persuaded his gradually co-operating feet to take the stairs.

Ethan shouted, ‘’Lo Dommynic!’ from amongst the toy-car traffic jam he was happily creating on the floor in the sitting-room doorway.

‘’Lo, Ethan.’ Dominic trod his feet into the trainers he’d left in the hall before attempting the frozen wastes of the kitchen’s quarry tiled floor. Pushing open the back door, he knew he was really awake when a frozen blast of rain slapped into him. ‘
Whooh
, shit!’ He checked behind him to see if Miranda had heard him swear within Ethan range. Nope. Safe. He turned back to the frigid morning. He could have sheltered behind the door while Crosswind cocked his leg over Miranda’s statue of the green man, but, instead, he let the wind sear the sleep from his mind and dispel the remnants of anger that something as simple as getting up in the morning should feel like struggling out from under a hot, heavy monster.

OK. Brain was engaging. Today was Thursday and he had an appointment with Nicolas Notten of The Stables at half-ten, which created welcome feelings of focus and anticipation. He turned to check the kitchen clock: eight-fifteen. So far, so good. He had something to do and he was awake in time to do it. Result. His aggravation with the getting-up process began to subside.

The leather of his trainers chilled his sockless feet as he reviewed his situation. Peterbizop had proved to have an inadequate level of personal service behind their flashy website, the agency/client interaction consisting of e-mail and telephone contact. Empathy and common sense were absent as other businesses they’d suggested included rodent control and modular building erection – don’t think so.

But perhaps they’d inadvertently done him a favour, reinforcing what he’d long suspected: he’d have to start his business from the idea up. He tingled with the need to find something to replace the precise, focused and rarefied atmosphere of the air traffic control tower. He’d taken courses in business start up, management and finance. Now he was bursting to put what he’d learned into
practice
, to create something worthwhile. What he’d done at The Stables so far had been time inefficient, but today that might just change.

By the time Miranda had walked Ethan across the playing field to the village hall for playgroup and Dominic had taken Crosswind for a run, showered and dressed in something approximating office clothes, the appointment with Nicolas Notten was approaching. Miranda had dusted off a dress and jacket that were not ethnic print and, whisking her mouse brown hair up in a bronze butterfly thing behind her head, looked as if she attended business meetings every day. Dominic felt a twinge of regret that he wasn’t going to be able to buy into the treatment centre, a ready-made opportunity for Miranda to begin the new career she saw for herself in her not-too-distant future. He smiled at her calmly, although he was feeling an unexpected humming of his nerves. ‘All set?’

Beaming, she jingled her car keys. ‘Let’s go.’

It was less than a ten-minute drive to the black iron gates of Port Manor Hotel. Once through, Miranda following a white signpost, swung her car left off the wide hotel driveway, taking a smaller track, curving uphill under the green light of a tunnel of trees. After half a mile, they returned to sunlight at the rear of the hotel, greensward running either side. Perched on a crest, in the days when Port Manor had been the residence of some minor aristocrat and The Stables had been the stables, they would have been sufficiently distant for the smell of horse not to sully the house.

The buildings edged three sides of the stable yard. On the fourth, the park swooped down towards a lake that reflected a coppice and racing grey clouds. Beyond, the countryside raked uphill again until it met the sky. Dominic paused on the rim of that giant, green, grassy bowl for a big beautiful blast of fresh air. Maybe that’s why it was called ‘the great outdoors’ – because being there could make him feel great. He’d love to put a kayak on that lake and
practise
rolls. He could almost feel the water, cool and silky—

‘
Eek
! Wind!’ complained Miranda, clamping both her hands over her hair.

‘You’re such a girl.’ The imaginary kayak vanished from the ruffled lake and Dominic followed his cousin into The Stables’s reception area, with its counter and three chairs, manned, as it had been the day before, by a gangly girl who looked too young to be anybody’s front-desk presence. She regarded Dominic and Miranda with a hint of surprise. ‘Hello, again.’ Her gaze flicked to her computer monitor, as if to match them to one of that morning’s bookings.

Dominic smiled. ‘Nicolas Notten’s expecting us.’

‘OK, Pippa, I’m here.’ A lank-haired man in his early forties barrelled down the corridor, oily face split by a grin of welcome, hand extended. Dominic shook it, introduced Miranda, and resisted the impulse to wipe his palm on his trousers.

