Dream Guy

by Clarke, A. Z. A;

  He flipped his sketchbook shut. The picture was dry now, and Joe wanted it with him, just to check that things were okay in Smokeyville. And he could also show it to Nell and see if she thought it was a safe enough place for the moment.

  * * * *

  Joe did not have another chance to check up on the picture until break time. The figure on the plinth had turned its back on the table full of bananas. Joe counted up the number of bananas. There were now fewer in each bunch, and he could see the traces of at least two banana skins tossed aside in the arcade. Smokey was absent from English. No one had seen him that day, but this concerned no one particularly, least of all Thomas, who was clearly delighted to be minus a pupil who made the presence of a wasp in the classroom seem like a minor diversion, even when all the girls stood on their chairs shrieking and batting their arms about.

  At lunch, Nell found Joe. Although she was in school uniform, he could not quite dispel the image of her in that little black dress. Her hair was down and fell across her face as she flicked through the sketchbook to Joe’s picture. What they saw gave both of them a shock.

  Smokey’s torso was pressed up against the front of the painting, his arms outstretched above his head, banging furiously against the surface, as though he were behind glass. They watched then as Smokey ran around the edges of the painting, disappearing between the arches of the arcade, bouncing back into the center, then up to the edge of the sky, pushing as if he could lift a lid off the top of the picture to escape from it. They could see that all the bananas had now been eaten, and most of the skins were lying around the ground or on the tabletop, smushed and browning, with the clear imprint of dainty little hooves squelched into them.

  Nell kept her mouth clamped tightly shut, but her shoulders shook as she watched Smokey racing around the picture, teetering on his hooves. She started snorting and holding her stomach when he turned his back on the front of the picture, did a handstand and tried kicking at the surface. Joe half expected the picture to smash like a pane of glass hit by a stone, but it held, shuddering a little as the solid little goat’s feet struck over and over again at the enclosing air. But they both sobered up when Smokey’s arms gave way and he fell. He landed in a heap on the ground, and his baseball cap rolled away. Then he cradled his head in his arms and started to sob. Joe was glad he could not hear him.

  “You have to keep him there until we’ve found the drugs.” Nell closed up the sketchbook and handed it back to Joe. He slipped it into his bag.

  “There’s no chance of getting them. Liesel saw him dealing in the park yesterday and my mum will have phoned his mum by now.”

  “Do you think they know he’s missing?” Nell folded her arms and gnawed at her lips. Joe felt bad about causing her anxiety—again. He shrugged and ran his fingers through his already-ragged hair.

  Neither Nell nor Joe could concentrate for the rest of the afternoon. Ms. McKechnie made it abundantly clear how little she thought of their distraction during her lesson, a distraction which caused Nell to slip up on delivering an answer to a fairly simple equation in class. Her false step inspired McKechnie to announce an extra algebra test, raising a groan of mingled disbelief and fury from the other students in the class.

  Then it was Crosbie’s lesson. Joe made his way there, half hoping that Smokey would be there, but he wasn’t. Nor was Crosbie, and Elphick was doing cover, so there was no chance of doing anything other than filling in worksheets on citizenship. It was dark by the time the class finished. Joe caught the bus home and let himself into the empty house. He had the place to himself for another couple of hours.

  First he checked on the picture of Smokey. He was back on his plinth, asleep. Joe wanted to give him some fresh food. He thought about rubbing out the banana skins and drawing in some more food, but it would probably wreck the page. But Joe remembered a lesson in symmetry. He dug around in his portfolio chest and found a simple mirrored pane of glass. He positioned it so that it reflected his sketch then drew the reflection on the opposite page so that now the arcades were on the left of the picture, the statue remained in the center but now faced backward and the cascade tumbled down the right hand side of the page. He sketched in pizza, some chocolate fudge cake and a big bottle of mineral water. He’d thought about Coke, but the red was going to be too virulent. He colored it and left the picture to dry. When Smokey woke up, everything would be different, reversed, but at least he’d have a decent meal. Joe felt bad about messing with Smokey, but then he remembered Liesel’s account of what had been happening in the park. He ripped the old picture out of the book, scrunched it into a ball and chucked it through the mini-hoop over his bin.

  Joe then turned his attention to his homework, working his way through McKechnie’s batch of sums first. She’d be the least forgiving of his teachers if he failed to do his homework. It took nearly an hour, and he hadn’t quite finished when he heard the front door opening. He looked at the Smokey picture and put it away, just as he heard his mother summoning him downstairs.

  Mrs. Knightley was in the front room, looking unusually disheveled. She was wearing her office clothes, a grey tweed suit and black silk shirt. She had her usual silver chain on with the pendant Dad had given her when Ben had been born, but her dark hair was wild and her eyeliner was a little smudged. Joe’s uncles were always saying that Joe looked like her, but he couldn’t see it. This evening, suddenly, he could.

  “What’s up, Mum?”

  “You haven’t heard, then?” She stopped pacing and leaned back on the arm of the sofa, her arms folded.

  “About what?”

  “Silas. Smokey. He’s in the hospital. He went wild this morning. Maria had to get him sedated and into the psychiatric ward of the Royal this afternoon, so that’s where he is.”

