Dreamhunter

  The bed they chose was occupied, but Rose and Laura were looking elsewhere, and scarcely noticed its occupant. He was quiet, reading. But, as the sun settled towards the horizon, and the shade of his umbrella thinned and swooped eastward, the girls moved to stay in its shadow.

  EVENTUALLY, THEY were lounging on the sand to one side of the bed.

  Rose craned and squinted. She shuffled a little closer to the sunbed. Then she said, ‘We have that book in school.’ She turned to Laura. ‘Well, next year we do. It’s Dr King’s A History of Southland.’

  Laura peered at the book. People usually read magazines on the beach, or didn’t read, but draped their faces with them.

  Rose said, ‘He’s up to chapter sixteen, “Tziga’s Fall”.’

  The occupant of the sunbed grunted. He sat up, swung his feet down on to the sand and looked at Rose. He looked to be a few years older than the cousins. He was already sporting a small, experimental moustache, a thin strip of brassy whiskers, a shade darker than his hair. He was fair skinned and freckled — and very pink.

  Laura said to him, ‘You’re getting a sunburn.’

  ‘I’d say, judging by your colour, that you are a little more practised at beach holidays than I am. This is my first, and I’m making the most of it. I hired this sunbed for the afternoon, and I’ll not leave it till the afternoon is over.’

  ‘I can never read on the beach,’ Laura said.

  ‘I’m not at leisure to choose when I do my reading,’ said the boy.

  ‘Won’t you at least take my towel?’ Laura said. She rolled off it and held it out to him.

  ‘That’s hardly necessary,’ he said.

  Rose said, ‘You could get off your sunbed and drag it into your shade. Your shade is oozing away from you — it doesn’t seem to understand that it’s been hired for the whole afternoon.’ She asked him where he was staying.

  ‘My uncle has an apartment in Bayview.’

  ‘Oh!’ Rose said. ‘Someone was killed there last year! A pot plant fell from the terrace on the sixth floor and killed a man on a first-floor balcony. It was dreadful!’ Rose mused for a bit. ‘But they did manage to re-pot the geranium,’ she said.

  The boy stared at Rose, baffled and sceptical at once. ‘What are you girls doing on the infants’ beach?’

  Rose tossed her head. ‘I am the mother of one of those infants, naturally,’ she said.

  ‘Only one?’

  Laura asked, ‘What are you doing on the infants’ beach? Can’t you swim?’

  ‘I thought I’d get some peace and quiet — get away from youths stuffing sand down one another’s fronts. All those splashing, dunking, shrieking, sidling, flirting nuisances.’

  ‘Laura and I are only interested in what you’re reading,’ said Rose.

  ‘Really?’

  Laura said to her cousin, ‘He’s here to Try. He’s doing research.’ Then she asked the boy, ‘Are you Trying at Tricksie Bend?’

  The official Tries took place at two locations. One was at the village of Doorhandle, an hour and a half by coach from Founderston. The Try at Doorhandle took place on a strip of land cleared from the forest a mile out of the village. The clearing followed the border for a short way before letting it go in the thick woods that — with patrolling rangers — helped to guard it. The second location was some fifteen miles away, across Rifleman Pass, on the Place’s seaward border. There the candidates Tried in a meadow that sloped up to a bluff above the river at Tricksie Bend.

  ‘No,’ said the boy, ‘I’m going back to Founderston tonight and I’m Trying at Doorhandle.’

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Laura. Then she asked him, ‘Do you have that book in your school?’ She wanted to establish how old he was, and where he went to school.

  ‘We had this book at my school.’

  Laura and Rose exchanged a look — he was perhaps more a young man than an oversized boy. ‘What school?’ Rose asked. Founderston Girls’ Academy’s annual ball was attended by the seniors of several boys’ schools and military academies. Rose was trying to place him on her social map.

  ‘A school in a town south of The Corridor.’

  The Corridor was a wide valley that cut through the mountains which divided their country. The south was all plains and grain, vineyards, small towns, pasture and cattle. The north had the capital, Founderston; the nation’s next largest city, Westport, with its mines and industries; forested mountains; and beautiful Coal Bay. The north also had the Place.

