Dream a Little Dream

by Sue Moorcroft

  What is monthly rent compared to sum of rent we three pay Nicolas?

  Bring in another therapist in Nicolas’s room?

  Other bills. Rates, water, telephone, electricity

  Increased insurance? Paid monthly? Check public liability/buildings/contents

  Nicolas’s cut

  Pippa? OMG

  Cleaner. Weekly. Cleaning supplies

  Accountant. Annually

  Solicitor—but only for lease legals?

  Maintenance. Us or hotel?

  She racked her brains for expenses, either hidden or obvious, that she’d overlooked, and added supplies for common areas, like loo rolls and soap. She tapped her pen and scratched her head and really couldn’t come up with another thing.

  So her opening remark, when Fenella and Imogen were curled up in her chairs, yawning with end-of-day fatigue, drinking jasmine tea and eating Jammie Dodgers, was an impetuous, ‘I think Nicolas is ripping us off.’ Then, at their frozen expressions, modifying it to, ‘Perhaps not ripping us off exactly, but at least on a cushy number.’ Deep breath. ‘I think we three could go into partnership, offload Nicolas and make more money. He’s deadweight because he brings no clients in – just takes our rent and pushes a bit of paper.’

  Silence.

  Imogen’s eyes were like saucers. ‘Where’s this come from? Why would we want to cut out Nicolas?’

  On a lurch of disappointment that they hadn’t leapt on her masterly plan with cries of joy, Liza tried to sound persuasive. ‘Lots of reasons. For one thing, he says he’s in the poo, financially. If it gets so that he can’t afford the rent, what will happen to us? Will the centre close while we run around looking for new premises or try and work from home?’

  Fenella dropped her Jammie Dodger in shock. ‘He isn’t going to close, is he?’

  ‘I don’t know that he is.’ Liza had to be honest. ‘But he showed some investors round, on Thursday.’

  ‘Pippa told us,’ said Fenella. ‘So they might invest.’

  ‘They’ve already said no. He said they were his last hope.’ Liza relayed what Dominic had told her, including the bit about investors not being angels with briefcases full of cash. ‘I think it’s possible that Nicolas is going to have no choice but to give up the lease. And we’d be the obvious option to take it over.’ She brought out her list. ‘Look, I’ve been brainstorming things we need to investigate.’

  But, barely sparing the piece of paper a glance, Fenella screwed up her nose. ‘There’s bound to be something you have to pay Nicolas.’

  ‘Why?’ demanded Imogen. She’d released her hair from its daytime knot and was combing it with her fingers.

  Liza remained silent. Hmm. Pay Nicolas?

  ‘You know,’ explained Fenella, vaguely. ‘If someone owns a lease, they own an asset. If you want it, you have to buy it.’

  ‘Oh that,’ said Liza. She added, buy lease? to the list.

  Imogen’s hair raking grew agitated. ‘But that would take money we don’t have.’

  ‘We might have to borrow a bit,’ Liza agreed, as if borrowing was no big deal, even though she already had her mortgage and her car payments. And credit cards that were OK but not what you’d call clear. ‘But think about the big picture! We already have our businesses intact. Each of us has our equipment, our supplies, our insurance, everything. All we’d be doing would be cutting out the Nicolas factor. And he doesn’t bring money in – he just takes it out.’

  ‘But he pays all the bills.’ Fenella seemed unable to conceive of The Stables without Nicolas sitting like a butter ball in his office.

  Liza fought to stay patient. ‘But he pays the bills out of our rent. If he can pay it out of our rent, we can pay it out of our rent. That’s only reorganisation, not extra money.’

  Imogen had turned Liza’s list so that she could read it. ‘Why have you crossed Pippa out, too? And written “OMG”?’

  Liza went all hot. She looked down at the damning line through little Pippa’s name. ‘I don’t think we can afford her,’ she admitted, sadly. ‘I think we need to each meet our own clients in reception and show them through to our rooms. It’ll save mega money.’

  ‘Ow!’ Fenella sounded as if it was she who had just received Liza’s dagger in her back. ‘We can’t sack Pippa!’

  ‘And I don’t want to borrow money,’ finished Imogen. Sitting back, she folded her arms.

