The Unlimited Dream Company (8 page)

It was now, after this second vision, that I and Miriam St Cloud first began to understand what was taking place in Shepperton. When I left the park and approached the Tudor mansion Miriam was waiting for me on the lawn. She watched me walk towards her across the spray-soaked grass, shaking her head at this irresponsible patient wilfully putting his health at risk. I knew that she was no longer frightened of me, but still half-hoped that I would leave her once-placid town for ever.

‘Blake, can’t you get rid of these birds?’ She pointed to the screeching sea-birds which circled the foam-flecked water, as if they were players in a discarded fantasy I had left lying around untidily. A flock of petrels and cormorants had joined the fulmars, and a dozen of the heavy-winged predators hungrily raked the river with their beaks, hunting with a kind of plaintive and distracted hysteria for the fish I had conjured from my vision. But those fish now swam in the sun-filled lagoons of my head.

‘Blake, do you want me to drive you to the station?’ Shielding her eyes from the birds, Miriam blocked my way with her strong body. ‘Is there any point in your staying here?’

For all her aggressive stance, she was as angry and concerned for me as a young wife would be. I was sure that in some way she had witnessed my vision, perhaps as no more than a sudden glimpse into that real world which I was slowly unfolding as I drew back the curtains that muffled Shepperton and the rest of this substitute realm. When I took off my drenched jacket her hands ran across my chest and back, searching for any fresh injuries.

‘I’ve been swimming in the river,’ I told her. ‘You should have come in.’

‘The water was lovely, I suppose. You’re lucky to be alive – there was a swordfish there.’

‘Did you see the whale?’

She shook her head, staring in an almost desperate way at the screaming fulmars. ‘Frightening creatures-
you
brought them here, you know. I’ve had to give Mother a sleeping draught.’

Steering me towards the house, she said calmly: ‘Blake, I did see something. Perhaps there was a whale … there was some magnificent creature swimming up and down, as if he was trying to come ashore. Lost whales often swim up the Thames.’

She took my arm and helped me across the hall to the staircase, her arms closely around me. As I stripped in the bedroom she folded my clothes with quick hands, like a wife eager to get her husband into bed. Was she already aware of my determination to mate with everyone in Shepperton? I stood naked in front of her, the bruises on my chest and mouth more prominent than ever in the electric light. Smiling in a reassuring way at her unembarrassed stare, I gazed frankly at her body, with its dizzying scents. In my mind I dedicated each of our sexual acts to the crippled children, to the young women and the old, to the trees and birds and fish, to my transformation of this riverside town.

‘Miriam, was anyone else in the water with me?’

‘A few people-five or six-some of the tennis players. And one of the local butchers, amazingly.’

‘No more than that?’

‘Blake …’ Although I was naked she let me embrace her, pressing her hands against my shoulders. ‘We’ve all been so exhausted – first your crash, and the whole nightmare of your escape. Then the storm last night, the strange birds and all these fish … portents of God only knows what. Half the time I don’t know whether I’m seeing or dreaming.’

‘Miriam – am I dead?’

‘No!’ She slapped my right cheek, then held my face tightly in her hands. ‘Blake, you’re not dead. I
know
you’re not. Poor man, that crash. There are things coming out of your head that frighten me, you’re crossing space and time at some kind of angle to the rest of us. Something’s happened here, you ought to get away from Shepperton altogether …’

My arms steadied her. ‘No, I have to stay. There’s a lot I want to find out.’

‘Then see Father Wingate. I know that’s all nonsense, but I can’t think of anything else that might help you.’

‘Father Wingate handed his church over to me this morning.’

‘Why? What does he imagine you’re going to do with it?’

‘Conduct a marriage ceremony – of a special kind?’

Laughing, she moved my hands from her breasts, as if nervous that I might transform her into a thousand-breasted Diana. ‘That’s strange. Do you know, Blake, as a schoolgirl I often had a fantasy of being married in an airliner – I think I was in love with a pilot I saw at Orly while changing planes with my parents. For some reason I was terribly keen on the idea of a wedding ceremony held ten miles up in the air.’

‘Miriam, I’ll rent an aircraft.’

