CA: [crying] Sorry. Freaking out. I mean . . . it’s just been so . . . right off the roof . . . I mean dead as in just gone . . . and it’s not my fault his dick is so big . . .
RP: Whose dick would this be, precisely?
CA: [unintelligible]
DC: Just stop crying!
END RECORDING
Secret Diary of a Prawn Star
Entry #47
Codename: Chaplin
Date: 13 September 2027
Client: Martin Elstree
Payment in advance: Yes
Session Goal: Sexual gratification, client
Location: Trump Metropole, Room 819
Narcolepsy status: Crashed on Tube for 10 mins. Seriously overtired
Nutrition/stimulants: Takeout curry & energy drink
Start time: 2.56 a.m.
End time: 3.27 a.m.
RECORDING DELETED
Material on this recording violated terms of service for the AR provision of Charlotte Aaron.
To store material of this type, please reset your system parameters to include use of power tools for sexual violence, olfactory triggers, penile enhancement and systemic bias.
The first cut
Gah! Only a dream! Only a dream! WTF was that sick business – ugh, can’t unsee, can’t unhear, can’t unsmell . . . eww, got to get a grip.
Pull it together, Charlie.
I’m awake. I’m awake. I’m literally pinching myself.
I think I can safely say I’ve never helped a client build a dream where their kink turns out to be attacking their boss with power tools. Thank god the recording system censored it. Let’s pretend it didn’t happen.
Where am I, again?
Let me think. I did Mrs H-W and then I got that text about Antonio and then I came here. Hotel. New client, Martin Elstree. Sex dream. Well, I think calling what just happened in his head a sex dream is stretching the definition. I need to wake up properly but it’s not easy. My body wants to keep sleeping.
I locate myself in the cushy chair by the TV. I drag my eyes open just in time to see Martin Elstree bucking under the super-king-sized bedspread across the room. He lets out a satisfied groan. All my arm hairs are standing on end and my skin is burning with that fast-creeping-adrenaline sensation you get when you’ve narrowly escaped being hit by a phalanx of e-bikes travelling at speed.
I watch Martin Elstree out of the corner of my eye. He thrashes a bit, then subsides. His breathing settles as he slides into light sleep.
I’m alert enough now to realise that the curry I wolfed at the station was a mistake. I’m going to spew. I put my hand over my mouth and lurch out of the chair, relying on the hum of the air con to cover the sounds of me sneaking into the hotel bathroom. I shut and lock the door, keeping my gaze on the tile floor. There’s a mirror the size of Lancashire over the sink. I lift the toilet seat and kneel in front of it. Complimentary bath products are all lined up on a shelf in the shower. They’re high-end, just like the hotel – even though Martin’s booked one of the smallest rooms in the place. At first he gave me the keys to his posh flat in Convoys Wharf but I am glad now that I held to my policy of no house calls for first-time clients. Now that I know he’s a fucking psycho, I may have to rethink my whole client-vetting system.
Deep breaths, Charlie. It’s OK. See? Aromatherapy bath oil. Fair Trade shower gel. I fix my attention on the calligraphy of the labels so that I don’t have to remember the sound of Martin Elstree’s boss’s croaking voice as she apologized to him for being a nasty authoritative bitch. So I won’t smell her flesh burning as he—
My stomach clenches and the curry comes up in a yellow-brown roar. Vomit hits the water and spreads in clouds, like really ugly watercolours. I spit, flush, rinse out my mouth straight from the tap. Keep the water running. Splash my face with my eyes closed. I want to hide somewhere inside myself, but everywhere inside is the sense of Martin Elstree’s revenge-porn dream. I thought revenge porn was just being a jackass and showing people naked pictures of your ex. I never realised it could be about taking revenge on someone you hated. With a hedge-trimmer and a blowtorch. The human imagination— No, I’m not going to think about it.
At last, to steady myself, I look up at the mirror.
