The Queen of Yesterday

by Rob Kinsman

  Oh Sid, you mad bastard. What have you gone and done now?

  “Oh, yes. Of course.”

  “Do you have any idea how it happened?”

  Zoe considered her answer carefully, even though there was really only one thing she could say.

  “No.”

  “If you have any thoughts, let me know.”

  “Will do.”

  “Oh, and his funeral is this afternoon. Three o’clock.”

  “That was quick.”

  “We want it done before anyone works out who he is. We’ll have half the dream-obsessed nutters in London showing up if we give them time to make the link.”

  After they'd hung up, Zoe turned on the news to see what had happened last night. It wasn’t long before it started describing the wild-eyed jester with the missing heart. Zoe hadn't made the link when she'd seen the portraits in the daily papers this morning. Artist’s impressions of the dream had become a mini industry in the past couple of weeks, providing an outlet to hundreds of art graduates. Many were even considering giving up their careers flipping burgers to go full time. Now that Zoe was paying proper attention to these images, depicted in a variety of self-conscious styles, the underlying similarity was inescapable.

  It’s Sid alright.

  Zoe got the first train back to London, heading not for work but for Sid’s funeral. Nobody deserved to be buried alone.

  In the event, the crematorium was packed. Despite the police’s best efforts to keep things low key, enough people had identified Sid from the dream for word to spread.

  The service had the feel of a tourist attraction, the predictable groups of Goths and other lovers of the macabre joined by those merely lost and confused. Faced with the overwhelming mystery of the dream, people were willing to hunt out anything which might give them answers.

  Zoe noted DI Kent in the crowd, presumably here to scout for potential suspects. The two women nodded frostily at each other. Zoe squeezed into a row near the front, sitting next to a young woman who had something of the night about her: dressed in black lace clothes, her face was painted white as a corpse.

  “It’s wrong for it to end like this,” the ghostly woman said to Zoe. “He would have wanted a proper send off. People screaming and puking. Drinking themselves into oblivion. Grieving for a man who refused to live by the rules.”

  A solitary tear trickled down her cheek, creating a flesh coloured river through her stark white make up. It was an effort for Zoe to stop herself pointing out that Sid had actually been as mad as a bag of baboons.

  “I used to live next door to him,” she said instead. “He was… quite a character.”

  The woman looked up sharply at Zoe, as if noticing her properly at last.

  “You’re Amelia?”

  A cold chill swept down Zoe's spine.

  “No. Zoe.”

  “Oh.”

  Silence spread as the coffin was brought in, carried on the shoulders of four long-haired Goths in frock coats. They were all in their forties but hadn’t grown out of the idea that dressing entirely in black, just like all their friends, somehow made them an individual. They set the coffin down, and the vicar took his place at the front of the congregation.

  “It’s good to see so many of you here today to pay your respects to Sidney Bishop, taken away from us so tragically soon.” Zoe had never heard Sid’s full name before. It sounded wrong, too normal. “I didn’t know Sidney, but he clearly touched the lives of many people.”

  Zoe's mind was ticking over. That name, Amelia, again. Coincidence?

  “We know little of the family he was born into, but it is those of you here, his friends, who became his real family.”

  The ageing Goths had all sunk their heads. Zoe had never seen any of these people before, not bumped into a single one of them on the stairs. Sid had been a mentally unstable loner, yet half the underworld had turned out to say goodbye. It seemed the dream had made him a celebrity, and now people were flocking around to see if the madman had known some wisdom which eluded normal people.

  When the service was over the congregation went to the pub. With Sid’s flat still being treated as a crime scene, and no family present, the local boozer had seemed the most appropriate option. Zoe found the reception even more depressing than the service, largely because she ended up trapped in a corner by people who still ran around pretending they were vampires.

  “How, um, how did you all know Sid?” she ventured, gulping back a glass of wine which tasted like someone had already drunk it at least once.

  “He sometimes came into the club,” said a tall man with flowing black locks. His lean physique meant he could just about pull off the Prince of Darkness look, even though his name was Roger and he was a driving instructor.

  “What club?”

  “Snakebite and Black on the High Street. Do you know it?” Zoe shook her head, no. In fact she did know the place he was talking about, and it was a fair representation of what she imagined Hell looked like. “Sid was such a lively presence there. An extraordinary dancer.”

  He was probably having a fit.

  On the edge of this little cabal was the woman Zoe had sat next to during the service. She kept squinting at Zoe, as if she’d come out without her glasses.

  “The night the dream started, he invited us to a party round his flat,” said hell’s very own driving instructor. “We saw his work and realised he was someone very special.” Now Roger also started squinting at Zoe. It felt like being interrogated by moles. “Are you Amelia?”

  “I already asked her,” interjected the woman. “She said no.”

  “I’m Zoe.” As casually as she could manage, Zoe added, “Who's Amelia?”

  “You must know.”

  “Apparently I don't.

  “From Sid’s artwork.”

  “His what?”

