Just Dreaming Read online

  “Yes, well.” Now Henry was smiling properly, with all the crinkles at the corners of his mouth. “I simply couldn’t help it. We’re powerless against our instincts.”

  10

  “THE TREE WANTS peace, but the wind will not stop blowing.” Why my Californian kung fu teacher Mr. Wu’s saying came into my mind just now I had no idea. After all, there wasn’t a breath of wind blowing just after midnight in this attractive London suburb.

  And I wasn’t a tree.

  But I still wanted peace. Instead, another few problems turned up to be solved every day. I couldn’t see them as mere challenges anymore; there were simply too many of them—and too few solutions, if any. There seemed to be no prospect of any improvement. And obviously there was no way of stopping Arthur, who was like a tsunami. We couldn’t do anything to stop him; we couldn’t even get our friends to safety on higher ground.

  I had taken Persephone home and made sure she reached her room without her parents getting a glimpse of her tearstained face. Luckily they had both gone to bed early, and they were sleeping soundly.

  “At least I got drunk for the first and last time ever on 1972 Château Thingy worth four hundred pounds,” muttered Persephone as I helped her to take her makeup off, get into her pajamas, and hang the dress back in Pandora’s wardrobe. “Isn’t it funny that I remember all about the wine, but nothing about what happened later?”

  Yes, it was. But how was I to explain the whole thing, without leaving her unable to trust herself to go to sleep ever again?

  After all, sleep was vitally important, and the whole situation was so complex that it would have been hopelessly overwhelming even for someone stone-cold sober.

  Fortunately Persephone was too exhausted to ask any more questions. So I had simply let her fall into bed, puzzled as she still was, and I hoped she would sleep like a log. Waking tomorrow morning was going to be bad enough. I knew all about that: just after you awoke, there was that weird little moment when you felt normal, warm and safe under the soft duvet. But if you then realized—as you usually did right away—that what seemed to you like a ridiculous dream had really happened, you just wanted to die.

  I had covered Persephone up, had gone downstairs quietly in the dark, and cautiously latched the front door behind me, greatly relieved not to have met one of her family in pajamas at the last moment, taking me for a burglar.

  As I was passing the bus stop not far from Persephone’s house, a bus was just arriving, but I thought I’d rather go home on foot, hoping that my head would clear in the cool night air. Although a church clock was striking midnight somewhere or other, I wasn’t frightened. I’d lived in much more dangerous places, and Hampstead was calm and peaceful by night and day alike. The full moon gave extra atmospheric light. Furthermore, in the unlikely case that a criminal might be lying in wait in one of the neat front gardens, I could do kung fu. Not that kung fu had been any use to me tonight when Persephone made her dramatic appearance.

  During the ten minutes it took me to get home, I gave every stone I could find a vicious kick, but as I turned into our road, I was still furious. And not just with Arthur, the cause of the trouble, but with myself as well. Because I hadn’t done anything to stop it, I’d just stood around helplessly in the background. And because I’d known all this week that something bad was going to happen, yet all the same I hadn’t managed to prevent it.

  The magnolias were coming into flower outside our house. I could see their pale petals a long way off, and I stopped kicking stones and quickened my pace. Maybe Grayson was home already and could tell me whether the police had turned up, and, if so, whether they believed the story we had planned to tell them.

  Coming closer, I saw that there was still a light on in Lottie’s room on the top floor, and I wondered whether to slip upstairs and let her comfort me a bit. Like in the past when I’d had a bad dream and got in under her quilt with her. There’d always been a faint smell of cinnamon and vanilla, and Lottie had stroked my hair soothingly and assured me there was nothing to be afraid of. It was like magic: if Lottie told me everything was all right, then it was—life was as simple as that in those days. Then she used to sing me German lullabies in her soft alto voice. The moon rose behind the trees in those lullabies, stars like little sheep grazed the sky, and shone their friendly light in at every window. Worries had gone to sleep, and God had watched over everything, including our sick neighbors.

