A Particular dream by Adam Parry

 

 

 

Chapter one: Hammers and feathers, 1989

 

Sunlight streamed, like amorous light beings, lying across Jane’s pale sharp shouldered back. She smiled in her sleep as the light encompassed her, gentle as sentient silk sheets, and it seemed some player in her dreams was nudging her into the sunlight its warm caress welcomes Jane into today. She lifted up off the bed and rested on her elbow her face full of summer kissing her, she yawns, her sleep smeared mascara made her look like a badly constructed Goth, a glimpse of a dream made her smile and the smile lingered on her face, and for a moments long after she lost the dream it seemed she too was a source of illumination, her happy summer-blue eyes shone brighter in the sunlight  flooding in through the badly drawn curtains, her faced was flushed as if she were embarrassed by a thing she half-remembered yet this seemed to make her glowing in the orange waves like the curtains were breathing fire. Should anyone see her that morning she would seem a golden ghost trapped on the bed by the light, perhaps a figure in one of her dreams remodelling her. She yawned again the sound melancholic like an endless sigh belied the joy Jane felt within. She stretches her arms, her lips make a circle, but she stifled the yawn and breathed out deeply releasing her dreams that seemed like jigsaws with too many missing pieces yet still dreams she had revelled in but, now she set them free to try another mind.

Jane looked at the clock by the bed.

She had plenty of time and lay back down on the mattress strands of her hair stuck on the moisture on her face, she brushed them aside. She had plenty of time and she wondered when Carl had left, had he got any sleep at all? He was always up at Anniesland doing night paintings of the lights down to the West End, already he had finished five from various positions and viewpoint. He’d even sold one. But Jane was worried about him he had become so thin as if he had burnt the little fat off his already skinny form, Jane had small hands but even she could put her hand about Carl’s wrist. A couple of days earlier she had thought she heard him crying in his studio, he used to cry too much when they first met, but it had stopped for a while when he was starting work on the series of nightscapes, now this, the crying was not like before it was almost ruining her listening to it, almost a feral howl he could no longer keep down in belly of his mind.

The night before she had stopped him as he left his room, behind him she saw his curtains were closed against the day. They were always pulled shut to blinker out his day, Carl looked shorter too and he hunched over himself as he were trying to hide, his white skin gleamed with sweat.

‘You look terrible,’ she told him, he smiled then curled over himself like a bad actor playing the part of a hunch-back and walked slowly, quietly toward the front door. Silently he opened the door, then wordlessly closed it behind himself. She stood at the door that day wondering if he would come back, he looked like he could fall down at any moment.

She had all the time in the world. For a while longer she lay on her bed, almost patiently as if she were waiting for someone she knew would not turn up. She remembered his face when she found him in the great, green carpeted hallway drunkenly trying to find the light’s switch. Snapping the switch on she faced him when he turned surprised to see her there. His eyes seemed to be on fire sunken deep in the red pits of the sockets, his mouth was slack she could see drool drying at the corners of his mouth. She had seen homeless people in sleeping bags worse than this. When she remembered the angel-faced man she had first met, made her ashamed of herself that she loved that man more, than this bedraggled rag of himself, just added to the shame she felt seeing him there a lost man in his own house. She led him to his bed, she did not want to touch him and managed to guide him there without holding or lifting up him off the floor, she did not want to remember his pale hairy belly or his bony arms, so was glad when she left him snoring in his bed along the hall from the bedroom where she lay now washed in sunlight. In her lethargy she closed her eyes and fell asleep.

Only the angry banging on the front door shocked her into waking she ran there and asked who it was but the banging on the door was the only answer. Then kicking began and suddenly black boots smashed through the flimsy green painted door. Carl stood there with two massive men standing behind him.

‘What have you done?’ Was her only greeting,

Then men behind hustled Carl into the house.

‘This my house!

