The Man Who Writes the Dreams

by Pera Barrett

  Now, Sergeant Sutherland was the cautionary tale for the buskers, skaters, painters, and poets. She spent each night trying to remember how she had put colour to canvas before, trying to make the paint stick. When it didn’t work she threw that fury into the fight they all waged. They say she hasn’t finished a piece in years.

  But the busker supposed she had an important part to play in the war. They all did.

  That night the camp pulled out hot water dispensers and set them up on trestle tables. The women and men lined up with their baked glass mugs to socialise and sip a hot coffee, chocolate or tea. It was the perfect way to end whatever kind of day had been had.

  While they unwound, the sergeant stood in her tent. Her left thumb was hooked through the opening of a giant palette covered in more than one rainbow of colour. Her brush was pointed down at the basketball lines painted on the floor, canvas and easel facing her in a challenge few would dare.

  While she painted, the busker slept.

  13 THE TERRAGULLS PT. 2

  “Oh well, I gave it a go. I still think it’s my calling, I just don’t think I can answer it, is all. We can’t all be made for greatness, right?”

  - Shahir Webster, 28 years old.

  ————

  From across the boat, The Old Man met my eyes with a questioning look.

  I cupped both hands around my mouth and shouted against the wind, “Why is the sea only attacking me?”

  “Ah.” The Old Man smiled a grin out of place in the madness surrounding us. “Stop looking at the waves,” he said without shouting, without cupping his hands around his mouth. “And stop thinking about what might happen if the boat was to tip.”

  I tried. Though trying to not think about anything was nearly impossible.

  “Look to the island and think about that instead,” he said.

  I hadn’t even noticed the dot that had appeared on the horizon, I was too busy ducking and weaving the ocean’s attack. I imagined the warm sandy beach that must be waiting for us, and pictured the quickly caving holes my feet would leave on the shore.

  The sky lightened.

  I imagined a beach towel. Popping the sunscreen bottle lid with my thumb, the smell and a single drop of white lotion flying, flicked into the air.

  Like a lion stuck with a tranquillizer dart, the sea lay down, calm.

  “Well done, Matthew. Well done. The trick is to make what you see, what you want it to be.” The Old Man continued pulling the oars through the water. “The beasts out here will make whatever you think is true, true. You created those waves, not the Terragulls. Theirs is a power borrowed. Those miserable beasts have none of their own.”

  “Terragulls?” I said.

  “Yes, an apt name I think. They direct your imagination to make you think the sky is darker, the waves are bigger, and the end is nearer. But you don’t have to let them.” He nodded, hands never leaving the oars. “Those eyes of yours are just a pair of chemical reaction factories, you choose how to interpret what you see in your brain.” He pulled again on the oars. “Don’t lose sight of the outcome and where we’re headed. That’s when they get you. That’s when they win.”

  My least favourite birds ever.

  ————

  The next week of rowing was uneventful - thankfully. The sun stood still, and we weren’t attacked once.

  ————

  “Land ahoy,” I shouted in my best sailor’s voice.

  Out of nowhere, a reef announced its presence with a dozen mast tips poking out of the sea at dangerous angles. Some looked like they belonged to long ago sunk pirate ships, others to smaller sailing boats a young lawyer might spend his weekends aboard, learning to tack and jib. Sometimes a hull broke the pattern, sitting out of the water like a man-made island, then another mast. Some had lines dangling from the yard that crossed the main mast, others were only poles, everything else eaten away by the elements. They stretched out as far as I could see in either direction, like pins poking out of a pin-cushion, circling a patch of welcoming, green, wonderfully firm looking land.

  “Here we are,” The Old Man said. He watched me staring out at the ship’s graveyard. “Failed rescue attempts.” He turned his attention to the map he now had back in his hands, then to a well-used compass. He muttered under his breath and looked back and forth from one to the other, then placed both on the seat beside him and rowed us confidently between the first pair of corpse vessels.

  We navigated our way through the reef for what must have been at least a day, but still, the sun didn’t move. I say we, but I can’t say I did much to help. I watched the skeletons of ships pass by, sometimes within a hand’s reach, and wondered who they had come to rescue, were they still on the island? And what had happened to the people on board? We didn’t stop for answers.

  Before long, the bottom of our boat was bumping along the shore’s stones, grating and rattling its way to stable ground.

  The Old Man tilted his head and looked at me with raised eyebrows; I leapt out of the boat into shoelace deep water; he tossed me the coil of rope and I walked up the shore, trailing it behind me.

  There were railway tracks running up the beach. The three sets of parallel, iron lines emerged from a trio of rust and tin clad boat sheds then disappeared down into the murky water below our boat. I guess they carried ship trailers once upon a time. They looked too old now to carry anything other than the rust flakes resting on their top.

  I knelt beside a rail and tied the rope-end fast around it before walking its iron top to the bank, arms outstretched on both sides like a gymnast walking a tightrope.

  The Old Man joined me, we carried on past the boat sheds and through a line of trees that marked the end of the shore like a row of gnarled old men standing guard. Defeated by too many years of the wind beating onto their back, they leaned forward and watched us leave.

