(1989) Dreamer (2 page)

‘You little bitch. What the fuck you doing here?’

She felt his hands clamp around her neck, felt the hand with just the thumb and finger, strong, incredibly strong, like a steel pincer, and her face was filled with the stench of onions and sweat; old stale sweat as if it had been in his clothes for weeks and was now being released, and fresh, raw onions, so sharp she could feel her eyes water from them.

‘I – I was—’ She froze as the grip of the hands tightened around her neck, squeezing the bones, crushing them. She jerked back, then she stumbled and he stumbled with her and they crashed to the floor. There was an agonising pain across her back, but she was free, she realised. She rolled, heard him grunt again, rolled some more and struggled to her feet. She felt his hand grab her sweater, pulling, and she wriggled, trying to tear free, then tripped again and fell.

As she tried to get up, his hand gripped her shoulder and spun her over, then he was lying on top of her, knees either side, pinioning her body down, and she felt the stench of his breath, the raw onions like a warm foul wind.

‘Like to be fucked, would you, little one?’ He laughed, and she stared up at his black hood, lit clearly by the bulb above it, seeing the glint of his eyes and his rotten broken teeth through the slits. He leaned back
tugging open his belt. The loose corrugated iron flap lifted above them in the wind, lighting them up with daylight for an instant, then banged loudly back down. He glanced up, and Sam sprang at him, clawing at his face with her hands, jamming her fingers into his eyes. The fingers of her left hand sank in deeper than she had thought they could, and she felt a hideous damp gelatinous sensation, then heard a rattling from the floor, like a rolling marble.

A hand crashed across her cheek. ‘You little fucking bitch, what you done to it? What you done?’

She stared up, trembling, pulling her hand away from the sightless socket that was raw red, weeping, the eyebrows turned in on themselves. She felt him lean back, groping with his hands, and as he did so she pulled a leg free and kicked him hard in the face. He jerked his head back sharply, smashing it against the bulb which shattered, and they were in complete darkness. She rolled away, scrambling feverishly towards the hatch, then she felt her shoulders grabbed again and she was flung backwards, felt him jumping onto her. She kicked again, yelling, thrashing out, punching, feeling his breath closer, until his face was inches from hers, and a sudden shaft of light came in as the loose flap above them lifted again, lighting clearly the red sightless eye socket that was inches from her face.

‘Help me!’

‘Sam?’

‘Help me!’

‘Sam? Sam?’

She thrashed violently, and suddenly she was free of his clutches, falling, then rolling wildly into soft ground, in different light; she tried to get up but fell forward, and rolled frantically again. ‘Help me, help me, help me!’

‘Sam?’

The voice was soft. She saw light again, from beside her, from an open door, then a figure standing over her, silhouetted.

‘No!’ she screamed and rolled again.

‘Sam. It’s OK. It’s OK.’

Different, she realised. Different.

‘You’ve been having a bad dream. A nightmare.’

Nightmare? She gulped in air. Stared up at the figure. A girl. She could see the light from the landing glowing softly through her long, fair hair. She heard the click of a switch, then another click.

‘The bulb must have gone,’ said the girl’s voice. A gentle voice. Annie’s voice. ‘You’ve been having a nightmare, you poor thing.’

She saw Annie walk towards her and lean down. She heard another click and her bedside Snoopy lamp came on. Snoopy grinned at her. It was all right. The baby-sitter was looking up at the ceiling, her fair hair trailing below her freckled face. Sam looked up too, and saw that the light bulb had shattered. A single jagged piece of glass remained in the socket.

‘How did that happen, Sam?’

Sam stared up at the socket and said nothing.

‘Sam?’

‘He broke it.’ She saw the frown on Annie’s face.

‘Who, Sam? Who broke it?’

Sam heard raised voices downstairs, then music. The TV, she realised. ‘Slider,’ she said. ‘Slider broke it.’

‘Slider?’ Annie looked down at her, puzzled, and tugged the strap of her corduroy dungarees back over her shoulder. ‘Who’s Slider, Sam?’

‘What are you watching?’

‘Watching?’

‘On the television.’

‘Some film – I don’t know what it is – I fell asleep. You’ve been cut. You’ve got glass in your hair and on your forehead. And your finger. It’s everywhere.’ She shook her head. ‘I left it on. It must have—’ She stared around again. ‘Must have exploded. Don’t move a sec.’ Carefully, she picked the glass out of Sam’s hair.

