Overheard in a Dream (47 page)

“In the isolation hut the loneliness was as penetrating as the ‘Agnus Dei’. Torgon was picking up her few things, putting them slowly one by one into her bag in preparation for returning to the compound, and there was such a sense of total desolation. She knew she was going back to her death, and she knew she was returning utterly alone, without any support whatsoever. Without Loki. Without her sister. Without her child … and … I realized for the first time, without me.”

Laura looked over. “Because, of course,
I
was the Power, wasn’t I?”

James looked at her.

“I mean, you’ve figured that out by now, haven’t you? Torgon’s world was my inspiration for trying to become something more than I could be by myself, but in the same way, I was hers. She had become great by imagining my world.” Laura’s eyes brimmed with tears. “But then she lost her visions, because I’d abandoned her.”

“That’s an interesting premise,” James said. “But ‘abandonment’ is a very strong word.”

“No, it’s the right word. I
chose
to leave her. I chose to turn her into something less than she was, because I wanted …”
Laura halted a moment and wiped her eyes. “Because I just wanted to be ordinary. To have what everyone else had.”

“So, you’re saying that you feel responsible for Torgon’s fate?” James asked, intrigued by this surreal complexity.

Laura’s brow furrowed. “Can you understand what I’m talking about? The difference? Between the real Torgon – this beautiful, noble creature who came to me in childhood – and the caricature I’d turned her into, which was no more than an extension of my ego?”

James nodded.

“There was Fergus with all his talk about destiny. I kept hearing that word all around me and never paid enough attention to it, never recognized I already
had
a destiny. I didn’t need Fergus’s version of it.”

Laura let out a long, slow breath.

“In some different, better world, I would have stayed on course with what I was fated for. I would have become that brilliant doctor and gone off to some god-forsaken corner of the world to do immeasurable good. People would have looked at me and said, ‘She’s inspired.’ Maybe even, ‘She hears the voice of God.’ Because there
are
indeed Voices in this world, call them what you may, and if you heed them, you
are
special.”

Laura paused and in her silence James detected a faint defensiveness. “But the frank truth is,” she said, “very few of us have it in us to be Mother Theresa or Martin Luther King. It’s easy to think that we’d all be capable of that kind of greatness if given the chance. But that’s a dream. The reality is very different. Torgon demanded everything of me from the moment I met her that night on the path the summer I was seven. She wanted my time, my attention, my social life, my
education, my career. To do what she wanted of me meant I couldn’t have friends. I couldn’t have a family. I couldn’t have anything except her. That was too much for me. To follow Torgon required a nobility from me I just didn’t have.

“So … I left her there as she was, to return to the village alone, and I moved on to create a life of my own. I’d had a remarkable apprenticeship, doing all that writing on the Forest, so I’ve put it to good use. My books are quality literature. They bring enjoyment to a lot of people and, I like to think, some depth and insight to the issues I write about. I’m a decent person. I try hard to do the right thing whenever I can. But I’m tired of feeling that I didn’t live up to what might have been. The way I see it, yes, a golden chalice was passed to me, but it wasn’t meant to be mine. So I drank from it and passed it on.”

“There is a story here,” Conor announced, taking a large, blank piece of drawing paper. He carried it over to the table. “It looks like there is nothing on it, but really there is a story here. Do you see it?” he asked James.

“I see a piece of white paper.”

Conor reached over and took one of James’s pencils and then sat down. “You will see the story soon, because I’m going to draw the pictures for it. Tomorrow when you look at this paper, you will see the story’s there.” He bent forward and began to draw a long line across the top of the paper.

“I was thinking about this when I was in my bed this morning,” he said, as he continued to draw. “I thought, the story will be on the paper tomorrow. So is it always on the paper? Is it just the way our eyes are that we can’t see it because it’s today and not tomorrow?”

“That’s a big thought to be thinking,” James said.

“I think big thoughts.”

“So I’ve noticed.”

“Tomorrow is hidden. My story here is hidden until I’ve done it. The world is full of hidden things.” He was drawing vertical lines on the paper, dividing the space into boxes. “My mechanical cat is hidden. No one can see it, because it’s in here,” he said and tapped his chest.