There we are, love. You idiot, look at you. Bloodshot eyes. Wet, scruffy eyebrows that shadow dark green eyes. Your skin’s normally sienna but in this light it looks more like mustard, and the violet headscarf that hides your alopecia is none too flattering – remember to wear the green one next time. Earring looks OK, discreet and simple. Remember, we’re supposed to be professional. When you’re a professional dream therapist, you might vomit but then you carry on.
And you don’t talk to yourself in the mirror, OK?
I’m not sure if I said any of that aloud. Maybe a little. Things get blurred. Always takes my brain activity a while to stabilize after I’ve been working on someone.
There’s a soft knock on the door and I jump several kilometres into the air with a squawk, then glance at myself sidelong in the mirror as if to make sure I really heard what I heard.
Knock-knock.
‘Charlie? Are you OK?’ Martin Elstree has a posh accent and one of those deep, scruffly radio voices, the kind that people instinctively seem to trust.
I try to answer but nothing comes out. I clear my throat repeatedly, putting my palm against the door even though it’s locked.
‘Yeah, I’m fine. I’ll be with you in a minute.’
The headache is starting. It doesn’t usually come on so quickly; but then, I don’t usually upchuck. I flick open my contact window and check the time. I’ve got maybe twenty minutes before the narcolepsy hits, and there is just no way I can risk going down with Martin Elstree in the room. I might wake up with a power saw up my vaj.
I open the door and he’s still standing there, in his jimjams and bare feet like a normal guy. I don’t want to see his feet.
‘That was fantastic!’ Martin Elstree blurts, pumping his fists in that repressed middle-class way, like he’s cheering for a football match in a phone booth. ‘So very very empowering. I don’t know how you did that but you’re a genius.’
‘I need to go now,’ I say. He’s blocking me, and even though we’re about the same height and I probably outweigh him, his dream scared me so thoroughly that I can’t bring myself to go any closer to him. I try to turn on my bodycam so everything he might do will be on record, but the stupid firmware is in the middle of an upgrade and won’t load. Fuck.
Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve hit the yellow warning button on my emergency link to O.
O’s voice comes straight into my head, a sleepy growl. ‘Problem? Turn on your bodycam, I can’t see.’
‘Arsehole client blocking me in bathroom.’ I’m not good at carrying on internal conversations without giving away what I’m doing. Martin must notice that I’m talking to someone because he steps back with a flickering look of offended honour even as O responds.
‘Throw a glass of water on him, darling. Shower hose. Flying headbutt. Do what you must.’
Flying headbutts are Shandy’s department, not mine. I shrug past Martin without saying anything and grab the door handle.
‘It’s only three-ish,’ he says smoothly as I open the door. ‘I booked you until eight. Just need a little time to recover, you see.’
Now I’m out in the hallway, on CCTV and with O in my ear, I feel bolder. I turn back and square up.
‘I don’t do deathporn. I don’t do gratuitous dismemberment. I’m a therapist.’ My voice is shaking and I’m wanting to hurl again. If only I still had something in my stomach, maybe I could hit his feet.
He acts shocked. ‘You must be joking, you don’t do deathporn? You have a great talent for it. You know, I could smell everything—’
I let the door go and stride fast for the lift. Head feels like it’s being squeezed in one of those machines that you put a minivan in and press a button and get out a little chunk of meta
l the size of a pepper shaker. He doesn’t seem to be following me, but by now I’m staggering.
‘Are you safe, darling? Should I send Muz?’
‘Yes, please, O.’
Muz is a bouncer for a club in Soho. He’s approximately eighteen metres tall and made of titanium. He and O are both motorbike aficionados, and he takes care of her ‘hog’ for her. He would squash Martin Elstree like a gnat.
‘Where shall I have him meet you? Room eight-nineteen or the lobby?’
‘O, I’m sorry, I think I’m going to fall asleep in public.’
‘Don’t do that. Put on a bit of Anthrax or something.’
I hit the button for the lift and lean on the wall. The hallway is empty and it seems to stretch on for ever into the distance. Like a dream hallway. So tired. My headache has moved into my wisdom teeth, which I was supposed to have removed last year but I was dating Antonio and couldn’t face the chipmunk-cheek after-effects, and . . .
