Amaryllis Night and Day

  She was carrying a heavy shoulder bag which thumped to the floor when she unslung it. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘here we are.’

  ‘You!’ I said. ‘I saw you in a dream!’

  ‘And I saw you, but why didn’t you get on the bus?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I lied. ‘I just hesitated and then I woke up.’

  ‘You’re lying,’ she said without any emphasis, her voice as clear and sweet and refined as a character in a BBC Jane Austen. ‘What were you afraid of?’

  ‘You’re very direct, aren’t you.’

  ‘You’re American. I thought Americans liked directness.’

  ‘I wasn’t afraid of anything.’

  ‘Lying again. Was there something about me that put you off?’

  ‘Jesus,’ I said, ‘you don’t let go of a thing, do you.’

  ‘I don’t pick up anything I want to let go of. Was there something about me that put you off?’

  ‘Not at all!’ I said. I couldn’t tell her to go away and stop bothering me, she was too beautiful. ‘I’ve told you, I didn’t get on the bus because I woke up.’

  ‘All right, whatever you say.’ She looked at me the way a betting man might look at a horse. ‘But I need you to stay with me longer than that, I need you not to wake up too soon.’

  ‘“Not to wake up too soon!” I don’t think I’ve been asked that before. You need me to stay with you in a dream? I don’t understand that. And I don’t understand how you managed to get into my dream when I’ve never seen you before in my waking life.’

  ‘It wasn’t your dream, it was mine. I brought you into it because I tuned in to you. I wasn’t sure I’d connected, though, until you turned up at the Balsamic.’

  ‘You call it “the Balsamic” as if it’s a place you’re very familiar with.’

  ‘Too true.’

  ‘You often wait there for the bus to Finsey-Obay?’

  She folded her arms across her chest and hunched her shoulders as if she were cold. ‘More often than I’d like,’ she said, looking past me.

  ‘So you pulled me into your dream because you wanted company? You were lonesome? What?’

  ‘I didn’t want to ride that bus alone.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I’d ridden it alone before and I didn’t like it.’

  ‘Why didn’t you like it?’

  Still looking past me, she said, ‘That’s enough for now, OK? Answering all these questions is like taking my clothes off in a cold room.’

  ‘OK, but would you tell me how you tuned in to me, how you connected?’

  ‘Do you spend a lot of time looking for what isn’t there?’

  ‘I spend a lot of time looking for what is there – that’s what I do.’

  ‘In what way?’

  ‘I’m a painter, but what’s that got to do with tuning-in?’

  She closed her eyes and hugged herself. ‘I spend a lot of time looking for what isn’t there.’

  ‘While looking away from what is there?’

  She half-turned away from me. The curve of her cheek was like a little plea for mercy. ‘How I tuned in to you: in my dreams I’d been waiting three nights for this bus that I didn’t want to take and I wasn’t looking forward to another night of it. Then yesterday afternoon I was at South Ken tube station and I saw you on the westbound District Line platform. You were reading H. P. Lovecraft, same edition I’ve got, so I thought you might be worth a try and I tuned in to you. Did you feel something happening?’

  I tried to remember. I get a lot of strange feelings, strange thoughts. Maybe there’d been a moment as I stood there when I was suddenly full of sadness. But then I often have those moments. ‘I’m not sure,’ I said. ‘How did you tune in?’

  ‘I just sort of aimed my thoughts at you.’

  ‘You just aimed your thoughts at me and connected and then you pulled me into your dream. Not a lot of people can do that.’

  ‘It hasn’t done me much good so far.’

  ‘You do this sort of thing often?’

  ‘Why, do I look like a tart?’

  ‘Don’t be so quick to take offence – if I say the wrong things it’s because this is all so new and strange to me.’

  ‘New and strange can be a lot better than old and familiar.’

  I made a little noise with my mouth and shook my head to convey that you never know. ‘You said that in your dreams you’d been waiting for that bus for three nights and you didn’t even want to get on it. So why go on waiting? Was anybody forcing you to?’