  I hadn’t heard those lullabies for ages. And if Lottie was going to Germany in July, I’d probably never hear them again. I blinked a few tears away. Why couldn’t everything simply stay the way it was? Why did life have to get more and more complicated the older you grew? A life without Lottie in it seemed to me very bleak.

  I’d never been able to keep secrets from her, at least not for long; she’d always noticed when something was on my mind. And she still did, but there were secrets that I couldn’t tell anyone, not even Lottie. And worries that wouldn’t go away even in the light of the kindly moon. To be honest, I wasn’t even sure whether God was really watching over us all.

  Presumably that was why I no longer had the right to climb into Lottie’s bed and let her comfort me.

  Because I’d been staring up at the light in her window for too long, I almost missed seeing that someone was leaning against the wall that divided our drive from the garden next door.

  When he emerged from the shadows, his hair shone like gold in the moonlight. It was Arthur.

  “Oh, it’s only you,” he said, disappointed. He was obviously waiting here for Grayson, which in turn meant that Grayson wasn’t home yet.

  I had stopped, automatically raising my fists. Now I let them sink again. In the last few hours, too much had happened for my adrenaline level to rise any further.

  “Haven’t you ruined enough lives for one day?” I asked. I realized that I wasn’t even feeling furious anymore.

  “I’d have thought I saved yours,” he replied.

  “Interesting way of looking at it.” I tried to see the expression on his face, but it was too dark for such details. Although it didn’t look as if Grayson had beaten him up—no black eye or split lip. What a pity.

  “I’d never have let Persephone shoot Henry,” said Arthur, so quietly and seriously that it took me a couple of seconds to understand what, fundamentally, he had just admitted. But even that didn’t stir up my anger again. I suddenly noticed how terribly tired I was. And sad. It had been a long, long day.

  “You mean that if Henry hadn’t moved in front of me, I’d be dead now and Persephone would be a murderess?”

  Arthur’s teeth flashed white in the moonlight for a split second. “I wanted to make something clear to you and the others, that’s all.”

  “You wanted to make it clear that you’re rotten right through, and you have no scruples at all?” I snorted contemptuously. “Sorry, but we already knew that. It’s just surprising to see how much further you can go.”

  “Oh, Liv, you’re only a little girl still. A little girl who naïvely divides the world into good and bad.” He sighed. “You don’t understand what an incredibly powerful tool we have within our reach.” Now he was speaking fast and urgently, almost as if he feared I wouldn’t let him finish what he was saying. “To you, all this is just a game. You don’t want to see that in reality we have the key to changing the world, making it a better place, in fact making it what we want.”

  “You want to improve the world, is that it?” I meant to sound sarcastic, but it came out almost despairingly. Because Arthur obviously really believed what he was saying. I took a deep breath. “All I see so far is how good you are at hurting people. Mrs. Lawrence and Persephone never did anything to harm you. And Theo Ellis was only answering back when you insulted him. Why are you being so horrible?” That final question had simply burst out of me, and as soon as I’d asked it I wished it unsaid. Because it sounded so childish. Like Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf. Why do you have such big teeth, Grandmother
?

  Arthur promptly laughed quietly. “Oh, why am I here arguing with you? I just wanted to shake up Grayson and Henry a bit. So they’d realize that we can’t go on fighting each other. If we remember our friendship, then we can do anything and everything together.”

  “Surely you don’t think that, after all you’ve done, they will ever be able to trust you again?”

  “Yes, indeed I do,” said Arthur. “You’ve no idea how deep our friendship goes. We’ve known each other since we were small. And we’ve gone through a great deal together. That makes a bond between us.”

  He sounded almost like Jasper earlier in the evening. Or then again, maybe Jasper’s sentimental comments on the subject of “friends for life” had come straight from Arthur. In fact, that struck me as quite likely.

  “I could never hurt my friends,” Arthur went on, and there was such deep feeling in his voice that I almost laughed out loud. But then it occurred to me that, so far, he had in fact never attacked Grayson and Henry directly. He’d turned his beady eye on others—for instance, me and my sister.