‘Charlie! Wake up!’
The lift is sitting on the 27th floor refusing to move and I’m on the eighth.
‘Don’t think . . . I’ll make it out . . .’ I spot a laundry cart full of sheets.
Now, let me make it clear that under normal circumstances I would never be tempted to curl up in a pile of sheets potentially loaded with other people’s body fluids, bacteria and stray pubic hair. But when I’ve been working, I become quite unable to control some of my primitive instincts. Right now the need for sleep is overpowering. I have to get somewhere safe and cosy before I pass out, and suddenly those sheets are looking too inviting to resist. I wonder if this is how dogs feel about lamp posts.
‘Eighth floor,’ I tell O. ‘Laundry cart near the lift.’
Then I climb in. Last thing I notice is how the dirty sheets smell like Chanel Number 5.
Secret Diary of a Prawn Star
Entry #48
Codename: Chaplin
Date: 13 September 2027
Client: N/A
Payment in advance: N/A
Session Goal: Find a way to wake myself up
Location: Laundry cart, 8th floor, Trump Metropole
Narcolepsy status: CRITICAL
Nutrition/stimulants: Fear
Start time: 3.28 a.m.
End time: 5.47 a.m.
Before I got sick there was no particular order to my dreams. When I could remember them, they were set in my mum’s house, or school, or sometimes in a mall or a friend’s place. Or maybe a car. They were a lot like real life, although things were stitched together in funny ways, of course, and nothing made much sense.
But during my narcolepsy days, I started visiting the Dream City on a regular basis. Usually I’m looking for something there, but I can never remember what.
The Dream City isn’t anything like real London unless you count the Square Mile – and then only in that both are full of swerves and unexpected openings. Making your way around it is like playing a video game where the designers are having a laugh at your expense. There’s no map of it, no overview, and very little concession to reality. Streets can turn into canals and canals into bridges, and occasionally roads go around corners that are greater than 360 degrees with no apology. Yet somehow it all holds together.
For architectural chutzpah, the Dream City is like Singapore. Showy, extravagantly futuristic. There are neon bridges connecting the tops of buildings. There are fleets of cyclists riding point to point in transparent tubes. But when you explore on foot you find old parts underneath: mossy cloisters of pitted stone with broken statues, canals that smell like ditchwater and plunge unexpectedly underground. You can ride through these dark tunnels poled by animal gondoliers who use recycled smartphones to light the way.
If you look, you can find railway-siding houses with piles of junk rotting in their back gardens, just like in real London. But the back gardens in the Dream City are overshadowed by mysterious honeycomb towers whose structure looks like a cross section of bone under a high-powered microscope.
One gleaming skyscraper has a sideways restaurant, where people sit at a ninety-degree angle to the ground eating seafood while the updraughts from street-sweepers stir their hair. They appear to be living in a different gravity from the rest of us. I seem to remember being told that to get up there you have to offer certain bribes to the concierge, but I never asked what.
(The concierge, by the way, is a tulip.)
Sometimes there are snorting horses drawing carriages over cobbles, and steaming reeks rise from manhole covers as if an underground machine is gearing itself up for a very rude belch. Sometimes the buildings are square and shiny plastic, as if they’ve drifted in from the archetypal sleeping Lego Republic.
Sometimes the city is muted to utter silence.
Sometimes the streets are metal grates over jungles that release a fume of fruit and rot and animal smells. You can’t get down there or see beyond the top of the canopy, but you can taste the moisture in the air of all that trapped life and you can hear the birds and insects in full cry. Once I saw a tiny drone fly down between the bars and amongst the leaves, and there was a crunch of metal being snapped and the sound of a motor wailing and then cutting off, and the birds went silent, just for that moment, before beginning to shriek.
One of the city’s more curious features is the way you forget most of it on waking, yet when you return in a future dream, you find you can recall everything that ever happened here in vivid detail. Sometimes these memories unfold in several layers like an accordion fan; you see a certain doorway or staircase and it’s like you clicked a hyperlink that offers up its long backstory in your own dream history – or maybe (I suspect) someone else’s.