‘Carl rents rooms. Get out if my house.’ but the heavies pushed Carl further into the bright, expansive hallway. She, was so angry, she felt like a wall of fire that was stronger than the bullies and could push them out then she could care for Carl. In the light she saw his face was bloody and she could feel the pains panting from his body. The heavy-set men loomed over her. Suddenly she was in terrified scenarios of rape, of pain, of imprisonment. Murder.

One of the guys said to the other:

‘Search the place, get all the money and the jewels we have plenty time get everything that looks valuable. Anything you can think of to cover his debt.’ She wept as the men trashed her house. Later one of them had kicked Carl and kicked even harder and he lay lost and breathing belabouredly as the cash and valuables were taken out by the men with an unbelievable swiftness helplessly, she watched as they took all they wanted and everything she loved about her home was gone or smashed and broken. When they just as swiftly departed, she went to Carl and said a Jewish prayer, an old prayer, and wept her healing tears on his face.

They were gone. Crusted blood closed Carl’s eyes, he was glad he’d been so drunk when Jess and his entourage grabbed him, he knew they’d had hurt him bad cut him, threatened to burn down Jane’s house with her still in it. If he had been sober, he would feel the pain they had inflicted on him burning lit ends of fags on his face, the cuts on his hairy arms as he tried to fend off their knives. ‘We’re going to kill your cat.’ They told him again and again. Through his bloody lips he asked if Chantelle, the pregnant tortoise-shell love of his life was OK. Jane lifted him up off the floor, though she was slight figured and two foot smaller than Carl, she somehow managed to struggle him up into her arms and carry him into her room and lay him on the sunlit bed. As she cleaned most of the blood off him her voice reached him and slowly his terrifying nightmares diminished and he was left in a dreamless slumber until the next day.

As he slept Jane started to tidy up and count her losses, they had taken so much, jewellery her father had given her with all their memories, taken were all of her watches and photographs in their expensive frames, her computer with all her work-she had raced through to her study and starting to really panic for the first time scrambled through all the forgotten crap in one of her desk drawers but finally discovered her Floppy Discs, they’d even gone through the fortune of LP’s she and Carl had collected, so many had gone almost made her weep. As she sat with her legs under her, she began to think of all the things they hadn’t taken and felt such gratitude when she saw this or that, and they hadn’t taken what she had already lost like her father, the memories of him were still safe in her head. Later she went and sat beside Carl, he looked broken, she could clean and salve his body, but she worried that this time she could not fix him.

In the afternoon she made soup and lingered a while in her garden, she pulled up some potatoes and onions, a couple of carrots, and sat on the lawn writing in her journal of that day’s journey. She got lost in the words and wrote for two hours. Surprised by the time she went back into the house and made the broth and had a bowl topped for him and still morning he was awake and smiled at her she couldn’t remember the last time he had smiled and she felt the onset of joy, as he devoured the soup as if he were kissing it, the same joy she had felt when she first met Carl two years ago.

She first met Carl in Radio City, a night club on Sauchiehall Steet.  He had scammed his way into the club and she had laughed as she stood near the entrance, she laughed too at the face annoyance of the feeble bouncer whom he’d befuddled and got by him. Carl didn’t notice her. He went straight to the bar. All night she hoovered around, but he barely noticed the long tawny haired Geography student in her long green dressed that she made herself.

Just before two when the nightclub closed, she went over to him:

‘I saw you.’ She told him smiling

‘What?’ He mirrored her smile.

‘Sneaking in without paying,’ she pointed to the bouncer. ‘You should go back and pay him.’

He laughed, ‘yeah right.’ He turned away gripping tightly onto his final Guinness of the evening, Jane walked to his side. ‘The bars closed can I have a sip of that?’

‘Sure,’

She drank half his pint, Carl looked surprised and a little angry, but drank the rest as quickly as she and together ignoring the busy bouncer left together. Cold was coming up stairs from Sauchiehall Street below. He saw her shiver and offered her his Crombie coat, but she wouldn’t take it. Then once they reached street-level and as the blast wet wind hit her harder, she changed her mind, he took it off and put it over her shoulder. ‘Thanks, Mr Gentle man.’

