Читать книгу Feather Boy онлайн | страница 17

You know how it is when there’s something niggling you, and you do your best to refuse it, chain it up in some dark and faraway place, only to have it come yap yap yapping back at you like some demented dog? Well, yap yap yap, here it comes again. Chance House.

“You can go there. Walk. It’s not far.”

I’m really not painting. I’m just waving a brush about. So I might as well – yap yap – go downstairs and get Mum’s road atlas. This is how she finds me, crouching over England with a piece of string in my hands.

“Geography prep?” she asks, practical as ever.

“Yap.”

“What is it?”

“Distance in miles from here to St Albans. How far do you reckon, Mum?”

“You’re the one with the string.”

“Right. Fine. Ninety miles. Would it be ninety miles?”

“Sounds about right.”

“Could we go there?”

“Why?”

Good question.

“Day out?”

She sits down, kicks off her shoes and puts her feet up on a little pouffe.

“Bit far for a day out,” she says. My mum is a small person, with a small face and a little puff of blonde hair. She looks exhausted.

“Can I get you a cup of tea?”

“God bless you, Robert.”

It’s only teabag tea but, the way she takes it, it could be water in a desert.

“I’d really like to go to St Albans. In fact, I think I have to go to St Albans.”

She shuts her eyes.

“Do you think we could?”

“Mmm.” She’s asleep. I lift the teacup from her lap. Where her skirt has ridden up I can see blood throbbing in her varicose vein.

In the kitchen I make myself a sandwich and then I return to my desk.

“It’s really not far,” yaps Edith Sorrel.

That’s when I decide to set the dream alarm. It’s not an exact science but it sometimes works for me. All I have to do is think about whatever it is that’s bothering me and then set the alarm for 3am. I’ve tried many different times of night but all my best results have come from 3am. Too early in the night and my dreams don’t really seem to have got going, too near the morning and they seem to be petering out. At 3am, I’m normally in the middle of some seething epic. As soon as the alarm goes, I start scribbling. I write down everything I can remember in my dream diary. Even the stupid and inconsequential stuff. Mainly that actually. I note all the colours, the people, the buildings, the looks, the feelings. But I don’t try to make sense of anything. In any case there often isn’t much sense to be made. But in the morning it’s different. Once or twice I’ve woken with some completely crystalline idea about a problem. An idea which often bears no relation to whatever I scribbled down in the night, but it’s still there like some perfect jewel on my pillow. Of course, it’s not always like that. Much more often I have to go back to the diary, reading and re-reading until something jumps out at me – a word, a colour, a phrase, a clue. Something to work with. Naturally, I always hope for the jewel. But somehow I can’t see that happening with Chance House.