‘Again? By the way, Stark’s a pilot – of a sort. Like you.’

‘But not a real one.’

‘Are you, Blake?’

I had recovered my strength after the swim, and could easily have lifted her from the floor on to the bed. But I was thinking of my own dream of flight. Had she really had a childhood fantasy of being married in the air, or had I imposed it upon her? A sickly cyclamen sun touched her hair, the trees in the park, the grass in the water-meadow, my blood itself irrigating all the secret possibilities of our
lives. I wanted to mate with Miriam St Cloud on the wing, sail with her along the cool corridors of the sky, swim with her down this small river to the open sea, drown the currents of our love in the ebb and flow of oceanic tides …

‘Blake—!’

Gasping for breath, she struggled from me. She tore her arms free and struck out at my face with her hard fists. For a moment, as she sucked at the air, she stared at me with real terror. When she ran to the door I felt my bruised mouth, aware that I had begun to crush the life from her lungs as I had done from her mother’s.

Later, sitting naked in a high-backed chair by the window, I looked down at the river in the dusk, at the now cerise water through which I had leapt as a right whale, my sleek body dressed in foam like the lace ruffs of the Shakespearian actors. What disturbed me was not my apparent attempt to smother Miriam St Cloud, but that I no longer wished to escape from Shepperton. Already I felt committed to the people here, almost as if I was their pastor. The unseen powers who had saved me from the aircraft had in turn charged me to save these men and women from their lives in this small town and the limits imposed on their spirits by their minds and bodies. In some way my escape from the Cessna, whose drowned wraith I could see in the dark water below the window, had gained me entry to the real world that waited behind the shutter of every flower and feather, every leaf and child. My dreams of flying as a bird among birds, of swimming as a fish among fish, were not dreams but the reality of which this house, this small town and its inhabitants were themselves the consequential dream.

As the night air soothed my bruised chest I sensed the power flowing from my body, filling the river and the park. I was sorry to have frightened Miriam – I wanted her to be the vessel of my transforming lust, and our marriage to be not a rape but a private coronation. I watched a shoal of
animalcula swarming in a halo around the Cessna, marine creatures from some warm pelagic deep which had crossed the oceans to swim up the Thames and release their light for me.

As for the corpse in the Cessna, this imaginary body no longer frightened me. I even welcomed its challenge, the duel between us for the domination of this river and town.

All night the people of Shepperton continued to stroll along the river bank. They gazed at the vivid foliage in the park that seemed to glow in the darkness like the forest at the fringes of a tropical city. Father Wingate walked along the beach by the illuminated water, fanning himself with his straw hat. He had recovered from our confrontation in the church and patrolled the shoreline as if to make sure that I was allowed to rest. Once again I felt the presence of my first real family. Together they were encouraging me to fulfil myself and make the most of whatever powers I possessed.

However, when the housekeeper brought me a tray of food I found myself unable to touch the roast meat she had prepared. Although I had eaten nothing for forty-eight hours, I was hungry only for the flesh of my own species. And I would take that flesh, not with my bruised mouth, but with my entire body, with my insatiate skin.

The next morning, at the start of my third day in Shepperton, I began work at Dr Miriam’s clinic. As I set off across the park I reflected that for all her deference to me, and my own messianic delusions, the job was a menial one-I was to clean the corridors and waiting-room, run errands for the nurses. While I dressed I thought of rejecting the job and giving myself more time to explore Shepperton, but Mrs St Cloud’s devoted presence, hovering protectively around the untouched breakfast tray, soon unsettled me. She gazed at me in a smiling, but drugged way, as if still affected by the sedative her daughter had given to her the previous evening. In her mind was I her infant son, born to this middle-aged woman from the bed of her dead husband? I was still trying to think of myself as her child, and felt vaguely prudish about our sex together. From the window I watched her talking in the drive to a young delivery man. Her evident interest in him confused me, and I almost felt rejected by her. She was complimenting him on something, her hands touching his shoulders. Clearly I had let an unsuspected dimension into Mrs St Cloud’s suburban life.

