Sweet Dreams

by Tricia Sullivan

  ‘About the cookies. He did hint you could stand to lose a stone. He said getting you out of the cab was like moving a dead tuna.’

  ‘He what?’

  ‘By the fourth floor he was winded. It’s a lot of stairs, darling. But don’t mention it. It’s just lucky he wasn’t working last night. I couldn’t have helped, otherwise. I’m more of a Mycroft type, really.’

  O’s hand trembles as she carefully paints her little toenail. I don’t know how old she is. Wrong side of eighty, I reckon. But Mycroft? I snort at the comparison.

  ‘You think I jest?’ she says archly. ‘If Mycroft had lived in our time he would have been a white-hat hacker. He would have had a flat like this, and he’d have stayed in all day and solved the world’s cyber-mysteries and had lots of naps.’

  ‘Mycroft rebooted, with a taste for throw pillows and florals,’ I say. ‘But are you really a white-hat hacker? Because if you are, you’re too cool to be Mycroft.’

  O leans over and blows on her toenails. ‘I wear many hats, darling.’

  She gives me the slitted look she always gives when she thinks I’m being foolish, then lies back in the recliner and closes her eyes.

  ‘I know you wouldn’t have panicked over nothing, my dear. I hope you’re all right.’

  I shudder. ‘You have no idea. That horrible person, Martin Elstree. It was a revenge dream, against his boss – who happens to be a woman. I don’t ever want to work with him again. Ever.’

  ‘I thought you might say that. He left messages on your business line.’

  ‘Just delete them, please.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘His dreams . . . what he wants . . . O, it’s not just kinky, it’s evil. I won’t do it, I don’t care how much he pays.’

  ‘I sent him your way because he pays fifteen times what Mrs Haugh-Wombaur pays.’

  I cover my eyes. ‘Please. Don’t say her name right now. I’ve got a touch of Smell-O-Vision and I don’t want to be sick again.’

  ‘Sorry, darling. Look, fine, whatever. Only trying to help. All I’m saying is, I booked you with him because if he likes you he’ll recommend you.’

  ‘To all his other nasty friends.’

  ‘He’s a solicitor. His friends are other solicitors, and business executives, and tech speculators. I’ve worked with him myself – in fact, he’s doing a really important piece of intellectual property litigation for me at the moment. He’s very well-connected.’

  ‘He seems so normal on the outside. You would never guess he’s so pervy to look at him. There’s something really wrong there.’

  ‘I’d never have let him hurt you physically. You know this. I had my eye on you the whole time.’

  ‘I’m not afraid of him physically, it’s the— Look, it’s hard to describe what it’s like being in someone else’s dream. It’s as if I’m orchestrating it but I’m also the thing that’s being orchestrated. It’s passing through me, it feels totally real. It was horrible.’

  ‘It must have been. Usually you try to make people better, no matter how unpleasant they are. And I note, most of these ultra-violent-fantasy men are afraid of their own shadow.’

  I snort. Shandy says the same thing, but neither of them has a clue what it’s like to be inside one of those fantasies.

  ‘But what do I know?’ she continues. ‘You’ve got the psychology degree. I don’t even have a degree.’

  ‘You don’t have a degree?’

  ‘Nope. MI5 recruited me straight out of primary school.’

  I flop back on the sofa and close my eyes. Whenever she makes fun of me, I act like a child. Stupidly, I’m actually fighting back tears.

  ‘I just want you to say I don’t have to do it.’

  ‘Of course you don’t have to do it. Who am I to tell you what to do? And darling, you know I enjoy having you here. It just seems a shame for you to be stuck living with a little old lady like me when there’s money to be made out there.’

  I open one eye. ‘Are you sick of me, O? Because I can find another little old lady. Or a cardboard box in Wandsworth Town.’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous! I’ll be sad when you leave me. One day this business of yours is going to take off. Why do you think I help you?’

  ‘You don’t have to, though,’ I tell her urgently. ‘If it stops being fun for you, you need to say so. But no more dream sex. From now on it’s straight therapy, bit of ASMR on the side.’