‘Are Mummy and Daddy back yet, Annie?’

‘Not yet. I expect they’re having fun.’ She yawned.

‘You won’t go until Mummy and Daddy get back, will you?’

‘Of course not, Sam. They’ll be back soon.’

‘Where’ve they gone?’

‘To London. To a ball.’

‘Mummy looked like a princess, didn’t she?’

Annie smiled. ‘It was a lovely dress. There.’ She walked over to the wastepaper bin, stooping on the way and picking something up from the carpet. ‘Bits of glass everywhere. Put your slippers on if you walk around. I’ll get a dustpan and brush.’

Sam heard the light tinkle of the glass dropping into the bin, then the sharp shrill of the front door bell. It made her jump.

‘It must be your parents. They’ve forgotten their key.’

Sam listened to Annie walking down the stairs and the sound of the front door opening, waiting to hear her parents’ voices, but there was a strange silence. She wondered if the film on the television had finished. She heard the click of the door closing, and there was another silence. Then she heard the soft murmur of a man’s voice; unfamiliar. There was another man’s voice as well that she did not recognise. Puzzled, she slipped out of bed, tiptoed across to her door, and peeked cautiously down the stairs.

Annie was talking to two policemen who were standing awkwardly, holding their caps.

Something was wrong, Sam knew. Something was terribly wrong. She strained her ears, but it was as if someone had turned off the volume, and all she could do was watch them mouthing silent words.

Then Annie turned away from the policemen and walked slowly, grimly, up the stairs while the policemen stayed down in the hall, still holding their caps.

She sat Sam down on the bed, pulling the blankets up around her like a shawl. She dabbed Sam’s cheek with a handkerchief, picked some more pieces of glass from her hair, laid them down on the bedside table and then stared at her with her large, sad eyes. Sam saw a tear trickling down her cheek. She had never seen a grown-up cry before.

Annie took Sam’s hands in hers and squeezed them gently, then she looked Sam directly in the eyes. ‘Your Mummy and Daddy have had an accident in the car, Sam. They aren’t coming home any more. They’ve – gone to heaven.’

Sam did not dream of the hooded man again for twenty-five years. By then he was only a dim memory in her mind. Something that had been a part of her childhood, like the toys she had forgotten and the rusting swing and the secret places that now had housing estates with neat lawns built all over them. Something she thought had gone for ever.

But he had not forgotten her.

Sam tapped out a row of figures onto her computer terminal, then sat back wearily and closed her eyes for a moment, the insides of her head banging and crashing
like the vacuum cleaner in the corridor outside. She looked at her watch. Six-twenty. Wednesday, 22nd January. Christ, time went fast. It only seemed a few days since Christmas.

She swivelled her chair and stared through her own reflection in the window at the fine needle spray of rain that was falling silently through the darkness of the fast-emptying streets of Covent Garden outside. The wettest rain of all, the type that seemed to come at you from all sides, got inside your clothes, inside your skin, it even seemed to come up out of the pavement at you.

A draught of cold air blew steadily through the glass onto her neck and she hunched her shoulders against it, then rubbed her hands together. The heating had gone off and the office felt cold. She stared at the story board propped up beside the VDU. One coloured frame showed a sketch of a palm-fringed beach. The next showed a man and a woman in designer swimwear and designer suntans bursting out of the sea. In the next frame the woman was biting a chocolate bar which the man was holding.

‘Castaway. To be eaten alone . . . or shared with a
very
good friend.’

The office had white walls and black furniture, and a skeletal green plant cowering in the corner that resisted all her efforts to make it flourish. She’d watered it, talked to it, played music to it, bathed its leaves in milk – and it stank foul for days – moved it closer to the window, further away from the window, moved it to just about every position in the room where it was possible to put a plant; but it never changed, never actually died so that they could throw it out, but never looked how it was supposed to so that it was worth keeping. Claire, with whom she shared the office, told
her she reckoned it was a
house
plant, not an
office
plant. Claire had strange views on a lot of things.

The walls were covered in schedules and pinboards with memos and Polaroids and product shots and there were two desks, her own which was vaguely orderly, and Claire’s, which was neat, pristine, irritatingly tidy. Claire always arranged it like that every evening before she left with a smug expression on her face, almost as if to imply she might or might not be coming back.