  A pause. Heart sinking, Liza took up her mug. ‘So where will you begin looking for your new treatment rooms? I might try Bettsbrough, because it’s closer than Peterborough. Driving in and out to Peterborough every day’s ridiculous, in view of fuel prices, even in my little Smart.’ Bettsbrough was the nearest town to Middledip.

  When the other two glared at her, she gave a great, exaggerated, sarcastic shrug. ‘What? You might want to shut your eyes to the fact that Nicolas’s business plan was a fairy tale, but I’m sailing dangerously close to not making a living. Once Christmas is over, I’m going to start looking around. I’m not going to lose my house and my car.’

  ‘So you’ll clear off and leave us with even more rent to find!’ wailed Fenella.

  Liza’s heart sank a few more inches. ‘I’m free to leave at a month’s notice, as Nicolas so kindly reminded me last week. But, yes, he’ll have to get another therapist in, if the centre goes on. I’m really sorry if you think I’m baling out,’ she added. ‘Probably you guys aren’t feeling the pinch so much, because you have partners to share your living expenses.’

  ‘So maybe there would have been advantages to marrying Adam, after all?’ Imogen snapped.

  Liza breathed in slowly and deeply so that she didn’t go off like a faulty firework. Imogen was upset and probably didn’t realise how bitchy she sounded. ‘I don’t need a man,’ she managed, eventually. ‘I can do this. But it might mean some hard decisions.’

  Chapter Nine

  PWNsleep message board:

  Tenzeds: I get really p*ssed off if I go to my room to work on my computer. Without the bustle of a workplace environment I can just stare into space or drop off.

  Inthebatcave: At uni, I used to keep alert by working around the noisy bastards. Sounds counterproductive but it’s better than sliding into sleep every half hour.

  Dominic gave himself a week to think. He spent a lot of that time at the kitchen table, reading websites, making phone calls, guarding his iPad from Ethan’s sticky little hands whilst Miranda created veggie meals or baked.

  On Thursday, he emailed Kenny King. In the confusion of learning to cope with narcolepsy and Kenny going off to lead wilderness expeditions and Outward Bound courses in North Carolina, communications had lapsed. But now he felt as if contact with Kenny was exactly what he needed. Kenny was fun, lively, alive.

  Hi Kenny,

  Seems ages since I heard from you. What’s going on in your life?

  Dom

  Kenny’s reply came quickly, hardly punctuated, and littered with the usual hope-spellcheck-puts-me-right word choices that he relied on to make his dyslexic way through life.

  Hey doc! Haven’t herd from u 4 so long I through u weren’t talking 2 me its 5am here just getting ready 2take a group of teenagers into the swamp n Carolina fantastic apart from heat and bugs but my time hear is nearly up & ill have to leaf the US and look for a job. Have put a few feelers out but nothing coming my way yet

  Ken

  Dominic grinned. Nobody but Kenny ever called him ‘Doc’, a nickname that came from Dominic’s initials, adopted by Kenny because Dominic was what Kenny termed ‘brainy’. Dominic replied:

  Been getting my head around all the crap that came with my diagnosis. Where are you going next? If you’re coming back to the UK I might have something to interest you.

  He sketched in a few details, added Dom and touched send, then slid his iPad on top of the fridge out of Ethan’s reach and took out the ordnance survey map he’d ordered from Amazon. He spread it out, taking pleasure in the thickness of the paper and its fresh smell. Ordn
ance survey maps evoked orienteering and climbing weekends. When he’d sorted his life out, he’d get back to those.

  Ethan threw down the Duplo bricks he’d been forcing haphazardly together and clambered up onto the chair beside Dominic. ‘You got a big picture.’

  ‘It’s a map.’ Dominic let Ethan slide onto his lap. ‘It’s kind of a picture of the ground, from above.’

  Ethan smelled of the porridge he’d eaten at breakfast. ‘What’s that?’ He stabbed the map with a pudgy thumb, which he often stored in his mouth between sentences, leaving a damp thumbprint.

  ‘The green bit? Grass. The blue patch, here, is a lake, these spiky things are trees that don’t lose their leaves and the cloudy shapes are trees that do.’

  ‘And what are they?’ The thumb besmirched the paper at a different spot.

  ‘Buildings. And see these black lines? When they get close together, it shows that there’s a hill. The lake’s between two hills and the buildings are on top of one.’ After breathing hard on the map and adding an artistic array of thumbprints, Ethan wriggled back down to his Duplo, leaving Dominic to study the no-longer-pristine map in peace. But when he folded it into a clear sleeve and rose to extricate his walking boots from the pile of footwear beside the back door, he found not only Crosswind dancing around his legs, but Ethan, too. ‘I come wid you, Dommynic?’