However, after a night’s sleep, and surrounded now by the brilliant day, my confidence returned. I felt flattered by the sunlight that followed me through the trees like a spotlight keeping track of a celebrity. Besides, the clinic was the perfect place in which to lie low while my mind realigned itself – particularly if I was struck by a sudden blackout or brain haemorrhage – and I discovered the real meaning of the events taking place around me. I suspected that a blood-clot deep in my brain might be responsible for my strange visions and for the dislocations of time and space. I felt a keening
excitement in the overlit grass and flowers, my mind too close for comfort to the singing filament of a dying light-bulb.

As the sun rose behind me it seemed to overflow from the river, transforming the park and water-meadow into a retinal bayou. Fish of every kind filled the water, schools of roach and pike surged around the drowned Cessna as if glutted on the residue of my dream. I strode through the trees, stretching out my arm to catch the brilliant motes. By the tennis courts I broke into a run, spurred on by the huge increase in illumination. The white marker lines hovered several inches above the clay, as if about to detach themselves from the court and take off across the sky like the aerial matrix of a pilot’s head-up display. Catching my breath, I leaned against a jacaranda tree, a strange visitor to this temperate park. The leaves were engorged with illuminated sap, each of the trumpet-shaped flowers a halo of itself. Deer moved through a copse of silver birch, cropping at the electric bark. When I shouted to them their eyes twinkled at me as if the entire herd had been fitted with contact lenses.

The sun was hallucinating, feasting eagerly on the Spanish moss that hung from the boughs of the dead elms. The woody tendrils of liana vines twisted around the sedate chestnut and plane trees. Lilies grew from the forest floor, transforming this formal park into a botanical garden seized and replanted during the night by some crazed horticulturalist.

I leapt across a flower-bed of scarlet tulips overrun by huge ferns and liverworts. A startled macaw clambered into the air beside me. Crossing the park, it shook carapaces of light from its green and yellow wings. Fifty yards ahead of me, Miriam St Cloud walked through the trees towards the clinic, surrounded by a flurry of parakeets and orioles, a young doctor making a house-call on an over-fertile mother nature. Happy to see her, I felt that I had prepared this abundant life especially for her.

‘Miriam …!’ I ran through the parked cars and stopped
in front of her, gesturing proudly at the brilliant foliage like a lover presenting a bouquet. ‘Miriam, what’s happened?’

‘It’s taken some kind of fertility drug, Blake.’ She was throwing berries into a chestnut tree, where a monkey-like creature with a bushy tail clung to a branch, surprised to find itself in this elegant park.

Miriam waved a hand around her head, trying to restrain the overlit air.

‘Macaws, parakeets, now a marmoset – what else are you going to bring us, Blake?’ She sidled up to me, hands in the pockets of her white coat. ‘You’re like some kind of pagan god.’

For all her good-humoured banter she looked at me with a certain wariness, thinking of the ambiguous nature of my special talents and not all that eager to face up to them.

‘A marmoset?’ Recognizing the creature, I jumped into the air, trying to seize its tail. ‘It’s escaped from Stark’s zoo.’

‘From the inside of your head, more likely …’ Miriam beckoned me towards the clinic. ‘You’ve come to work here – now, what exactly can you do?’

Did she suspect that I was still making love to her mother? She strolled around the grassy verge of the carpark, glancing at her reflection in the polished door-panels and showing off her strong legs and hips to me. What could I do? I wanted to shout: I can fly, Miriam, and I can dream! Dream me, Miriam! Only a few steps behind her, I felt my sex thicken. A pagan god? For some reason I liked the phrase, it reassured me.

Suddenly I was convinced: certainly I was not dead, but as well, I was not merely alive. I was twice alive!

Barely able to restrain myself, I caught Miriam’s arm, eager to tell her the good news and embrace her in the back seat of the district midwife’s parked saloon.

‘Blake, now hold on …’

Avoiding my eyes, she pushed me away. I gripped the windshield of her sports car, shaking with sexual violence at
myself. As I stared at the ground I noticed that the shoots of some lurid tropical plant were springing through the cracked cement. The blood-milk flowers, like the blossom of ah aberrant gladiolus, effloresced between my legs, as if in response to my own sex. I had seen the same flowers outside Father Wingate’s church.

