Incarnate (17 page)

“You said everyone does.”

“Well then, you don’t need to ask.”

She wasn’t getting away with that. Susan waited until she could see Eve’s face. “What do you think she dreams?”

“I don’t want to know.”

They were running for the train. “Why are you scared of her? What does she do?” Susan said as the doors closed and the train lurched forward.

“This.” Eve pointed to her black eye with the hand that wasn’t clinging to the strap overhead. “Don’t make me tell you what else. I’m frightened to.” She gazed at Susan over the heads of grown-ups squashed together on the seat, and Susan wondered how many of them were listening. “That’s why I’m glad you’re my friend,” Eve said.

Susan wasn’t sure why. “Can’t someone stop her? Doesn’t anyone know?”

“I don’t want anyone to try. They’d only make her do worse things.” She gave Susan a wide-eyed pleading look as the train stopped at Edge ware Road, jerking them loose from their handholds. “The people who know her are frightened of her too.”

They struggled to the doors and ran toward the District Line. Susan was growing used to London, except that it seemed to take so long to reach anywhere she wanted to go, and almost everywhere felt like the rush hour all day. Perhaps she didn’t want to see where Eve lived after all. They found seats on the train, and she was wondering what else she could ask about Eve’s mother when Eve said, “Do you want to dream?”

It sounded like an offer. “Why?”

A flood of darkness swept the station away. “Cause I can show you how to,” Eve said.

“You mean sniffing something.” Just the other day a policeman had been to the school to tell them all how dangerous glue was.

“Oh, no, you don’t need that. You just have to let the dreams come.” Eve was giggling at her suspiciousness. “They’re there all the time. You shouldn’t try to stop them.”

The train rocked in its cradle of darkness. “Do you want to?” Eve said.

Susan was remembering the times Mummy had demanded if she’d dreamed, until she had made Susan afraid to sleep in case she did. She had always thought that Mummy stopped herself from dreaming too. “I’ll think about it,” she said, feeling at the mercy of the dark.

Night had reached Bayswater Road. Drops of water on the buds of a shrub in a garden were unlit Christmas lights, drops turned a drooping clothesline into an abacus and Susan felt she could slide them along.

She unlocked the door. The smell of cats and cabbage met her as she poked the time-switch and she and Eve raced upstairs. Her footsteps clattered, Eve’s were softer.

She was turning the key when the lights above the stairs went out. “Mummy,” she called. But when she pushed the door open she found the flat was dark.

Her feet sank into the new carpet as she groped for the switch. In the dark they seemed to sink further than they should. The light came on, and somehow Eve was at the mantelpiece. “She’s gone out,” she said, handing Susan a note.

“Won’t be long” was all it said, except for a line of kisses. Surely she couldn’t be working late on Saturday. Perhaps she was buying Christmas presents, but Susan felt let down, not only because she had expected Mummy to be home but also, more so, because Mummy always wrote Susan’s name on notes. The way Eve had got hold of it first, it was almost as though Mummy had meant it for her.

“Do you want me to show you how to dream, then?” Eve said.

All of Susan’s resentment made her say “Yes.”

“Come on then, before she gets back. We’ll use your room. That’s the darkest.”

After the streamers that slithered over Susan’s face and hands, the dark felt soft and soothing. She pulled the cord, and there were Rapunzel and Repulsive sitting together like old friends. She was growing apprehensive. “What have we got to do?”

“You haven’t got to do anything. Just stop trying not to dream.” Eve stood by the light cord. “Lie down, go on.”

Susan climbed on the bed but sat against the headboard. “Can’t we leave the light on?”

“No, it’s got to be dark.” Eve came to her and pushed her gently down. “I’ll be with you,” she said, and went quickly to the cord and pulled.

The dark took Susan’s breath away. She felt she was drowning in it. When she felt Eve lie down, a soft weight beside her, she managed to draw a breath. One reason she spoke was to hear herself; the dark was silent as the bottom of a pool, her ears were throbbing. “Now what happens?”

“Breathe slowly, like when you go to sleep,” Eve whispered in her ear. “Let yourself float and see where you go.”