  She didn’t stamp her foot but she looked impatient. ‘The dream always starts at the bus stop. Do you remember the neighbourhood it was in? There’s no place I wanted to walk to from there, it’s all too nothing.’ She shuddered. ‘And you can’t get a taxi around there and there never are any cars along that road to give you a lift.’

  ‘Is there perhaps more to it than that?’

  Her face closed up a bit. ‘How much do you need to know?’

  ‘More than you’re telling me.’

  ‘I’d rather not say everything out, all right?’

  ‘I don’t need to know everything but I need to know more about you and that bus.’

  She looked at me as if she didn’t like me very much. ‘Right: me and that bus. Once the dream starts and I’m at the bus stop I’m stuck with it; if the bus comes I have to get on, I haven’t got a choice. I don’t want to get on the bus but I have to. That’s how that dream works. Are you satisfied now?’

  ‘There’s no need to get angry with me – you want me to ride that bus with you and you can’t blame me for being curious about the whole thing.’

  ‘Jesus, am I that hard to be with? Have I lost my looks all of a sudden?’

  ‘You’re beautiful and probably you’re charming when you’re in the right mood and I’m delighted to be your companion but why did you pick me? You must have family or friends who could help you with this.’

  ‘No family and no friends I’d want to bring into that dream.’

  ‘But you brought me into it.’

  ‘Look, if this is all too much for you just say so and I’ll find somebody else.’

  ‘No, no, it isn’t too much for me – it’s just that I feel a little crazed. Please don’t be offended but you’re not a vampire or anything like that, are you?’

  ‘Do I look like a vampire?’

  ‘You look like a Pre-Raphaelite nymph but that doesn’t rule out the other.’

  ‘Well, I’m not going to suck your blood, if that’s what you’re worried about.’ She turned her back on the display case. ‘I don’t like Klein bottles,’ she said. ‘They make me feel like what’s the use.’

  ‘But you came to the place where the Klein bottles are. Did you know you’d find me here?’

  ‘It seemed a possibility. And now I’m going.’ She slung her bag.

  ‘Want to go for a coffee?’

  ‘Good idea.’ She flickered a smile at me.

  I picked up her shoulder bag, she took my arm as if we were a couple. Amazing. We were out of the museum by then, going down Exhibition Road. She had a Pre-Raphaelite walk, as if she wore mythical garments that didn’t cover too much. I hadn’t had a woman to walk with for a long time; her breast was touching my arm and I wouldn’t have minded walking right through the afternoon to the twilight and the Balsamic bus stop with her. When she wasn’t talking she seemed very vulnerable. Sometimes as she turned to look at something I’d see the curve of her cheek and I wanted so much to protect her that I was all choked up with it. Protect her from what? Lenore’s face came to me and I looked away. I wondered what this one did for a living.

  ‘I teach piano,’ she said without being asked.

  ‘Is that Chopin on your T-shirt?’

  ‘Mazurka No. 45 in A Minor.’

  ‘That’s my favourite one.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘Do you play?’

  ‘No, I just listen to it on CD.’
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  ‘Whose recording?’

  ‘Idil Biret – she gets the dance in it and the shadows.’

  ‘Hum it.’ She covered the staves on the T-shirt with her hand.

  ‘You needn’t do that – I can’t read music.’

  ‘Hum. Or whistle if you’d rather.’

  I whistled it as far as I could and when I stopped she said, ‘Flat,’ but nodded and indicated with her face that I had passed the test. ‘I have that recording,’ she said as if she had just heard it. ‘Why is No. 45 your favourite?’

  ‘It’s like the ghost of itself, as if it’s in the past and the present at the same time.’

  ‘Balsam through itself.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Passing.’

  ‘Through itself?’

  ‘Mm.’

