Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,48

gave me as much of the story as she thought would keep me satisfied. Rationed it out, right up until the end. But there's more, I'm sure of it."

"So it's Honora."

"I could be wrong."

"It's all we've got to go on. So how was the journey?"

"I had some bad feelings on the way over. Then when I got to Ireland it was OK. Honora was warm after she'd recovered from the shock of seeing me. It brought a lot of things back."

"Me too.Seeing Brad, even in that state."

"It brought back things about us, too."

"All of it?"

"Everything."

Lee kissed Ella's neck. "I never really figured why or how it ended."

"Well," Ella smiled, "we never really forgave each other for being only human."

"One day you were gone, then there were three postcards, and then thirteen years had passed."

"The postcards! I remember trying to fill them with anything but what really mattered."

They lapsed into silence. Ella felt Lee's loneliness dangerously close to the surface.

"You were never out of my mind. All the years."

"Stop talking about it. Come here. We can make the years fall away." She smiled again, and put her hand inside his shirt. "Do you remember a certain game we used to play?"

"Of course I remember”.

Ella pulled him down on to the rug and they made love. It was clean, hungry sex. They pretended nothing had changed, that they were back in Ella's scented cave and that the amber light from the fire was the dawn breaking through the heavy curtains of their old world. They could be childlike again. They could pretend to be victims of a fold in the ordinary sequence of time, with the intervening thirteen years as a long cold night. Pretending was good, and each could pretend as well as the other, and the game of pretending didn't devour the way that dreaming devoured.

TWO

"Ditto, ditto!" cried Tweedledee —Lewis Carroll

Honora Brennan, still recovering from Ella's unexpected visit, is frightened. She wanders round the house drinking from a glass of stout and swallowing temazepam. In her back room she stands before the covered easel and removes the tablecloth.

Sitting back on a high stool, she contemplates her work, squinting at it through the soft-focus lens of alcohol and tranquilizers which gives the painting a fluid quality all of its own. The canvas shows a familiar scene: a sturdy, spreading oak leaning out across a lake that seems to have no farther shore. But the view is changed in some way, as if Honora has painted a different dreamside, one in the grip of a new authority, which leaves even her guessing.

Honora covers up the painting before the answer comes to her. She climbs the stairs to bed. The hinge on the gate outside whines and she glances down into the street. A child has climbed on to her gate and is swinging on it, gently back and forth: a girl, a little older than those she teaches at school, neglected, wearing a cut-down dress from a fashion at least a decade past, with lank hair framing sad eyes. The girl looks up at her. Honora draws the curtains.

Curled up in the dark, Honora wishes that Ella had stayed longer. Maybe she would go to England, and spend some time with Ella. Her visit has turned up buried secrets, memories that sit up and point at her like corpses out of coffins; but it has also brought the warm companionship they enjoyed in the early days on dreamside.

Honora spends half the night drifting between waking, sleeping and dreaming. She is shaken by the wind rattling the window. Ella, Lee, Brad, Professor Burns and countless other voices all take turns at owning the hand that rattles the window, until in exasperation she gets out of bed. Taking a school copy of the prayer book from her bookshelf she levers open the staples that bind it, carefully folding the leaves into paper wedges and forcing them between the gaps of the window frame. She climbs into bed and drifts back into sleep.

The familiar branches of the giant oak loom large, as if from out of a mist, swaying gently and beckoning her on; she's carried in by the currents. She just goes with it, not part of it but with it, that's all it ever took, all it ever wanted, without struggle or without any more need to help it along, until, breaking into substance like the gentle breaking of an insignificant wave upon a beach it is delivered to you or you to