Dreamhunter (9 page)

‘He’s asleep,’ the girl guessed.

‘I’m afraid so, Miss. You see — no one ever wakes up.’ He wasn’t apologising. She was the one at fault, since no one ever woke.

‘Dream too rich for your blood?’ said the joker, and arched an eyebrow. He’d just finished doing his rounds, had pressed his ear to several doors and had been excited by the sounds of a male curse and female sigh.

One of his workmates clipped him over the back of the head. ‘Sorry about him, Miss Hame. He has terrible manners. Would it be acceptable to you if one of us walked you?’

‘Yes,’ said Laura, ‘but not him.’ She didn’t even glance at the joker as she said this. He found himself blushing.

‘I’ll see you home myself,’ said the oldest man. He took off his jacket and draped it over her shoulders. He found a lamp and lit her way down the back stairs to the stage door.

The Strand was empty, its streetlamps pale in the moonlight. The westerly had dropped. The girl walked quietly beside her escort. Now and then she turned to look at the regular flashing light on the end of So Long Spit, miles away across the bay. Laura thought about the dream. It wasn’t the first time she had strayed inside one of her aunt’s dreams before. She had never mentioned it to Grace. Laura didn’t want her aunt to feel that she’d somehow failed to keep Laura’s attention. The dream had been exciting, and Laura couldn’t see why it hadn’t kept her in its grip, why her dreaming self would choose to show more interest in prisoners building a wall and — most of all — why the dream should give her
Mamie’s father’s
name. A name formed around the letters on the fragment of paper Uncle Chorley had
fished from the mouth of a dead ranger. Did it mean anything?
What
did it mean?

It seemed to Laura that the faraway flashing light was tapping on her eyes, as though asking to be let into her head. But Laura was tired, and her mind remained dark, and puzzled.

They reached the gates to Summerfort. The house was above them, hidden by the bulk of the hill, but the man could see the driveway running through flax and tea tree. The drive was paved with broken scallop shells, which shone in the moonlight and slithered noisily against each other when the girl stepped on to them. ‘I’ll be fine from here,’ she said.

‘Goodnight, Miss Hame,’ said the man. He stood at the gate holding his lamp high, till she disappeared around the bend in the drive.

Grace appeared with the breakfast tray. She carried the morning paper tucked under her arm.

Chorley saw that his wife looked pleased with herself, so didn’t hurry to comment on her dream. He sat up in bed and stretched out his arms. Grace peered at him speculatively and tossed him the newspaper. He opened it and settled back on the pillows.

The room was quiet. Chorley could hear the sea and the cheerful sound of sugar lumps dropped into hot tea and the crisp crusts on rolls pierced by a buttery knife.

Grace handed Chorley his coffee and climbed into the bed. She put the buttered rolls down between them. The Tiebolds began to fill the bed with crumbs — only Grace giving a momentary thought to the person whose job it was to clean up after them. (She still remembered
having to clean tobacco dust and pipe ash off the counter of her tobacconist father’s little shop.)

Husband and wife swapped pages of the paper and murmured to one another about the news. For instance, the buzz about who would be the new Speaker of the House of Representatives. They agreed that one man in particular struck them as a good choice. ‘Solid and equitable,’ Grace said.

‘Yes,’ Chorley agreed, ‘though, for the life of me, I can’t think of anything
else
I know about the man.’ He shook his head, and put the paper down, stretched his legs and said, ‘Grace, why must I always fall into your villains’ heads? I never seem to have a choice. And I can’t say that I enjoyed being that jealous brother. He spent the whole dream breathing in clean air and breathing out smoke.’ He pulled a face and Grace for a moment saw the luxurious fury of her heroine’s controlling brother.

‘He’s light-headed all the time from holding his breath,’ Grace said, and kissed her husband on his slightly scratchy morning jaw. ‘I like that.’ Grace sighed and shrugged and nestled down in the bed.

Rose burst into her parent’s room. ‘Laura got up and went home last night,’ she said. She was waving a note about. ‘She writes that she couldn’t get back to sleep.’

