Common People

by Tony Birch

  ‘But I can’t write it down,’ I said, trying to explain my predicament. ‘As soon as I realise I’m awake, the dream, well, it’s already slipped away. There’s nothing left to write. It’s gone. My mind’s a blank when I wake up.’

  Phil looked at me suspiciously. ‘Well, if it’s gone, how do you know you’ve been dreaming? And the night sweats? Sounds more like an anxiety attack to me. You must be worried about something?’ He put his feet up on the desk and laughed. ‘Maybe it’s a midlife crisis. Fuck, you’ve just turned fifty. We all go through it.’

  He stood up and patted me roughly on the shoulder. ‘Don’t let it get to you. Chat up one of the office girls. A night out on the town, that’s what you need. Chase down a piece of stray pussy and you’ll soon get over your worries. The only dreams you’ll be having then,’ he winked at me, ‘will be wet ones.’

  Phil’s advice, like most of what he said, offered no help, although one thing that he said stuck with me – you must be worried about something. I wouldn’t have thought so, not until he posed the question. But maybe I was? After waking from the dream I had an overwhelming sense that something was very wrong, that something catastrophic was about to visit me. I just didn’t know what. By the next morning, after having finally drifted back to sleep, my wife would need to shake me awake so I wouldn’t be late for work. I tried to convince myself that everything would be fine. It is only a dream.

  But things aren’t fine, and they don’t get better. They get worse. The sweating and the nightmares, or what I think may be nightmares, continue. I become exhausted and am barely able to sleep at all. Until the morning I meet Howard.

  The night before I had gone to bed resigned that I may need professional help to deal with my anxiety and then for a reason I can’t explain I sleep right through. When I wake up I feel fresh and relaxed. It feels like a good day. Today will be my day, I reassure myself in the shower. I have a quick breakfast, grab the car keys, and go to leave for work, but the car refuses to turn over. I look under the bonnet before realising that I’ve left the headlights on overnight. I go back into the house and tell my wife that I am catching the bus. She wants to call the RACV there and then, but I tell her not to worry. There’s no hurry. She can ring them later in the morning. I am taking the bus, I tell her. She looks at me as if I’m crazy. She repeats that she can make the call for me. But I tell her no. Today it will be the bus.

  Rather than walk to the end of our street and along the main road to the bus stop, a ten-minute walk, I cut through the lane behind the house to a reserve and follow the creek that cuts through the suburb. I walk on the bicycle path that meanders beneath a line of trees along the creek. It is a beautiful autumn morning, crisp and clear. I feel so happy that I begin to swing my briefcase in the air. I even consider whistling. And then I feel suddenly light-headed and pass out.

  When I come to, I am lying on my back. I can feel the familiar dampness of my shirt against my skin. But it is no night sweat. I look up to a dappled blanket of sky. I try sitting up. I feel dizzy and a little nauseous so I rest my head back on the wet ground and turn on my side, vomiting bile onto the grass. A fluoro-suited cyclist passes me just as I am clumsily getting to my feet. She brakes, turns an arc off the side of the bike path and comes back to me.

  ‘You okay? Can I help?’

  I look up. The woman is young and pretty. She has straw pigtails protruding from her helmet. She looks like a Viking. Viking Woman, I think to myself. I feel as if I am a little drunk. I want to laugh at her and tell her she looks silly. But I don’t, because I realise that I am the one who must look silly. The knees of my pants are covered in mud, and although I haven’t noticed it yet, I have damp autumn leaves stuck to the back of my suit jacket.

  ‘Thank you, but I’m fine. I just tripped over on that tree branch, there,’ I explain.

  I search the ground, attempting to locate something, anything that may have been the cause of my fall. Her eyes follow mine, combing the ground.

  She asks me again if I am all right before locking her plastic slippers into the pedals and taking off. I brush myself down as best I can, retrieve my briefcase and decide that although I am still a little uneasy on my feet I will continue to the bus stop. But I haven’t taken more than a couple of steps when I feel a second wave of giddiness. I rest against the nearest tree trunk to stop myself from falling again. It is then that I lucidly recall my mysterious dream for the first time.

