Incarnate (16 page)

By the time Martin had spoken his piece to the camera, it was dark outside. The Christmas lights made Oxford Street look like a fun fair. The slush was lumpy poster paint, splashed everywhere. In the Korean restaurant on Poland Street, he murmured, “Will you come back with me tonight?”

“If you want me to.” She hoped her eyes told him how inadequate her words were. She wanted to be alone with him, to tell him about herself before he went away. The restaurant and the taxi to Kensington were too public, the lift was too deserted and echoing, and they hadn’t been in the flat long before they were making love, enjoying each other’s bodies like tactile sculptures made of flesh and muscle and bone and salt skin until they could no longer take their time, digging their nails into each other’s shoulders as they came. Then they lay in each other’s arms, and Molly said sleepily, taking herself unawares, “The first time we met I felt as if I’d dreamed of you.”

He stroked her breast and cupped it in his hand. “I’m glad.”

That wasn’t how she’d meant it, she had to start again. “It frightened me. I nearly refused to meet you.”

His small sleepy frown looked slightly resentful. “Why, what did you dream?”

“I didn’t dream anything that I know of. It was the idea of having dreams that frightened me.” She wasn’t making herself clear. “I used to dream of the future,” she said, and grew tense.

“I guess most people do sometimes.”

“Sometimes. With me it was often. I used to dream that someone was going to die, and they did.”

“That’s pretty common, isn’t it? I seem to recall the Rhine Institute back home went into all that once.”

“I took part in some research years ago,” she said, and felt as breathless as she had in the police cell. “Near Oxford. They had several of us under observation to see if we dreamed the same thing.”

“Did you?”

“I don’t know. I’ve managed to forget what I dreamed, and now I feel as if I shouldn’t have.” She stretched out her arm for her handbag. “I’d just about forgotten the whole thing when I got this.”

He held Stuart Hay’s letter above them to read it, and she read it again, though she knew it by heart. “… the experiment in which you participated… any aftereffects … anything which you feel to be in any way unusual … may be important to both of us… .” Despite that no doubt inadvertent hint of intimacy, it read like a form letter to her, the kind of letter that opinionated self-important Hay would send. It had no right to disturb her as much as it did.

Martin folded it and handed it to her. “So?” he said as she replaced it in her bag. “Any aftereffects?”

“I don’t think so. No,” she said defiantly. “I thought I saw someone the other day in Soho who took part in the experiment. I could have, I suppose, but it doesn’t count. And I’ve been dreaming again, strange dreams. Too strange to be the future, anyway, that’s something. Maybe they’re aftereffects of his letter.”

“I take it he ran the experiment.” When she explained, he held her gently as if to soften what he had to say. “If that’s all that happened,” he said, “why does it bother you so much?”

“I suppose because it reminds me.” Her heart was pounding unpleasantly. “Reminds me how much I’ve forgotten and makes me wonder why. And reminds me how I used to feel. Frustrated, mainly, knowing that someone was going to die and not being able to do anything. I wanted to change things, I wanted to so much.”

He was smiling and nodding, satisfied. “It’s good we’ve talked this out before I leave.”

“How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

“I wish I could say. I’ll call you from Chapel Hill, okay?”

She wished she felt calmer. She felt as if she had left something crucial unsaid. She tried to recall the experiment while she was safe in his arms, but there wasn’t much left: a sense of thundery frustration, pale green walls and doors, a blur of faces whose names were clearer than they were. Joyce and Stuart and Guilda and Freda—and Danny, whose name she’d only dreamed was Swain—and the student whose name was, wait a moment, Helen. The sense of frustration led her back toward the dreams she’d had as a child, to her parents’ gentle rebukes that she shouldn’t say that kind of thing, it only upset people for no reason. Perhaps they had been right after all. She was dozing in Martin’s arms, she felt ready to dream without being afraid even if she couldn’t change anything, and then she jerked awake so violently that Martin gasped. “Are you all right?” he demanded.

“I think so. I’ve remembered something.” She was hardly aware of clinging to him while she tried to recall. “I had a nightmare about changing things. I must have been quite little, before I can remember dreaming of the future. I dreamed my bedroom was changing into something else, and it would stay like that if I didn’t wake in time. I knew somehow it was changing because I was dreaming. When I managed to wake up I didn’t dare look.”