  ‘Fine. You know I support you, whatever you decide. It’s been a long night. I’m going to bed. Get some sleep. Your eyes look like old tyres.’

  ‘Thanks heaps, Mycroft.’

  TRANSCRIPT

  DC: Donato Cruz once again with my colleague Dr Pelka as we interview Ms Charlotte Aaron of Seven Sisters Road, Finsbury Park. Resuming our discussion at Location B after Ms Aaron lost consciousness. It’s now 4:08 A.M. Ms Aaron, given that we’ve just witnessed your narcolepsy in action, can you give us a bit more of the timeline with respect to your condition?

  CA: Well, let’s see. I was just going on with my normal life, temping to pay the bills and living in a cupboard under the stairs in Canning Town. Like you do.

  DC: Cupboard under the stairs?

  CA: Flat-share. My mate Shandy and her friends rented out the cupboard under the stairs as a fourth bedroom. Just big enough for a bed and a power socket to record my ASMR. No good if you’re claustrophobic, but I’m not.

  DC: Tell us about that. ASMR.

  CA: You know what it is? Do you get tingles?

  RP: I do, yeah, the sound of scissors and shoes on wet pavement, mostly, but sometimes—

  DC: Just to clarify, Ms Aaron. By ‘ASMR’ you mean ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’, which it must be noted has only a flimsy scientific basis—

  CA: That’s not true, they’ve done actual science and it’s a thing!

  DC: —but is a cult phenomenon originating on YouTube and more recently recorded on BigSky’s AR sub-platform, Sweet Dreams. So, Ms Aaron, do you listen to ASMR, or do you record it yourself?

  CA: Both. I have a channel, but I’ve not updated it for ages. Since I got the narcolepsy I haven’t been able to do it. I fall asleep while I’m recording.

  RP: It’s not funny, Donato.

  DC: I wasn’t laughing. So tell us about this narcolepsy. When did it start?

  CA: After the study at Excelsior-Barking. So . . . summer last year.

  RP: While you were taking a break, I looked up the paid studies in the nanotech department but couldn’t find anything that matched your description. Unless you mean the AR one. ‘Enhancing peripheral nervous system response to AR triggers through internally delivered feedback.’ There was no infection as such, it was a neural booster.

  CA: That’s the one. You took a drug, they monitored you and put you in an AR simulator to see if your experience was more convincingly real.

  RP: And that study concluded in April. Your illness started in . . . ?

  CA: June. The narcolepsy started in June. But the dreamhacking started the day I took the drug. I was on a coach going to see my mum and I fell asleep and wandered into the dream of the person sitting next to me.

  RP: Walk me through that. How did you know you were in their dream?

  CA: Well, it obviously wasn’t my dream. The dreamer was busking in the tunnel under the Natural History Museum, collecting money from tourists. There was a flood and he was up to his waist but still playing.

  DC: You could have been dreaming that yourself.

  CA: Dreaming in vivid detail that I was a violin player performing Paganini? Ha! You’ve obviously never heard me sing in the shower. My mate Shandy says she’s heard dying walruses with better pitch.

  DC: OK, moving on . . .

  RP: No, please continue, Charlotte. What happened after the bus?

  CA: Just so we’re clear. The guy’s name was Piotr, which I knew because I was in his dream and I could hear his thoughts. After Piotr and I both woke up on the bus, he and his violin case
got up and changed seats. He looked straight at me and said, ‘Stay out of my head.’ We were both right freaked out, but I can’t understand why he was hostile. I actually materialized a rubber dinghy in the tunnel to save him, which I thought was pretty resourceful considering I’d never even been in anyone else’s dream before. He just didn’t appreciate it. Maybe he had a death wish.

  RP: And after this incident – it happened other times? What can you tell us about those first instances?

  CA: Well, I’ve always been a lucid dreamer, but after the drug or infection – I’m calling it an infection because I got sick, you understand – after that, I started wandering into other people’s dreams on the regular. It mostly seems to happen if I’m physically close to the person, but I did test it once with Shandy when we had half of London between us and I was able to find her dream in the end. It just took longer.

  DC: You got sick. What were the symptoms?

