SIXTEEN
Carshalton Shangri-La
‘I’m having some strange dreams,’ Anna Waterman said, a few days after her brush with dogs. She had arrived late for Dr Alpert due to a missed connection, but seemed pleased with herself. She sat down immediately and without any indication that she was changing the subject, went on: ‘Do you know where I’d live, if I had the chance?’
‘I don’t know. Where?’
‘I’d live in the covered bridge that goes over the platforms at Clapham station.’
‘Mightn’t it be a bit draughty?’
‘I’d keep it as one big space. Every so often you’d come upon a bit of carpet, some chairs, a bed. My furniture! I’d encourage the trains to keep running,’ she decided, the way you might say: ‘I’d encourage birds to visit the garden.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Just for the company. But Clapham would no longer be a stop. People would have to understand that.’ She smiled and sat back expansively in her chair, her body language that of someone who, having made a very fair offer, expects a positive response.
Helen Alpert smiled too. ‘I thought,’ she said, ‘that you were happy with your own house now?’
Anna nodded. ‘Less unhappy,’ she agreed.
The doctor made a note. ‘And Marnie?’ she enquired. ‘How are you getting on with Marnie?’
Around the bathroom issue, and the deeper issues represented by it, Marnie and Anna had developed a kind of considerate wariness. Marnie had phoned the next day, anxious to apologise. In return, Anna sent a card, a kingfisher bursting out of the water with a small silver fish in its beak. Next time she arrived, Marnie brought flowers, a thick bunch of white stocks, blue delphiniums and sunflowers which they made into an arrangement together. One of the sunflowers was left over so Anna put it in a jug in the new bathroom. Every time she went to the loo she felt light and warmth pouring from it, and found herself full of the slow, lazy happiness she had been used to as a child, before things went wrong. The problem with Marnie, Anna had begun to suspect, was that for her nothing had ever really gone wrong.
‘I’m not sure Marnie is as grown up as she thinks she is.’
The doctor left a pause in case Anna wanted to develop this insight, then when nothing further emerged, enquired:
‘And the dreams?’
‘The dreams are a nightmare.’
In the last few days she had seen everything. Half the time she hadn’t even been sure she was asleep. In the dream she could be most certain of — the one in which she was most clearly dreaming — she was up on the Downs again, viewing herself from outside and slightly above: a woman carrying a child’s empty coat across her arms as if it were the child itself. This woman was bent forward from the waist, looking into the middle distance at the white chalk paths, then down again at the coat. Her expression was one of neither joy nor musing. Skylarks sang. Hawthorn trees clustered on the hillside below. People appeared and disappeared on long, rising horizons. There were tiny blue flowers in the turf. Quite slowly, she passed out of the picture, vanishing over one of the immense skylines of the Downs.
Carrying a child: perhaps it was a dream about Marnie, perhaps it wasn’t. If, in the doctor’s consulting room, you acknowledged a dream like that, what might you be admitting to? You couldn’t be sure. Anna therefore kept it to herself. But it was always possible to be frank about her standard dream:
The unknown woman lay on the black marble floor in some vast echoing space, dressed in a Givenchy gown; someone very old, unchanging but not yet herself; someone, essentially, waiting to change. Sometimes there was a kind of leaden buzzing noise, less a noise in fact than something that had seeped into you as you dreamed. Or you might hear a kind of high, distant ringing inside the floor, a kind of tinnitus at the heart of things. Sometimes there was the sense of an audience: someone — it might be you, it might be not — had started to clean her teeth then cut her wrists in a hotel bathroom, only then looking up to find tiers of fully-booked seats stretching up into darkness like a university lecture theatre. These were deranged but self-limiting images you could throw all day like sticks for Helen Alpert to chase — both doctor and patient got plenty of exercise out of that. So today Anna began refabricating a version of the dream she had once had while Michael was still alive, in which the first false-colour imagery of the Kefahuchi Tract — a new astronomical discovery for a brand new Millennium — had seemed to detach itself from the television screen and drift up into the dark air of their Boston motel room, where it hung like jewellery in a cheap illusion then slowly faded away. By that time the room was vast.