“Sounds like it might have been a good thing for you that you weren’t able to change things.”

“You don’t understand.” She was so frustrated that she punched his shoulder. “How could I
want
my dreams to change anything after I’d had a nightmare like that? How could I forget it so completely? I’ve never remembered it until now, don’t you see?”

“It’s pretty common, forgetting stuff that disturbed you when you were young.” She sensed that he was willing her to calm down; he had his own troubles. “You’re all right now, Molly.”

She wished she were. She wished she could forget again, forget how she had opened her eyes at last and glimpsed her bedroom reshaping itself around her, presenting its familiar appearance just a moment too late, a movement so subtle that eventually she’d been able to persuade herself that she hadn’t seen it at all, or else she would never have slept in that room again or anywhere else, perhaps. Now all she could think of was the headachy frustration of not being able to change what she foresaw, and Terry Mace saying they had the power to change. Hadn’t he said something else that she ought to remember? Struggling to recall it only drove it further into hiding. Perhaps Martin could remember, but when she turned to ask him, he was asleep.

An arctic wind had left the streets deserted. Under the streetlamps the slushy pavements were shivering. Alone in bed, she wished she had stayed with Martin. She woke in daylight, orange through her eyelids, and wondered if Martin had left by now. She stretched out her arm and bruised her knuckles against a bony object that shouldn’t have been there beside the pillow. Her eyes sprang open. She wasn’t in her flat, she was in the four-poster bed.

It was as though she’d dreamed herself back into Martin’s flat. The place was too quiet; it felt like the times when sounds withdrew from her. Then she saw the note propped up next to her handbag.
Didn’t want to wake you but I had to catch my flight. I’ll call you when I’m on the ground. Look after yourself while I’m away. Love, Martin.
She saw that he’d hesitated after writing “Look after yourself” and wondered if he had thought of adding “for me.” So she had only dreamed that she’d gone home; she realized now that she hadn’t felt her steps. Nevertheless the flat and its antique furniture seemed unreal, a museum exhibit she had strayed into by mistake. As she used the shower, she wondered when exactly she had started dreaming.

She was still wondering as the cage glided through the floors, as she closed the street door behind her and stepped onto the crackling frozen slush, as she slithered into the station arcade, beneath the hanging flower baskets. Had she already been dreaming when she had turned to find Martin asleep? And what had she wanted to ask him?

Trains rattled her to Marble Arch. In the office she felt disoriented and lonely, at a loss for work. At the edge of her vision, the blue corridor kept seeming to have turned pale green, and made her feel as if someone were going to appear. When someone did, she started and then stared, wondering who the woman was.

“Remember me? Nell. I just wanted to thank you. I only got the job upstairs because of you.”

“You got it? That must be a relief,” Molly said distractedly.

“You’ve no idea. Anyway, I’d better not be seen chatting on my first day at work.” A minute later she came back. “We can walk home together, can’t we?”

“Yes, if you like.” Yet Molly wished she hadn’t said so, which seemed absurd and unfair. Perhaps the visit to the police station was still troubling her. Or telling Martin about her dreams. Or his sudden departure. Working on the budgets ought to help her get hold of herself. She should be pleased that she’d helped find Nell a job. Perhaps Nell was a little odd, but it was wholly unreasonable of Molly to wish she had never met her at all.

15

T
HE FURTHER
you ventured into the Moonlight World, the darker and hotter it grew. At first all Susan could See as she peered into the cages were her own dim face and Eve’s, flattened on the glass. The glass seemed to melt away as her eyes adjusted, and here were harvest mice no bigger than her thumb, restless foxes the color of moonlight, the black and white explosion of a porcupine, a loris climbing as if it weighed nothing. Two sleepy fat-faced rats sat together on a log and watched her as she copied the labels on the cages into her school notebook, and then she found her way through the dimness and the chorus of flapping and scuttling to Eve.

Eve was in front of a cage in which washleathers hung from a branch, pegged there by their feet, for they were bats. Susan copied their label and watched their fluttering. The movements seemed mysterious, so secret that they didn’t know themselves that they were making them, and she knew they were dreaming. It wasn’t only the enclosed heat that turned her throat dry. She cleared her throat and blurted out, “Do you have dreams?”

