Outside a tinfoil moon shimmers and the grey day has faded. Inside Martha there is a world of turmoil that has reinforced her weirdness into most bizarre dreams. There hasn’t been a night free of dreams, not in living memory, not for Martha. But, as you may or may not know, this is true of all of us. Conversely to how unsettling they can be, they are a fail-safe for sanity.
Only mad people don’t dream.
This is, I think, because it keeps the brain, or whatever, going through times when we have no stimulus. This is why boring people don’t daydream when they’re not thinking, and interesting people do. It’s why intelligent kids can’t concentrate in lessons; because their natural survival skills tell them to occupy themselves – in case it gets any duller and they fall into a coma.
So Martha has spent a lot of time dreaming and is currently in bed – picturing effortlessly a deserted house. Near the window of an upper storey hall she can see a blonde child facing its reflection and concentrating. Behind her, across the empty, dusty floor is her father – holding a flatcap. Near the door there is a tall and nasty looking man. That’s all you need to know about them yet. In the glass outside the girl can see trees, darkness, gravel, almost unseeable in the gloomy distance below. As well as this, and appearing slowly through layers of age and window grime, a face. This head is made entirely out of charcoal, all cracked and chipped, and stuck on. Inside there may be flesh, but inside the mouth is dark, so she can’t see. The little girl in the dream knows that she has been waiting for this, and her father can’t see it. The man in the doorway is hidden, and wants the girl to do the talking. But the head talks instead. Sleeping Martha doesn’t hear what is said now. She is watching with interest at how the head stopped being a reflection or an image on the glass, or an apparition, and became a solid, squelching lump on the dust grey ceramic sill in front of the child.
The face is turned inward, into the room, slightly away from the dream girl, so it’s eyes have to strain at the corners to keep her in their line of site. She notices this too, but no one is moving. Martha has noticed that to make the face more scary the bottom lid of its eyes have been taped down under the charcoal, and the gap has been filled in with yellow sand. It’s teeth, just visible, are yellow too. It has no hair.
Upon waking it reminds her of a dream she had where her father stood in her doorway, smiling, with one ok eye, and one disappearing eye. As she had stared at it the pupil got smaller, then the iris, till the white was inhumanly prominent. Then the skin, devoid of hair, had wriggled up and ate up the socket. No gap, no dip, just skin, with a wriggling, circular tear in the middle, where the eye should be. It had soon widened out again, but it made Martha feel very ill, and she couldn’t look at it any more. The rest of the face had been so detailed.
This lead us to think of the discussion about dreams that we had with him afterwards. He mentioned a dream he had had, when he was very little, about Jesus. I had had a dream about the devil once, and eyes were important in this too. Michael’s dream about Jesus was just a normal man, sweet and friendly, but with thin plastic-y sacks for eyes, under lidless skin, filled with writhing maggots, as maggots often are. Writhing.
I’ve got to get up and go to college, ugh, I’m not going to bother today, it’s practically the end of term anyway. Last night was so sad, we got so cold waiting for the train and it never came, never
came, I feel sorry for Cynthia.
Ahhh poor Me. I was listening to Martha sleep last night, when she got back in, she had another dream. My dad’s name is Michael, me and Martha, and Cynthia all live here with dad most of the time. My dad, not her dad, not stupid screaming Cynthia. Cynthia doesn’t have a father. Well. I’m quite hungry, so it’s eclairs again for breakfast.
I try on different bras for a while. And I mimse around the room playing Leonard Cohen songs on the computer. I’m thinking about food again. It’s three o’clock. Dad’s students bring round pastries in the morning before they go off to find photographical certainties in the computer room. I used to think that everywhere you went you were required to bring pastries or cheese or drink.
Cynthia thinks she might go out and meet Ernie today, at the coffee shop on the corner by the Church. But I am tired of Cynthia. She ate lunch with me today, and we ate too much sugar, now I feel ill. She told me what she thinks of me. How boring I am, I don’t do anything. How she doesn’t want me to spend all my time with Ernie, Ernie being HER friend.
Cynthia walks out of our house door, and down three small stone steps to the road. She sidles through a gate further down and onto the main road, where she weaves about in vague wanderings until she decides to cross. Later she will walk back the same way, but she’ll fall over, and panicking return to the park. She was meeting up with Ernie and Phil and some girl. The girl was blonde, she is irritatingly pretty, but in a slightly emaciated way.
I can’t be bothered to explain their conversation, it was boring, about music, and it’s not music I know. Cynthia likes singing, but the emaciated girl is actually in a group, and everyone is fawning all over her. They drop a few tabs that night and the panic of falling is that way induced. That’s that.
They were off to a club after that, off to see the emaciated girl’s band. I was off babysitting for Genevieve at the park all day. I took a short way round, took the station road past the pigeon funeral outside the kebab place. It was sad, seeing the matted feathers and black blood. I saw them the moment I entered the park, Simon was working, Genevieve was about to try for another job, so I sat with Peter for the afternoon, watching him chase the dirty pigeons and throw gravel at the park keeper’s house. He’s eighteen months old. I never have to do much, because he entertains himself well. Sometimes I write poetry about the park. I spent all last summer here, not the whole thing, but most of it, reading Charles Bukowski’s Ham on Rye.
Today I have Sylvia Plath still on the go. It’s getting a bit icky I think, the girl was practically raped at a party. However, these kind of novels are infinitely superior to happy insane rambly go nowhere books, I don’t like the happy writers, too faux deep and eternally surrounded by people they think are great. I just can’t read Jack Kerouack.
But it doesn’t matter, the day goes well.