“You know inside you there is something strong,” James said.

Conor nodded. “Yeah. I hear it singing. My mother can’t. She says, ‘Put on your socks, Conor, it’s time to go.’ I say, ‘The mechanical cat is singing.’ She says, ‘Don’t be silly. We haven’t got time.’” He looked up. “But the mechanical cat knows. Nothing’s hidden from the mechanical cat.”

James looked at him.

“The mechanical cat can see everything. He can see the story hidden on this paper. He can see tomorrow. And at our house he can see the ghost.”

“This is the man under the rug?”

Conor didn’t answer. He had finished dividing the paper into sections and now turned to the box in the top left-hand corner. “I’ll draw a picture of the man under the rug. Then you’ll know what you’re looking for.”

Tongue protruding between his lips, head bent close to the paper, Conor threw himself into the activity. A figure appeared, lying prone, but the drawing was hard to decipher because there were many faint, spidery lines coming out from the body in all directions.

Conor moved on to the next box and drew a picture of a man standing up. It wasn’t a particularly unusual picture, just a typical child’s drawing of a man with wide-open eyes and a blank expression, dressed in trousers and a plain shirt.

In the third box Conor drew another man. This time the picture was gruesome. He made blood come out of this man’s mouth and out of wounds over his body. The man was still standing, but there was a knife in his side and a second knife in his neck.

“They shouldn’t be in this order,” Conor said thoughtfully, as he sat back to look at the drawings in their little boxes across the top of the page. “This is going to be one of those tests that doctors give you. You will see the pictures and then you must put them in order to tell a story.”

Leaning back over the paper, he moved to a new box and drew a picture of a bed. He put a child of indistinct gender in it, under the covers. The child wasn’t asleep. Its eyes were staring circles. Conor paused to study the picture a moment, then went back to work, lavishing much more attention to detail on this picture than he had on the others. He drew a rug on the floor and a toy truck and a little horse. He added hair to the child’s head and made stripes on the blanket. Then he began to draw the body. “You and I can’t see this part,” he said as he worked. “It’s hidden under the blanket. But the mechanical cat can. Nothing is hidden from the mechanical cat.” Conor drew pyjamas on the child and beneath the pyjamas, genitals. It was a boy, lying on his side in the bed and James could tell he was urinating.

“Now here, in this one …” Conor had moved to the next square and he began to sketch a man much like in the first box, lying prone on the floor. He drew a line over the man. “That’s the rug. I don’t know how to draw a rug so you can tell what it is looking at it from the side. And the boy came downstairs. Very quietly. Quiet as a mouse. He did pee-pee in his bed. See up there?” He pointed to the other picture.

Conor stopped. A long, pregnant moment followed, as he regarded the series of drawings. Then he lay down the pencil and looked over at James. “This is my dream.”

“You’ve dreamt all this?”

“Yeah. Many times. When I am asleep, I dream it. When I am awake, I dream it too. Even when I am not dreaming, it’s there. But no one knows this. It’s one of the hidden things.”

The next pause lengthened and grew into a full silence, soft and deep

Conor finally looked up at James. “I am listening for the mechanical cat now. He can sing louder than the dream. That’s what he does.
Zap-zap. Metal fur. Never cry. Never die.
”

James smiled. “He sings to make the dream go away?”

“Yeah.”

Another pause.

“In here, the boy is safe.”

“Yes,” James said

Conor leaned over the paper again and in the next box he began to draw a picture of a child, standing beside a table. “Here is this room here. This is the man’s table. See? Right here. This table.” Conor patted the wood. “The boy is standing beside it. ‘No ghosts here,’ he says. He says that to himself.”

Leaning closer to the drawing, his body going more rigid as he worked, Conor said. “And here inside the boy,
here
is the mechanical cat. Can you see it? I have drawn it, so now it’s not hidden. Can you see?”

Inside the torso of the child who was standing beside table, Conor had carefully drawn a small cat. It sat upright in the manner of cats, its ears pricked forward, its eyes watching out from the picture. It had a tiny upside-down triangle for a nose and an almost wistful smile on its face.

