‘I knew that. I know that. You guessed well.’
The song went on.
EIGHT
Penny always loved her dreams and she was sure they were better than anyone else’s. A bad sleeper, she had trained herself to go off into a kind of trance, sitting motionless with her dreams superimposed luridly over everything else. There was no way she was missing out on dreams, no matter how little she slept. And as she dreamed, her blackened fingernails tingled.
Tonight she was sitting very calmly at the dining-room table, staring into her own reflection in the framed picture opposite. Around her head, almost outside her range of vision, floated three objects. They were an egg timer, a little man made of china and a brass coffee pot.
In her dream she allowed herself a quick smirk.
Once you had the knack it was very easy to keep all these things together in your mind. You simply had to stop up the holes in your head.
She closed her eyes and made herself sink.
Out on the coast road in the night, she was walking along and looking out to sea. The North Sea was still and black. Beside her the road was quiet and, as it dipped and rose with the lie of the land, these few bleak miles between Shields and Sunderland, she watched the tireless seabirds commute between the vast rock out at sea and the Roman remains beyond the road. The Roman remains were weathered and copper-coloured, looking like an abandoned wedding cake, its icing picked away. Penny decided to cross the road and examine them. And on the road, she realised then, there were a number of dead dogs. They lay at awkward angles and blood was pooling around their open mouths. A woman was whimpering, her anorak bundled up around her, visiting dog after dog, nudging them, shaking them, coaxing them with clumsy words. It was Nesta, her hair silver and dry in the moonlight. She was setting a bowl beside each dog and, taking a milk bottle out from an inside pocket, pouring them each a small drink. Penny crossed the road, ignored by Nesta and the dogs, wanting to say, What if a car came by? But she crossed and said nothing, making for the grass, for the tussocky hills and the Roman remains.
Looking back, the pale bowls of milk on the road looked like satellite dishes. In the long grass there were shouts and squeals of fright and merriment. She squinted and, just by the sheer drop of the cliff, Fran, Frank and their four kids were shouting and running about, each with a butterfly net, recapturing their gerbils. When one was found, they’d pop it in an empty lager can.
Penny climbed up to the crumbling, muddy remains of the Roman fort, and by one of the entrances she discovered a miner’s lamp and a diving suit. It was like the Famous Five. Next thing she knew, she’s slipped into the suit, which seemed to have a vital, rubbery life of its own. Her helmet lamp flashed on and she plunged into the Roman doorway which, as she walked in, became the entrance to a steeply declining tunnel.
God, Penny thought. Not this one again. She was revisiting the scene of her most shamelessly Freudian dream. Worse than the one about riding down the street on her mother’s sewing box. These were the underground caverns where, in one recurring dream, the Big Fat Wailing Worm lived. It lived in Lambton, brought back from the Crusades by a local knight, chucked down a well, grown to monstrous proportions simply to terrify Penny. It pursued her across moors and into houses, where she would slam doors on it, making it pull backwards and forwards through thresholds, eventually burning down the house with its friction and its wailing. But this wasn’t one of those dreams.
Beside her, Andy’s Nanna Jean was standing in a clean pinny and her usual immense black frock. Penny had no idea who she was, but she seemed friendly enough. Jean was explaining that this wasn’t an awful white wailing worm dream. ‘But you have to go right under the water, through the caves to the rock, hinny,’ said the old woman.
A question popped into Penny’s head. ‘How is your friend?’
‘She’s dead, bonny lass,’ said Jean. ‘She walked out under the ice. Best way to go. Now you go on, catch up with the others under there.’
Penny gulped and struggled onwards. She left the old woman far behind as the tunnel grew thinner, the walls slicker and colder. She was potholing now, she thought, with a grimace. She remembered hearing something about fish with no eyes. Down here, they didn’t need eyes. Down one hundred and twenty feet: she counted every one and soon she was where she presumed sea level began. Then down again, wading purposefully, training her lamp on the walls, throwing crazy shadows. On the bloody orange walls were stencilled bits of bodies, as if someone had been drawn around, like a template. There were pictures of madly galloping black horses, antelopes, dog creatures and things that were half seal, half penguin. Penny stared at them as she went along, hunting for drier land.
And then, suddenly, she was hauling herself on to a dry, sandy shore. She must be far beneath Marsden Rock. She couldn’t quite believe she had climbed so far down, across and up again, even in a dream. Then, Vince was helping her to her feet. He was in his sharp purple jacket and suddenly she felt clumsy in wetsuit and flippers.
‘Hi-ya, pet,’ he said. ‘I thought you were stopping in tonight.’
Penny asked, ‘What was it you were saying about not believing in world-sorrow, and not believing that things fitted together?’
‘Did I say that?’ He sounded puzzled.
‘Yes, in a lesson.’
He shrugged. ‘That was a lesson. That was E. M. Forster. This is real life.’
‘You don’t believe that!’
