Friday Reading

Laid up, Lucy has a strange dream or is it a visitation from her past?

8 August 1980

I’m in bed with . . .  the flu. Sorry to tease you! The wages of primal therapy. On Tuesday I fell into a fever and I’ve been sweating for three days. Now maybe I’ll fit into some of your skinnymalinks gear. Only trouble is Ma’d freak if she saw me dressed like you. She had a fit when I borrowed your jacket a while ago. I told her it made me feel closer to you but she was having none of it. Made me put it back on the hall stand just exactly where it’s been hanging since you left.

Today is the first day that I’ve felt vaguely human. Yeah, yeah, I can hear your joke now. Very funny. Actually though you’d have a point cos I don’t look very human. More like a Zombie. Or a vampire. I can’t take too much daylight so the curtains are still shut. I think I’ve been coiled up like a snake in the bed for the past three days.

  I kinda remember Ma bringing in cups of tea and Bovril. Hate that stuff. You know how she is about it being ‘fortifying’. I chuck it down the loo as soon as she’s gone downstairs. Da brought in a radio but I couldn’t listen to it. The voices sounded to be all jumbled together and I couldn’t even tell what language they were speaking. Now I’ve managed to eat a slice of toast and I feel full. Maybe tonight I’ll crawl downstairs and slump in front of the TV for a few hours.

Before I do that I have to tell you about my dream last night. It was almost too vivid and strong to be called a dream. Grey Coat was here. Same as ever. She sat on your bed, her old dog panting at her feet. She was wearing the same dusty old man’s coat and peeping out from under it the floral skirt over the trousers. Her hair still looked like a sheep’s arse. But here’s the weird bit, for the first time ever I was able to really see her face. And she was looking at mine.

Her eyes are amazing: china blue, like a doll’s. She has no teeth and when she talks her tongue slithers over her gums. Her voice is surprisingly light and girlish. At first she didn’t speak but began to sing, very low, in German I think, a sort of lullaby, the one that you used to play every night in your music box when we were little. It made me sad to hear the tune again.

  She reached over and laid her hand on my forehead and nodded. I was afraid to move in case I scared her which is funny when you think how scared we were of her. I wanted to ask her was it true the thing Da said about her parents being killed in a concentration camp and that she was adopted here. Do you remember? He told us to be nice to her that she had suffered a lot, that she was very brainy but her mind was broken by all those horrible memories. Now I wonder how he knew all this stuff about her. I must ask him.

  There’s a hum off her, you said.

  No surprise with all the clothes she had on, winter and summer, and she slept on the waste ground or under the trees in the park. Ma told us to keep clear of her for fear that she or her mutt might be dangerous. I wondered if she remembered the day you put a glass of milk on the ground in front of her, hoping to tempt her to speak to us. I was scared of her and stood a few yards back. But she didn’t want to talk. We left the glass there.

  You were right about the hum. It came in here with her and lingered when I woke up.  That’s what convinces me she was more than a dream – unless it’s myself I’m smelling.

  I asked her where she had been.

  Over there, she nodded towards the window.

  I looked around but saw nothing only the same old faded chintzy curtains.  

  She looked down, tired already of my questions and started rummaging among the things on your bedside locker. First she picked up the photo, squinted at it then chuckled and slapped her knee. She put it back in its place real carefully. Next she lifted up the bear, dandled it in her lap, kissed it and clasped it to her chest rocking backwards and forwards, making the bed creak. All of a sudden she stopped and drooped her head over the bear. She didn’t budge for a few seconds and when she lifted her head up I saw that her eyes were blank. Lost. I shivered, looking into their frozen blue.

  Where’s Deb? I asked her on a whim. I know there’s no reason that she should know anything that the guards and the priest and Her Auraness the psychic and Mr. and Mrs. General Public between them haven’t discovered.

  She didn’t answer but sat with her head cocked to one side, as if she was listening to another voice, one that I couldn’t hear. I haven’t thought about her for years. I can’t even remember when she stopped stravaging the roads. I don’t think we notice when she wasn’t around anymore. Come to think of it she probably curled up and died on the waste ground, alone like a wild animal, with no one to hold her hand or mourn her. What do they do with people who die like that? I mean do they give them a funeral and bury them or what?

On her bad days that’s one of Ma’s reasons to get upset. She gets to thinking it would be easier if we knew you were dead and had a grave to visit. It would be something, she says, to just know where she is, even there.

  Even there. Six foot under. In a box.

  Please not that, Sis.

I must have fallen asleep in my dream because next thing I knew I was awake and wondering what time it was. A weird atmosphere hovered in the room, along with Grey Coat’s smell. In a way waking up was like the dream. I closed my eyes again wondering would she come back.

  Da distracted me, poking his head around the door to ask if I wanted tea and toast. When I said yes he left. I leaned out of bed to open the curtains and try to see what it was Grey Coat meant by ‘Over there’. I fumbled for my glasses and looked again. This time the rectangles of red and white and grey took form as the neighbours’ houses, and their back gardens with their rotary washing lines, wooden sheds, rusting swing sets and the hills beyond.

Raising my eyes a little I could see down the pale track of the sky to the mountains. Was that were Grey Coat was pointing? After a while I couldn’t hold my head up. I shut the curtains, and flopped back in the bed, exhausted by the view. Rolling onto my side I saw your bear had tumbled – or been dropped? – to the floor.

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I hope you’re enjoying Family Lines. Don’t forget to let me know what you think of the story so far here:

From today I will be posting new chapters of the novel every Friday instead of fortnightly.