FOUR
Only people with no imagination
have to resort to their dream life
—Fransisco Umbral
The dreamwork seminars continued, measured against the advance of spring. Lee persevered in a knot of frustrated lust for Ella and blamed this condition for the temporary abandonment of his studies. The late night sessions in Ella's room continued, but they never brought him closer to her. Ella usually invited Honora and other people from the dreamwork group back to her draped cavern, where he had to satisfy himself not with the hot, honeyed sex of fantasies, but with fluting, undergraduate conversation and a long stick of hand-rolled tobacco which supposedly contained something interesting, but which only ever burned his throat. Even Brad Cousins, who was always patently uninvited to these sessions, often managed to insinuate himself into the barricade of languid bodies that blocked any prospect of physical intimacy with Ella.
Against all contrivance, Lee always seemed to find himself sitting opposite and away from Ella, a kind of dumb agitation corrugating his brow as he fidgeted and gazed over at her. She would sit on the floor with her legs drawn up under her and lecture someone—probably about the coming revolution—while making gentle karate chopping motions at the air in front of her as if she were neatly slicing her argument into digestible chunks. Occasionally, just occasionally, she might look up and grant him the special intimacy of a brief smile. Like any starving man, he showed a pathetic gratitude for these meagre crumbs.
On the rare moments he did find himself alone with Ella, he balanced himself on the edge of her bed like a jungle cat waiting to pounce but never feeling that the moment was quite right. After the initial mistake he had made on the first night, he felt sorely inhibited. In any event, in the absence of a crowd of bodies, Ella set up another kind of barricade—an unbroken mesh of words; a tirade of original ideas, rehashed theories, speculations and unproven assertions which constituted her semi-occult excursions of the past or her left-wing projections for the future.
"I'm a f*cking revolutionary," she said, on many an occasion.
Once Lee, who knew different, decided to throw down the intellectual gauntlet. "No you're not," he said.
"Yes I am."
"No you're not."
"Yes I am."
"No you're not."
"Why am I not?"
"You're just not."
"Why not?"
Lee got out before things got too deep. "Never mind."
Nothing much was happening. And it wasn't happening in Lees dreaming activities any more than it was happening in his sex life. In fact he couldn't see much difference between the two. Both seemed to involve some futile speculation which was failing miserably to produce dividends, and he had almost forgotten what one had to do with the other. He persisted with the prescribed exercises whenever he remembered what they were, earnestly quizzing himself about whether or not he was dreaming and solemnly reminding himself to become aware during his next dream. But these exercises were always broken by sexual fantasies of architectural proportion, with Ella Innes as the central pillar. Conversely, the most potent of these fantasies of Ella would occasionally be startled by the flashing thought that he must by all means become aware during his next dream. As far as he understood it, the relationship between the two things, sex and dreaming—and he was honest enough to recognize his own motivation—was that if he did manage to control his dreams, then in that other shadowy place he might have more success with Ella Innes than he did in the real world.
He continued to attend the dreamwork sessions, conscientiously reporting complete inventions. He was smart enough to make only the most modest of claims, in case he was pressed for detail by the professor. At times he considered dropping out, as some others had done, but then, in one session, Ella crossed and uncrossed her legs and he remembered why he was there.
"Dreamwork," said the professor, breaking into Lee's reverie and signalling the end of the session. "Awareness of dreaming, in at least some muted form, is now upon most of us, so I have another exercise for you. I want you to perform this exercise at every opportunity during your dreams. Look at your hands in front of your face. Try to fix your gaze on your hands. Look at your hands and try to hold them there for as long as you can manage. That's all."
One night, shortly after that session, something strange happened. Lee was asleep and dreaming. In the dream he met not Ella, but Honora Brennan, the Irish girl from the seminars.
Lee found a small walled garden in the middle of busy streets. All around it, giant concrete towers loomed, and above it was a colossal motorway flyover with loud, but somehow distant, rush-hour traffic. The garden had been planted between two of the flyover's huge pillars. In its centre he came across Honora sprawled in a deckchair and wearing a thin cotton dress. In the telepathy of the dream both recognized the erotic effect this dress was having on Lee, and Honora seemed to flaunt the fact that she wore nothing underneath. Honora seemed relaxed, Lee felt uneasy. Slowly, Honora rose to her feet, then climbed the one tree in the garden to sit on one of the lower branches. Clamping her legs, she let herself fall backwards, so that she dangled upside down, hanging from the clenched backs of her knees. Her dress slipped down over her naked body, revealing a pubic bush of shining chestnut curls above her flat, white belly.