Conor drew thin lines down through the head, the arms and the legs of the child, all connected to the cat, as if it were a feline puppeteer working its big creation.

“I need to colour this,” Conor said. He rose up and reached across the table to the basket of crayons and marking pens, then coloured the cat black with a white blaze on its face, white socks and bib and a little pink nose. He coloured the eyes green and then made whiskers and very, very neat little claws just showing from the white paws. He didn’t colour the boy at all.

“I want to cut this out. Where’s some cardboard? I want to paste it on cardboard first to keep it good. I need cardboard,” he announced and jumped up from the table. Without waiting for a response from James, he crossed over to the shelves and rummaged through the assortment of art materials. Finding a small piece of poster board, he returned. Taking up scissors, he skilfully cut out the figure of the boy. He glued the picture to the poster board, then endeavoured to cut away the excess to leave just the figure of the boy with his internal cat.

Conor was very pleased with the result. His face lit up brightly. “Look! See? Here it is.
My
mechanical cat.” He leaped up and ran to the shelves to get the box of cardboard animals. Pulling out the little cardboard tabby, he fitted it into its stand as he came back to the table. “See? My cat and your cat. Here. I’ll get clay, so mine can stand up too. Mine and yours! I can take this home! This one belongs to me.”

“Yes, you’ve made your own mechanical cat now, haven’t you? What a good idea you had.”

“Yeah! I have done it all myself, so I can keep it.” He flashed a brilliant smile at James.

Conor leaned back to admire the cats on the table, but as he did so, his eyes drifted towards the paper he’d been drawing on. “I didn’t finish that,” he said. He picked up the paper with its missing square. “I should have made another picture. I didn’t do the whole dream.” He made no effort to resume.

“Can you tell what has been left out?” James asked.

“I didn’t put her on the stairs. Made a picture of the stairs.” He felt around the hole where he had cut out the drawing of the boy and the cat. “She said, ‘
Don’t
come down.’” Conor looked at the other drawings. “She said, ‘You’re a bad, bad boy. You must
not
get out of bed.’ She wanted to play with my finger-paints. She didn’t want to ask first.

“I needed to do pee-pee. I thought, ‘I must get up. I need the potty. I can’t get my pants down by myself.’ But she was crying. She’d used my finger-paints without asking. She said in a scream, ‘You bad, bad boy! You
bad, BAD
boy! This is for coming downstairs.’ The bad boy came downstairs. So, he ran back up. Quick as could be. Quick as a fox. Quick under the covers. She is screaming. The boy is screaming too. Screaming and crying. Where’s his strong daddy? He wants his daddy, but his daddy isn’t there. The mechanical cat isn’t there. No one is there and the boy pees in his bed.”

Conor ran a finger over the picture of the boy in bed. “Yes, that’s what happened. It was a very bad dream. A dream I kept having.”

“It sounds very scary indeed,” James said. “I can understand how you would feel so frightened.”

Conor put his hands over his eyes. “I don’t talk about it. Keep my mouth zipped shut,” he gestured across his lips. “‘Don’t talk about it,’ she says. ‘It isn’t real. It’s just a dream.
It will go away, if you don’t pay attention to it. You make it real with your thoughts. But thoughts aren’t real.’”

He was rocking back and forth, his fingers pressed tight to his eyes.

“Who’s saying this to you?” James asked.

“The mummy. She says it isn’t real. You just heard them in a dream.”

“What about this other picture?” James asked, pointing to the last one of the boy and the man under the rug. “What can you tell me about this?”

Conor lowered the cut-out. “This is in the dream too. They’re all part of the dream. But this is the quiet part. When there is no one but the ghost man. Mummy isn’t here. Daddy isn’t here. The ghost man isn’t running down the hall. The boy is thinking, ‘This room looks different.’ He is thinking, ‘What is that big lump?’ So he goes over and lifts up the rug to see why it’s so lumpy and
there is the ghost man!
The boy gets
very
scared. He runs. Like this.” Conor raced two fingers across the tabletop. “He runs very fast because he knows the ghost man is going to get up and come get him like he did before.”