  We walked past a half-buried statue with a hand grasping at something just out of reach. Its fingers were outstretched. I imagined if there was skin, it would be a pale, taut white. There were patches of original brown stone here and there, the rest was covered in white hardened bird droppings, and not-quite-as-hard, brown and green moss. Two arrows stuck out of the sinewy arm, both with hard stone ribbons carved to look like the shafts had just struck, and the ribbons were still fluttering behind through the air. One was inscribed with Infedliatem and the other, Verum.

  The Old Man ran his hand over the statue. “Disbelief and Truth,” he said. “Every dream gets pierced by those at some point. Some pop like a balloon, and some keep on floating. The good ones snap off the feather fletching, push the arrow through, and carry on.”

  So this is what an island of fallen dreams looks like.

  14 FEATHERS!

  “It’s hard enough to find a job full stop, with the way the market is. So I get it, making a job from something you love is twice as hard. But hard isn’t impossible, and eight hours a day is a long time to be doing something you don’t love.”

  - Sarah Chadwick, 34 years old.

  ————

  When David started changing, it was like a nightmare he couldn’t scream his way out of.

  It was about a week after his relocation run with the busker and he was in the spare room, locked behind its door. The air was stale and the room was dark; heavy closed curtains shielded him from the sun. He sat on the edge of the bed, arms on knees and head in hands.

  He looked up at the mirror again, in case things had gone back to normal.

  Where his arms were covered in short fine hairs a week ago they were now were covered in short downy feathers.

  Feathers!

  That wasn’t even the worst of it. David moved his gaze in the mirror past the side of his head to the top of his back. Sprouting out of his bare shoulder blades was a set of small, stubby wings. Saying they were small was like saying you were a little bit dead.

  Wings!

  The feathers were beetle-black, the wings themselves like a moving mass of insect
s. The reach of these new appendages had grown a few inches each day, and David could now move them like he was moving his toes. He could wriggle his wings.

  Wings!

  At first, David thought he was still dreaming. When he didn’t wake, he thought he was losing his mind. His wife’s wide eyes as he walked out into the hall had assured him he was very much awake — and unfortunately — sane. He ran into the spare room and slammed the door shut.

  Jane’s high-pitched voice came through the door almost immediately.

  “Babe? You just gave me a fright is all. Bit early for Halloween isn’t it?”

  He turned the lock on the door until it clicked.

  “Dave?”

  David looked up at the mirror. The eyes staring back weren’t his own, blackness swirled in their centre like oil floating on top of a pond.

  “Can you open the door please?” Jane had said.

  He had stared blankly at the wood panelled door.

  ————

  Four or five days had passed, and David hadn’t left the room once.

  His head throbbed. It felt like his brains were mushrooming out and trying to push through his skull.

  He hadn’t eaten. Wasn’t hungry. Didn’t care. The sides of his mouth were sticky and bitter, with a burnt plastic taste on his tongue. He didn’t understand what was happening.

  A few months earlier, David had noticed subtle changes in himself. Conversations with Jane that were usually nothing, were leaving him seething with anger. He spent less time at the golf course and the gym and the pool — the time for himself that he once took religiously. Small things that all seemed to happen more as he gained favour with Brigitta and moved up the ranks. He had suspected they were connected. But it was easy to not question things that helped him climb up the ladder.

  Don’t look down.

  The more he thought about it, the more he suspected he had known this would happen. Not this exactly, but something bad. Somewhere inside of him, he’d known. There had been a section in the contract that he knew he should have asked more about at the time. Why couldn’t he remember what it was?

  Face wrinkled in confusion, and disgust and despair, David watched his reflection as it wept.

  15 THIS DIARY BELONGS TO LISA

  “When mum gets home I’m going to tell her I don’t need to save up my money anymore. I know I’ll never be able to afford the horse ranch.”

  - Lisa Chapman, 9 years old.

  ————

  The rain started to fall as we passed the moss-covered statue. Thunder rumbled low in the cabbage trees ahead.

  The Old Man took the lead and ran. “Come along, Matthew.” He held his briefcase in both hands over his head like a tuk-tuk’s roof. I jogged in his footsteps and pulled the drawstrings on my jacket’s hood tight around my head.

  The birds didn’t like the wet either. Before the shower had started, they had sat above the path from the beach, black silhouettes watching our invasion in silence. Now the murder flew up from the trees. I say murder because they looked like crows, and they looked like evil.

  The path wound around a few more giant pines and then disappeared into a hazy mist that wrapped around a little house. It wasn’t the scary sort of cloud that hides a hockey mask and chainsaw. Just a regular old forest fog that seemed to like that little house.

  We followed the path through the mist, and up to the front yard.

  The house was made of pale brick and faded yellow weatherboard. It had a verandah at the front with wrought black railing that housed a table and chairs made of nearly-matching-metal. A single hanging pot-plant swung out from under the verandah on its little chain, as if trying to catch whatever rain it could, and passing it across to somebody under the roof.