  Rose said, ‘What does Dr King have to say about Tziga’s fall?’

  The boy leant his forearms on his knees and opened the book. ‘He seems to be saying that it was no accident. And I keep feeling sorry for Hame’s sister, Marta. She’s “just folks” in this story. Everyone else is special and involved.’

  ‘Yes, poor her,’ Laura said, of her Aunt Marta. She was fond of Marta, whom she never saw often enough. It was Laura’s impression that her father didn’t invite his sister over because she and Chorley didn’t see eye to eye. Marta was very religious, and Chorley, a firm atheist, was rude about her beliefs. He wasn’t rude to her face, but Aunt Marta seemed to be able to tell that Chorley said things behind her back.

  Rose wriggled a little closer to the boy, put her finger on the corner of the book and pushed it down so she could see it. Laura hoped Rose wasn’t going to do her show-off’s upside-down reading. Rose could read upside-down in mirrors too. ‘So,’ said Rose, ‘you live in the south, but I suppose you’ve shared dreams.’

  ‘One or two. My uncle is a dreamhunter.’

  ‘Which one? Is he famous?’

  ‘George Mason. He usually only works in hospitals. Pike Street, and St Thomas Lung Hospital.’

  ‘Well — that’s good,’ said Rose, in the tone of someone thinking of something nice to say.

  ‘I think we might have King’s history at home, in the library,’ Laura said.

  ‘You have a library so large that you’re not sure what’s in it?’ For some reason the boy seemed to find the idea of a large library offensive. Or perhaps it was only the idea of a large library largely unread by girls who had access to it.

  Laura could see that Rose would strike back at the boy’s remark; she had sparks of white in her blue eyes. ‘Actually we have two libraries too large to know what’s in them. One here, and one in Founderston.’

  Laura said, ‘Rose!’

  ‘Rose,’ said the boy. He said it as if he had a pen and was writing it down.

  ‘My cousin has had too much afternoon this afternoon,’ Laura said. Rose said, ‘We can look for the King if you’d like, Laura — and check his history against the facts. You know, I don’t think I’ve ever read about dreamhunting.’

  When Laura and Rose were four they had been told what Laura’s father and Rose’s mother did for a living. That simple explanation went something like this: ‘Laura, your father and, Rosie, your mother go to the Place to catch dreams. Other people pay to go to sleep with them and share their dreams in hospitals and dream palaces.’ The little girls had accepted this explanation because they were very happy with the arrangement. Laura’s Da and Rosie’s Ma were only sometimes at home in the evening, and so Laura could climb into bed with her Ma, and Rosie with her Da. There was room in each adult bed for two girls, if that’s what they felt like. But, for Laura, who had this lovely privilege explained to her only a few months before her mother fell ill with the cancer that killed her, her knowledge about what her father and aunt did for a living became connected in her mind with the terrible changes that came later. She had questioned how things worked in her world, and then things changed for the worse. Laura was careful about asking questions after that. She kept looking at her life, her family — her happiness — only out of the corner of one eye.

  The boy’s jaw had dropped. He was staring at the cousins as though they’d grown horns. After a moment he collected himself, and glared. ‘You’re a Tiebold,’ he said to Rose. ‘You’re Grace Tiebold’s daughter, aren’t you?’ T
hen he turned, with a different expression, to Laura, ‘So you must be …’

  ‘Gosh, it’s nice to be famous,’ said Rose.

  ‘Honestly, you girls are just playing with me, aren’t you?’ said the boy. ‘Saying “What does the book say?” as though you really are infants. Big joke on the country boy, right?’

  Rose tilted her nose in the air. ‘No,’ she said, ‘my motives are completely pure. I only wanted to pilfer your bought-and-paid-for shade.’

  He stood, shut the book with a snap and picked up his towel from the sunbed. He stepped through the cousins and began to walk away.

  ‘Hey!’ Laura called. ‘Good luck!’

  He spun back. ‘I suppose you expect me to wish you good luck too? But you don’t need luck. After all, like everything else, I’m sure it’s not what you know but who you know.’

  ‘No, it’s who you are,’ Laura said, plainly.

  He turned away and stalked off.