  Nausea swept over Joe. He doubled over, his hand over his mouth, but the wave passed and he sat down in the armchair, curled up like a hedgehog.

  “There’s more,” said his mother, less harshly. “The police have been called in. Maria found over half a kilo of cocaine in his room.”

  Joe looked up at his mother, his face suddenly haggard with evident shock. “You know I don’t know anything about all this.”

  “I hope you don’t, Joe, and I hope that’s what you’ll be able to tell the police. They’re coming over to question you about all this sometime this evening. The sergeant who rang me up said about eight p.m. Maria had to provide a list of all of Smokey’s friends, and you’re on it. So I really hope you were telling me the truth, and I also hope you’ll have the wit to tell them the whole truth.”

  Then she hauled Joe through to the kitchen to help her get supper ready, and he spent the next hour and a half watching the clock inexorably tick toward eight, too distracted to pay any heed to the rest of the family’s speculations about where Smokey had got the drugs and what was going to happen to him.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Dr. Dolon

  Two police officers came to interview Joe, and they behaved nothing like his expectations. They were plainclothes detectives from the drug squad, in their early thirties, dressed as if they were about to go clubbing—the man wearing a T-shirt and Levi’s with Camper shoes and the woman in red tights and a swirly, patterned mini-dress. They didn’t try any right-on talk. They just got on with the interview in a rather clinical fashion. They seemed to accept Joe’s tale of a disintegrating friendship and his rather lame explanation of bringing Smokey back to the house on Thursday evening to catch up on GCSE coursework. He didn’t exactly plan to conceal the Lamborghini’s existence, but he saw that it would arouse all sorts of suspicion, and if his mother had said nothing about it to them, there was no reason why he should.

  Mrs. Knightley came up to his room that night. He was ready for her. The police interrogation had sharpened him, and he was still feeling refreshed from his weekend’s uneventful sleep. She quizzed him about the Lamborghini, about Silas, about drugs, about his cartoons, about every aspect of his life, gnawing at inconsisten
cies, tugging at the loose threads in the responses he gave.

  When she had gone, Joe shook out the carpet and lay down, still dressed. He closed his eyes and the first thing that came to mind was Nell’s face. He did not know how she would feel about seeing him now, but he was beyond merely wanting to see her. He ached for her.

  When he opened his eyes, he was still on the carpet. Nell was sitting there too, legs crossed, arms propped on her knees, deep in a book, her hair hooked behind her ears and swinging forward against her cheek. She was wearing a maroon fleece top, striped green and maroon pajama bottoms and sheepskin moccasins. He raised his head and she gave him a thoroughly unimpressed look.

  “What am I doing here now, Joe?”

  He explained about Smokey, about the police, about his mother. Nell did not begin to look any more sympathetic, but she did appear less affronted. She sighed as Joe trailed off.

  “You have no idea how this dreaming thing works, do you?”

  “No.”

  “Can you control whether you dream or not?”

  “I’m not sure. I didn’t dream this past weekend.”

  “Did you draw anything?”

  Joe thought about it. He’d fiddled about with his Life at the Knightleys strip for Dad, but other than that and the painting of Smokey on Sunday evening, he had not drawn anything.

  “Hasn’t it occurred to you that you dream when you draw?”

  “But I didn’t draw the Sardinia dream—or the nightclub dream when Smokey and I went out in the limo. And I’ve never drawn you.” Although even as Joe said that, he knew that what he wanted most at this very minute was to draw Nell and keep her with him forever. Having her near was the only good thing that had come out of this whole business.

  “Did you find the Turkish scholar guy?”

  “I did. He said he hadn’t heard anything like it before, but he would see what he could do to help.”

  They stopped talking. The carpet was hovering above a manicured lawn which undulated away on all sides as far as Joe could see. Above was a cerulean sky. That was all. There was no other relief to the scenery, just mown grass as though the carpet had become a raft on an emerald-green sea.

  “This is actually quite restful,” said Nell after a long while. Then she returned to her book. Joe agreed with her, although he didn’t say so out loud. He reached out to see what she was reading. She held it away from him and said, “You just have to ask, you know.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “It’s by Freud. It’s about wish fulfillment. Do you know what your wishes are, Joe?”

  “I have no wishes.” Which was a lie.

  Nell didn’t say, ‘Oh, yeah,’ out loud but her expression was perfectly readable. It occurred to Joe that he really didn’t know what he would do with a wish. He’d wished for a car without thinking twice about the consequences, and now he was lumbered with a huge yellow monster he wouldn’t be able to drive for the next eleven years.

  He looked again at Nell, watching as her eyes ran over the print before her, noting the fine bones of her hand and wrist as she turned the pages, the elegant length of her limbs and the delicate elongated fingers with neat, trimmed fingernails. Her hands were those of a woman, not a child. She wore no rings, no earrings, no jewelry at all. He still did not know what he wished for. She put down the book.

  “Where are we?”

  “Here.” Joe looked round again at the emptiness. “Wherever this is.”

  “What about our physical bodies? Smokey’s physically in the hospital, but he’s also in the picture, isn’t he? So where are our bodies?”