  I followed The Old Man up onto the verandah. He stopped on the last concrete step and brushed the rain from his briefcase, running his hand over the top, near the handle. A soft click popped through the sound of the raindrops. The clasp on the briefcase snapped open.

  “Oh dear.” The Old Man reached down and fumbled with the clasp.

  A yellow, folded piece of paper slipped through the small opening in the case. Then another dropped out and fell to the ground. A breeze pushed by and seemed to suck out a stream of the small folded notes, lifting them into the air and blowing them around us in a circle of white and yellow triangles and squares — wingless origami cranes.

  The Old Man’s eyes widened. “Oh dear, oh dear.” He knelt and placed the briefcase gingerly on the ground in front of him then sprung up and started lunging at the twisting snake of paper as it wound around us — his fingers opening to grab at a note floating by, then closing on empty air and skin as he missed. “Matthew! My boy, a hand, please?”

  I snapped my arm out and grabbed at a square as it passed. Got it. Then another, and another. I stuffed them into my pockets and reached out for more while the Old Man flailed, catching one here and there. We stood in the middle of that flying paper circus, snatching and grasping until we had every last folded leaf.

  While The Old Man stood panting, I unfolded the last piece of paper I’d caught. There was a short transcript written in neat, blue ink. I read it aloud:

  “Did you know Valerie Willis went to school down the road? She grew up just like we did. Look at her now. There’s a poster of her in the canteen saying she hated the training but loved to win, and you can’t have one without the other. I’m gonna train like her. Already set my alarm for an hour earlier, you should too.”

  - Ariana Cleveland, 12 years old.

  I pulled another from my pocket, smoothed its wrinkles against my jeans and read:

  “Bro, I’m telling you. I used to dance every day, just like that, better even. Where did the years —”

  I looked up from the note. “What are these?”

  The Old Man’s hair was ruffled and his shirt was untucked. “Moments of change, pivot points, if you will.” He held his hand out, looking at the note I was holding. “They are the precise time when a person changes from a dreamer to a doer, or from a dreamer to a Cog Turner.”

  I passed him the note and then the rest from my stuffed pockets. He opened the briefcase and folded each one back into a triangle, before sliding them back into the case.

  “Very useful for research.” The Old Man closed the clasp with a click. “And understanding exactly what it is we’re fighting against.”

  “I see,” I said — not sure if I did.

  The Old Man tucked his shirt in, smoothed his hair, and lifted the briefcase twice as if weighing its contents. “Right, now, let’s see if we can’t save this little girl.” He opened the door.

  The lounge was a similar yellow to the outside; the painter had nearly got the colour match right. There was a brown couch in front of a big black TV. A fireplace sat recessed in the wall, cobwebs and ashes inside. There was one photo on the mantelpiece. Its silver frame had a red heart sitting top and centre with ‘Memories’ written inside. The picture was centred on a little girl with a big smile. She had long brown hair and a red spotty dress. The smile on her face said ‘this is my Christmas dress, and it’s my favourite dress in the world’. A lady with the same mahogany hair held her hand on one side, and a man in a black buttoned up shirt held the other.

  Clink

  Clink

  Clink

  The sound of dishes rattling from the next room made me jump. “There’s somebody here,” I whispered, turning my head to face the sound.

  A woman’s voice came from close by, her hurried tone was edged with the practiced patience of a mother. “That’s nice of them, baby. Make sure you write back and say thank you. Hey, remember I’m working late again tonight, but there’s a bowl of spaghetti bolognese in the fridge, and if you get your homework done, you can have one bowl of ice-cream. One.”

  “What about my test on Friday? You said you would help me practice.” A little girl’s voice sounded from the other room, just a few metres away.

  I jerked my g
aze from one side of the lounge to the other, scanning frantically for somewhere to hide.

  “Hadn’t forgotten that,” the woman’s voice said, “we’ll do it in the morning. I’ll have to wake you up a bit earlier than usual, so definitely no staying up late, OK?”

  “OK, Mum.”

  “Love you, have a great day at school and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  The door behind me clicked, I spun around, eyes wide, ready to face whoever owned the home we were invading. But there was nobody there, and nothing had moved.

  “Don’t worry.” The Old Man scratched his head absently. “She can’t see us.” He turned away and moved through the room.

  The little girl’s voice sung out. “Uh uh oh, turn the lights down low and the music up loud till the speakers blow.” The dishes clinked off-beat with her tune.

  We passed through the lounge and into a hallway. There were more pictures on the wall; a horse; a grandmother; a picture of the little yellow house.

  We were in what must have been the girl’s room now, a single bed and cloud-embroidered duvet cover sat against the wall, piled with more pillows than looked practical. To the side of the bed was a soft-pink writing desk. There was a brown plastic horse standing upright on a corner of the desk, one front leg bent in mid-canter. The rest of the desk was covered in sheets of drawings, a leafy tree here, a paddock filled with horses there. In the centre was a farm scene half sketched in pencil. There was a single black feather under one leg of the desk. Its vane moved in the breeze, trying to escape.