thought you must have been doing something, perhaps you and Lee, cooking something up together, resurrecting the dreaming. I thought you might want to include me in some scheme or other . . ."
"I told you; Lee and I don't want it any more than you do."
"Oh I realize that now. But I just want to black it out, hide somewhere, not talk about it, not think about it. When you came I thought: Oh God no, this is why the dreams have been coming back, leave me out of it."
"Do you think us coming together can make things worse?"
"I don't know anything; it just triggers a lot of... associations."
"The point is, if it's not you or Lee or me, then it must be . . ."
"Yes. I was afraid of him. My God Ella, what's happening to us?"
Ella didn't answer. "We should go out tonight," she said, trying to brighten things.
"I never go out."
"You do this evening. I want Guinness and didley-didley music, and you can show me where to get it."
All protests were brushed aside, and Honora, who an astonished, high-spirited Ella later discovered hadn't been outside her house socially for two whole years, was dragged out in a state of excitement and nervous terror mixed. When they left the house it was snowing; soft, light flakes of snow falling under the amber streetlamps, melting the instant they touched the ground.
S I X
If we swallow arsenic we must be poisoned, and he
who dreams as I have done, must be troubled
—William Cowper
Elderwine Cottage, damp and stinking. Stooping to gather a fistful of letters franked more than a fortnight before; Lee yelled something intended to be Hallo or Anyone In but which came out unintelligibly between. Off right, a narrow hall of razor-edged shadows admitted to a room with a bare light bulb burning. He carefully nudged open the door. It was ankle deep in newspapers and litter. Some of the papers were unread and folded neatly in piles, some had obviously served as wrappings for a variety of takeaway foods. Judging by the smell, some still did. Floating in the debris were dozens of brown ale and whiskey empties, bottles frozen neck-up in a polluted lake. In the next room he tried flicking on a light switch for a bulb that was missing. He passed through to the kitchen. A tinker's workshop of pans and dishes was stacked high in the sink which was full of grey water, a half-inch slab of grease on the surface; rock-hard doorsteps of sliced bread grew fibrous green beards; disposable fast food cartons were left strategically, still offering half of their original contents; milk bottles stood with their contents crusting in phases of metamorphosis. It was more like a biochemist's laboratory than a kitchen.
"Brad Cousins!" He climbed the creaking wooden steps and found upstairs two cold empty rooms with generations of paper stripping itself from the walls. Downstairs again, he took a second look in the back room with the broken light. There was a man asleep on the couch, he looked like a bundled sack, roped and tied at the top.
"Is that you Brad?" he said loudly. The sack didn't stir, but he knew that he had found his man.
Brad Cousins slept on, his jaw slack and his mouth open, a string of saliva swinging from his chin to his T-shirt like a delicate piece of suspension engineering. A pair of scuffed placeless brogues was kicked off at the end of the couch, adding to the general stench of lived-in nylon socks. From matted head to swollen foot, the sleeping body exuded a root odour, and a sweet-rotten scent of sweat and alcohol commingled.
"Brad. Brad, it's Lee. Lee Peterson."
One crimson-cupped eye opened. Lee found himself talking as though through a drainpipe. "Brad. I've come a long way to see you. I've come to talk to you, Brad. We have to talk. All right?"
The bloodshot eye glazed over, an inner protective membrane forming across it.
"Brad. I want you to listen, Brad. Can you hear me? There are some questions I need to ask you."
The eye closed. "No, don't go to sleep again, Brad. I don't want you to go back to sleep. Brad. Brad. Wake up, Brad."
This time both eyes opened and with a startling marionette movement he jerked himself upright on the couch. His eyes were like glass beads fixed on Lee. Finally he got up and lurched unsteadily out of the room. Lee heard him go out through the back door