  CA: Falling asleep everywhere. By which I mean every. Where. When it first started, I was visiting my mum but she ended up bringing me back to London and paying for a private doctor. I tried several drugs, nothing worked. I couldn’t keep taking her money.

  RP: And the people who were running the AR study – you talked to them about your problem?

  CA: [snorts] They were all, ‘Nope, not us, our thing couldn’t have caused it plus you signed this thingie exemplifying us—

  DC: Indemnifying?

  CA: Yeah, exempt, condemned, that. Where they wash their hands of you. This is one reason I felt so sympathetic to Mel when she came to me . . . we are still talking about Mel, right?

  DC: You lost your job in July?

  CA: Yeah, they couldn’t sack me right away, but I was fairly useless. So, like, I thought we were talking about Melodie. Am I under investigation here?

  RP: Never mind my colleague. We’re just trying to establish the facts.

  CA: I didn’t go to work because I couldn’t wake up. I slept for four days solid.

  DC: Four days solid? Were you in a coma? What about your . . . er . . . biological needs?

  CA: I woke just to go to the toilet, take a drink of water. Then back to sleep. My room-mates couldn’t get me up.

  DC: Just to clarify. Where was O at this point?

  CA: I’ve no idea. I didn’t meet her until after I got evicted from the cupboard under the stairs. New definition of low point, that.

  DC: You didn’t know O before?

  CA: Not in person. She was one of my ASMR subscribers, but we’d never met. Who is this about? Mel? Or me? Or O?

  RP: We don’t know yet. So you’re saying you didn’t meet O through a service? Like Granny Flat or something?

  CA: She hates Granny Flat. Says she’s not a granny.

  RP: But she does take in younger women as housemates? You’re not the first?

  CA: She’s had a few over the years. She uses a wheelchair off and on since the cancer. To be honest, she could afford to hire people to help her so it’s not like I’m her carer. I think she enjoys the company. And she said having cancer made her want to give back.

  DC: OK, bringing this back on topic. You slept for four days. And what happened when you woke up?

  CA: I didn’t, really. Shandy got scared and called the doctor, and the doctor said to call 999, and the paramedics came and took me to hospital. I was there a week with a mysterious fever. Eventually I got better and was discharged. Then I was sacked.

  DC: Your employer dismissed you because of illness, then? That’s illegal.

  CA: Oh, they didn’t dismiss me right away. Nobody believed I was sick. The doctor couldn’t find anything wrong with me. She said it must be a virus. But I had problems staying awake, and I had problems telling the difference between being awake and being asleep. And the dream thing was happening all the time.

  DC: Which brings us to the subject of Ms Tan. You saw her as a client.

  CA: I saw Melodie Tan as a client. Yes.

  DC: And what a bad move that was for Ms Tan.

  CA: I don’t see the need for you to be so nasty. I didn’t cause this. I didn’t ask for any of this! I really—

  DC: What is happening? Hey! Snap out of it.

  RP: Ms Aaron? Charlie? Are you . . . Donato, is she asleep again?

  END RECORDING

  How not to be a doormat

  ‘You did everything you could,’ Mrs Haugh-Wombaur says when I call her to follow up on our session. ‘Don’t blame yourself. You’ve done more for me than any other therapist. We’re down to one recurring nightmare, and I’ve even taken up Pilates thanks to the insights you’ve given me on posture and self-esteem. The vegetarian diet is working out really well, I feel ever so much better. I think I can take it from here. I’ll ring you in a few months, OK?’

  I don’t know whether to be crushed or relieved. I stammer some polite response, careful not to say anything about the effects of the vegetarian diet. (But I’m surprised. It smells like she’s dining on raw meat.) Then we ring off.

  I yawn. Two clients in one night was a bit much, although Mrs. H-W won’t have known the difference because I always leave in the early hours. My clients don’t feel so invaded that way. I need to sleep nearby in order to enter their dreams, you see – ideally I like to be in the same room – but it’s important to keep everything professional. So I stay elsewhere in the house until I’m sure they’re asleep, then slip into their bedrooms and work nearby. In the morning, I slip out again before they’re awake. Needless to say, I carry a lot of keys.