  The Goths all looked at each other, as if finally realising they had an outsider in their midst. Roger got out his mobile phone, fiddled with the buttons then handed it to her. At first she was unable to make out the detail of the pictures on the tiny screen, but Zoe tried not to squint too much for fear that the mole people would claim her as one of their own. Eventually it all came into focus. Photographs of paintings, presumably Sid’s artwork. It was pretty basic stuff, much as you’d imagine coming from a man who thought there were angels trapped down the back of his sofa. But it wasn’t the technique which troubled Zoe, nor even the fact that half of them seemed to be drawn with blood and semen. No, what really got under her skin was the content. The pictures were all of a woman, who had been drawn with no more sophistication than a cave painting. She did, however, bear a striking resemblance to Zoe. The red hair, the pointy nose. Deep brown eyes. Scrawled across the images in Sid’s shaky handwriting was a single word. Amelia.

  “Seems like you were his muse,” said Roger.

  Zoe checked into a cheap B&B for the night, turned her phone off and tried to delay her inevitable mental breakdown. None of this made sense, Sid was just the lunatic down the hall, they had no real connection. And surely it was also just chance that Nick had been looking for someone who happened to have the same name as the subject of Sid's paintings.

  As the sun came up she was still trying to convince herself of this.

  When Zoe reached the office it was immediately apparent that she was going to pay an unusually severe penalty for having bunked off for the previous day. The clue was that her colleagues were smiling.

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” said Julie, who looked on the verge of orgasm. Zoe instantly ranked it among the top five most disgusting things she’d ever seen.

  “Why are you all looking at me like that?”

  “Alan wants to see you. He’s got something he’d like you to help him with.”

  Zoe felt her blood run cold.

  “What?”

  “Dreamers’ Confidential. Zoe speaking. How may I help?

  Overlord Alan’s latest attempt to placate
the borough’s pushiest idiots was to open an anonymous phone service, a sort of Samaritans for the genetically stupid. Because it had been set up so quickly there still hadn’t been time to recruit any staff to answer the single phone line they’d made available, so anyone with suitable qualifications was being press-ganged into doing shifts. Three years earlier Zoe had rashly signed on for an ‘Understanding and Empathy’ course, largely because it was an excuse to get out the office and eat free biscuits for a couple of days. She hadn’t imagined she would ever be called on to actually be either understanding or empathetic.

  “I’ve been having this dream,” said her anonymous caller.

  “The same one as everyone else on the planet?”

  “Yes.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “I want it to stop.”

  “I understand,” said Zoe empathetically. This, at least, was true.

  It didn’t take her long to realise all the calls she received seemed to follow the same basic pattern. Firstly, the anonymous and interchangeable callers would start by stating the obvious, i.e. that they’d phoned the dream hotline because of the dream. Phase two was what Zoe thought of as the ‘I Pay My Taxes’ moment.

  “What are the council going to do about it?”

  No amount of understanding or empathy could give them a satisfactory answer. Zoe would refer them to the council’s dreaming policy, they would say it was nonsense, and Zoe would have to pretend she didn’t agree.

  The third stage was when the anonymous caller would start to get emotional. The more angry they were at the start, the more likely they’d start weeping uncontrollably as they began to spout out why they’d really called.

  “I know other people find it upsetting, but for me it’s personal. My dog / wife / boiler just died, and I don’t know how to cope.”

  These problems would often have nothing to do with the dream, and it would turn out they’d just called to have a chat to someone who wasn’t allowed to hang up. This didn’t stop Zoe feigning a faulty line on more than one occasion.

  Stage four, a.k.a. ‘About Fucking Time’, was when the caller would eventually realise the futility of their phone call and hang up.

  Over the course of the afternoon Zoe received calls from dozens of people, although she knew for a fact that at least three of them were Julie with a fake Welsh accent.

  Although having to listen to other people’s petty problems was a sure-fire recipe for sending Zoe up the wall, she was intrigued by how sour their feelings had become. Within the space of a couple of days the dream had gone from the hot girl everyone wanted to screw, to a mad cat woman with a contagious and disfiguring STD. More upsetting, however, was having to listen to endless descriptions of the man whose death her own mind had blanked out.

  “The jester was horrible. He had bulging wide eyes, like a bug.”

  “They were torturing him. I’ve never seen anything so cruel.”

  “I guess he looked a bit like Elmo on drugs. You know Elmo? From the Muppets. Or was he a Fraggle?”

  Poor mad, bad Sid. RIP.

  Just before five, a familiar voice called the whingers’ hotline.

  “I did what you asked, I went to the police,” said Skyhawk.

  “Why are you phoning me on this line?”

  “They won’t think to check here. Your mobile might be tapped.”

  Zoe was getting sick of this whole cloak and dagger routine.

  “They record these calls for training purposes.”

  “They just say that to get rid of perverts,” he said, knowledgeably. “They can barely find anyone stupid enough to take the calls in the first place, let alone listen back to them.” Fair point. “I need to meet you. We have things to discuss.”

  She supposed she owed him that much. He had voluntarily presented himself to the police, after all.

  “I finish in half an hour. I’ll meet you outside.”