  “In our rooms at home, I guess.”

  “Does that mean we’re in a sort of coma? This is weird.”

  Joe lay back and closed his eyes. To Nell’s alarm, the carpet began to move.

  “Hey, what are you doing now, Joe?”

  “Wait and see.”

  The carpet rose about a meter above the ground and as it moved, the sky darkened to indigo, the stars like pinpricks in its fabric. Nell put out a hand, as though she could scoop up the color and hold it. It grew colder and colder as they rushed through the dusky air, and the stars were soon quenched by the streetlights of the town below. The carpet began its descent and Nell started to recognize landmarks from the town, from their zone, from her street, from her house. Then they were hovering outside her window.

  “Look inside. Is your body there?” Joe did not open his eyes at first, but then he squinted to see what was going on.

  The carpet hovered at the window. Nell put her hands on the ledge and peered in through a chink in the curtains. “I think I can see my legs. Now let’s go to your house. We can see through the Velux into your room, unless you’ve drawn the blind.”

  They skimmed over the rooftops, avoiding aerials and chimneys, disconcerting one cat out on the prowl and rousing several dogs into a frenzy of unnerved barks. Somebody threw open a window and called out into the unheeding night, “Shut that bloody dog up, or I’ll do it for you.” The dog was summoned inside, which only slightly muffled its bemused baying.

  Then they were fluttering over the Knightleys’ house, the carpet shimmying a little as Joe kept it steady, allowing Nell to look in.

  “You’re there. You’re lying on your rug. Your ordinary rug, not this one.”

  Joe steered the carpet away from the window and back toward the light of the great meadowlands where they had first found themselves. The carpet was silent as a glider. They could hear only a faint whisper of air as they traveled faster and faster toward the sunlight.

  Joe opened his eyes and sat up. The carpet landed on the grass, which was lush and soft.

  “So we’re there, but we’re here. What happens if someone comes in and wakes us up? I suppose the whole thing disperses if it’s you and if it’s me, they think I’m unconscious and freak out.”

  The idea clearly did not appeal to Nell. “I think we should go and visit Smokey in hospital tomorrow, check up on him. And if he looks really out of it, I think you’re going to have to get him out of that picture.”

  “What if I got all the teachers into a picture? Then they’d all be sick and they’d have to close the school for a while. You can’t have kids in school if half the teachers are absent.”

  “What picture could you get them into? But you’d have to draw them all. It would take you forever. You’d have to do, what, fifty portraits?”

  “Probably more, just to be on the safe side, and I don’t know half of the staff. There are all those people in the sixth form section who never come near us.” Joe started thinking about pictures into which he could dump the teachers—crowd scenes, maybe from some of the French Revolution paintings that he’d looked up for his history project or perhaps one of those crazy medieval paintings that Crosbie loved so much with roses growing out of people’s bottoms. It was a great distraction from facing up to what Nell had said. Joe didn’t want to see Smokey. He remembered his other problem.

  “What was Meeky doing today?”

  “Don’t know. I never see him around. He was horrible at primary school, and I don’t suppose he’s improved any. We’re not in any of the same classes.”

  “Bet he’s tried to muscle in on Smokey’s operation. I just hope Smokey hasn’t blabbed about where he got the stuff.”

  “What’s he going to say? ‘I got this really great gear from a lightning trip I took to Sardinia courtesy of my good friend Joe, who will dream you to your ideal holiday destination, with or without narcotic substances.’ Get a grip, Joe. Your secret is safe.”

  “I’ll have to bring Liesel tomorrow. It’s my turn to pick her up, and no one will be at home to look after her. Ben’s off at work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

  “That’s fine. I can keep an eye on her while you go to see Smokey.”

  * * * *

  So the next afternoon, much against Liesel’s will, Joe and Nell levered her into the thirty-nine bus that went past the Royal Hospital, and they bribed her wi
th a teen comic and a bag of Maltesers to sit still in the waiting room. Nell took out her books and Joe reluctantly edged down the corridor, surprised at how empty and quiet the place was. Given all the bulletins on the news about overcrowding and bed shortages, the place was spookily silent. He could see one nurse at a reception desk. He went up and asked where he could find Silas Murphy. She had warm brown eyes and a Ghanaian accent. She pointed him across the passageway to another door, and he went in.

  Joe hadn’t known what to expect. He’d had a vague idea that it would be like an ER and that there’d be machines bleeping and buzzing everywhere. But it was just Smokey, lying there, his mum holding his hand, her eyes sunken and her shoulders rounded. Smokey looked smaller than in everyday life. His crinkly hair had been shaved off and there was one electronic sensor on the side of his head just above his ear and another on his neck, both stark and white against his café au lait skin. His eyes were closed tightly, the dark eyelashes furled like scimitars, his usually mobile mouth quiet and closed, his chest rising and falling steadily. When Mrs. Murphy turned around to see who had come in, Joe noticed the silvery tracks of tears on her cheeks, as fragile as a snail’s trail. He swallowed.

  “How is he, Mrs. Murphy?”

  “No change. It’s good of you to come, Joe, especially when he’s in such trouble.”