‘I thought so,’ Grace said.

Chorley looked down at his wife, worried. Grace’s tone was so strange, so knowing. ‘Laura was very upset yesterday,’ he said. ‘No wonder her attention wandered.’

‘No,’ said Grace, ‘
she
wandered. She’s done it before. She wanders about my dreams as if —’ Grace screwed up her face. ‘I was about to say, “as if they’re her own”, but when I catch my dreams I follow them faithfully.’

Chorley was shaking his head at his wife.

‘Listen,’ she said, ‘what Laura does — no one does that. Not even Tziga can do that — go exploring, as if it’s a world, not a dream.’

‘Mother?’ said Rose. She was disturbed by her mother’s tone.

‘I thought so,’ Grace said again, brooding. ‘I felt her taking a tour backstage.’

‘Hang on, Grace,’ said Chorley. ‘At one time, for months, you imposed my face on the faces of all your heroes — whatever other faces they wore in the dreams you caught.’

‘It’s not at all the same as your face appearing in my dreams,’ Grace said to Chorley.

‘But when you did that you were
changing
something, Grace, even if it was unintentional. All Laura does is
change
things a little.’

‘I don’t go rummaging in other people’s cupboards,’ Grace said, softly. Then she dropped the subject.

But Rose wasn’t about to let it drop. She felt that she could make a better job of defending Laura than her father had. ‘You mustn’t be mad at her, Ma. Laura doesn’t mean to be annoying. She’s like that at school — always drifting — and teachers think it’s insolence. Only sometimes she isn’t able to pay attention to what
she’s supposed to be paying attention to. It’s like Da says, her mind wanders. She used to get dreadful marks in Comprehension because she was always supposing that the questions were trick questions and there was some less obvious answer that the teachers really wanted.’

Grace shook her head. ‘I’m not angry at her, Rose.’

‘Good,’ said Rose. ‘At least she’s not making your heroes look like anyone else — like, for instance, that handsome lifeguard on the infants’ beach, who we think is a smackerel.’

‘What on earth is a smackerel, Rose?’

‘Oh, you know, a smashing mackerel, which is to say a miracle,’ Rose explained.

Chorley frowned at his daughter. ‘This isn’t George Mason’s nephew we’re talking about again?’

‘No!’ Rose was disgusted. ‘He was brassy and parboiled. The lifeguard is a god!’ Then she said that if her parents had finished arguing she would leave them in peace. But only if they had.

They found themselves making promises as if she was the adult and they children, then they watched her raid half the contents of their breakfast tray and swan out of the room. For a moment they stared at the closed door. Then Grace said to Chorley, ‘Laura isn’t just wandering around behind my scenery. Dreams don’t have a backstage. It’s all real, and it goes on and on, a big world in a small box. Every dream is like the Place itself, vast, and no place to wander alone.

‘Look — it’s a good day’s walk between Doorhandle and Tricksie Bend, but in the Place you can walk for weeks and still find nothing you can recognise from the other side. Tziga and I talked about doing a transverse trip. Our talk inspired a group of rangers, who set out with a lot of food and water, and a stash of Wakeful.’ Grace paused to take her husband’s hand. She said, ‘They were never seen again.’

The main autumn Try took place on the road west of Doorhandle. It was always a circus. At Doorhandle there were dozens of officials overseeing the registration of candidates from around five in the morning. Police were present as crowd control. Marquees and refreshment stands were set up for the sightseers, journalists, the candidates themselves and their families. At the end of each Try day the grass in the forest clearing was trampled flat. Hundreds Tried at Doorhandle.

At Tricksie Bend the Try was usually a quiet event, for Coal Bay was a small catchment area, despite the summer population of holidaymakers at Sisters Beach. At Tricksie Bend, on the morning of Laura and Rose’s Try, the Regulatory Body had only to register forty-five nervous adolescents, and two adults.

Laura and Rose arrived with only half an hour to spare. They came with Chorley. Grace was acting as an official, and had gone ahead of her family.