  ‘That was interesting,’ said Rose, looking after him. ‘If we say who we are we’re boasting, and if we don’t we’re sneaky.’ Then she said, brightly, ‘Let’s go for another swim.’

  HALF AN HOUR later a wind got up on the beach. It bowled sun umbrellas, flipped picnic rugs and made the wide brims of fashionable sun hats take on unfashionable shapes. Everyone began to abandon the shoreline.

  The cousins were very quick to pick themselves up off the prints their wet bodies had made on their hired towels, and sprint up the steps to the Strand. Because Laura and Rose spent three months of every year at the beach they knew that when a westerly set in around five it was bound to blow until the early hours of the following morning.

  The girls hurried across the Strand to the corner of Main Street. They tumbled through the glass and brass doors of Farry’s, the confectioner, and stood shaking sand from their knitted swimsuits and printed cotton kimonos. Rose, seeing her favourite table emptying, made a dash for it. She came around from one side as the previous occupant was leaving by the other. Rose slid into the warmed iron chair and the woman who had just left it looked back at her, rather startled. Rose didn’t notice. She was issuing orders to the countermen: ‘I want my usual — chocolate and ginger ice-cream with candied apple and cream.’ She repeated her order to the waiter who’d come over to clear the table. Then, as he made space, transferring plates from the marble tabletop on to his tray, she stretched her tan, salt-silvered arms out of the sleeves of her kimono and laid them on the table. She said, ‘Do you think my skin looks dry?’ She pinched the taut flesh on her sharp elbow joint.

  ‘If you like, Miss Tiebold, I can give you a bit of butter to rub on your elbows.’

  ‘I asked for your opinion, not for assistance,’ said Rose.

  The waiter said, ‘Ah.’ Then, ‘I’m sorry to have to admit that my experience of female elbows is rather limited.’

  Rose dismissed him with a wave of her hand.

  Laura was up at the counter, choosing a cake.

  Farry’s had two curved counters at the back of its round room. Behind the glass front of one, sweets were displayed — marzipan in the shape and flavour of every fruit, and filled chocolates, bitter dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white. There were glistening fruit jellies, and thick slabs of marshmallow dusted with sugar. There were caramels, and fudges, peanut brittle, sugared almonds, sherbet in paper envelopes with liquorice straws, and hokey-pokey stacked high like gold bars in a treasury. The shop smelt of sugar and fresh cream. Behind the glass of the other counter, glittering beneath the light of electric bulbs, were huge slabs of ice and, nestled between them, steel tubs of Farry’s famous ice-cream.

  Laura saw that an assistant was waiting for her order. She was having trouble making up her mind. She felt vague, stupefied by sun, weak and watery from swimming. She told the man she’d have the same as her cousin.

  ‘Again,’ said the man.

  This was a little rude, but the girls had practically lived at Farry’s every summer of their lives and, Laura supposed, the staff were entitled to remark on their habits. ‘Again’ was true. Laura was in the habit of following Rose, of letting Rose make arrangements, shape their days, choose their food. The man was telling Laura off. Teachers would do the same. They’d say, ‘Laura Hame, if you don’t come up with your own topic we’re just going to have to separate the two of you.’ Or they’d say, ‘Miss Hame, could you please show a little more initiative?’

  It was easy for Laura to follow Rose. Rose always made headway, whichever way the wind was blowing. And following Rose left Laura free to watch what was going on around her.

  As Laura walked back to the best table in Farry’s big bay window, she looked about, her mind floating, unburdened by decisions. She saw a woman come in the front door shepherding a wind-tossed flurry of girls — of three different sizes, but in the same white flounced dresses, their straw hats clapped flat to their heads by their lace-gloved hands. Laura saw the matron take in Rose, slouching in her chair at the front table. Laura saw the woman assess Rose point by point: Rose’s damp kimono, her gold hair clumped in salt-dulled rat-tails. She clicked her tongue against her palate, went ‘tich’ like an angry thrush. Then Laura looked past the woman and saw, through the window, across the road, the manager of the stagecoach posted out on the pavement, looking at his watch, then up Main Street towards the rise to Rifleman Pass.

  Laura glanced over her shoulder at the clock above the door to Farry’s kitchens. She saw that the coach was already more than half an hour late.

