SIX
If we swallow arsenic we must be poisoned, and he
who dreams as I have done, must be troubled
—William Cowper
Elderwine Cottage, damp and stinking. Stooping to gather a fistful of letters franked more than a fortnight before; Lee yelled something intended to be Hallo or Anyone In but which came out unintelligibly between. Off right, a narrow hall of razor-edged shadows admitted to a room with a bare light bulb burning. He carefully nudged open the door. It was ankle deep in newspapers and litter. Some of the papers were unread and folded neatly in piles, some had obviously served as wrappings for a variety of takeaway foods. Judging by the smell, some still did. Floating in the debris were dozens of brown ale and whiskey empties, bottles frozen neck-up in a polluted lake. In the next room he tried flicking on a light switch for a bulb that was missing. He passed through to the kitchen. A tinker's workshop of pans and dishes was stacked high in the sink which was full of grey water, a half-inch slab of grease on the surface; rock-hard doorsteps of sliced bread grew fibrous green beards; disposable fast food cartons were left strategically, still offering half of their original contents; milk bottles stood with their contents crusting in phases of metamorphosis. It was more like a biochemist's laboratory than a kitchen.
"Brad Cousins!" He climbed the creaking wooden steps and found upstairs two cold empty rooms with generations of paper stripping itself from the walls. Downstairs again, he took a second look in the back room with the broken light. There was a man asleep on the couch, he looked like a bundled sack, roped and tied at the top.
"Is that you Brad?" he said loudly. The sack didn't stir, but he knew that he had found his man.
Brad Cousins slept on, his jaw slack and his mouth open, a string of saliva swinging from his chin to his T-shirt like a delicate piece of suspension engineering. A pair of scuffed placeless brogues was kicked off at the end of the couch, adding to the general stench of lived-in nylon socks. From matted head to swollen foot, the sleeping body exuded a root odour, and a sweet-rotten scent of sweat and alcohol commingled.
"Brad. Brad, it's Lee. Lee Peterson."
One crimson-cupped eye opened. Lee found himself talking as though through a drainpipe. "Brad. I've come a long way to see you. I've come to talk to you, Brad. We have to talk. All right?"
The bloodshot eye glazed over, an inner protective membrane forming across it.
"Brad. I want you to listen, Brad. Can you hear me? There are some questions I need to ask you."
The eye closed. "No, don't go to sleep again, Brad. I don't want you to go back to sleep. Brad. Brad. Wake up, Brad."
This time both eyes opened and with a startling marionette movement he jerked himself upright on the couch. His eyes were like glass beads fixed on Lee. Finally he got up and lurched unsteadily out of the room. Lee heard him go out through the back door and then heard the clanking mechanism of the backyard toilet flush. He returned without a word.
"Brad. Listen to what I'm saying—"
"You have my permission to stop talking to me as if I'm in a coma," Cousins interrupted. "If I'm not saying much right now it's because I'm conducting a lively debate with myself. Interior dialogue. If the better half of me wins the debate, I'll go back to sleep. Then when I wake up you won't be here and I'll feel much happier."
"Don't count on it."
"OK, so why are you here? Let me run the options. I borrowed half a quid from you when we were students and you've come to get it back. No? Your marriage is on the rocks and you want some advice from your ol' mate Brad Cousins who always knew how to handle women. Yes? Or you need a career break and you want me to use my position to pull a few strings for you, is that it? Eh? Well I don't have half a quid, I never give advice and my influence is on the wane. You wasted a journey. You can go." He leaned back and closed his eyes.
"Just came to have a little talk with you, Brad."
"Are you still here? I thought I was only—"
"Dreaming?"
"What do you want?" Brad scowled play-time over.
"The booze doesn't keep the dreams away, does it?"
Cousins got up and wobbled over to the other side of the room, steadying himself against a heavy oak sideboard. "Away at bay I pray they stay."
"You're still pissed."
Cousins drew a circle in the air and punctured it with a nicotine-dyed finger. "I'd forgotten how telepathically perceptive you were."
"Do you sleep well?”
"I sleep like a baby log. Thanks."
"No bad dreams?"
"Ah! Dreamscreams?"
"Any repeaters?"
"Dreameaters?"
"Ever go back^ there?"
"Dreamscare?"
"You like this game?"
"Why not. How long can we play?"
"How long can you keep it up? How long can you go on pretending?"
"You were always boring; did I ever tell you that? Always boring."
"Why won't you talk about it?"
"It. What is it, exactly?" The cabinet door in the sideboard had lost its handle. Cousins expertly prised it open with his fingertips. He lifted out a third-full bottle of Scotch and a dusty, gluey-looking tumbler with a long human hair, probably his own, stuck at the rim.