  Speaking of keys, that afternoon I drop by Martin Elstree’s office and leave the flat keys he gave me with the receptionist.

  ‘You’ll see he gets them?’ I say. I don’t want him turning up at O’s place looking for them.

  ‘Don’t worry, love. They live in my drawer when he’s not lending them out.’

  She gives me a faintly pitying look and I recoil a little, flustered. People think sleeping together means sleeping together. When actually it only means sleeping together. Mind you, after Elstree’s hedge-trimmer dream, I’m no longer sure what it is I do.

  I leave his office with my tail between my legs. So much for Martin Elstree being my ticket to a better class of customer. O has refused to refund his deposit, but that doesn’t take the sting out.

  I know I’m upset because after I drop off the keys, I don’t go home but instead to the knitting café in Camden, where I eat four cupcakes and drink a tall skinny latte. I don’t know why I order a skinny latte when the four cupcakes would totally overpower any dietary benefits of low-fat milk. All around me, people are knitting decorously, reading books, taking occasional sips of health-promoting green tea. I’m scoffing and slurping and scowling.

  After the second cupcake, I realise I am angry. I’m good at what I do. Yet here I am, my oldest client sacking me and my newest expecting me to entertain his most disgusting, violent fantasies for money. If I say no, the fact that he’s a powerful and influential person means I’ll also lose the possibility of any referrals, which I now realise I was counting on.

  Picking up the third cupcake, I decide it’s unprofessional of me to take all this so personally. But by the end of that cupcake I’ve fallen into despair because apparently I can’t even make a go of the flakiest career in the Alternative Therapies Handbook, and how sad is that?

  Halfway through the fourth cupcake, I open Antonio’s message and read the rest of it.

  She is seeing a psychiatrist but he just gives her drugs and they interfere with her work. My girlfriend is a professional musician. She’s in town as a guest artist with the Philharmonic and she is having a breakdown.

  Now I’m stuck between being jealous of a professional musician and greedy for the sliding-scale fee I can charge her.

  She’s a sweet person. Very focused. Maybe a little high strung. But now she thinks someone wants to kill her. She’s dreaming about a stalker and she’s afraid to go to sleep. It’s starting to affect her work.

  I belch and get a dirty
look from one of the hardcore knitters.

  ‘Sorry, love,’ I say.

  I’m feeling a little sick now. I frown, reading the last few lines.

  I know we didn’t end in the best way. I hope we are still friends. I need your help.

  Yeah, right.

  Also in my messages: a notification that my overdraft is nine pounds away from its limit. I hear an odd snorting noise, something between a whine and a sob and the sound of a pig at the trough. The hardcore knitter picks up and changes tables to get away from me.

  I wish I could get away from myself.

  * * *

  It’s coming toward evening again and O is asleep on the sofa when I finally let myself in. I can hear the whuffle of her snores over the rain that tiptoes across the skylight. The skylight is one of the few advantages of living on the top floor. O refuses to leave this flat even though she has used a wheelchair off and on for the better part of three years. It’s because of the birds, she says. She keeps pigeons on the roof terrace. When I moved in, one of the conditions for living here was that I’d help look after the birds and do a bit of shopping for her. She rarely goes out; says it’s because the lift’s dodgy but I think she’s a touch agoraphobic.

  The flat is stale. In the kitchen, I find the remains of reheated lasagne and half a carafe of coffee sludge. After feeding the pigeons, I dump the lot, wash up in O’s huge, scarred Belfast sink and take the rubbish out. By the time I’ve climbed three flights of stairs a second time, I’m so tired that I lurch like a sailor on my way over to O’s workstation, which is open to my dreamwork calendar. O is a Virgo and loves to organise people. After she took me under her wing and started setting me up as a proper business, I offered to pay her but she just looked at me with those chilly eyes of hers. She’s loaded and says she believes in paying it forward. I never intended this to happen, much less to go on this long, but there’s no doubt she has the contacts I so desperately need.

  My diary looks bleak. O has managed to book me with a regular client on Sunday the 19th at 2 a.m. She’s written: ‘One of the hairdressers downstairs, can’t remember which one, having anxiety dreams. They never go to bed before 2. OK?’