You never know what you will find around the next bend. Once I was in someone’s flat and stepped out onto a balcony only to be confronted by a vast plain of water, apparently without waves, stretching out for ever, in all directions. It appeared to surround the building; yet when I went back inside the flat and looked out of a different window, I saw only a multistorey car park complete with two drunks having a pissing contest against the wall.
This time I’m picking my way along the bank of the swollen river, one hand on a slimy chain-link fence that separates the crumbling bank from the frontage of buildings. Sodium lamplight turns the droplets that collect on the links to gold, and they shower down on me every time I grab the fence for balance. On the landward side there are Plexiglas flood defences, but these have big holes in them as if giants have been chucking rocks at each other. Up ahead I can see a place where someone has taken wire-cutters to the fence and ripped back a panel.
In the Dream City, everything is in colour except for the people. They are in greyscale. As I get closer to the gap in the fence, I see that greyscale people are queuing up to climb through a hole in the floodgate and then stepping through the chain-link fence. They appear to be adults and children, but they are all wearing masks so I can’t see their faces. One at a time, they climb through the gap in the fence and keep walking, right off the edge of the bank and into the river.
Their heads disappear beneath the turbulence.
There are no boats in sight. There are no life rings.
I hurry forward. I shout, trying to get people’s attention, but no one even turns their head. When I reach the gap, I stand there and try to block the next person from coming through, but I can’t.
‘Hey!’ I cry. ‘Don’t go through here. You’ll fall in the river. Look where you’re going!’
The person ignores me and steps around me. I even grab his arm to try to stop him.
‘Don’t touch me,’ he says in a dull voice. ‘It’s assault.’
Startled by the accusation, I hesitate – and in that time he walks straight off the edge of the muddy bank and into the deep water. He disappears.
I try to block the next person. They are wearing a plastic doll mask with eyes closed. I grab the edge of the mask and rip it off. Underneath is another mask with eyes closed.
What the
hell? There is no way these people can see where they are going because the masks have no holes where the eyes should be.
‘Wake up!’ I scream. ‘Wake up!’
The person faces me and tries to walk through me.
‘Where are you trying to go?’ I say. ‘This is the river. You’re going the wrong way.’
In a tinny voice, she says, ‘I’m going to a Sleepwalkers Anonymous meeting. This is the right way.’
Then she reaches out and pushes me. I fall.
There’s a muddle of sky and lights and reflections before I hit the water and go under with the whole river punching down my throat like a cold fist.
Cardboard box in Wandsworth Town
I don’t so much wake up as crash into reality. My mouth tastes like rancid goat and I can feel the headache still lurking like a bank of thunderheads on my internal skyline. Sometimes I get a touch of synaesthesia, so when I smell nail-polish remover I expect it’s connected to the headache. Until I open my eyes.
I am home in Finsbury Park on the sofa. O is sitting on the recliner opposite in her dressing gown, her hair in rollers that she must have slept in. Her wheelchair is parked nearby and she has put her bare feet up on it. With her reading glasses on the end of her nose, she looks like a plump, wrinkled elf as she paints her toenails a lovely turquoise. Outside, the sun is coming up over North London.
‘I hope you’re not hungry,’ she says. ‘I don’t think I could make a piece of toast.’
I sit up, fuddled. My voice comes out faint and harsh at the same time, like I’ve swallowed sandpaper.
‘How did you get me home?’
‘Called Muz. He located the laundry cart just before the maid noticed you. Fireman’s carry into the lift. Bribed doorman to look the other way. Minicab. Then up the stairs. Our lift’s out of order again.’
She ticks off points in the air with the nail-varnish brush as though keeping score.
‘Muz carried me? All that way? Oh my god. I’ll have to bake him some cookies . . .’
I’m not totally clear on the relationship between Muz and O. He does jobs for her involving the hog and heavy lifting, but they are also friends. A bit like O and me, I guess.
Sweet Dreams Page 2