As their car passed through the village, Laura and Rose had turned to look back through the window at the downhill view of its houses. They exchanged a look.

The time had come. It seemed that within a day they had gone from not being allowed to do something to being pushed into it. For fifteen years they had steered clear of the border, now they were steering straight for it.

Chorley turned the car off the road. It bounced up a hill towards the meadow on the bluff above the river. Other vehicles had already flattened a trail through the dry grass. A small crowd of onlookers was clustered around parked cars and carriages. The candidates were already in formation further up the slope, standing knee-deep in golden late summer grass, along a line marked by a shiny blue satin ribbon. The ribbon was strung between two stanchions and extended right across the meadow.

Laura said, ‘Does that mark where the border is?’

‘They line you up along the ribbon,’ Chorley said. ‘The border is several paces beyond, I think.’

The cars, carriages, horses in nosebags, the small crowd milling under the shade of hand-held umbrellas, the short line of candidates and the finishing-line ribbon were all humble and unceremonious. Rose was disappointed. ‘It’s not what I expected,’ she said.

Her father told her that Tricksie Bend was favoured by parents who supposed their children might suffer from stage fright — who were afraid that stage fright might affect their candidate’s performance. ‘Of course your mother and I know that’s nonsense. But Tricksie Bend is more private. That makes it better for you.’

Laura thought that there were quite enough people for her — even the small crowd was intimidating.

Grace came to meet the car. She put her arms on the sill of the driver’s window and leant in. ‘We were right to delay, Chorley,’ she said. ‘There are several reporters up there. They have cameras.’

Chorley told the girls to put on their hats and lower their veils.

Laura and Rose’s hats were new — bought to match their first full-length dresses. Before now the girls had worn skirts that stopped at the top of their boots, halfway between knee and ankle. The hats’ wide brims supported veils of bunched organdie. Laura and Rose realised that it was with this moment in mind that they’d got their new outfits.

Chorley said to Rose, ‘You do see now why we wanted you to Try on the quiet side?’

‘Yes,’ said Rose.

‘Thank you,’ said Laura.

‘I’m going to stop by the registrar,’ Chorley said. ‘As soon as I stop, you two get out and go straight to his table.’

Rose and Laura nodded. They turned away from the windows of the car and towards each other. Laura saw
Rose’s eyes, wide and shining behind the lilac gauze of Rose’s veil and through the pale yellow of her own. Over Rose’s shoulder she saw a photographer’s assistant drop a burning match into a pile of magnesium in a flash pan he held aloft. There was a white flash and a puff of smoke rolled up from the pan. Laura’s vision filled with a shining cloud of green light. (And, a day later, there was her face in the paper, her black eyes huge and fearful. The caption took the tone of the article, which disputed the wisdom of letting girls Try at such a tender age. The caption read, ‘Age of Consent?’)

The car reached the registrar and abruptly stopped. ‘Out,’ Chorley said.

The girls clambered out and hurried to the registrar’s table. Grace waited for them, holding two pens — their forms were already filled in, and only lacked signatures. Grace pointed at each page, showed Rose and Laura where they must sign. Laura’s hand shook and the pen dropped blots beside her signature. Rangers had crowded around the two girls, jostling the newspapermen away from the table. But they let Chorley through. Chorley signed too — the forms required the signature of both parents for Rose, and two guardians for Laura.

‘Laura!’ a newspaperman shouted. ‘Do you have anything to say about the objection lodged to your candidacy?’

Laura looked around at the reporter, but the registrar was speaking to her. He told them to please make their
way up to the line. They were holding up the proceedings. Laura looked around. She tried to catch her aunt’s eye to ask if she’d heard the reporter’s question and what it meant. But Grace had her head down over the permission forms.

Chorley repelled another camera and shouted, ‘Please! Let these young women collect themselves!’

‘That’s right, George,’ said one reporter to another. ‘Mustn’t put the girls off their game.’ Then, in an insinuating way, ‘It’s an inspiration seeing these girls going on the game.’