‘Where are you headed?’

‘George Square I can get a bus to Halfway there. Thankfully the bus is quick this time of night.’

‘Halfway? I like the name. When will you get halfway to Halfway? Where is that?’

‘Over the Clyde.’

Slowly they made off. with the wind it was a long, slow battle to George Square. He took her hand and led her to the shelter of a well-lit shop doorway and started to kiss her; she laughed and pulled away.

‘You have Mick Jagger lips,’ she told him.

‘Have I? No-ones told me that before.’ She gave Carl a quick kiss on them and led him back into the wind. ‘The bus leaves in ten minutes, we’ll have to run.’ And hand in hand they blasted back at the blasted wind down Sauchiehall Street like a wall of cold that they broke through, like a door, or the eye of a storm, through the wind barely aware of it with their speed and laughter and excitedness and they made it to the bus-stop just a minute before the vehicle took off for Halfway. They kissed almost the whole way there they sat at the front seat on the top deck watching the drunks stoting about, and other lovers in their own shop doorways, Carl baulked at stink of the bus a few, no more than a few, drank lagers and bottles of vodka. They would have would’ve missed their stop if Jane hadn’t instinctively looked up as they turned onto her street.

The stop was just passed Jane’s house; she took his hand and led him in, then with his lips of hers Jane started speaking. She was studying Geography at Glasgow University near where Carl had his flat. She could come and visit he told her after she’d finished classes, she said she would.

‘Hillhead Street? What Number?’ She wanted to know.

‘4, Hillhead Street,’ as if he were James Bond speaking his name

‘I go down there every day.’ Finally, they had made their way in after all the wind and alcoholics on the bus. Wrapped in each other, to the end of the hallway she took him into the kitchen and asked him if he wanted a pizza:

‘Obviously.’ He said; she laughed. While they waited for them to cook, she went upstairs and ran a bath. Once the bath was steaming and hot and bubbly and steamed encompassed the bathroom, they brought up their pepperoni pizza’s, undressed together for the first time and ate the food in the bath. Afterwards, after wiping the tomato sauce off his chin, she dashed down the stairs again and fed Justinian the dog and brought up some black grapes from in front of late-night television, laughing at all the weirdos on Channel Four’s late night discussion programme, then once it got boring Jane went to the kitchen to make breakfast soon Carl followed her down, she asked him if he’d take out the garden waste. It was cold as he’d left his Crombie coat in the bathroom, but he spent some time taking in the gardens, recognizing the plants, some he had forgotten name of and some he had never seen before as Justinian peed copiously and shat once. Once in again, the smell of frying bacon sausages mushrooms, Tight Tomatoes and black pudding reminded him of home in Aberdeen. Greedily, as if he had not long before they’d had a 12-inch pizza, he wolfed down the food while Jane with a modicum of dignity ate more slowly and only stepped up the pace when she noticed Carl looking hungrily, almost lustily, at the black pudding and what else left on her plate, he didn’t get a bean, not even when reached out to her plate she forked him on the finger.

They had a good time the next two years, she moved into his house on Hillhead Street and had a long honeymoon of love and sex, after a while they had a room to themselves but, then they spent long times with each other Jane wrote in Carl’s room as he painted in the silent room, sometime in the middle of the night he would knock on her door to show her his latest painting, thrilled the sight of her on the canvas and then he would try to write paltry poems compared to her beautiful words, but he would read them for her and he fell in love with her. Later she was buying him new clothes and food and he was always asking for money to buy painting equipment.

