The Queen of Yesterday

by Rob Kinsman

  “Nick. Nice to meet you.” He offered his hand. Julie clutched onto his fingers longer than was strictly necessary.

  “I’m Jools.”

  Zoe had never heard her call herself that before.

  “Do you work with Zoe?”

  “I try,” sighed Julie. “Have you two know each other long?”

  “About twenty five minutes.”

  “She didn’t just leap on you in the crowd?” Julie said in her best voice-of-experience tone. “I’ve warned her about that. Makes her look desperate.”

  “Actually, I leapt on her.”

  Zoe, who had been silently bracing herself for the worst, perked up.

  “Oh,” mumbled Julie, miffed.

  “It’s not often you see a beautiful woman walking along without someone holding her hand.”

  Zoe realised she’d stopped breathing.

  “So, the dream…” stammered Julie.

  “Is something we’re not going to talk about,” cut in Nick. “Aren’t you sick of everyone just saying the same things over and over again?”

  “Well, yeah. But…”

  Nick put his finger to Julie’s lips to silence her. Zoe’s eyes widened with delight.

  “No buts. If you want to talk about the dream then please, go and find someone else to do it with. There’s plenty of eager people around.”

  It was at that point, twenty-seven minutes after she’d met him, that Zoe realised Nick was without question the most perfect man she’d ever met.

  Although she had been wrong about these things before.

  Three

  That night the dreamers got their first glimpse inside the castle. As on the previous two nights they began by circling the skies, observing the majestic palace in all its glory. It sat atop an enormous mountain, which stretched from the ground like the hand of a titan. The walls were set back from the cliff-edge, separated from the fall by a narrow but impassable moat. How and why the water had been transported to that great height was just one of the many mysteries that had died with the builders. Topping this magnificent scene, the roof of the castle was covered over by a sparkling crystal dome, burning bright with colours that danced in the light.

  The drawbridge lowered. The dreamers glided across and into a grand hall from which a great king had once ruled a mighty realm. Along the walls were the banners of his forgotten kingdom. Suits of armour stood guard where once soldiers had been stationed, glistening weapons in their gauntleted hands.

  And everyone saw something move in the shadows, but nobody could tell what it was.

  That same night, Zoe dreamt she was being chased by a teddy bear she’d owned when she was a child. She ran for her life, praying Mr Timmy wouldn’t sink his fangs into her before she reached the safety of her parents’ bedroom. Nobody else shared that dream with her, but when she awoke she didn’t care because Nick was lying next to her.

  She hadn’t bothered to go back to work after they’d met. The world would have to wait a little longer to learn the latest developments in Outer East London noise abatement policies. Zoe suspected that the world, like her, wouldn’t give a shit.

  Julie had finally buggered off once she’d realised that her snide little attempts to screw things up weren’t working. Nick showed no sign of having to get back to whatever it was he did, so he and Zoe had walked and talked. When they got hungry he had suggested showing off his culinary skills, by which he meant whipping up an omelette then having wild, animal sex. Zoe had gladly accepted.

  And now she lay in his bed, watching his eyes twitching. Normally she’d wonder if a lover was dreaming of her, but she knew that wouldn’t be the case today. The evidence would be all over the late edition of the morning papers.

  He was a handsome man, there was no doubting that. Zoe thought of him as a kind of low-rent Harrison Ford. Manly, charming – certainly. But not quite the real deal. There was something a little off about him, but she couldn’t put her finger on what it was.

  Sensing her eyes on him, he began to stir.

  “Morning,” she said.

  When he looked up and recognised her, a brief flash of concern passed across his face. Zoe tensed. Was he already regretting last night? But then she realised that wasn’t the problem: it was the fact that she’d pulled him away from the dream, denied him every last moment of this all-consuming new drug.

  “Hey,” he said.

  “Go back to sleep if you want. It’s early.”

  “Hmmm,” he hummed, unsettled. He draped an arm over her and tried to pick up the glorious dream where he’d left off. When sleep reclaimed him, the frown still hadn’t left his face.

  After half an hour Zoe had got bored, found his dressing gown and gone through to the living room. She made herself a coffee and turned the news on. She didn’t know how long their dream amnesty was going to last, so she’d better do her homework.

  Once she’d taken in the bullet points about what everyone else had been up to during the night, she couldn’t resist having a nose around the flat. It was an expensive place. The apartment was part of a gated community in a considerably more upmarket area than the post-apocalyptic wasteland Zoe lived in. Despite the swish location, the interior was strangely impersonal. There were no photos of loved ones on display. The furniture was high quality, but the walls were plain. The few pictures on display were abstract and underwhelming, making no impact on an already characterless room.

  A small bookcase contained a curious mix of Scandinavian crime novels and guides to military history. They were both overshadowed by a sizeable collection of cookery books, which left Zoe feeling a bit short-changed by the omelette she’d been wooed with.