  In the dream I am in my house, which although eerily familiar is not my house. I am running from room to room, becoming increasingly frantic as I open and shut the doors. I get to the end of the hallway, which is like the hallway in my own house but much longer. I find an open door and am welcomed into the room by a soft yellow light. As I step over the threshold I see my mother standing in front of me. She is very old, looking just as she did in the weeks before her death. She is wearing the floral housecoat that became her uniform; the one we teased her about because she was never out of it during those final months.

  The room she is standing in is not a room as such, but another endless corridor. The walls are lined with floor to ceiling shelves. Cluttered along them are hundreds, if not thousands, of the cheap ornaments my mother collected during her lifetime. I feel afraid, certain that I have seen a ghost. I then see myself, or my reflection at least, in an etched mirror on a shelf behind her. But it is not the image of a fifty-year-old man I see. In the mirror I am a boy of ten again, a head of blond hair and the soft unmarked face of my youth.

  I turn away from the mirror, back to my mother. She has transformed herself. No longer a hunched eighty-five-year-old housebound pensioner, she is a vivacious thirty-something. I see that she is wearing a pair of red dancing shoes that she always favoured as a younger woman. Long after she stopped dancing she kept the red shoes in a box in the bottom of her wardrobe. When I cleared out her flat after the funeral, I took the shoes out of the box and held one in each hand, standing in her empty bedroom. I eventually threw them into a plastic garbage bag along with the rest of her clothes and dumped them in a charity bin.

  As I continue to the bus stop I replay the dream again and again, desperately wanting to make sense of it. I make a mental note that I will write down the details as soon as I am on the bus. At the bus stop, as I check the timetable attached to the bus shelter, I hear a voice behind me.

  ‘The 8.05. The 8.05. He is two minutes late. He always is. He will be here in … in around ninety seconds.’

  I turn to see a man, maybe a little younger than myself, sitting on a low red-brick fence. He looks vaguely familiar. Perhaps I’ve seen him at the local shopping centre? He has one of those old-fashioned haircuts that seem to have come out of the Great Depression; a razor sharp part down the centre of his head, a fringe flopping over his forehead, shaved back and sides. His clothing comes from a similar era, although it is not aged or worn. He is wearing a chequered shirt, buttoned to the neck, a brown hand-knitted cardigan with wooden buttons, grey pants and a pair of polished brown leather shoes. He points to the timetable. ‘The 8.05. It will be here in …’ he looks down at his own watch, ‘sixty seconds.’

  I do not answer, and walk to the other end of the bus shelter.

  He is correct about the delayed bus. Just as the minute passes it pulls into the kerb.

  My travelling companion motions me onto the bus in front of him. I look for an empty seat, at a safe distance from the elderly passengers huddled together down the front and a group of raucous schoolkids bouncing across the back seat. As he follows me down the aisle several passengers greet him warmly.

  ‘Good morning, Howard.’

  ‘How are you today, Howard?’

  ‘Lovely morning, isn’t it, Howard?’

  I take my seat. Although there are several other empty seats he sits down next to me. He turns around and waves to a couple of passengers before smiling at me and offering his hand. ‘Good morni
ng, I am Howard,’ he says.

  I look down at his open hand before tentatively offering my own, although I don’t offer my name. Howard studies my face. ‘You don’t catch this bus. The 8.05. You don’t catch the 8.05. What bus do you catch?’

  I look straight ahead and answer without making eye contact. ‘No, I don’t catch the bus. Not usually.’

  He reaches across the seat and picks something from the shoulder of my jacket. I back away. He shows me the leaf of Liquidambar, held delicately in his hand. As he twirls the leaf between his fingertips the light picks up its bruised colours.