  Half an hour, in a four-hour journey.

  ‘Look,’ said Laura to Rose, pointing at the clock, then the anxious manager.

  The waiter returned. He carried a tray with a plate of ice-cream and pink curls of candied apple. He put the tray down on the table, shook napkins open and dropped them on to the girls’ laps. The girls leant back to let the linen settle.

  Rose dug into her ice-cream, then immediately began to talk around her spoon. ‘Perhaps it’s broken an axle,’ she said.

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘You’re a ghoul, Laura.’

  ‘I’m the ghoul? It’d be pretty gruesome to break an axle above the bluffs in Rifleman Pass.’

  Rose shrugged. She said she was going to get a conversation cake too. ‘Do you want one?’ She jumped up, dodged the matron’s table and the waiter carrying the matron’s tea, and ducked under the brass rail before the cake display case. She draped herself on its glass. She gave a moaning sigh, pressed one pink cheek against its condensation-covered surface.

  ‘Miss Tiebold,’ said the assistant.

  ‘Two conversation cakes. With cream and lemon curd.’

  ‘Certainly. Will that be all?’

  ‘And a pitcher of mint tea.’

  Rose brushed the glass with her nose, leaving a smear. She came back to the table. She didn’t say thank you.

  The matron’s daughters were all managing to sit straight in their chairs and eat with their cake forks. They were a contrast to the cousins, who sat in Farry’s prime spot and clearly visible from the street, dusted with crumbs of baked egg white, licking their fingers and staring fixedly, rudely, at the people waiting at the stagecoach stop.

  Laura said, ‘It’s nearly an hour late.’

  ‘Come to think of it,’ Rose said, ‘you haven’t even seen the bluffs at Rifleman.’

  ‘Your Da took us up to the trig station near there. Remember? It was one of his educational outings. The trig was right on the border to the Place.’

  ‘Did your Da know about this?’

  ‘Uncle Chorley lied about it. He said we’d stopped at Tricksie Bend.’

  ‘I remember that. We bought honeycomb.’

  The three girls at the next table had removed their gloves to eat. Between each bite they dabbed at their lips with Farry’s white linen napkins. They were so ladylike, so poised and mild that they only raised their heads when Laura and Rose suddenly dropped their teacups into their saucers and jumped up, shoving their chairs back so
hard that one fell over with a clang.

  The stagecoach had appeared behind other traffic on the long avenue of Main Street. Its driver was standing up in his seat, his whip flicking and biting above the backs of his horses. The stagecoach sounded its horn, then kept sounding as it made its way through Sisters Beach’s shallow settlement to the stage post. The stagecoach pulled up — a noisy emergency.

  The cousins rushed out of Farry’s and across the road. Rose’s kimono billowed open in the wind — its cord detached itself and, unnoticed by her, went away leeward, travelling along the pavement like a thin, side-winding serpent.

  The girls plunged into the little crowd and pushed to its front in time to see the stage doors open and passengers spill out.

  A man and woman were clasping each other. She had a handkerchief stuffed into her mouth. Rose leant back on the jostling crowd. She called out, ‘Driver! Have you lost someone?’

  The driver and passengers all looked at her.

  It did happen that, every so often, an adult might vanish by the cairn that marked the border on the road beyond Doorhandle — might melt from the coach. It would turn out that this person hadn’t, for whatever reason, chosen to Try at fifteen. Hadn’t attempted before to pass across into the Place.

  Rose called out her question, and the crowd hushed. People looked from the stage post manager to the driver, to the girl in a kimono and bathing suit. ‘Because —’ continued Rose, managing and informative, ‘— you should go straight to the telegraph office at the station and send a wire to Doorhandle.’

  Most of those who fell were missed right away and, when they emerged, were recovered. Some, disorientated, wandered in the wrong direction, deeper In. Rangers were dispatched to find them.

  ‘Have someone send a ranger,’ Rose said. She gestured at them to hurry.

  The driver lifted his hand, the hand with the horsewhip gathered in it. He pointed with his whip, showing something to his employer, the bossy girl in beachwear and the gathered crowd.

  Laura saw what was fastened to the roof rack among the luggage on the top of the coach. A long, limp, blanket-wrapped bundle.