  The rack of CDs was equally unexpected, containing lots of classical recordings incongruously mixed with a rather shameful collection of 80's pop. She couldn’t really imagine Nick as a Billy Ocean kind of a guy, which was probably just as well if she was ever going to sleep with him again.

  The whole place was a void. It felt more like a show-home than somewhere anyone actually lived. Zoe reckoned this favoured the secret agent theory, although more likely it just confirmed he was a man living alone without a woman’s touch to brighten up the place. There were none of the stray bills, old receipts and other bit of debris that papered Zoe’s own flat. For all his laid-back charm, it suggested Nick was rather meticulous.

  In the corner of the room was a desk with three drawers.

  That’s private. Keep your nose out.

  Zoe tried the top drawer. It was locked.

  She heard him approaching just in time to move away from the desk.

  For breakfast Nick cooked her another omelette.

  “You do know how to make other things, don’t you?”

  He grinned, although Zoe clocked that he didn’t actually answer. On the plus side, at least he was pretty good at omelettes.

  They sat at the breakfast table, chatting and laughing as if they’d known each other for years.

  “Any of the white wines. Chardonnay, that kind of thing.”

  “I can trump that: Babycham,” replied Nick.

  “That’s not a real one.”

  “Swear to God.”

  “Poor sod.”

  Their discussion of chavviest baby names was a refreshing start to the morning.

  “Have you lived here long?”

  “On and off.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “You know.”

  She didn’t.

  “I move about a lot,” he explained. Zoe realised she shouldn’t seem needy by asking if he had any plans to move on soon.

  “Do you have any plans to move on soon?” she said.

  “Depends how things pan out.” He flashed her a smile before blatantly changing the subject. “So, your friend from yesterday. Julie.”

  “I wouldn’t call her a friend.”

  “Colleague?”

  “More like a sworn enemy.”

  Nick chuckled. “I think she had eyes for me.”


  “Are you tempted? If so I can put in a good word for you.”

  “Reckon she’s out of my league.”

  “I didn’t like to say.” More guilty laughter, Zoe’s favourite kind. “What were you doing there? At the – I don’t know what you call it – a ‘happening’?”

  “Weird hippy festival?”

  “That’s a better description.”

  “Vision of tie-died hell?”

  “Ditto.”

  “I went because I like watching people,” said Nick, plainly.

  “In a pervy way?”

  “Depends on the people.”

  “It’s a long way from here.”

  “I was looking for someone.”

  “Oh.” Zoe hesitated, realising the danger in her next question. “Did you find them?”

  Nick offered a non-committal shrug and turned his attention back to his coffee.

  By the time Zoe finally gave in and decided to go to work, still in the same clothes she’d worn the day before, she was buzzing. She was slightly troubled by Nick’s reluctance to give away much about himself, but that didn’t matter. They’d managed to last the whole time without talking about the dream, and that alone was worth its weight in gold.

  When Zoe got home that evening, Crazy Sid was sitting crying on the stairs. She hesitated a nano-second too long to be able to turn back without being seen.

  “She’s gone,” he told her.

  She wondered if he meant one of his party guests / hostages.

  “Who?”

  “The queen.”

  Zoe felt for the mobile in her pocket. Just in case.

  “You mean from the castle?”

  “She was so beautiful, but now the king is angry. He wants revenge.”

  “Sid, it’s just a dream..”

  His sharp look silenced her. For the briefest moment he suddenly seemed to be the sanest man on the planet, weighed down by a dreadful truth.

  “He’s going to make us pay,” he said.

  As Zoe flicked through the TV channels that evening it became clear that Sid wasn’t the only one with a theory about the empty throne room. Not content with the hundreds of conflicting opinions the ‘experts’ were offering, the news had taken to asking Joe Public what they thought it meant.

  “Obviously it’s about the death of the monarchy.”

  “I think it’s a statement on the emptiness of modern living.”

  “It’s about parking fines. I only stopped for two minutes to help a disabled kid across the road, and they slapped a ticket on my car.”

  None of these barmy ramblings were coming close to telling Zoe what she really wanted to know: was there anybody else like her?

  She poured herself a large glass of crisp white wine and dug out her laptop. For hours she searched through tedious forums and blogs for other non-dreamers but drew a blank. There were just too many pages of people raving about what they had experienced to find any dissenting voices.

  There was only one thing for it, she was going to have to start the ball rolling. She spend nearly an hour crafting the perfect message. One thing she knew for sure was that anonymity was the name of the game. A couple of years earlier she’d tried online dating, only to have her photo recognised by Peter when he was browsing the site “for a laugh” one lunchtime. In her entry Zoe had lied that looks weren’t important, and consequently had to put up with six months of people trying to set her up with Acne Nigel. She wasn’t going to make the same mistake this time.

  ‘Woman who still has her own dreams at night seeks similar. GSOH irrelevant. No time wasters. If your dreams are still your own, please contact Cassandra.’

  She’d picked the pseudonym Cassandra not because she felt she was a prophet doomed never to be believed but because she really, really liked Only Fools and Horses.