‘So exciting!’ exclaimed Dr Alpert. As a child — eight years old and full of joy — she had loved those pictures so much that she remembered even now the lumbering black cathode-ray TV on which she had first seen them. They were less pictures than promises about the nature of the world, the rewards of study.
Anna — who, to the extent that she could remember the event at all, remembered it differently — could only shrug.
To the postmodern cosmologists of Michael Kearney’s generation, entrapped by self-referential mathematical games, habitually mistaking speculation for science, the Tract had presented as the first of a new class of conundrums: the so-called Penfold Object, the singularity without an event horizon. To Kearney himself it was just another artefact of the 24-hour news cycle, data massaged into fantasies for media consumption, less science than the public relations of science. The day NASA/ESA revealed its Tract composites — great hanging towers like black smokers in an ocean trench, luminous rose-coloured fans and pockets of gas, shock- fronts with an aluminium sheen, looping through the gaseous medium as sounds 50 or 60 octaves below middle C, all layered-up from a year’s observations by half a dozen space-based instruments, not one of them operating in the wavelengths of visible light — he had stiffened like a cat which thinks it sees something through a window; then relaxed equally suddenly and murmured, ‘Never fall for your own publicity’; later adding with a grin, ‘They might as well have had it announced by a man in a cloak and a top hat.’
A generation later in Dr Alpert’s office, Anna asked herself out loud, as if the two ideas were related, ‘What are dreams anyway?’
What indeed? thought the doctor, after Anna had gone. Sometimes the client beggared belief. Helen Alpert studied her notes; laughed; switched the voice recorder to Play, so that she could listen for a sentence or two which had intrigued her.
The client, meanwhile, her mood still elevated, loitered a moment or two on the consulting-room steps, watching the tide sidle upriver like a long brown dog; then, with the whole afternoon in front of her, made her way by two buses and a train to Carshalton. September, the greenhouse month, wrapped discoloured, vaporous distances around Streatham Vale and Norbury, where silvery showers of rain — falling without warning out of a cloudless blue-brown haze — evaporated from the hot pavements as quickly as they fell. Nothing relieved the humidity. At the other end, Carshalton dreamed supine under its blanket of afternoon heat as Anna made her way cautiously back to the house on The Oaks, approaching this time from the direction of Banstead, crossing the Common on foot — past the prison compounds which lay as innocuous as gated housing in the woods — and entering the maze of long suburban streets at a point halfway between the hospital and the cemetery. 121, The Oaks remained empty, with no sign of the boy who had disturbed her on her previous visit. When she tried the back door it proved to be unfastened as well as unlocked, opening to a push. Inside, economics — as invisible as a poltergeist, a force without apparent agency — was dividing the place up into single rooms. Evidence of its recent activity was easy to come by: stairs and hallways smelling of water-based emulsion and new wood. Bare floors scabbed with spilt filler, power cables lying patiently in the broad fans of dust they had scraped across the parquet, ladders and paint cans that had changed places.
Anna wandered around picking things up and putting them down again, until she came to rest in what had been a large back bedroom, split by means of a plaster partition carefully jigsawed at one end to follow the inner contour of the bay window. In this way, the invisible hand generously accorded its potential tenants half the view of the garden — flowerbeds overgrown with monbretia and ground-ivy, rotting old fruit nets on gooseberry bushes, a burnt lawn across which the damp, caramel-coloured pages of a paperback book had been strewn. Anna blinked in the incoming light, touched the unpainted partition, drew her fingers along the windowsill. Sharp granular dust; builders’ dust. Nothing can hurt in these unfinished spaces. Life suspends itself. After a minute or two, an animal — a dog, thin and whippy-looking, brindled grey, with patches of long wiry hair around its muzzle and lower legs — pushed its way through the hedge from the next garden and went sniffing intently along the edge of the lawn,