  Dominic met the little boy’s eager eyes regretfully. ‘Sorry, Ethe. I’m going too far for you this morning. But I’ll take you to the swings this afternoon.’

  The little face sagged into instant misery. ‘Caaaan’t I coooome nooo-ooow …?’

  With an apologetic look at Miranda, Dominic repeated, ‘Later, mate,’ tucked a bottle of water guiltily into his hiking jacket, leaving his cousin to cheer her son with a story from Ethan’s favourite book of folk tales which, from Ethan’s grumpy face, didn’t make up for Dominic’s monstrous betrayal.

  Crosswind bounced like a toy along the narrow pavements of the village, jumping up every few strides to nudge Dominic’s hand with a wet nose. But, as soon as they cleared the houses and Dominic unhooked the lead, the little terrier settled down to the serious job of snuffling the hedgerows, tail quivering with joy, leaving Dominic free to fall into the rhythmic stride that he could keep up for hours, first along the verges and then onto a footpath. He breathed in the sharp air, enjoying the feel of his muscles bunching and blood pulsing through his veins.

  After a couple of miles he took out the map to compare it to the land he was approaching: a coppice, then coniferous trees that looked as if they ought to have a star on top for Christmas marching up packed contour lines of grassland from a pale blue comma lake. The big slope that rose up to The Stables. The small dash footpath that Crosswind was happily exploring by nose was joined by a larger dash bridleway where the hawthorn hedges funnelled the wind, combing Crosswind’s fur and rattling streams of dry golden leaves along the ground. At the lake, Dominic clicked the lead back onto Crosswind’s collar and climbed the steep greensward, breasting the hill in front of The Stables, pale grey stone sparkling with lichen in the autumn sunlight. He took the water bottle from inside his jacket, along with the small collapsible bowl that lived in one of the many mesh inner pockets. He took a couple of swallows from the bottle, expanded the bowl and poured Crosswind’s drink, then tied the lead to a drainpipe. ‘Crosswind, down. Stay.’ Crosswind lay down slowly, too well mannered to complain, but eyes full of wounded reproach.

  Dominic rubbed the dog’s silky ears. ‘Yeah, I know. I won’t be long.’

  Through the black-painted door, and Dominic stepped into the cool and quiet interior, smiling at Pippa at the front desk.

  ‘Hiya!’ She beamed, obviously beginning to view him as a regular visitor.

  ‘Is Nicolas in?’

  ‘Let me find out.’ And she disappeared up the short passageway. Dominic’s eyes followed her so far, but then slid to the closed door of Liza Reece’s treatment room.

  Pippa bounced back. ‘Nicolas says to go in.’

  So he turned his mind away from Liza and to the task in hand, shucking out of his jacket to enter Nicolas’s overheated office, receiving a sweaty handshake and a beaming, hopeful smile. ‘This is a pleasant surprise! Coffee?’

  ‘Not for me. I’ve got a dog waiting outside.’ Dominic didn’t take the seat that Nicolas waved him to, but came straight to the point. ‘Nicolas, I’m afraid I don’t want to buy into your treatment centre. But are you prepared to sell your lease on the premises? I think this place would be brilliant for something else I’d like to do.’

  Slowly, Nicolas’s face turned purple. ‘Sell what?’

  It took five minutes. Dominic timed it on the wall clock. Five minutes for Nicolas to scroll through leaning-across-the-desk anger, ‘Who the hell do you think you are, strolling in here and trying to end my business?’ dull, hopeless sorrow, ‘I had a lot of dreams,’ slumped-into-a-chair self-pity, ‘It’s always the little guy that gets squeezed out,’ and hand-to-head regret, ‘I should have taken more advice before I took the place on.’

  Dominic let Nicolas vent until finally reaching sour pragmatism. ‘I suppose we could talk about it.’

  Then he stirred. ‘How long does the lease have to run?’

  ‘More than twenty years.’

  ‘OK, I’m still interested. I’m sorry if my proposal isn’t what you wanted to hear. But, if you’re prepared to consider it, I suggest you get some figures together. Maybe you’d like to have the lease valued? While you do that, I’ll make further enquiries about whether my idea’s likely to float. Then we could talk again.’