  She posted her advert to various bulletin boards, none of which were hard to find. Dream sites had briefly overtaken porn as the second most popular use of the internet, although it was going to take more a global miracle to displace videos of cute cats in the number one spot. She turned off the computer, went to bed and dreamt of a squirrel who could play the harmonica.

  Four

  That night further parts of the castle were revealed.

  There were grand banqueting halls, where lords from across the realm had once filled the air with the sound of laughter and treachery. Cavernous bedrooms were adorned with tapestries showing the great deeds of knights whose names lived on in legend.

  Some of the more observant dreamers gradually started to realise something. The castle stood alone. There was no sprawling city at the foot of the mountain, not even the smallest of villages. It was a desolate island surrounded by nothing but barren wasteland, the world around it flat and empty.

  By 6am Zoe finally admitted to herself that there was no chance she was going back to sleep. She had to know if anyone had replied.

  She pulled on her dressing gown and stumbled through to the laptop. Her fingers hovered over the keys, a wave of anxiety washing across her.

  What if there isn’t anyone else out there?

  She took a deep, fortifying breath and opened Cassandra’s email. There had been a lot of responses.

  Thank God.

  She clicked to read the first message.

  ‘Lying bitch. U think UR sooo special but UR just a worthless nobody U stupid fucking cow.’

  The next email contained words to the same effect, as did the one after that. After a while, Zoe’s eyes only needed to skim across to the first swear word before she moved on. Not a single message offered anything but anonymous hate. Numb, she turned off the computer and phoned in sick to work.

  Most of the houses in the village were chocolate-box quaint, all thatched roofs and oak beams. It was the sort of place people retired to so they could live out the end of their lives in a forgotten idyll of old England.

  The one blot on the village was a small clutch of ugly modern houses the council had erected in the face of disapproval from everyone, including the poor sods who eventually had to live in them.

  Zoe’s parents were two of the poor sods in question.

  Since the day they were built almost no feature of the houses, from the plumbing to the doors, had worked quite the way it was meant to. For wannabe social climbers, like Zoe’s mother Ruth, the fact the rest of their new community resented them on principal was always going to be a problem. Unfortunately their financial situation hadn’t allow them to move somewhere more acceptable.

  However, after decades of aggressive socialising, Ruth felt she had slowly made inroads into the village community. Zoe’s father, George, had fast-tracked his own acceptance into local life by becoming such a regular in the Green Dragon that many people assumed he owned the place. Zoe, on the other hand, had found growing up in the village a deathly dull affair. She wasn’t from as posh a stock as the other local girls, and they knew it.

  Still, it was home and she was glad to be back.

  “Hi, it’s me,” Zoe called out as she let herself in. No reply. She peered into the front room. Her father’s chair was empty so he definitely wasn’t home. He rarely ventured out of the battered armchair except when tending to his three basic bodily functions: sleeping, going to the toilet or drinking his body weight in real ale. Over the years Zoe had frequently witnessed him doing all of these without even leaving the chair.

  Her parents hadn’t answered the landline when Zoe had called to warn them she was coming, and neither of them had mobiles. Ruth did actually own one, although it was still in its box. George had bought it for her after reading about the damage the radiation could do to the human brain, but she’d refused to use it after reading the exact same article.

  Zoe went upstairs to drop her stuff off in her room.

  Someone had stolen her bed.

  She put her bag down on the floor, gathered her thoughts. Her parents hadn’t known she was coming so…

  So what? They hid her bed when she was away?
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  She went through to check her parents’ bedroom. Again, no bed.

  What the hell are they playing at?

  Zoe helped herself to food from the fridge. Her mother was borderline OCD and insisted on transferring every item of food from its original wrapping into little Tupperware containers, which made it next to impossible to ever locate anything specific.

  Zoe pulled out three anonymous containers at random and took them to the table. Cheese, beetroot and unnecessarily chilled chocolate biscuits. Could be worse. Zoe tucked in.

  When she was done, she flopped down onto the sofa and texted Nick, wondering if he wanted to meet up after the weekend. She knew this broke all sorts of rules of the sisterhood, but she didn’t care. After the online abuse she’d been subjected to she just wanted something to look forward to.

  Her phone remained defiantly silent afterwards, but she wasn’t too concerned. Nick was probably busy signing on / spying / pushing crack to schoolchildren. Zoe really had to find out what he actually did one of these days. For now, however, she stretched out and lost herself in a novel, glad to block out the world around her.

  Zoe’s parents came home three hours later, by which time she hadn’t moved a muscle.

  “Oh,” said Ruth, as if she’d walked in on an impromptu orgy rather than a surprise visit from her only daughter.

  “Hi Mum. Dad.”

  George nodded at Zoe and slumped into his chair, already fishing around for the remote controls.

  “We weren’t expecting you,” said Ruth.

  “I didn’t know I was coming. I had a bad couple of days. Wanted to get away.”

  “Oh.”

  George flicked the telly on and vanished into a world of his own.

  “Um, did you know someone’s stolen all the beds?”