  I open my briefcase, take out a client file, close the case and put the file on top. I don’t want to talk to Howard, or anyone else. I take my fountain pen from my suit coat pocket and try concentrating on the paperwork, but it is a pointless exercise as I continue to worry over the dream, quizzing myself as to what it could mean. I take my notepad from the briefcase and begin writing.

  Howard leaves me to myself for several bus stops. When we pull up alongside the railway station, the schoolkids from the back seat get off the bus. I pray that Howard will get off, too. But he doesn’t. He has settled in next to me. Some of the remaining passengers begin pointing to Howard and call out to him.

  ‘That’s not you, Howard. You’re the good Howard. That’s not you, over there.’

  I look up. They are all smiling at Howard, even the bus driver. He smiles back at them and nudges my arm, pointing to something outside. ‘That’s not me. I’m the good Howard.’

  I look out of the window but have no idea what he is talking about. He points again. ‘Look, that’s not me. That’s not me. I’m the good Howard.’

  I finally see what he’s referring to. It is a faded piece of graffiti scrawled on the side wall of the railway station: HOWARD LIED – AND SOLD OUT ON REFUGEES.

  I don’t get it. Not at first, at least. But when I do, I laugh, to myself mostly, and just loud enough so that ‘good Howard’ hears me. He leans across and smiles.

  As the bus is about to pull away the railway gates come down blocking the traffic. Several minutes after the train has passed by the gates have not lifted. The bells continue to ring. The gates are stuck. I rest my chin in my hand and place my forehead against the window. I feel myself drifting back into the dream and force myself to sit upright, desperate to stay awake.

  Howard leans across the seat. ‘Are you tired? You look tired.’

  I try ignoring him but he won’t be put off. ‘You have to get your eight hours, your eight hours. Do you get your eight hours? You look tired.’

  I look across at Howard, finally accepting that I am stuck with him. ‘No, Howard, I don’t usually get my eight hours. I did last night, funnily enough, but most of the time, no, I don’t get a great night’s sleep.’

  He rocks in his seat. ‘I do. Eight hours. Nine hours. Ten hours. Why don’t you get yours?’

  I look down at the notes that I have been scribbling then back to Howard. He is waiting for an answer. ‘It’s nothing. I have dreams. They wake me sometimes.’

  He becomes inquisitive. ‘Dreams? You have dreams? What are your dreams?’

  I look at him, this total stranger, who is probably a little strange as well. I peer out of the bus to the graffiti. The traffic is not moving. The driver gets on the microphone and suggests that we may like to get off and take a detour via the next train. A few more passengers exit the bus. I can’t follow them, as I have to go across town. So I stay. And so does Howard, who is waiting for my response. I give in to his persistence.

  As I recount the details of the dream Howard hangs on every word. When I stop I feel that my story is unfinished, that I need to say something more, although I am not sure what. I shrug. ‘I don’t know what it means. One of my work colleagues, he tells me that dreams need to be interpreted. If we learn to understand our dreams, we come to understand ourselves. But I can’t understand much of my dream. Not yet, anyway.’

  Howard is quiet. I look down at the notepad thinking about my mother. I feel reasonably certain that the dream must have something to do with her death. On the day of her funeral I could not stop crying. I was surprised by my reaction, although I shouldn’t have been. After all, she was my mother. But in the weeks before it was all over, when she had been quite ill and was in pain, I had rationalised that she had lived a relatively good and long life. That her death would bring her peace, as they say. I had stood at the graveside, my crying audible, a little embarrassed in front of the other mourners. My wife put an arm around my waist, attempting to console me, ‘It’s okay, it’s okay.’

  Afterwards, she commented again that it was all right to cry. ‘You used to cry all the time when we were younger, at the movies, when Elsie had her paw caught in that rat trap down the back. You even cried when your football team lost that final by a point. Remember that? You were like a blubbering kid?’

  Howard pulls at my sleeve to get my attention. ‘Tell me about the end again, the end of the dream.’

  ‘The end?’