"Do you know you are dreaming?" she asked Lee.
"I know it."
"Remember your hands." And Honora disappeared like the Cheshire Cat.
He raised his hands and looked at them for a long time, until he grew bored.
On waking, Lee scribbled everything down, and even prepared a dummy back-diary so that he would have a respectable document to present at the next seminar. He reported the dream faithfully, omitting just a few of the erotic elements, and sat back to be congratulated.
A number of the initial participants had left, including the girl with migraine, who claimed that the exercises exacerbated her medical condition, and the girl who had consulted the chaplain only to find that the dreamwork sessions clashed with the Christian Union's candle-and-guitar nights. The group now comprised only "graduated" lucid dreamers with established credentials. To most people's dissatisfaction Brad Cousins was still a regular and was now dreaming, as he said himself, with Technicolor lucidity.
Lee's excited report was greeted with a mild response. He was merely showing signs of catching up with the rest. "Why," said Burns, sensing Lee's frustration with the obduracy of the group, "would you consider this experience of lucidity to be of greater significance than any of your experiences hitherto?"
Lee was in no position to admit that his "previous experiences" were woven of a fabric even thinner than dreams. "Obvious," he said, claiming time to think.
"This obvious factor," Burns twitching one of his secret smiles, "is a mite too slender for my apprehension. Would you like to share it?"
"It seems to me that people in the group have begun to help each other in this enterprise, perhaps unconsciously."
Some eyes squinted in appreciation of this idea and some heads nodded. Burns thought for a moment.
"Interesting proposition, Lee." The professor's familiar address was new. "But I would tend to be more modest about claiming the erotic or otherwise attentions of the admittedly attractive Miss Brennan. I think you can safely claim this to be your own work."
Heads nodded, some nostrils snorted, all in agreement with this sound judgement. Embarrassed but not offended, Honora smiled timidly at Lee. But if his new powers failed to impress the group as a whole, they had an interesting effect on Ella.
After the session, as the reduced group trailed out of the professor's house, Lee hung back to talk with Honora, worried that he might have embarrassed her by blurting graphic descriptions of her lurid behaviour in his dreams. But his concern also had something to do with the fact that the intensity of his dream had conferred an enhanced radiance on Honora. She looked different.
It was while Lee was talking to Honora that Ella dropped back and inserted a proprietary arm under his.
"I just told Brad and the others that we were going on somewhere," she said.
"Oh," said Lee.
"Right, then," said Ella.
"Right, then."
For a moment they stared dumbly at each other.
"Next time," said Honora, already a shadow hurrying to catch the others.
Lee and Ella walked along the side of the cemetery as dusk fell, then out across the park towards Ella's house.
"Where is this somewhere we are going?"
"Nowhere different," said Ella, "I didn't want to do the usual; chew the fat, all that stuff."
It was a mild spring night. When they reached the row of cherry blossom trees by the tennis courts, Ella stopped abruptly, and turned and kissed his lips. She quickly slipped his arm, skipped away from him and leaned against the bough of one of the trees.
"That dream," she said.
"What?"
He took a step towards her but she reached up for a low branch and scrambled up to sit on it. She looked back at him. Her eyes were like gleaming obsidian and her hair fell across her face. She was a spirit in the tree.
"Do you know what I can do?"
"What can you do?"
"I can do this."
Clasping her calf muscles tight against the branch she let herself fall backwards, hanging from the backs of her knees, swinging slightly as she dangled there upside down, her hair falling away from her ears and neck, her outstretched arms almost reaching the grass.
Lee was mesmerized. "Yet it's not the same."
"Do it."
Lee put his hand on her stomach, creamy white in the darkness, and unbuttoned and unzipped her faded blue jeans. He undressed her against gravity, pushing up her jeans and pants to her knees to reveal the upward-pointing black triangle of hair, where in the dream he had wanted to put his tongue, and where here he did so. Ella shivered, and asked him to lift her down.
They walked across the park to Ella's house, most of the way in silence. When they got there Ella made her room even more like a cave by switching off the lights and lighting candles and turning the place into a flickering nimbus of joss scents. Only then would she let Lee undress her, this time with gravity in support. She pulled back a sheet on her mattress on the floor. Lee thought he might be dreaming, but he wasn't.