‘You should buy some in the Barrowlands a lot cheaper,’ she advised  one day the first day of the of that day there  in their second year together but he refused to use cheap paints, she knew he was afraid of Barro lands as some yout had kicked Carl one stupid day, always he insisted  ‘I only used  good paint, and all the clothes she bought for him, she never got even 1/2p from him, within a week they were messed covered in paint even his new boots, he was borrowing a fiver or more often a tenner, which he never returned. His crying at the slightest thing pissed her off, they’d make up and both were having the best sex together, then things changed  he refused sex  and he became a born-again Christian and didn’t let Jane in his room in case he was tempted by the lovely Jane, but fell out of faith with goodness and the weeping started up again and he looked ill all time and hid in his room for days, then he started to tell her how excited he was with his plan to do a series on night pictures, he never read her novel anymore or read to her, most nights he was up at Maryland looking down at the city and would try to capture the lights of the immensity of housing estates til they were lost to the horizon. She thought she’d change flats, hating him, but they stayed in the strange house on Hillhead Steet that was as tall and dissolute as a Dreadnought,  the house of her heart, she had loved this place, would always love this place she stayed went to University during the day and stayed in her room in the evening most of the time writing short stories didn’t see Carl much except in the kitchen, it had been over a year they hadn’t had sex, he had not even  intimated that he’d like to do it, but she went out some weekends and Carl made himself sick with jealousy. His new painting left unfinished on his easel and the paint brushes thrown untidily on the floor, something else wasted which had enthused his mind when first he started it, quietly he would sneak through on those weekends she was out and he’d read her stories and extracts from the novel she still hadn’t completed and during those nights he fell in love with her again, or maybe he fell in love with Jane for the first time.

Now. He slowly regained consciousness and all pain that the alcohol had masked swamped over him and he wanted to throw up. He threw up, on himself on Jane’s bright sheets, pillow, blankets, he couldn’t stop himself stopping only when he had rid himself of all that was in his stomach and still he retched, as if his body was telling the poison was himself and puking Carl out of Carl was impossible, then thinking he had made too much noise, fear that had been made present in his life for so long recently, returned that she would hear him and come through and demand answers, that Jez somewhere had heard him and finish him off, that had not already taking everything and return for more. But, then in his head, incomprehensible, were the Jewish words she had spoken over him when Jess’ men had looted their home, and they slowed the pace of his heart and he wiped the tears from his eyes. They were enough, whatever she had said, to remind him of resolve, recall himself before he had met Jess, who he had been before he had started taking that stuff. No, he told himself, no more. And he fell back asleep and woke up hungry and Jane came into room with the soup.

Jane fell weeping angrily onto Carl’s dirty-mattress and unmade bed. She felt filthy, she had emptied the bath once she had brought him back to her bed and had to gush open the cold taps to get the dirt, the blood and puke and shit and stink of him off the enamel, had scrubbed it with a hard brush and used bleach as the annoying noise of the washing machine rose louder and louder in volume, vibrating inside her. She wanted to scream her body demanded that she screamed. She complied and almost intentionally struck her head against the side of the bath. Then the tears came and she felt ashamed and had to hide in his room, she thought, all these years she had thought, that she had consigned such behaviour to infancy, but now she had begun weeping and shuddering and snotting down her face she couldn’t stop, didn’t want to stop. Yet she did eventually and went to the washing machine and inspected her sheets and hung them in the garden to dry then had a bath herself. She lay there and alone more herself she didn’t know what to do, that she had herself back under control was a relief, but she had to do something as she had washed him, she saw what a mess he was in, really, she should take him up to A+E, then she told herself she was catastrophizing then she began to doubt her own thoughts. Eventually she got out of the bath, dried herself and put on some clean clothes an old pair of denim shorts and a Jesus and Mary Chain t-shirt with no sleeves, and put the dirty ones into the machine, but couldn’t bear to put the annoying thing on again. She went back into her room and rummaged about in an old handbag she never used and took out some savlon creme and some antiseptic lotion and until that day fell into dusk and then darkness she slowly and methodically soothed the hurts on his body promising herself she would never cry for him again.