Chorley Tiebold gasped and lashed out. He knocked the reporter’s hat off. The man’s comb-over came unstuck and lay in oily tatters against his neck.

Grace grabbed the girls and thrust them before her, around the registrar’s table and up the slope to the line. Behind them they heard the registrar shouting, ‘Only dreamhunters, rangers and candidates are allowed past this point!’

Space had been reserved for the girls roughly in the centre of the line. Grace positioned them standing more than an arm’s length apart, and about three feet from the blue ribbon.

Rose hauled off her hat and dropped it on to the flowing mass of thick grass behind her. She raised her face to the breeze. Laura copied her cousin. Once she had abandoned her hat she could hear clearly, but she was still breathless and her heartbeat was shaking her body.

While Grace and the other officiating dreamhunter and rangers conferred, the registrar locked his box and left his table. He made his way up the hill, holding his coat tails free of the seeding grass. He was carrying a stopwatch — as if it really was a race that the candidates were about to run. He stopped on the slope and straddled one end of the ribbon.

Grace came up to her daughter and niece and touched their shoulders. ‘Don’t anticipate the signal, or you’ll look silly.’ Then she said, ‘See you shortly.’ She stepped over the ribbon, and disappeared into the air. The other dreamhunter and rangers did the same — as though showing the candidates how it was done.

It was the first time Rose and Laura had ever seen the phenomenon that they had known about all their lives and had always accepted without giving it any thought. Seeing the people disappear came as a shock. Rose called ‘Mother?’ — tears springing into her eyes.

‘Candidates! At my signal,’ the registrar bellowed.

Downhill the crowd was hushed. Up the slope, towards the blue air over the bluff, Laura saw a pair of skylarks start out of the grass and go up, singing. There was a thistle in the grass directly in front of her. It was a big, healthy thistle, with three bright purple flowers and a woody stem. Grace, oblivious in her sturdy walking boots, had positioned Laura where she’d have to take her few paces through that thistle.

Beside her Rose said, ‘Laura!’ Urgent.

Laura looked around. The registrar had dropped his handkerchief. It fluttered, snagged on the grass. The whole line was a pace ahead of Laura and Rose, already pushing the ribbon with their legs. Rose had waited for her, but was leaning far forward, as though she meant to throw herself on to the ground. Laura picked up her skirts and approached the thistle. She stepped gingerly over it, then jumped forward to catch up with the ribbon.

Where was it? She was too far behind. Laura let her heavy skirts drop — must she spend the rest of her life dragging about in all this cloth? She let out a sob of frustration. The skylarks had stopped singing. She couldn’t find the ribbon. The ground was bad. The grass had gone grey.

Laura came to a dead stop. She looked around. There was no ribbon, no candidates, no crowd of carriages, no village, no river, no quiet box beehives, no birds singing and no Rose. She heard feet running on hard earth. She saw the rangers converging on her — one girl out of that whole line. They came up to her — but Aunt Grace ran right past her, without a word or glance.

ROSE WALKED ON
, pushing the line. She turned when she sensed Laura failing, saw how sick she looked. Laura was a walking corpse. Then she was a spectre. Then she was gone.

Rose stopped, and the shiny blue line of ribbon was carried off by the others ahead of her. One by one the other candidates came to a stop. Some abruptly, some
gradually as if slowed by the drag of the grass. Some doubled back to pass again through the place where the Place should have been for them. Rose did too. She went and stood where Laura had been, where Laura’s trail of parted grass came to an end.

Rose felt numb. She didn’t know what she should do, so looked up to see how the other candidates were dealing with what had happened — or had failed to happen.

The staggered group, no longer in line, had all stopped walking forward. All but one. One girl carried the ribbon away. It flowed behind her trudging form, a blue V of wake. She began to run, knock-kneed, up the meadow.

‘Hey!’ Rose shouted. Then she went after the girl, tapping the next nearest candidate, a boy of her own age. ‘Help me,’ she said.

