Dreamside - By Graham Joyce Page 0,58

love from Carla Black, great fun XXX, letters from old friends. From the bottom of the tea chest he lifted a Perspex case.

He hardly dared open it. Could things be said to have happened only so long as they agreed they had happened ? Perhaps all that had gone on between Ella and him was the grand performance—what had the professor called it? folic a deux—a teenage romance conducted against a blazing operatic backdrop erected just to give things stature. Maybe that was it: nothing more than an outlandish metaphor for adolescent love.

He balanced the torch on the corner of the chest and broke open the Perspex case. It contained a girls black beret; a half-empty packet of Rizla liquorice cigarette papers, a brass incense-trinket, half a dozen colour-faded photographs of Ella or of himself with Ella, and three postcards from the Greek Islands. It was his shrine to Ella. Over the years he had preserved it in secret. There was one other thing. It was an Indian carved wooden box, about two inches square, which Ella had given him after an important event had taken place. He opened it and inside, its tiny white rays and yellow disc dried and withered, but preserved and perfectly recognizable, was a daisy head. He took it out and held it in the palm of his hand. Somewhere, unless she had lost it, Ella had the other one. He would have to ask her.

Lee sat in the dark attic, with the weak light of the torch shining on the daisy head resting in the palm of his hand.

Honora knelt in the peace of the empty church, hearing only the sounds of the hail on the roof and the creaking of the hassock on which the priest kneeled. She allowed her mind to range unfettered over vivid images of her dreamside experiences.

The memories flooded her with a sweet intensity. She felt the anxiety and the sheer pleasure that came with the control of dream-side. She felt the body's dreamside ache, a lust more physically acute than anything felt in the material, waking world. But she also remembered the fear, the brooding undertow beneath the earth and water and waxy sun of dreamside.

They were inseparable, this pleasure and this fear. Never before had she felt them so strongly. It was like a live thing inside her. She had called it from dreamside, the essence of dreamside, reforming, shape-shifting, soul-sucking, predatory, sloughing off one skin like a serpent, taking on new colours, all-devouring, breaking her down, covering her over with warm soil, reconstituting her, like a death without dying until buried over she became spice for the earth's pleasure. This was the thing the priest would take from her. This was the sin she could surrender to him.

She wanted purification. The priest would take her confusion and sin and guilt and doubt, and dissolve it. She felt it slip from her to him, memories that melted as they transposed themselves, her mind drained of all thoughts of lucid dream incarnations.

She opened her eyes. The priest had stopped praying and was looking at her. He was shocked. She knew instinctively that he'd had a taste of it, had peered over the edge and drawn back. He was unable to take it from her. What should have been dissolved between them had been arrested. Now bitterness hung on the air. His hands were trembling.

"You felt it!" said Honora. The priest failed to answer.

In despair she looked up at the plaster statue of the Virgin. The figure hanging over her swelled as she looked at it, and pulsed. This pulsing was the beating of her own heart. She desperately wanted release. It was all wrong. The priest couldn't help her. She looked at the figure of the plaster Virgin; at the flecks of skin-colour paint, faded with age to grey. Over how many failed confessions had this flaking plaster Virgin presided? How many prayers had dropped short?

Honora wanted to cry for her childhood. She wanted to cry for every Sunday School and for every mass she had attended, in their own way like lucid dreams—the invocation of hopes and the for-fending of horrors. Her eyes were wet. As she looked up the Virgin stirred. There was a rustle of her blue robe and Honora was sure she heard her sigh. A whiff of decay hung on the air.

She sobbed and closed her eyes. Her memory fanned out across her faith; it was like watching the fragments of a shattered