Susan was having enough trouble reminding herself where she was, for she felt as if the dark were growing. The shifting patches of dimness must be in her eyes, but they made her feel that the dark was like the Moonlight World, full of activity that she would see as soon as her eyes adjusted. Closing them was no help: light seemed to flare up from her cheekbones, two regular flares that fanned across her vision and faded away. Her breathing was slowing down into their rhythm; it seemed to be the only way she could breathe. “That’s right,” Eve whispered.

If this was dreaming, drifting helplessly through the dark while the lights in her eyes made her feel even blinder, Susan didn’t want to dream. She would have got up at once except that Eve might laugh at her. She dug her fingers into the mattress through the blanket and hung on. She thought of holding Eve’s hand but somehow didn’t want to. When her ears stopped throbbing, she heard the television in the flat next door.

She tried to hear it clearly so as not to drift, but it made the dark seem even larger. She was listening across a dark river, very wide. It was the Mersey, of course it was; she could see it at the feet of streets as she ran home, down past the shop with the rising sun on the awning that said “Every Morn Think of Vaughan,” down past Vale Park and the tree that bore a mossy toilet seat, the mark of a fallen branch. Now it was night and the misty dockyards were hooting like a ship as long as the far bank, a ship carrying dozens of cranes and chimneys twelve floors tall and the Liver Clock with the stone bird tied on top, a long thin misty ship lighted by sodium streetlamps and the pinpoint windows of tower blocks, a ship that was sailing away under a fairy-tale moon like a fat banana. High tide was rushing in, children came racing down the ramps from the promenade to see who dared stay longest on the beach, and Susan sang “Girls and boys come out to play, the moon does shine as bright as day.” She went back along the pipe, above house bricks that the sea had smoothed into oval red stones, and headed for the ramp at Egremont, where the streets to the promenade were so steep they had handrails. “Leave your supper and leave your street,” she sang, “and join your playfellows in your sleep,” which seemed so odd that it made her shiver. “Don’t try to see things,” Eve said beside her. “Just let them come.”

Had Susan been singing aloud? If that was dreaming, she wished Eve hadn’t interrupted. She lay and waited and hoped she could go back. Surely hoping didn’t count, but now there was only the dark that might be huger than the sky or close enough to touch. Suddenly she couldn’t move. She remembered asking Mummy what death was. It was like going to sleep and just not waking up, Mummy had told her, which had sounded reassuring until Susan had realized that if you never woke up you might never be able to stop dreaming. She couldn’t move, for the coffin of darkness was holding her tight, the darkness which was how it was once you were dead, a dark in which you were no longer any size and so couldn’t measure the dark, the dark in which there was movement, the flares blooming in her eyes, light opening like hands and passing out of her, great luminous hands that kept letting her go. They were playing with her, but not forever. The next time they might not open, they might keep hold of her as their face leaned down between them, a huge blurred glowing face that she could almost see. Once she saw it clearly, the hands would never let her go. She opened her eyes but could still see the blurred face, growing huger and closer. She was clutching the blanket, but that didn’t seem real enough to help. She was really lying on the bed, the dark was her room, she could roll off the bed as the face that was almost not blurred filled the dark above her, as the hands closed over her. She dodged at the last moment and slipped breathlessly under the hands, which missed her shoulder but touched her hand as she shoved herself off the bed, soft fingers that felt huge but shrinking. Of course that must be Eve’s hand, and the rest was a dream. Susan knocked a book off the shelves on the dressing table as she plunged through the dark. The thick carpet seemed to be drowning her feet until she pulled the cord. She stood gaping, trying to breathe. The bed was rumpled but deserted. She was alone in the room.

She fled into the hall. The streamers at both ends were still, the bathroom was empty. When had Eve left her? As she ran into the main room, she called “Eve” so loud that the window vibrated. There was no sign of Eve except for her book on top of Susan’s encyclopedias. Susan ran between the plants to the window to see if Eve was out there, under the streetlamps that were beginning to shake in the wind. She hadn’t reached the window when someone knocked at the door.

She hoped it was Mummy, too burdened with parcels to use her key. Just now she hoped it wasn’t Eve. But it was a woman in a housecoat, her hair in curlers under a net. It looked like dust in a carpet sweeper. The woman demanded, “Was that you?”