  Coaches and tourists, soft ice-cream and hot dogs approached and receded. It was a grey and sweating sort of afternoon but with her beside me the light and air were different, as if this footage had been shot by the same cameraman who did the dream. Near the tube station we stopped at the Greenfields Café, subtitled Sandwich Emporium, which offered tables on the pavement under an awning. She saved our table while I went inside and got the coffee, then we sat there looking at each other while the world and his wife and children walked past with cameras, maps, bottles of mineral water, and loud voices in several languages. A man in shorts and a string vest passed us, singing, ‘I love you, I love you,’ into his little telephone.

  ‘I’m Peter Diggs,’ I said, extending my hand.

  ‘My name’s Amaryllis.’ She tilted her head a little to one side to watch my reaction while she shook my hand in an absent-minded way.

  ‘To sport with Amaryllis in the shade …’ I thought, but decided not to quote Milton at her. ‘You look like an Amaryllis,’ I said. ‘It’s not a name every woman could wear.’

  She nodded as if I’d passed another test. I felt as if I were auditioning for a part; I had to remind myself that she was the one who’d approached me.

  ‘Surname?’ I said.

  Her hand jumped up from the table as if it were about to take flight, then settled down again. ‘Not yet,’ she said, brushing away invisible crumbs. ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘Not the kind the paranormal people are always trying to photograph.’

  ‘What kind then?’

  ‘The ones that live in the mind – no one else can see them – doing what they did and saying what they said in the past, over and over.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Maybe because they didn’t get it right the first time.’

  ‘Is there a lot that you didn’t get right the first time?’

  ‘Yes. What about you? Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘I’d rather not but they seem to believe in me.’ She said this looking away from me as she did much of the time in our conversation. ‘Let’s talk about something else now.’

  ‘OK. Has it ever struck you that people are mostly composed of the past? Every new moment immediately becomes the past, and the next moment, which is the future, does the same thing. There’s not much now to be had.’

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, and shook her head, whether sympathetically or not I couldn’t tell.

  ‘Where did the Finsey-Obay bus take you last night?’ I asked her.

  ‘I don’t know; I just kept climbing the stairs until I woke up.’

  ‘Were you afraid?’

  ‘I had to pee. I’d better go now.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I need to think about this. I always leap before I look and then I’m sorry later.’ She was half out of her chair.

  ‘Are you sorry now?’

  ‘Not yet.’ She was walking away. ‘Don’t follow me.’

  ‘I don’t know your last name, I don’t know where you live and I haven’t got your phone number. How am I going to get in touch with you?’

  ‘At the Balsamic?’ she said over her shoulder as she dwindled towards the tube.

  6

  The Brass Hotel

  ‘At the Balsamic?’ she’d said. Was she going to pull me into her dream again or was she testing me to see if I could dream her? Yes! I could feel it in my guts: it was a test. She needed me to dream her because she wanted to work something from my end instead of hers. What? Evidently what she wanted from me had more to do with the dreamworld than the one we lived in and worked in by day. Otherwise it would have been too simple, I supposed. Was I being used? I didn’t care.

  Amaryllis in the flesh had been quite different from the dream Amaryllis. Her dream, that had been; so that was how she dreamed herself- thin and pale with straw-coloured hair, almost a ghost of the real Amaryllis who had walked beside me down Exhibition Road. I saw again the curve of her cheek as she turned her face away from me. How many times had I said to my students that the idea was immanent in the image!

  Tomorrow was a working day and I ought to have been getting my thoughts together for it but all I could think of was Amaryllis. I didn’t want to ride that Japanese-lantern bus but I didn’t know how else to see her again, so I poured myself a large whisky and put Takemitsu’s Eclipse for shakuhachi and biwa in the CD player. The music was spooky and shadowy but it seemed heavy and earthbound compared to those luminous paper yellows, pinks, and oranges; that bus had its route in a dimension I couldn’t reach while awake but the more I recalled the Balsamic bus stop the more it began to seem as real and permanent as any other bus stop – it just happened to be in a world I could only get to in a dream. I flung my arms apart as if to open the curtains between me and it but everything stayed the same.