  ‘About your mother, and the red shoes.’

  I tell him again, about seeing myself in the mirror as a child, and then looking at my mother, suddenly much younger, all dressed up for a night on the boards.

  Howard screws his face up then looks down at his watch before replying. ‘Your dream, I think it is about dancing. Your mum, she liked dancing?’

  My mother loved dancing, when she was younger, at least. She and my father would go to the fifty-fifty dance every Sunday night at the Brunswick Town Hall. As I sat on the bus I could see them in the front room of my childhood home, ready to go out on the town. Him in a black suit with his hair slicked back, my mother in those shoes.

  ‘It’s the dancing. I think you need to go dancing.’

  I look across to Howard, bemused. I’ve never been dancing. I can’t, in fact, dance. Before I can respond Howard suddenly jumps up from his seat and walks to the front of the bus. The driver opens the door and Howard moves to the lower step. The few remaining passengers call out to him, ‘Goodbye, Howard, see you tomorrow.’

  I watch as he walks to the other side of the road and stands alongside the graffiti wall. The boom gates lift, which causes the elderly passengers at the front of the bus to cheer in childlike unison. As we take off I look over at the Good Howard. He waves a gentle goodbye to me.

  I can’t say for certain if it is meeting Howard that improves my sleeping and keeps the restless nights at bay, but from the night of the bus trip, I feel calmer and sleep better. And not just for one night, but every night. I also feel healthier generally, and for some reason, lighter on my feet. Several weekends later I am down in the back garden turning over the compost. My wife is up in the kitchen going through the newspapers. I can hear music drifting onto the patio but cannot recognise what it is. When I finish I return the shovel and pick to the shed and walk up to the house, thinking about a cup of tea. I leave my boots and socks at the back door. I am greeted by the wonderful voice of Ella Fitzgerald belting out her version of ‘Mack the Knife’.

  My wife is at the kitchen sink peeling vegetables. As I walk past her on my way to the bathroom she looks over her shoulder and smiles at me. I pause for a moment and look down at her hips as they sway to the beat. In the bathroom I stare into my unshaven and wrinkled face, the warm soapy water caressing my hands. As I look down into the ivory sink and closely inspect my hands I realise that my bare feet have been shuffling an awkward rhythm back and forth across the tiles.

  That afternoon we dance across the kitchen floor and keep the dance going long into the night. The next morning, lying in bed, I think about Good Howard and my good fortune, in meeting him. The following morning I leave the car at home and head through the park to catch the 8.05.

  COLOURS

  My grandfather taught me about the sky. At night he would take me out walking in the paddocks behind the government house we
lived in on the Reserve. He’d tell me to look up at the sky while he took a pouch of tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette. Pop would stay quiet until he’d finished his smoke, a habit he stuck with long after the advertisements on TV warned that people who smoked were going to die. Only when he’d finished would Pop point one of his nicotine-stained fingers at the stars and tell me that a night would come sometime in the future when the stars would save me. He’d wave a hand in the air, smile at me and raise his eyebrows like some cheeky kid sharing a secret with a friend. But the secret was his alone, seeing as I didn’t have a clue what Pop was on about.

  The grog was banned on the Reserve back then, but Pop could always find a way to get hold of it. He loved the drink. Too bloody much, my mum used to say. The fool has cooked his brain. Most in my family were teetotallers. Some had jumped on the wagon needing the fear of the Old Testament for support. Not Pop. He never feared the drink or the Bible, but he knew the grog did him harm nonetheless. This girl he would sometimes say, particularly when he was on the charge, I love her, but sometimes she doesn’t love me.

  Mum was working on the egg line in those days and it was Pop’s responsibility to keep an eye on me. He did a captain’s job when he was sober, but when he’d had a day out with the drink he’d sometimes forget all about me and wouldn’t bother eating himself. I’d get hungry and take off for the supermarket, thieving ice cream and sweet biscuits, or on a good day, a packet of lollies.