All around me the bright flutes poked their blood-tipped spears among the wheels of the parked cars, from my footsteps in the grass verge.

‘Blake, they’re extraordinary … Dear, they’re beautiful.’

‘Miriam – I’ll give you any flowers you want!’ Rhapsodizing over the thousand scents of her body, I exclaimed: ‘I’ll grow orchids from your hands, roses from your breasts. You can have magnolias in your hair …!’

‘And in my heart?’

‘In your
womb
I’ll set a fly-trap!’

‘Blake … Do you always get so excited by everything?’ Still unaware of the motive force driving these sexual fuses, Miriam knelt between the cars and began to pluck the flowers. Calm now, I watched proudly as this beautiful young woman carried my sex in her hands towards the clinic. Again I sensed the power that I had felt all day, a power that had poured into me during my last vision. After my dream of flying I had behaved like an injured bird stranded in a small suburban garden, just as I had been trapped in this nondescript town. But after my vision of swimming as a right whale I had been transformed, marking my triumph in having escaped from the drowned aircraft. Now my strength was fed by the invisible power of great oceans that reached up the minute vein of this modest river. I had emerged on to the land reborn, like my amphibian forbears millions of years before me who left the sea to stride across the waiting parklands of the young earth. Like them, I carried memories of those seas in my bloodstream, memories of the deep time.
I had brought with me the majesty of the right whales, the age and wisdom of all cetaceans.

That morning I moved grandly around the clinic with my mop and pail, wheeled the soiled linen to the laundry van, ran errands for the receptionists. I watched contentedly as Miriam carried my blossoms around the surgeries and offices, filling the vases which I collected for her from a cupboard. Among the patients in the waiting-room, the expectant mothers and infertile wives, she set out the vivid flowers of my sex.

Two of the patients were middle-aged women whom I had last seen leaping into the river during my vision of the fish. I remembered them, the local hairdresser and a lawyer’s wife, sailing grandly through the crowded water, part of my aquatic congregation. Now they sat among my flowers, concerned only with their varicose veins and menopausal flushes. As I polished the floor around their feet neither of them took her eyes off me.

Later, when the morning clinic had ended, Dr Miriam called me into her office to empty her surgical bin. Pinned to the illuminated screen were the X-ray plates of my head. Miriam stood with her back to the window. A brilliant light filled the park with an almost electric glare, as if one of the location units from the film studios had set up its arc lights.

‘The birth-rate here is about to soar, Blake – do you realize that almost every patient this morning was obsessed with the idea of pregnancy? There was even a grandmother asking about a donor insemination.’

She took off her coat and looked at me in a concerned but unamused way. Perhaps she expected me to pull out my penis and get to work? I wanted to reassure her, give her courage to face me and our coming future.

I hovered around her with my refuse pail. The sights and scents of her body flooded my senses. Her clear teeth tapping
as she stared at the X-ray plates, her left nostril sniffing at a painted finger-nail, her strong hips on which she rocked from side to side, all these obsessed me. I wanted the franchise on every breath she took, on every thought in her head, I wanted to record her small laughs and absent-minded gazes, I wanted to distil her perspiration into the most jealous perfumes …

‘Have you never had any children, Miriam?’

‘Of course I haven’t! Though Stark and I –’ Aggressively she waved me away, and on a sudden impulse followed me to the door. She held my arm in a sharp grip. ‘As a matter of fact, since you arrived I’ve thought of nothing else. I’m as obsessed as those stupid women …’

‘Miriam, don’t you understand …?’ I tried to embrace her, but she held me off with remarkable strength. ‘It’s the crash … you’re-’

‘Blake, for God’s sake … Last night-you were rehearsing some kind of death. Whether for you or me, I don’t want to know.’

‘Not death.’ For the first time the word failed to frighten me. ‘A new kind of life, Miriam.’

When she had gone, setting off on her rounds in the sports car, I stood in her office, and examined the X-ray plates on the display screen, these photographs of my head through which a ceaseless light flowed. It seemed to me that the whole world outside, the trees and the meadow where the children were constructing my grave, the quiet streets with their sedate houses, formed an immense transparent image exposed on the screen of the world, through which the rays of a more searching reality were now pouring in an unbroken fountain.