  The hours between then and bedtime were perfectly useless as far as work was concerned. I drank, I ordered in a pizza, I watched The Double Life of Veronique on video. Then I began to worry that Amaryllis might die in the dreamworld or get stuck there. Finally, at two o’clock in the morning, I dragged myself soddenly off to bed. ‘Balsamic,’ I said, got my head down, and lay awake until some time between four and five. Then I dreamt I was in a lift in the Brass Hotel. The building was brass and so was the lift and everything else. The other people in the lift looked ordinary enough. We were going up so I waited until everyone else got off, then I pressed the button for the lobby. I went to the brass reception desk where a brassy-looking woman gave me a brazen look and said, ‘What?’

  ‘Any brass for me?’

  ‘Who from?’

  ‘Whom. Amaryllis. She looks like a Waterhouse nymph.’

  ‘For you?’ She covered her mouth and began to laugh and I woke up.

  ‘What’s so funny?’ I said. But the Brass Hotel was gone and the receptionist with it. So I’d have to try again. I felt a surge of panic at the thought of not seeing Amaryllis in a dream, not seeing her ever again anywhere. Don’t think that way, I told myself. Who knows? Maybe the Brass Hotel is on the Finsey-Obay bus route.

  7

  Venice?

  The next day was Tuesday, a teaching day. I’d been trying to get my students to loosen up their heads a little. ‘Bring me something you’ve never visualised before,’ I’d told them. Some pictured childhood memories, mostly bad ones; some brought in monsters derivative of Bosch and Giger; one heavily Christian young woman did a crucifixion. In the main the images, with the exception of those few that were straight erotica, were unpleasant but not surprising; the mind has its cupboards and its hidden predictables. I tried to find interesting things to say but my thoughts were elsewhere and my remarks bored me even more than the drawings and paintings I was seeing.

  The last work I looked at was by one of my mature students, a brooding sort of man in his forties who was a film editor. He was dark, with dark hair and pale-blue eyes. He reeked of cigarette smoke and always needed a shave. His name was Ron Hastings and he’d done a large pastel of a horned Satan wearing pyjamas with a design of yellow, orange, and pink oblong shapes. This Satan had a crocodilian sort of tail and looked as if he might well have fathered Rosemary’s baby.

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bsp; ‘Interesting pyjamas,’ I said.

  ‘He came to me in a dream,’ said Hastings. ‘The pyjamas seemed to be lit from within.’

  ‘Did he say anything?’

  ‘No, he just laughed and I woke up.’

  ‘Probably just as well you did.’ I suddenly had the feeling you get when you reach for something on the top shelf of a cupboard and everything falls on your head. I crawled out from under the fallout and worked up some comments on dream imagery and the exploration of the subconscious. Some discussion developed from this and I encouraged the students to keep pen and paper by their beds so they could catch dreams before they faded. Only one or two seemed more than minimally interested; they all had projects that didn’t leave them much time for side trips.

  So I got through the day and I went home with Ron Hastings and his Satan in my head. Why can’t life be simple? I wondered. But in my experience – I was thirty-four years old – it never had been and I didn’t expect it ever would be. What was it with these yellow, orange, and pink luminosities? Dream leakage or what? Might Hastings have been at the Balsamic bus stop at one time or another? Was he an old boyfriend of Amaryllis’s? I pictured the two of them together and wished I hadn’t. Then I remembered a film called Dreamscape in which Dennis Quaid had the ability to get into other people’s dreams and take an active part. Quaid was the hero of the film but there was a bad guy who had the same ability and they had to fight it out. Was Hastings going to be my bad guy? In any case, his yellow, orange, and pink Satan was an intrusion that I resented. Could it have been coincidence? I doubted it.

  I drank some whisky, ordered in Chinese takeaway, watched The Vanishing, read a bit of Death at La Venice, went to bed, stayed awake, fell asleep, and dreamt that I was in Venice. The sky was leaden, the smell was bad, the Piazza San Marco was choked with tourists and pigeons. I doubted that the Finsey-Obay bus went to Venice but even so I was hoping to find Amaryllis. I looked for her in all the cafés, on every bridge and in every passing gondola and vaporetto but there was no sign of her so I decided to enquire at the Questura.