Sam heard the cleaner coming closer down the corridor, clunk, bang, thump, and she squeezed her eyes shut against her headache which she could scarcely distinguish from the banshee howl of the vacuum cleaner. The door opened and the roar became a thousand times worse. She looked up fit to scream if Rosa was going to try and come and vacuum in here, then she smiled as her boss, Ken Shepperd, came in and closed the door behind him.

‘Hi. Sorry, I’d have been down earlier, but I had a—’ He waved his right hand in the air, then circled it around as if he were winding a ball of string.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. ‘I just need to know who you’re going to have to light the Castaway shoot.’

‘You look pale. Feeling OK?’

‘Bit of a headache. I think it may be this VDU. I’m going to get one of those filters for it.’

‘I’ve got some aspirins.’

‘It’s OK, thanks.’

He walked across the office towards her, a restless man in his mid-forties in the clothes of a college student, his steely hair tousled, permanently in need of a cut, his face comfortable and creased like his denim shirt, his sharp blue eyes smiling good-naturedly. He stopped by Claire’s desk.

‘Tidy, isn’t she?’

Sam grinned. ‘Is that a hint?’

‘How are you finding her?’

Claire had only been with them a few weeks. Lara, her predecessor, had left without any warning. One Monday she failed to appear and sent in a letter the next day saying she was suffering from nervous strain and her doctor had advised her to work in a less stressful environment.

‘She’s all right,’ Sam said. ‘She doesn’t talk much.’

‘You complained that Lara nattered too much. Maybe Claire’ll cope better with the pressure.’

Sam shrugged.

‘What’s that look on your face mean?’

She shrugged again. ‘I thought she was nice when she started – but – I don’t know.’

‘Give her time. She’s quite efficient.’

‘Yes, sir!’

He walked over and stood behind Sam’s desk, staring down at the story board. ‘Joncie,’ he said. ‘I want Joncie to light it.’

‘Shall I book him?’

‘Pencil him in.’

‘Who do you want if he’s not available?’

‘I’ve mentioned it already to him.’ He squinted down at the board. ‘Castaway. Daft name for a chocolate bar.’

‘I think it’s all right.’

He glanced down the sequence of coloured frames, and read out aloud. ‘Like a coconut, Castaway has the goodness on the inside.’ He stepped back, patted his stomach and repeated the line again, in a deep bass voice. Sam laughed.

‘Castaway,’ he boomed. ‘The chocolate bar that won’t melt in the sun . . . Castaway, the world’s first pre-digested food. You don’t even need to eat it – just buy it and throw it straight down the lavatory.’

Sam grinned and shook her head. Ken lit a cigarette and the sweet smell tortured her. She watched him prowl around the office, staring at the schedules on the walls; eighteen commercials already booked for this year; they’d made forty-three last year. Ken charged a fee of ten thousand pounds a day for directing and the firm took a percentage of the total production cost. If he weren’t still paying off his debts and his wife, he’d be a rich man by now. And if he could keep his temper and his eye for the changing fashions, he would be eventually.

‘You’re going to behave at the meeting tomorrow, aren’t you?’

‘Behave?’ he said.

‘Yes.’ She grinned.

He nodded like a reluctant schoolboy.

‘Big bucks, Ken.’

‘Done the budget?’

‘Just going to print it out.’

He looked at his watch, a heavy macho brute of a watch festooned with important-looking knobs, waterproof to five hundred metres (handy for the bathtub, Sam once told him). ‘Fancy a quick jar?’

‘No thanks. I want to get back in time to bath Nicky. I was late last night.’

‘Only a quick one.’

‘Hot date?’

He pointed a finger downwards. ‘Snooker. Got a couple of new lads from Lowe Howard-Spinks coming over. Business, Sam,’ he said, noticing her expression.

‘Business!’ she mocked.

The wipers of the elderly E-Type Jaguar smeared the rain into a translucent film across the windscreen, making it hard to see. She drove fast, worried Nicky might
already be in bed, straining forward to see the road ahead, past the Tower of London, its battlements illuminated in a bright fuzz of light and mist, into London’s docklands and slowed as she turned into Wapping High Street, trying not to shake the twenty-five-year-old car too much on the cobblestones. She passed a block of dark, unfinished apartments, and a large illuminated sign which said SHOW FLATS, and another which said RIVERSIDE HOMES – RIVERSIDE LIFESTYLES. Buy a lifestyle, she thought. I’ll have a pound of salami, two melons and a lifestyle please.