Dream Guy (14 page)

The answers were not as straightforward as Joe had hoped. He had come from England, by dream, to return the carpet that had inadvertently remained in his room, but explaining how he had traveled was a challenge. He decided on the truth.

“I traveled through my dreams. My dreams come true.”

“True?” Karabashi could not disguise his skepticism. “Perhaps it would be fairer to say that your dreams have become real.”

“Perhaps it would, but isn’t it the same thing?”

“There is a difference between truth and reality,” Karabashi explained.

Joe pondered this notion. If Karabashi was right, something could be true without being real, and it could be real without being true. This could explain the Lamborghini, which was real but not a true Lamborghini.

Karabashi continued. “For example, we are here in this orchard. This is real to you and me. We can both feel the grass beneath us and the bark of the trees and the scent of the blossom. But no one would believe me if I said that a child from the future had come to visit me and returned this carpet—for which, I thank you. Once again, I find myself in your debt.”

“Just because no one believes you doesn’t mean it’s not true.” Joe’s head was beginning to ache slightly. He sat up and rubbed his temples. “I am truly here. You know that because if you look at your flask of mint tea, it has gone down, and you wouldn’t have eaten so many cakes if you had been on your own.”

“The mint tea and baklava are manifestations of reality, not truth.”

Karabashi was beginning to display one of Joe’s father’s more irritating characteristics—a willingness to occupy his brain with a question that had no answer, spiraling through skeins of arguments just for kicks. Joe didn’t care about semantic definitions of truth and reality. He simply wanted advice over this dream thing.

Then Karabashi asked if Joe needed help. Joe was forced to listen to the scholar more closely.

“Not really.” Then he took it back. “That’s not true. If you knew anything about how these dreams work… If you could help me get them under control, that would help.”

The scholar stroked his beard and his dark eyes were distant as he considered this conundrum. His brow creased then cleared. He stroked his beard again, then seemed to come to a decision. “I have never heard of a man whose dreams took on the form of reality, but I will investigate. But this is complicated. Should you remain here while I complete my research or should we arrange to meet? There is no point in your coming unless my research has produced results, but how am I to indicate to you that such an advance has been made? How can we communicate?”

Joe’s heart leaped and fell as Karabashi offered his assistance then predicted obstacles. But then, he had managed to insert himself into Karabashi’s world when the need had arisen. If it could be done once, it could be done again. He pointed this out to the historian, but it only gave rise to another issue.

“I believe that you must chronicle your dreams. You must note the time, the place and the purpose of the dream. You must list the people you meet and why you are dreaming this dream. There will be a pattern, and once you have the pattern, you have the key to understanding.”

This was a sensible suggestion, but it would take a good deal of time. It was the sort of long-winded way of proceeding that all teachers loved, a way that required a student to do a lot more work than the teacher, who simply had to read the record and tick it, except that Karabashi would not be able to mark his work, since he would be unable to read English. Joe sighed. It certainly wasn’t an exciting thing to do, but it did make a sort of dreary sense.

Karabashi continued to muse on Joe’s situation. He wondered how time functioned in Joe’s dreams and whether they would be able to arrange a suitable time to meet. “There are times when it would be inconvenient for both of us if you were to appear out of nowhere, as you have done this afternoon. It would arouse comment and might lead to accusations of sorcery and treachery. Yet you must come again, and I suppose I must simply ready myself.”

He looked at Joe, then blenched. “Young man, I can see inside your body!” He reached over and took Joe’s hands. He looked wonderingly at them. “I can see your bones and your veins. I can see the blood flowing around in you and your lungs drawing breath. What is happening?”

Joe had no idea, for he felt no different, but he looked down and understood what Karabashi meant. Light was streaming out of his body, rendering his skin translucent, muscles and tendons clearly visible, organs operating and all individuality erased, for he had become like a drawing in an anatomy book, a three dimensional model of a human corpse. He stood up, disconcerted and fascinated, then began patting at himself, even though he knew that would not make his skin opaque again. Karabashi also stood, his calm imperturbability shattered, panic and revulsion rising within him. He bent down and grabbed the carpet, which he threw to Joe.