A blur peered out at her between the bats: Eve’s face. “Don’t you?” Eve said.

“No, I never.”

“You do, you know. Everyone does.” Eve turned away from the bats, and they stopped fluttering. “If you don’t have them when you’re asleep you must have them when you’re awake.”

“How do you mean?”

“Some of the things you think you see must be dreams.”

“That’s stupid,” Susan said, to get rid of the idea; it made her feel feverish, and so did the oppressive heat and the dimness. “Everyone doesn’t dream. My mummy doesn’t.”

“Oh, yes she does.”

“She doesn’t. I should know. She’s my mummy, not yours.” But Eve looked so sure of herself that Susan demanded, “Why did you say she does?”

“Because she told me.”

“She never.” Eve looked calmer still, and Susan wanted to push her, kick her, pull her hair. “When?”

“Before you came.”

Was it possible that Mummy could have told Eve a secret she had kept from Susan? “What did she say?” Susan said resentfully.

“I can’t remember. She didn’t say what she dreamed, if that’s what you mean,” Eve said when Susan glared at her, and headed for the steps. “Come on, there’s lots more zoo.”

Faint gray stains were spreading over the white sheet of the sky. The light made Susan blink and sneeze as she picked her way between islands of slush that were shrinking in miniature lakes. Soon Eve began sneezing too, though Susan had thought it was only yawning that you caught from other people. She pinched her flapping notebook between her icy fingers and went to an enclosure where tortoises big enough to ride on were poking out their old men’s necks. She wrote them down, and was listing a crocodile like a scaly watchful rock when someone called, “Hey, Susan.”

It was Chloe and Zoe, who didn’t rhyme. Mrs. Fisher, the teacher, had written their names on the blackboard just yesterday when she was talking about words. Susan liked her, liked the school even though it was so big, liked the way Mrs. Fisher’s class had welcomed her on her first day with paintings and lemonade and homemade cakes. “They’re in my class,” she told Eve.

Chloe’s hair was plaited like a basket, Zoe’s skin was blacker, her lips plummier. “How many have you got?” Zoe said.

“Lots.” Susan displayed her list. “How many have you?”

“More than you.” Zoe was turning Susan’s pages. “I got all the insects.”

“Insects don’t count,” Chloe protested.

“They do too. You wait until Mrs. Fisher sees you didn’t write any insects.”

“Don’t care. They don’t count, do they, Susan?”

“I didn’t think so.” She would have liked to have spent more time watching the beetles like walking jewels. Eve was peering over Zoe’s shoulder at her notebook. “What’s that?” she said as Zoe glanced warily at her. “They aren’t insects, are they?”

“They’re a tongue twister,” Zoe said scornfully. “Try it, girl. Say it ten times fast, go on.”

“Gwyneth’s useful Aberystwyth thesaurus.” It had been Mrs. Fisher’s tongue twister that nobody could say, but Eve said it ten times without stopping. “There,” she said, not even breathless.

“Get her,” Chloe said, so sarcastically that it reminded Susan she hadn’t introduced Eve. “This is Eve. She lives in my street,” she said, then wondered if Eve did.

“Susan has to list some more animals now,” Eve said. “You can come with us if you like. We don’t mind, do we, Susan?”

“We’re going in the Moonlight World. You’ve been in already. Come on, Zoe, move your arse or we’ll be late for the disco.”

They’d had enough of Eve, of her frayed coat and drooping socks and her black eye. Perhaps that was unfair of them, but Susan couldn’t help resenting Eve for driving them away; no wonder Eve seemed to have no friends to play with. A mynah said ”Wotcher,” a lion gave a meaty yawn, camels like patchy carpets stalked about, and Susan listed them all. She hoped her list would be the longest and win Mrs. Fisher’s gold star.

Though it had been Eve’s idea to come to Regent’s Park, Susan didn’t speak to her until they had left the zoo and were on their way to Baker Street through the darkening twilight. It wasn’t only that she had driven away Susan’s friends, it was her saying that Mummy had dreams. That was why, as they stood on the down escalator with the ink from their tickets printing itself on their hands, Susan said, “Does
your
mummy dream?”

Eve had stepped onto the next stair down to let a father run past with his little boy on his shoulders. “I don’t know,” she said, not looking up.