  Nicolas wiped his glum face on his palm, hair lank, skin pink and stretched shiny. ‘We can talk now.’

  But Dominic shook his head. ‘I need to speak to the hotel. I only want this place if I can rent some of the grounds, too. Without it, my idea will come to nothing.’

  The word ‘nothing’ caused Nicolas’s colour to drain. ‘The lease is a valuable asset—’

  ‘Only if somebody wants it,’ Dominic said, with some sympathy. ‘I’ll understand if you want me to drop the idea. You could advertise the lease, if you can afford to wait …?’

  ‘What you don’t seem to realise is that I’ve got a thriving concern, here.’

  ‘If it’s a thriving concern, I’m wasting your time.’

  Nicolas halted, blinking rapidly. His chest heaved. ‘You’re a chancer,’ he managed, tightly. ‘You think that me looking for investors means I’m in trouble and that you can get something for nothing.’

  Anger flared suddenly in Dominic, but he clenched his teeth against the impulse to fire back a sarcastic reply that, in fact, he knew precisely how it felt to lose a dream and understood Nicolas’s distress – but that that didn’t alter the fact that Nicolas’s business was about to go belly up. Instead, he made his voice calm and reasonable. ‘What I think is that I might be able to get the lease at a fair market value. It’s a depressed market, but that’s not my fault. I’ve had a cursory look at your business and the lease is the only asset to interest me.’

  Nicolas dropped his head back into his hands, staring at the desk. ‘Let me think.’

  Waiting for Nicolas to chew the situation over, the heat of the room began to press its heavy hand across Dominic’s face and, with a sinking heart, he recognised a coming sleep attack. He opened the door in search of fresh air, wishing he’d put ProPlus in his jacket. He could use some caffeine.

  ‘I don’t know where it all went wrong,’ Nicolas muttered.

  Dominic yawned, wanting to drop into a chair but not wanting to, because he knew that if he did, he’d be gone. He strove to stay in the moment. But he answered, unguardedly, ‘Sometimes we all need to be open to new ideas.’

  The area around Nicolas’s lips whitened as he slowly raised his gaze. ‘Liza?’

  Dominic was jolted back to wakefulness by the unhappy sliding sensation that went with saying the wrong thing to the wrong person. ‘What?’

  ‘Liza
’s “new ideas”,’ Nicolas clarified. ‘It sounds to me as if you’ve fallen for her line that we could make megabucks, here, if we just turned complementary medicine into a circus.’

  ‘As I don’t want a treatment centre, Liza’s views are irrelevant.’

  But Nicolas wasn’t going to let a logical argument cheat him of an opportunity to vent about Liza. ‘Bloody woman,’ he spat. ‘For years therapists have been battling for respectability, and now Liza’s trying to drag us into gimmickry, for reasons best known to herself.’

  ‘Survival?’

  Sweat popped on Nicolas’s forehead like liquid anger. ‘If that’s what it takes for complementary medicine to survive then I don’t want anything to do with it!’

  Dominic made a huge effort not to allow himself to be deflected from his purpose, despite the urge to make Nicolas see the speciousness of that argument. The greater need was to get the meeting over before sleep jumped on him again with both its heavy feet. ‘Which brings us back to where we started. Are you interested in selling your lease?’

  The walk home was an ordeal. Dominic fought falling asleep on his feet, heaving one eyelid open then the other, knowing that October wasn’t the time to find a patch of grass for an emergency nap, but the cold hardly registering. Crosswind stayed close to his ankles, his nose touching the back of Dominic legs rather like Ethan’s little hand patting for the attention of a grown up. By the time Dominic finally regained Miranda’s house, his face was a leaden mask and darkness filtered into where his brain ought to be. He managed, ‘Hi,’ for Miranda, as he shut the door.

  In the kitchen, folding clothes as she kept an eye on Ethan through the window to the back garden, she glanced around. ‘How did it go?’

  ‘Later,’ he said. Or thought he said.

  Upstairs, heavy, using the handrail to drag himself up, legs like weights, banister, door to his room. Yellow-orange walls combining oddly with his navy quilt cover. Heavy colour, made the box room press in on him. With the last vestige of energy he fumbled his phone timer to thirty minutes and dropped down onto his bed, still wearing his boots.