under an enchantment. She pulled back, dropped the curtain. She had seen him before, perhaps in a dream.
She lay down again. The waterfall track was finished, and had given way to the music of dolphins and whales. In the cradle of the deep she swayed, slept, and slept more deeply still.
It was 5 A.M. when Al came down. Her guts were churning; this happened. She could eat quite an ordinary meal, but her insides would say no-no, not for you. She raised the kitchen blind, and while her bicarb fizzed in a glass at her elbow she looked out over the larch-lap fences swathed in pearly light. Something moved, a shadow against the lawn. In the distance, a milk truck hummed, and nearer at hand an early businessman slammed with a metallic clatter his garage’s Georgian door.
Alison unlocked the kitchen door and stepped out. The morning was fresh and damp. From across the estate a car alarm whooped and yodelled. The man on the lawn was young, and had a dark stubble and a blueish pallor. He wore a woolly hat pulled down over his brow. His big sneakers bruised his footprints into the dew. He saw Alison, but hardly checked his stride, simply raising two fingers to his forehead in acknowledgement.
What’s your name? she asked him silently.
There was no reply.
It’s all right, you can tell Al, don’t be shy. The creature smiled shyly and continued to circle.
She thought, you can go under a false name if you like. Just as long as I have something to call you by, to make our life together possible. Look at him, she thought, look at him! Why can’t I get a spirit guide with some dress sense?
Yet there was something humble in his manner, that she liked. She stood shivering, waiting for him to communicate. A train rattled away in the distance, up from Hampshire, London bound. She noticed how it gently shook the morning; the light broke up around her, flaking into creamy fragments edged with gold, then settling again. The sun was creeping around the edge of a Rodney. She blinked, and the lawn was empty.
Colette, pouring her orange juice at eight-thirty, said, “Al, you cannot have two pieces of toast.” Colette was making her diet; it was her new hobby.
“One?”
“Yes, one. With a scrape—no more than a scrape, mind—of low-fat spread.”
“And a scrape of jam?”
“No. Jam will play havoc with your metabolism.” She sipped her orange juice. “I dreamed there was a man on the lawn.”
“Did you?” Alison frowned, holding the lid of the bread bin before her like a shield. “On the lawn? Last night? What was he like?”
“Dunno,” Colette said. “I almost came and woke you.”
“In your dream?”
“Yes. No. I think I was dreaming that I was awake.”
“That’s common,” Al said. “Those sorts of dreams, people who are Sensitives have them all the time.”
She thought, I dreamed there were trucks outside the house, and a blanket in the back of one, and under that blanket—what? In my dream I came inside and lay down again, and dreamed again, within my dream; I dreamed of an animal, tight and trembling inside its skin, quivering with lust as it wolfed human meat from a bowl.
She said, “I wonder if you’re becoming a Sensitive, Colette.” She didn’t say it aloud.
Colette said, “When I agreed to one slice of bread, I meant one normal-sized one, not one slice two inches thick.”
“Ah. Then you should have said.”
“Be reasonable.” Colette crossed the kitchen and barged into her. “I’ll show you what you can have. Give me that bread knife.”
Al’s fingers yielded it, unwillingly. She and the bread knife were friends.
It was gardening day. The new contractors had brought plans and costed out the decking. They were going to build a water feature; it would be more like a small fountain than a pond. By the time Colette had beaten down their estimate by a few hundred pounds, she had forgotten all about her disturbed night, and her mood, like the day, was sunny.
As the men were leaving, Michelle beckoned her to the fence. “Glad to see you’re doing something with it, at last. It was a bit of an eyesore, lying all bare like that. By the way—I don’t know if I should mention—when Evan got up this morning he saw a man in your garden. Evan thought he was trying the shed door.”
“Oh. Anyone we know?”
“Evan had never seen him before. He rang your doorbell.”
“Who, the man?”
“No, Evan. You must have been in the land of dreams, both of you. Evan said, they’re not hearing me. He said, all right for some.”
“The advantages,” Colette said, “of the child-free lifestyle.”
“Evan said, they’ve got no lock on their side gate. And them two women alone.”
“I’ll get a lock,” Colette snapped. “And seeing as the blessed gate is all of five feet high, and anybody but a midget could vault over it, I’ll get some barbed wire on top, shall I?”
“Now that would be unsightly,” Michelle said. “No, what you should do, come to our next meeting with community policing and get some advice. This is a big time of year for shed crime. Police Constable Delingbole gave us a talk on it.”
“I’m sorry I missed that,” Colette said. “Anyway, the shed’s empty. All the stuff’s still locked in the garage,