“You will need this to return, I am sure. Come back when you can. Come back whole. Has this ever happened before?”

“No,” replied Joe, clutching the carpet and staring as Karabashi, his parasol, his rug, his orchard and its enclosing walls were now engulfed by a white fog which rolled in thick swirls as dense as candy floss.

Mrs. Knightley was standing over him, calling out his name over and over. He caught hold of her hand and said, “Mum, I’m here.”

She sat down on his bed and picked up the carpet cradled in his arms. She reached up and felt his forehead then under his chin, checking his glands.

“You were so deeply asleep that it terrified me. I thought you were unconscious. I had to wake you up, Joe, just to check you were okay.”

“I’m fine. Much better.”

Her expression was dubious, but she relaxed as she stood up. She wandered over to the Velux window, which was closed, and looked out. It was dark, and all Joe could see was the orange glow from the streetlamps. She pulled down the blind then walked back over to him.

“Do you feel up to supper?”

“I’m not hungry.”

She bent and tousled his hair. “That must be a first. You’ve had hollow legs for the last few months. I could bring you up a sandwich or something.”

Joe loathed having crumbs in bed, but he could see that his mother wanted to do something for him, so he nodded, even though he would hide the sandwich under the bed and wait until she wasn’t looking before sticking it in the bin.

As soon as she had left, he threw back his bedcovers and looked for a place to keep the carpet until enough time had gone by for Karabashi to have made some sort of progress.

Now three people knew about his powers—Nell, Smokey and the scholar. It was reassuring to think that two of them wouldn’t be interested in badgering him into having dreams on their behalf.

He opened his cupboard and put the rug on a high shelf over the hanging space, tucked away where no one was likely to disturb it. He looked around his room and thought about reading a book. Then a wave of dizziness hit him, and he lurched back to bed. He lay there, gazing at the slope of the ceiling, covered with cartoons mostly too small for him to decipher. So much more had happened to him this week than any other week of his life. This time last week he had been cocooned, protected from the unknown and sheltered from harm. Now, he had been flensed and was faced with tasks to complete. For Karabashi, he must prepare an account of his dreams so far. For Nell, he must work out what to do about Smokey and for himself, he must discover the identity of the stranger who had twice invaded his world.

The possibility of dreaming himself back a week, before all this had started, also occurred to him. It would be much easier to stick at being Joe, the quiet, doodling kid two rows back. But somehow, Joe knew that even if he tried it, the dreams would not let him rest now.

Chapter Twelve

Smokey and Mirrors

When his mother returned with the sandwich, she insisted on sitting at Joe’s desk while he ate it. No hiding it under the bed, then. After that, she insisted on changing his sheets and putting him back to bed as if he were four. She considered aloud whether Ben should spend another night at his brother’s bedside, but Joe’s demeanor showed that he would not welcome that invasion. He could see that if he obliged her in everything else, she would give way on that idea. So he was very pliable and almost chatty, although he found that quite difficult. When she came across an old book full of steam trains that he had kept for the drawings, he even let her read to him and found himself nodding off as she murmured the tale of an arrogant engine trapped in a tunnel for his snootiness.

He did not dream that night. He might have, but when he woke on Saturday morning, he remembered nothing of his dreams and had only a wonderfully light sensation in his bones, his skin and his muscles.

Joe went downstairs and ate two bowls of cereal, three pieces of toast and a banana. His mother watched him with a contented smile as she flicked through the paper, snorting at the occasional news item, brow furrowed over others. Afterward, Joe took his dishes, rinsed them and put them in the dishwasher. Then he came over to his mother and gave her a hug.

She hugged him back and said, “You’re still sick. You must be. You never clear up after yourself.”

“I do now.” Joe gave her another squeeze and asked if he could go on the computer. It was so calm in the house without Ben and Liesel about, just the time to send an email to his father. No one would be trying to look over his shoulder, insisting on doing their practice or looking up the price of dance clothes on the Internet.