“Yes.” Susan recognized her now: she lived across the landing—beyond the open door cats slept on faded chairs in front of a gas fire. “I was calling to my friend.”

“You admit it, do you? Well, we’ll have less of it. This is a quiet house.”

“I wasn’t making much noise.”

“The cheek of it.” She turned to her cats and shouted, “Just listen to her, will you. Not much noise, she says.” She swung round to glare at Susan. “I suppose you’d call that singing all day yesterday not much noise, would you?”

Susan stared, forgetting not to be rude. “It couldn’t have been us. I was at school and Mummy was at work.”

“I’ll bet she was. You wouldn’t have been making all that row if she’d been here.” She reached out and thumped the door with her fist, and Susan smelled the cats on her. “Don’t you be saying it wasn’t in here. I stood right here listening and telling you to stop. You’re the only child here, aren’t you? Haven’t got another family hidden in there, I suppose?”

“There’s just me and Mummy,” Susan said, but her thoughts were louder.

“I should think so. No call for us to do it just because the darkeys do. Half of them don’t know what a proper house is for. No wonder, with all that stuff they smoke. Never mind that,” she growled, dragging herself back to the subject. “It was you singing and getting me so I couldn’t hardly think. Don’t you ever do that again or you’ll have something to sing about, I’ll set the truant officer on you.” She was shuffling back to her flat, her slippers clapping under her heels. As she shooed a cat back onto its chair and slammed the door, Susan heard her mutter, “I wouldn’t even call it singing. Raving, more like.”

Susan closed out the dark landing and stood by the door. She didn’t want to think, but she had no choice. Eventually she turned on the gas fire and watched from the window for Mummy. The streetlamps shivered, shadows roamed the street. Eve must have been in here yesterday when she ought to have been at school, however she had got in, but there was more to it than that. Eve had made her dream. That wasn’t the worst problem either, that wasn’t what Susan had to deal with. If Mummy were dreaming, after all that she’d said about dreams—and it was Eve who said she was—then Eve must be doing that, too.

16

M
OLLY
was almost nodding off when the phone rang.

It was Ben Eccles. So you’ve found out where I live at last, she thought, much good may it do you. “What’s the problem?”

“Martin Wallace.” His voice was savage and something else—triumphant, perhaps. “Is he there?”

“He went back to the States this morning. Why?”

“Because his film that we broadcast tonight is a fake.”

She didn’t quite believe him, not when she disliked him so much, not when it sounded almost as if he were accusing Martin of having faked the film. “Who says so?”

“I’ll tell him, not you. Where is he?”

“I don’t know his number.”

She hoped he would tell her what he wanted to tell Martin, but he only gave her his home number. “You tell him to call me as soon as he gets in touch with you,” he said.

She couldn’t believe him when he had offered no proof. She paced through her flat, past her aimless army of reflections. Even the sounds of the wind chimes above the doors rasped her nerves. When the phone rang again she vowed that she would get some sense from Ben, if there was any to be had. But it was Gould, the head of Staffing. “I understand you may know where we can contact Martin Wallace.”

“I’m afraid not.”

“You surprise me. If he contacts you, please ask him to call me at once.”

“Has Ben Eccles been saying things about him?”

“No, the police have. About him and the film he claims was sent to him. The film is bogus. There is no question of that.”

She wrote down his number, which was more than she’d done for Ben Eccles.

She put down the phone and wished she had asked him what proof there was. She was still wondering whether to call Martin when he called her.

She told him everything except Gould’s request. She didn’t want to give him any more to deal with. She could tell that he wanted to stop talking and think, and she said good-bye as soon as she decently could.

Afterward she lay feeling exhausted and wondering what the police had said. Suppose they had faked their proof and the film was real after all? It seemed impossible that Lenny Bennett’s mother could have been fooled, even though by the time you saw the face of the man in the cell it had been beaten almost shapeless. Her thoughts were blurring, she was falling asleep—no wonder after such a night. For a moment, then another, she couldn’t even hear the silence. She was stepping down through the gaps in her consciousness to a place where there might be no anxiety.