The White Block 2

Continued from http://www.abctales.com/story/60180


"No," he said. "Not like that it's like? I'm going back to
places, in the dreams, that I never wanted to go back to, but at the
same time it's making me like something's missing,
like?"


He wasn't sure what he wanted to say or why he wanted to say
it to her. He felt like he was floundering, as if he was suddenly
another person. A conversation from a table behind them about market
share and the bottom line erupted into a loud gale of
laughter.


"Don't worry Martin, we all have bad dreams sometimes." She
pointed at him with her fork. "They mean what we want them to mean. I
still have dreams about a car crash I was in when I was fifteen, the
car turning over and over, but when I wake up, I look around the
bedroom, at all of the things that we have, and I know it's okay. Just
dreams, just misfiring neurons. If you try to think about they mean
you'll just wear your mind away to the size of a pea."


They were in unfamiliar territory. The smell of expensive
food and expensive perfumes and the sound of expensively gained
confidence suddenly oppressed him, made him feel like an outsider, a
charlatan. She was trying to reassure him so that things would stay as
they were.


He cleared his throat and tried to speak again, feeling his
voice as tiny against the loud and expansive voices around
him.


"In one of the dreams I'm standing with my sister and we hold
hands and she's naked. We're outside and she's trying to tell me
something but I can't hear. I know that she knows I can't hear and I
can see the sadness in her face. I wake up and I'm crying. Really
crying. I can't?"


He looked away from the easy style of her hair, the
smoothness of her skin and the way the her top sat just right on the
slight tan of her shoulder, looking out across the bar swigging at his
glass until the wine so carefully selected may as well have been cider
in a can. He could feel the thickness of his voice as it furred with
emotion. "It's like a different world and they're still there, I mean
my sister, I left it all behind and now it's come
back?"


Stella looked at him, dearly wishing for the cigarettes that
she had given up when they had both joined the gym. He was fidgeting,
tearing at a strip of skin at the side of his thumbnail. She wondered
what had happened to him. He seemed so fractured and jumbled, with no
consideration of her at all. She knew that he didn't like to talk about
his past; she'd learned in the early days when they laid naked, the
sweat cooling on them each, gazing lazily at the curls of smoke that
rose toward the ceiling. Words had tumbled from her mouth before she
had even thought of them, stories of her childhood, of ponies and prep
schools and balls. He had just looked at the ceiling in silence,
suddenly a thousand miles away, never answering, other than once when
they were almost too drunk to speak to say that his mother was a good
woman.


What did it matter, she always thought, I like him as he is,
why do I care where he came from? We're happy, why begin rooting in the
attic for dust when the rest of the house is spotless?


For her benefit, he had tried to change the subject and laugh
off the dreams, and things had returned to a level of normality. She
felt a tension released inside of her, as if they had come very close
to waking up from a beautiful dream.


Climbing into bed together with the slight smell of garlic
and wine remaining under toothpastes and mouthwashes, exchanging the
polite pleasantries of a married couple, he had instantly wanted her.
An erection strained at the stylishly tight confines of his boxer
shorts. He wanted more than to have sex with her. He could feel his
body being pulled to hers, wanting to be enveloped by her, to melt into
her. His heart beat in his ears as he roughly caressed her breast
through the stretchy tactile warmth of her pyjamas, his breath too hot
and too quick.


She took his hand gently and held it until he pulled it away,
his body a knot of need, the warmth of tears in his eyes making his
cheek glow in the darkness.


It was almost as soon as he closed his eyes the dreams
began.


He thought that he didn't remember much from his other life.
He had begun immediately to play a character after he left. The mask he
had chosen to obscure his true features had become his face, until it
was all that he recognised in the mirror. With each dream, he had felt
the mask chafe more, his real face sweating underneath. The duplicity
seemed so obvious that even a child could have spotted
it.


The dreams dropped details into him that he had not
remembered; filling him with sensations and places that seemed more
real than anything he had experience in years. Cheap cider washed
against the back of his throat, pricking it with icy chemical bubbles.
Long wet grass stripped him with freezing moisture. The smell of stale
fat took him back to a tiny room with orange curtains that stifled him
and pressed the air from his chest. Whenever he closed his eyes, the
never-ending traffic of the dual carriage way cut through the darkness.
It was a story that had suddenly stopped years ago and now suddenly
restarted, all of the characters moved into position, all of the scenes
set and props arranged.


His Dad twitched and mumbled all day in the chair next to the
window, watching the lorries and cars as they relentlessly spun from
the roundabout and accelerated down the wide carriageway away from the
city. His Mam tended the flowers on the kitchen windowsill, alone on
lino and enclosed by melamine. His sister waited in the longer grass at
the edge of the school field, smiling with cigarette in hand. All were
as he had left them, all waited for his return to take up their roles
and whirl into action again.


He found himself watching Stella as she worked in the office
at home, hovering on the threshold between rooms soundlessly. She moved
with an effortless grace as polished and smooth as marble. When they
made love in the hush and warm rustle of clean sheets, he could feel
himself elsewhere, in other rooms, with other women, subtle scents
replaced with the sharp smell of sweat and the cloying musk of cheap
perfume. When he kissed her skin, nothing lingered but the slight taste
of gentle soaps and oils. Sometimes when he ran his hand over her, he
could feel almost nothing there at all, just a warm
surface.


When Stella wasn't there, he found himself wandering from
room to room unable to settle, touching the things they had bought
together, running his finger down smooth walls and along spotless
surfaces, bare feet sinking into heavy carpet pile or spreading on
smooth floorboards. Opening their chrome fridge, the light shone on
foods that he had never eaten as a child. Everywhere, things contrived
to remind him of their exclusivity and their price by whispering of
quality and design. All around, space and air and light pressed upon
him. He no longer knew the person who lived in this house, the person
who had bought those things and arranged them so lovingly. Everything
was strange and meaningless as if he were trying to understand a
civilization by examining a selection of relics.


At work, he found himself sat behind his desk like a child
sitting in his father's chair, brow furrowed in mock concentration.



His colleague Josh was the first to notice, catching his eye
across the light air of the open plan office. A jittery gay man in his
mid-twenties and already a veteran of numerous campaigns, Josh prided
himself on his perceptiveness. Nursing an oversized mug of black
coffee, he darted quickly towards Martin's desk, making a great show of
sitting nonchalantly on its corner, arranging his arms and legs to
communicate openness and non-threatening camaraderie.


"Martin," he began, flashing a grin that still held an
illusion of boyish innocence, "I'm not going to mince my words here.
What's up? There's only two reasons for a face like that, either the
drugs have run out or there's trouble on the home
front."


While not the best of friends, Martin had always regarded
Josh as a valuable asset, a ticket to worlds that he would never have
entered otherwise.


"I think we should maybe go grab a coffee. You look as if
you've got a lot on your mind, and who better to listen than a young
fool like me."


Martin, despite himself felt a bubble of hope rise inside
him. Maybe Josh would understand the feelings he'd been having.

Continues at http://www.abctales.com/story/60293