The White Block

The flat was at the top of an almost square, bone white block that
stood
on a hill with other identical white boxes, looking out over a small
patch of scratty grass and down onto the dual carriageway. He'd only
been back there in dreams. In the last dream, five days before he'd
left, the door to the central staircase was standing wide open. He'd
stepped slowly over the threshold and up the stairs to find the door to
the flat ajar.


Pushing it open, he found instead of furniture and nick nacs,
every room
was filled floor to ceiling with decaying, faded flowers that fell to
the
floor and crumbled to dust as he pressed through them. Pushing further
in looking for his Mam and Dad and sister, the must of flowers pressed
up
against his skin and filled his lungs until the flowers were nothing
but
powder and the flat was empty apart from himself.


Standing at the closed door, the florescent light flickering
on and off
through the cracked glass, he had played with the keys in his
hand,
throwing them up in the cold air and catching them as he had done when
he
was a child. Even though he had not been back for years, he had kept
the
keys to the flat on his keying because somehow it seemed important for
a
reason he couldn't grasp.


Turning the key in the lock sealed an agreement made five
days ago when he had purchased the train ticket. He had returned and
the click of the
barrels of the lock and the swing of the door into the cold concrete
of
the stairwell made it irreversible. He had changed. In the crisp
night
air that swept into the damp smelling building, everything was sharp
and
clear as if he was seeing for the very first time.


It had been the dreams that had undermined things. For the
first few
years after he left, he never really thought about it at all.
University
suited him fine. Then his first job after university suited him
fine.
Then his partner suited him fine. Then marriage suited him fine.
He
hardly ever thought of the white box on the hill the looked down onto
the
constant flow of cars, never really thought of the flat at the top
with
his Mam and his Dad and his sister in it. He thought that he had come
to
terms with it all.


He had done well enough for his past to disappear when he so
wished it.
For most, including his wife, he arrived ready formed, a creature
freshly
minted for the moment but also one that had always existed, without
birth, without childhood. The better his job went, the more success he
had, the more dependant his wife became upon him for love, the less he
acknowledged his past until it eventually seemed to shrivel and curl up
like a neglected plant, of interest to no-one, not least himself. No
one
remembered the awkward frightened man who had washed up on the shores
of
university. It was almost as if he had never existed.


At first, the dreams had been weak. He would wake next to his
wife in the quiet quilted darkness of their bed, the trees whispering
to each other in the garden outside and feel rain on his face or hear
in the suburban blackness the rasp of constant traffic on wet tarmac.
Other times, he would jolt from his sleep gasping with a feeling of
being small and exposed and small under grey sky or the under the cold
light of a florescent strip. Each time a sense of comfortable
familiarity would mix with a panic that expanded inside him like a bomb
in an enclosed space, grasping at his chest and constricting his lungs.
He would try to explain to his wife as she looked on him with concern,
but either she would start laughing or the words would tie themselves
in knots and the feeling would be lost.


He forgot the specifics of these dreams almost as soon as he
awakened,
burrowing down into a more comfortable insensibility, but a residue
would
remain. A deep sense of unfamiliarity, it made him surprised at the
taste of the food that he ate the next day and made him unsure of the
layout of the home that he and his wife had so lovingly designed. Lying
back in bed, he would look at her sleeping body and find a
stranger.


Time increased the intensity of the dreams, each one more
clear and sharp
than the last. Some nights he would be down the hill from the flat,
past
the garages, to the corner of the school playing field where the
grass
grew long and collected crisp bags and drinks cans. Others he would be
in the flat, talking to his Mam as his Dad grew more indistinct until
he was a shadow on the tired wallpaper. Once or twice, he was standing
with his sister, holding hands in the copse of trees under halogen
lights on the wide grassy roundabout that guided the constant stream of
cars down the wide black dual carriageway.


Each dream perturbed him more. One night after dreaming of
the roundabout and his sister he awoke to feel the cold night air nip
at his flesh as he stood naked in the middle of the large and
well-tended lawn at the back of the house, trapped in the white light
of the security lamp that sat at the corner of the conservatory. Feet
wet and muddy, he had crept back into bed, his chilled body making his
wife flinch away and mutter in her sleep. He hung behind her in the
morning; waiting until she had left for work to stuff the grass flecked
soiled bed sheets into the washing machine.


Another time, he awoke to find himself crushed into a corner
of the games
room behind the oversized leather sofa that he had bought on a whim
one
summer afternoon, cupping his testicles in one hand, his own urine
making
a warm seat on the plush carpet. In the quiet broken only by the hum
of
the fluorescent light of the fish tank, he was surprised to hear
the
hacking of sobs in his lungs as the tears rolled down his
face.


Every dream of the white block and the field and the
roundabout took him
closer to understanding what he returned to in the comfortable
hushed
darkness of their bed when he slept. Wandered over what he had seen
and
felt the night before, he would feel, for a few fleeting seconds, he
was
waking from a warm and numb doze, feeling cold air on his face for
the
first time in years


He tried to discuss it with his wife as they ate in the
gastro-pub that
they both favoured, the wall behind them papered with ironic
seventies
wall paper of round cornered squares in oranges and
browns.


Gathering his breath and taking a larger than acceptable swig
of his wine, he looked at her.


"Stella, you know that I've been having these dreams?" he
said, his
intonation rising at the end of the sentence making it sound like
a
question. While he paused again to gather his thoughts, she
answered,
drawing great pleasure at talking through a mouthful of succulent
food.


"What dreams would these be, Martin? You can't have many more
unfulfilled ambitions," she said, with a laugh that clattered like a
handful of jewellery onto the table.


"Not those kinds of dreams. I've been having dreams that are?
disturbing me, I suppose. I have them nearly every night, and they make
me feel, well, strange. I can't understand them, they make me sad and?
and unsettled." For the first time in years, a Geordie harshness that
had left his voice almost as soon as he left Newcastle began to creep
back in as he spoke. She picked it up, her large blue eyes registering
a surprise that she would not have dreamed of voicing. "I've been
dreaming about somewhere I haven't been for a very long time.
Somewhere? Important. Somewhere I can't," swallowing deeply he
corrected himself, "haven't gone back to since I left
it."


They had never talked about where he came from in any detail.
He was
successful, expansive, and comfortable with himself. Their time at
the
beginning had been laughter dappled with wide-eyed and joyous sex. Now
it had settled into a steady routine of companionable pursuits and
buying
things. There had been times when he forgot completely about the
white
block. As far as the world and his wife were concerned, he was born
in
the light of success and money. With a present so attractive, his
past
had been immaterial.


Now, she could see the weight of time beginning to accumulate
upon him
like sediment. He was being dragged to earth by the weight of a
past,
becoming heavy, gaining gravity. She laughed again, more brittle
and
staged, as if for the benefit from the rest of the room. "Oh darling,
we
all feel odd in the mornings sometimes. God knows, if I didn't I'd
wonder what was wrong."


Continues here: http://www.abctales.com/story/60253