  “I don’t think you’ve understood the principle of friendship,” I said. “If you hurt people that Grayson and Henry love, then you’re hurting them as well.”

  Another bright-white flash of Arthur’s teeth. This time his laughter sounded scornful. “Speaking of yourself, are you, little Livvy? It must be great to feel that two boys love you at once. You think you’re really important, right? But until six months ago, Grayson and Henry didn’t even know you existed. And believe me, they’d have forgotten you again just as quickly. Want to bet on it?” He held his hand out to me.

  I felt like spitting on it. All of a sudden, my anger had come back, and I welcomed it like an old friend I’d been missing badly. It was so much better to be furious than sad. I was wide awake again. “I’d really love to go along with that,” I said, sounding as cool as possible. “Not that I’d get anything out of it, because if I win the bet, the stupid thing is that I won’t know.”

  “It’s all the same to me,” replied Arthur. “In fact, I just have to prove it to myself. Yes, so I spared you today, but I’m beginning to regret it.”

  And now I was really angry. Okay, so he had “spared” me, but all the same, Persephone was going to be exposed to the mockery of the whole school for weeks. Not to mention poor Theo Ellis. No one would believe that he himself didn’t know why he had broken into that jeweler’s shop, and of course he’d doubt his own reason. At best, he’d end up in a psychiatric hospital. He might never recover from the experience.

  “Seriously, what would keep me from clearing you out of the way?” asked Arthur. “By means of anyone I like, in any way I like. What’s more, at any time and any place…”

  That did it!

  “And what’s going to keep me from breaking your jaw again? Right here and now?” I snapped back, taking a step toward him. To my satisfaction, Arthur retreated. As for what I was going to do next—to be honest, I didn’t know. And unfortunately I was not going to find out, because at that moment a red sports car raced up and stopped, tires squealing, at the edge of the sidewalk beside us.

  Matt’s style of driving was all his own, and he didn’t waste time parking neatly either. His car was always at a slight angle from the side of the road, and it was a miracle that so far no one had at least knocked his side mirror askew.

  Unfortunately it hadn’t hit Arthur, who seized his opportunity, turned around, and made off. I supposed he felt it was too dangerous to hang around waiting for Grayson here.

  Matt saw me only when he got out of the car, and although I couldn’t be quite certain in the dark, I felt pretty sure that he was grinning.

  “Oops!” The smell of beer and a tangy eau de toilette wafted toward me. “Hope I didn’t disturb you and the boyfriend.”

  “Not at all,” I said.

  “But I obviously scared the poor guy off. Don’t you want to go after him?”

  “I don’t think I’ll bother. But if you want to do me a favor, you could run him down in your car. That would solve at least a few of my problems.”

  Matt laughed. “That bad?”

  Yes, that bad.

  Arthur didn’t turn to look back. And he was not walking particularly fast, but from his manner, treading rather more firmly than usual, I thought I deduced that he was furious too. Well, that was something, anyway. Even if it probably meant that he would now spend the whole night making sadistic plans to do away with me. What use was it for me to protect my own dream door like Buckingham Palace if Arthur could set someone on me anytime he liked? Someone who didn’t even know what he was doing when he pushed me under a bus or whatever fate Arthur intended for me? I’d probably be looking behind me for the rest of my life.

  “How old are you, Liv? That’s your name, isn’t it?” Matt was looking at me curiously. I could see that, even in the dark.

  “Yes, that’s my name. And I’m seventeen,” I replied.

  “Oh. Much too young for me. What a shame,” said Matt regretfully.

  “Yes, probably. Although I’m not sure whether I’ll get to be much older.” I smiled at him. “I think I’ll go in now and write my will. Good night, Matt.”

  “Good night, Liv. Stay away from open windows.”

  I most certainly would. That, at least, was something I could do.

  11

  “WELCOME TO OUR little practical course in flying for beginners, Miss Silver!” The captain of the aircraft placed my hand on a lever in the middle of a control panel between us. It was covered with countless switches and small lights blinking on and off. “There’s no time to lose, am I right? I believe you have to fly a Boeing 747 tomorrow?”