The girl was running, blinded by tears, towards the bluff above the river. Rose and the boy pursued her. The boy overtook Rose and tackled the girl. They went down with a crackling thump in the grass and Rose threw herself down beside them.

‘There’s a cliff,’ said the boy to the girl, who clapped her hands over her face and burst into loud sobs, her flesh quivering in her too-tight cotton dress, and her buttons shivering on their rusted wire posts. Everything the girl wore was made over, Rose saw. And Rose understood the difference between this girl’s dashed hopes and her own disappointed expectations.

‘I can’t!’ the girl moaned, ‘but I have to.’

‘None of us can,’ the boy said. ‘And if we can’t we can’t.’

The girl paused to listen, then continued to weep.

The boy said, ‘We’re hidden in the grass here and the grown-ups can’t see us.’

Rose leant up on an elbow and craned over the heads of the grass. She saw the dark trails the candidates had made, and the wind pushing at the rest of the meadow, making ripples of shadow. Rose saw her mother appear and spin to face uphill, searching for Rose. Her mother spotted her almost immediately and started forward — forgetfully, for she rushed straight back out of the world again.

Rose laughed. It struck her as funny.

Her mother came back, wringing her hands, and began to patrol an invisible line.

Rose decided to let her mother wait. Let Grace think about it — that her daughter was sitting somewhere where she, Grace, couldn’t ever reach her. The land between Doorhandle and Tricksie Bend, though open to almost everyone, was closed to Grace. As closed as the Place was to Rose.

Rose was angry with her mother, who, it seemed to her, had never encouraged her to consider the possibility that she’d fail her Try. Grace had wanted Rose to become a dreamhunter. Grace was clearly distressed — but was she upset for Rose or her own disappointed hopes? ‘I’m not going to cry,’ Rose thought. ‘And I’m not going to put up with
her
crying.’
She lay in the grass watching her mother’s misery and feeling a kind of spiteful satisfaction.

Rose’s father detached himself from the onlookers, skirted the barrier of officials and went to Grace. He didn’t offer his wife any comfort, but appeared to speak sharply to her. Then he pushed Grace forward, firmly, away into the Place again. He dropped his arm once Grace had disappeared and strode up the hill to Rose.

Rose’s father sat down with them. ‘That was quick thinking,’ he said to Rose and the boy. He took the boy’s hand and gave it a brief, approving shake.

The weeping girl spread her smeary fingers and glared at Rose’s father through them. Chorley reached into his jacket and pulled out a Farry’s toffee tin. He opened it and offered it around. Rose and the boy took one each.

Chorley said, ‘There’s plenty to be done by people who don’t spend their lives stupefied by one dream after another.’

The girl sat up, and thrust her blotchy face into Chorley’s. ‘That’s all very well for you! You’re rich. And she’s beautiful.’ She pointed at Rose.

‘And you’re ambitious,’ Chorley said, calmly. ‘Stay that way.’

‘I’ve always been frightened of dreamhunters, anyway,’ the boy confessed.

‘Me too,’ said Chorley. ‘But I rather like being frightened.’ He stood up and helped the tear-stained girl to her feet.

She accepted his help, but told him that he was an idiot.

‘Our people are waiting for us,’ the boy said. He was frowning downhill. ‘I bet mine are miffed.’

Chorley took Rose’s hand. ‘I’m not disappointed in Rose,’ he said.

‘I hope you’re disappointed
for
Rose,’ said Rose, her voice brittle.

‘Yes,’ Chorley said, and looked at Rose as though waiting for something more.

‘
I won’t cry
,’ Rose told herself again.

The girl was eyeing the ribbon. She said she wondered who got to keep it.

Chorley bent down, bundled it up and gave it to her.

LAURA SQUATTED
in a circle of rangers. She crumbled the grey-white grass in her hands. She rubbed the turf bald. The grass would never grow back. A fire could have removed all the vegetation, could have inhaled and taken it. But, in the Place, it was impossible to strike a spark or kindle a flame.