Adler, Jung and all those other old bores are not invited to the party and will be regarded as gatecrashers. For this week I simply want you to find your way into the habit of recording. That's all. Nothing arduous in that. You may or may not find that this in itself begins to have an effect. If you don't dream, write clearly in your diary that you were unable to recall your dream but that it is your intention to recall subsequent dreams. A small tip: set your alarm clocks half an hour earlier than you normally wake. We will, if at all serious about this, make a few sacrifices. We shall meet at the same time every week, for a slightly longer period, having more to talk about. All clear?"
Everything was clear.
"So." The professor got up and walked to the door. Before closing the door behind him he turned and looked back. "Sweet dreams," he said darkly.
The students pushed back their chairs and made movements towards the door.
"Anyone going for a drink?" Brad shouted.
"I could go for that," said Lee, looking encouragingly towards Ella and her friend.
Ella, along with the rest of the students, shuffled out without replying. Bollocks, thought Lee.
TWO
Youth, which is forgiven everything,
forgives itself nothing
—George Bernard Shaw
Brad Cousins was exercising his favourite habit of speaking to one person as if they were a gathering often. Lee was his audience. Against the backdrop of the student bar, pinball tables chattering, crack of pool balls striking and muted Stones' classics piped through a stuttering PA system, Lee was regaled with an accumulating list of Brad's personal antipathies. He was half-way down a pint of flat amber beer by the time he had been instructed on Brad's aversion to basketball, brazil nuts and beehive hairdos, his detestation of Liverpudlians, lavender perfume and loose-leaf ring-binders, his hatred of trade unions, tapioca and television journalists. Lee groaned inwardly at the thought of another dismal half-pint's worth of cataloguing before he could make his excuses and leave.
"She's dirty," cackled Brad, breaking off from his inventory of rancour, "I like her; dirty."
Lee followed Brad's gaze and locked on to a figure in black beret and black tights standing at the bar. Having shaken off her shadowy friend, Ella Innes had arrived and was ordering herself a drink. As she turned from the bar Lee semaphored wildly to attract her attention. But she looked through him without recognition, and settled at a nearby table where she expertly proceeded to roll a cigarette in brown liquorice paper.
"Frosty," Brad scoffed, swirling his beer to make it froth. "Anyway I can't stand women who drink out of pint glasses to try and prove something."
Lee ignored him. Ella's table was two strides away. "I waved at you to ask if you wanted to join us," he said, sitting down next to her.
Ella moved an eighth of an inch away from him. "Yes, I saw you." She concentrated on crafting the cigarette in her long white fingers, only looking up at him as she slid her tongue along the gummed edge of the paper.
"Oh?"
"Pardon?" She blinked at him.
Lee hovered, looking for a way out. She's pulling my strings, he thought. "Why don't you join us?"
Ella looked over her shoulder as if for signs of imminent rescue. She was an international celebrity being pestered for three minutes of her time by a provincial journalist. With a practised, long-suffering if there's to be no help shrug she gathered her papers, matches, tobacco and beer and relocated to their table.
"What did you make of that session?" Lee asked.
She shrugged and lit her cigarette. "What did you?"
"That beret is ridiculous," Brad said to ten people. "You look like a member of the Provisional IRA. In drag. After a bad night. In Belfast."
"The thing about going to these sessions," Ella said to Lee, "is that you never know who you're going to meet."
Brad pretended that the irony was lost on him. "All I'm saying is that the effect doesn't work. It doesn't come off."
"I was interested," Lee cut in quickly, "in some of the things you were saying. About controlling the direction of your dreams, I mean. I'm really going to get into it."
"Do it," she said, as if to say stop talking about it.
"You sounded quite advanced."
"Head of the coven," said Brad.
"But I don't have premonitions." She plucked a loose flake of tobacco from the tip of her tongue.
"He only said that about premonitions," Brad put in, looking at Lee, "so he wouldn't