  “Maybe not tomorrow, but in the near future,” I said, embarrassed.

  “Well, let’s start, then. This is the throttle lever, and you work the landing flaps with this switch. To start the plane—”

  “Just a moment,” I interrupted him, going rather red in the face. “You do know all that about flying was only a metaphor, don’t you? What I really have to learn is, er … something else.”

  “Oh, that’s perfectly clear,” said Matt. Because it was his face under the pilot’s cap. “But flying and sex are practically the same thing. It’s all about the equilibrium between delay, thrust, the gravitational pull, and air resistance—that’s the whole secret. And of course you mustn’t be afraid.”

  He pushed a green button, and a flight attendant appeared.

  “Anything I can do for you, Captain?”

  “Yes.” Matt smiled at her. “You can keep the copilot away from me for the next half hour, and we’d like some coffee to keep us awake, a piece of cake for later—and oh, yes, could you kindly lend Liv your bra? The one she’s wearing is a total turnoff.”

  I looked down at myself in horror. Only now did I see that I was sitting there in my underwear, and certainly not the nicest I had. In fact, they weren’t even my own. The panties went right up to my waist, and, like the bra, were made of some kind of fabric the color of pork sausage. Mom sometimes wore a bandage on her hand for carpal tunnel syndrome, and it was that sort of thing. This was exactly the kind of underwear I could imagine my great-aunt Gertrude wearing.

  “Yes, it’s hideous,” the flight attendant agreed rather pityingly. “Mine comes from Victoria’s Secret. You’ll like it.” She willingly slipped out of her uniform, which was blue and yellow, its colors clashing with the green cockpit door in the background. The bra that she now revealed was made of plain black lace.

  “Stop!” I cried.

  Both Matt and the flight attendant looked at me in annoyance.

  And it really was annoying too. Me in Aunt Gertrude’s undies, with Matt and a flight attendant doing a striptease in the cockpit of a plane—it just didn’t make sense.

  My glance went back to the green door behind the flight attendant. It wasn’t only the color that didn’t fit the picture as a whole. You didn’t get ornate wooden doors like that in airplanes,
and you certainly didn’t get door handles in the shape of lizards screwing up their eyes to squint at you.

  “A dream!” I said in relief. “A stupid, feeble-minded dream.”

  “If you don’t like it here, you’re free to go,” replied Matt, sounding offended. “I’m sure we can have fun without you. At least I don’t have to teach Patricia here anything now.”

  Patricia giggled flirtatiously.

  “Fine. Have a good flight.” I made her disappear with a wave of my hand, and Matt and the entire cockpit after her. To compensate, I imagined a sunny meadow and breathed deeply. As always when I began a lucid dream, I had no idea how late it was. After meeting Arthur, I had fallen asleep surprisingly quickly, so I didn’t know when (or even if) Grayson had come home, but sometimes my body indulged in more deep sleep than normal, as if it knew it wouldn’t be able to recover from the stress of waking life in the REM phase later. That was the exception rather than the rule, but it could happen that I didn’t begin to dream until the early hours of the morning, and there wasn’t much time left before I woke when I finally spotted my door.

  Barcelona, as I had now christened the lizard on the inside of the door, purred when I stroked her scaly head. She was an enchanting creature, so beautiful that when she kept still you might have thought she was a delicate piece of jewelry made from onyx and garnets. Her still anonymous sister on the outside of the door put her scary double tongue out at me when I passed her in the corridor. With her sharp, vampire teeth and the adhesive pads of her feet, which allowed her to scurry up and down the door like lightning, she was every bit as frightening as I wanted her to be.

  “But it’s okay for you to be nice to me,” I said, closing the door behind me. At that moment I realized that I was still wearing the nightmarish sausage-colored armored underclothes.

  The lizard hissed gleefully as I conjured myself up a prettier outfit and, still feeling embarrassed, looked up and down the corridor, staring particularly hard at the gleaming black door of Henry’s dream room opposite.