  “No. I can’t go near that building.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t want my mind corrupted. The walls have a bad energy.”

  “A what?”

  “The people who spend time there are lethargic and drained of their life essence. It’s because your offices used to be a Victorian asylum.”

  “You’re kidding?”

  Now she thought about it, Zoe had wondered why the rooms were so small.

  “Think of the negative energy in the walls which must have bled into you over the years. We’ll meet at a neutral location.”

  “Where?”

  “I can’t say on an open line.”

  “I thought you said no-one was listening.”

  “Better safe than sorry.”

  “Then how the hell am I meant to find you?”

  Skyhawk cleared his throat then started reading something. “My first is a place where once there were horses, my second a time beyond stars…”

  “Whoa! Are you giving me a riddle?”

  “Yes. I’ve designed it to refer to things you’ll relate to. Hopefully that will mean you can solve it before any third parties. My third is a…”

  “Meet me at the sodding Tube. I’ll keep an eye out for snipers.”

  She hung up.

  As she got off the bus and headed to the Underground station, Zoe saw a vision of hell heading to intercept her: a young woman wielding a clipboard and a clutch of leaflets. She was wearing a hand-knitted bobble hat which was obviously supposed to make her look kooky and earnest. Zoe loathed anyone who thought they could save the planet by wearing wool and thinking fluffy thoughts. If that worked then surely sheep would be running things by now.

  “Heya, how’s your day?”

  “Getting worse by the second.”

  The woman started walking alongside Zoe.

  “I wondered if you had a few minutes to discuss the future of the human race.”

  “Sounds like that would take more than a few minutes.”

  “A miracle has united us all. We have to rejoice.”

  Zoe walked faster. The woman kept pace, but she looked like a vegan so Zoe was counting on her running out of energy before the next corner. Unfortunately she bolted along like a greyhound.

  “Waking Dream is an international organisation which aims to end world conflict.”

  Zoe had seen this fledgling organisation start to pop up all over the place. Their views changed on an almost hourly basis, which was the advantage of being the new kid on the block and having no holy texts to contradict. If, for instance, enough people felt that the dream wanted everyone to buy kippers, it would be policy by lunchtime.

  The one constant was that they believed the dream was a sign from the shadowy king about how the world could find peace and harmony. Zoe can't have been the only one to have noticed that the king himself was hardly Gandhi, but logic was hardly the point. People were scared, and this lot offered comfort and reassurance to those who hadn’t coped well with the fabric of reality turning out to be different than previously advertised.

  “I’m really not interested,” said Zoe.

  “Can I give you a leaflet?”

  “No.”

  The woman pushed a leaflet into her hand regardless. Zoe was now actually sprinting, but the woman had accomplished her mission and slowed to look for someone else to irritate.

  When she got to the tube there was no sign of Skyhawk. As she kicked her heels waiting, Zoe's hand brushed against the unwanted leaflet in her pocket. She decided that this was the perfect opportunity to introduce it to its new home, also known as the dingiest and most foul-smelling bin she could find. But as she took the scrunched up piece of paper out her pocket her heart missed a beat.

  The photograph on the back of the leaflet was of the man who had stabbed Nick.

  When the rush of shock had passed, she took in the few details the leaflet offered. The dapper man was called Thomas Knight and he was the founder of Waking Dream. His photo portrayed him as a calm, trustworthy elder statesman, although it was a look which Zoe immediatel
y equated with dodgy-as-hell head of a fringe political party.

  With no immediate access to the Internet, Zoe had no way of finding out anything else about him. More to the point, what was she going to do with this discovery? DI Kent already seemed to doubt her version of events. How was it going to look if she now claimed she'd been attacked by someone half the planet were now turning to for guidance?

  Shock and indecision kept her busy for the forty further minutes it took Skyhawk to arrive.

  “You could have told me you were going to be so long.”

  “I had to lose my tail.”

  “What are you, a lizard?”

  Skyhawk shuffled forwards, looking constantly over his shoulder. “Let’s walk and talk. It makes it harder for them to get a lock on us.”

  Zoe humoured him.

  “According to the police you’re sexually obsessed with me,” she said, by way of small talk.

  “That was just a cover story. Don’t worry. You’re not my type.”

  He didn’t look like the kind of person who should be narrowing the field by having a type.

  “Thank you for not telling them about my... condition,” said Zoe. Skyhawk nodded, matter of fact, as he led them through a maze of backstreets.

  “Perhaps now you’ll be willing to answer some questions so I can start my research.”

  “Wait, there’s something else.”

  “What do you want?” he mumbled, grumpily.

  “You’re good with computers, right?” she said. “I mean, you found all those details about me.”

  “Correct.”

  “There’s a man I was seeing. He’s disappeared. Can you find him for me?”

  She could almost see the computations going on behind his eyes.

  “Do you have details about him?”

  “No.”

  “Name?”

  “Well, he said he was called Nick, so it’s probably not Nick.”

  “But it could be literally anything else?”

  “He’s quite masculine, so I doubt it’s something like Hilary. That can be a man’s name, you know?”