‘Why don’t we go into my office?’ Nicolas beamed.

Dominic followed Miranda and Nicolas, crossing the spot where, yesterday, Liza Reece had left him standing like a buffoon. The door to her treatment room was shut and he wondered whether she was behind it, bringing bliss to some other lucky bastard’s feet. In the office, he took the seat nearest the door, a blue vinyl-covered chair that wheezed when he sat on it, and waited through the ritual of Nicolas offering coffee and Miranda’s, ‘Do you have any herbal tea?’

‘I think the girls keep camomile in the kitchen.’ Nicolas beamed again, rubbing his hands as he bustled his bulk back out through the door.

‘I’ll stick with coffee,’ Dominic called after him. ‘Strong, if possible.’ Dominic grinned at Miranda, knowing Nicolas had gained no points with her for referring to adult females as ‘girls’.

A few minutes later, Nicolas returned on a whoosh of words. ‘Here we are, here we are, here we are!’ He deposited three steaming mugs on the desk and plumped down in his seat. ‘What I’d like to tell you about The Stables is—’

Armed with his shot of caffeine, Dominic sat back to listen as an obviously prepared pitch spooled out. And out. For a heart-sinking hour. Although he was beginning to feel guilty at how far Nicolas seemed to have got his hopes up, it would have taken a harder heart than his not to hear him out.

Miranda, who, no matter how much of a force she was in her own home had never got over a childhood shyness with strangers, contributed nothing. The office was overheated. Dominic opened the door to let in fresh air, glad that he’d set his phone alert to go off twice in case he got sluggish. Rising on the pretext of depositing his empty mug on the desk, he remained standing, to keep his head clear. ‘So, how is your income generated?’ he put in, when Nicolas paused to sip his lukewarm coffee.

Nicolas folded his hands. ‘Each therapist pays me rent for their treatment room and a small commission on every treatment.’ He moved smoothly into a practised speech about how an injection of working capital would revitalise the business, replenish the promotion budget and encourage the business to make a profit.

‘How, exactly?’ Dominic pressed.

Nicolas’s hands tightened. ‘With the, um, greater promotional budget to, er, bring in more clients to each therapist, so building commission.’

Dominic began to feel a bit sorry for Nicolas, so nervous, so transparently desperately searching for funds with no real idea how to plug the leaks through which money was gushing. But he felt even sorrier for everybody who worked at the treatment centre, as Nicolas’s hopelessly unrealistic outpouring made it ever clearer that his business enterprise was doomed. He was chin-deep in financial sewage. And, any moment, someone was going to come by in a speedboat.

Still, Dominic’s agenda prompted him to say, ‘Yes, please,’ when Nicolas heaved himself from behind his desk and offered to show them around The Stables.

First port of call was the room in which Dominic had met Liza Reece, yesterday. Without knocking, Nicolas thrust the door open. ‘This is one of our treatment rooms.’ Dominic’s skin prickled at a flash vision of white hands on his feet.

‘We have three treatment rooms – the other two are in use but are similar.’ Nicolas listed all the therapies the centre offered, which he’d said at least eight times already, and waffled about equipment, which, so far as Dominic could see, wasn’t much: the couch, two chairs, a desk and a trolley. As Nicolas talked, Dominic’s gaze ran along a row of framed certificates on the wall, each bearing the name of Liza Reece: maternity reflexology, baby reflexology, vertical reflexology and foot reading.

Nicolas was already moving on, towards the other wing of the building. ‘Back through reception, we have the staff room, kitchen and cloakrooms.’

Dominic’s interest was caught. ‘Does the kitchen need to be so large?’ The square room accommodated a washing machine, dryer, hob, microwave and fridge, with acres to spare.

Nicolas beamed proudly. ‘It was all in place before my time here. The hotel converted the stables with the idea of creating a spa, with a pool, hot tub and everything. Then they decided the economic climate wasn’t right so looked for someone to lease the premises and run a facility that would be an added attraction for the hotel.’ He swelled a little. ‘Mine was the successful proposal.’

Dominic processed the layout of the building through his mind. ‘Where would they have put a pool and a hot tub?’

‘The pool was going to be dug behind, on the other side to the stable yard. The hot tub was to go in the wing I didn’t take on. There are showers and changing cubicles,’ he took a few steps to the end of the corridor and rapped on a door, ‘just behind this.’