The whiskey splashed into the tumbler as if it were Cola. No companion drink was offered. "It is an unappreciated visit from an unwanted past. It appears when you're least expecting it, and when you least want it. It comes when you are asleep, when you thought you were enjoying yourself, defences down, getting in the zeds. It knows that it's not welcome, but it sits there uninvited in your comfortable squalid little nest with its ridiculous mouth open asking for answers to questions."
"I can't say that age or booze has had a mellowing effect on you."
"Mellowing? Spare me. You've come to discuss my spiritual development."
"People like you don't develop; they ferment. I've come to talk about dreaming."
At that last word, Cousins moved to the window, glass in hand. He leaned against the window-sill and peered over at the neighbouring tumbledown cottage. "No, don't change the subject. Really. I'm always interested in your observations concerning my moral and social progress. Who will you be reporting back to, I wonder."
"I've seen Ella, if that's what you mean. That's why I'm here."
"How is the old slag? Has she slept her way to prominence? Good luck to her and all who sail in her." He seemed to have spotted something and leaned toward the window.
"What about you?" Lee trying to be barbed in return. "Did you ever see Honora Brennan again?"
Cousins tried to spit out the hair that caught in his mouth. He kept his back turned as Lee spoke. "You know why I came here. Someone's been stirring things up. Now either you've been back there muddying the water, or if it's not you, then at least like Ella and myself you've been caught in the backwash."
"What can I do against such dazzling logic?"
"You can drop the act; you're as frightened as we are."
"Aw, shaddup."
"What are you afraid of? Don't want to be reminded of what happened back there? Don't want to remember your special part in it?"
"All right! All right! I did go back there as a matter of fact. I didn't want to go. In fact I tried bloody hard not to go. I spent night after bloody night fighting to keep it away. But it was too strong. It got so I was afraid to go to sleep at night, because I knew what was going to happen. I used pills to stay awake for three or four days, and then when the inevitable happened I didn't have the strength left to resist it." He turned to face Lee across the room. "You wouldn't recognize the old place now: they've got penny arcades and fat lady shows, and hot-dog stands and end-of-pier comedy acts. It's quite a tourist pull these days; you should get Ella to go down there with you for the bank holiday."
"You're scared, Cousins." Lee stood up. "You live ankle deep in shit and you're scared. I can smell it on you, even through all the booze."
"And I don't even owe you the time of day!"
He turned back to the window. Lee was at a loss. Swaying uneasily against the unlit fireplace, he rubbed his hand along the dusty mantelpiece, waiting for resolution to materialize out of nothing. Cousins nodded at the crumbling cottage across the yard. "She's out there. I've seen her."
Lee stepped across to the window. He could see nothing.
"Who? Who are you talking about? Ella?"
"Noooo," waving a finger at the dereliction. "Not Ella. Her."
"There's nothing. Nothing."
"Did you see that? Did you see that light there—just a flicker. You couldn't have missed it. Did you see it?"
Cousins's gluey eyes were pressed against the window. He stank. Lee stepped back, looked around at the filth and debris of the room, wondered what he was doing there. There was no trace of light in the other cottage. He had had enough.
"To hell with it. I didn't see anything. And I'm going. I shouldn't even have come."
It was as if a spell had been lifted. He was appalled that he had allowed Ella to pack him off on this fool's errand. This confrontation disgusted him. But what really vexed him was not that Brad was a sot but that there was something about Brad's slither into alcoholic slush that was only superficially different to his own dash for stiff conformity. Both of them were casualties—Ella's word for it: men whose souls leaked through the corrosion which followed brilliant dreaming.
Now Ella had got him scurrying down here rattling chains and locks that were turning to dust in his hands. He felt alone, he wanted his neat home, his hermetically sealed box, wanted not to be confronted with this degenerate version of himself where the only distinction between them was a full set of buttons and a splash of cologne.
"You can… put your head down here for the night..." Cousins said, suddenly sheepish.
"What?" A mirthless laugh. "Is that a funny? Thanks, old friend, but no thanks. I'll take my chances of roughing it at The Plough, back down the road."
Back behind the steering wheel, he turned his headlamps up full on the derelict cottage. He had let Cousins spook him. He could still see him watching from the window. Turning the car around rapidly he drove back on to the road, switching on the wireless for the comfort of a Radio 4 voice.
At the Plough, with barely more customers than staff, he had no difficulty in getting accommodation for the night. He was shown to a room with an uneven floor and heavy Victorian furniture. Before turning in, he opened a window and looked out across the moonless, starless valley, wondering why he had bothered to come, but already knowing the answer. In the comfortable bed he fell into a fitful sleep; a seamless patchwork of dreams crossing easily from past to present and back again to the past.