It was the start of a quiet weekend for Joe. That afternoon, Mrs. Knightley took the three children for a squashed ride in the Lamborghini, judiciously timed to avoid the rush of cars around the shopping center on the edge of town. In the evening, they ate Chinese takeaway and played Scrabble, as they had done when Dad had been home, and once again, Joe had a dreamless night. On Sunday morning he even agreed to go for a walk with the others before lunch. He did not acknowledge but he did notice Ben’s efforts to shield him from Liesel’s sniping. He went up to his room after lunch to do some coursework. He pulled out a piece of paper and began sketching. He thought of Karabashi’s advice about keeping a record of his dreams and understood this was the way to go about it. So he began sketching out and dating the drawings—first the fish business, then the Lamborghini, then the nonsense with Dill and the key, and getting him back to Maycomb, the night out with Smokey, the encounter with Karabashi and his pals in the palace scriptorium, extracting Nell from her room, the Sardinian holiday and, finally, the orchard. On each cartoon, he noted the date, the time of the dream and the amount of time that had seemed to pass within the dream.

Try as he might, Joe could discern no pattern or consistency in the dreams. He could dream under coercion, when Smokey or Nell had made him. He could dream up what he wanted, but he was also subject to whim and accident. He did not know why his sleep had been uninterrupted over the last two nights, and he had no idea what limits or rules governed his dreams. It seemed amazing—wild, entrancing and chilling—so frightening that Joe felt as though a solid block of ice had taken up residence in his chest. If he surrendered to the fear, the ice would engulf him, but if he held it back, perhaps it might melt a little and the pressure would lessen.

It was just before supper that Joe checked his diary for the week ahead and listed the tasks to be completed. He had a fresh piece of paper on his drawing board and had doodled Smokey’s name in a swirling, fat script, bulbous and jagged, a miniature graffiti signature. In a few swift strokes, he had outlined Smokey’s greedy face and hands, with a speech bubble saying, “Come on, old mate, just a tenner for the best marching powder ever.”

He had no idea how much coke Smokey had managed to get, where he would have hidden it or whom he would have sold it to. He would have had all day Friday to flog it at school, but Joe wondered if he was stupid enough to take it onto school premises or whether he would have simply set up meetings so he could sell off packets over the weekend. It might already be too late, because Smokey would probably have sold off as much as possible over the past three or four days, assuming that he could force Joe into getting more supplies. There would be pressure. Joe was sure of it. A running campaign of cajolery, flattery and threats to get Joe back to the island where he’d got his first batch.

That meant finding some way of stopping Smokey now.

At supper, Joe was distant and distracted again, to the dismay of his mother and brother. Liesel was subdued, tired by a day spent with her friends in the park, until she remembered her news.

“I saw your friend Smokey in the park today. He was pretending to be so cool. You know he’s got an iPod, one of the brand-new ones that takes pictures and everything,” Liesel related.

“How could he afford that?” asked Mrs. Knightley, astonished. His parents were coping financially but they didn’t have the money to splash around on sophisticated electronic gadgets.

“He was selling stuff,” said Liesel.

“What stuff?” demanded Mrs. Knightley.

“You know. Drugs, I suppose. Little packets. He was really posing—fist bumps and handing over little bags or folded up pieces of paper, counting up his money. Loads of people were coming up to him—Charlie Meek and that lot, and some of the girls, all flirty.”

Mrs. Knightley whipped round to Joe. “Do you know anything about this?”

“No.” He shrugged. “Not really. Nell told me he’d got something to sell, but I don’t know anything more than that.”

She reached for the phone and tapped out a number. “I’ve got to tell Maria about this. What exactly was he selling, Liesel? Was it weed or was it something stronger.”

“Stronger. I think it was coke. It was white powder anyway.”

No one answered the phone at Smokey’s house. Mrs. Knightley left a message asking his mother to call urgently, then she put the phone down. She turned back to Joe.