Behind Her Eyes(62)

—I wake up with a gasp, upright in my own bed, sucking in deep breaths of air. I feel jolted awake, like in those almost-dreams of falling you get when on the cusp of sleep. My eyes dart around in the gloom, trying to shake my complete disorientation. I look down at my hands and count my fingers. Ten. I do it twice before I’m sure that this time I truly am awake. My lungs feel raw, as if I’ve been out and smoked twenty cigarettes in the pub as in the days of old, but I don’t feel tired. If anything, I feel weirdly energised given how emotionally battered I am and how tired I was when I went to bed. I’m thirsty though. Desperately thirsty. Wine before bed. I’ll never learn.

I get up and creep to the kitchen and drain two glasses from the tap and then splash my face. My lungs return to normal, the rawness fading. Maybe it was just some echo of the dream.

It’s only 3 a.m. and so I head back to bed, even though I’m not sure I’ll go back to sleep, and I pause at Adam’s door and look in and smile. He’s definitely home. That part wasn’t a dream. I’m about to close the door when the bear on the floor catches my eye. Paddington. Fallen out of bed. I frown and come in closer. The plastic cup on the bedside table is on its side and empty. The bear is soaked. This time I can pick Paddington up, and he’s heavily sodden. I look at Adam, my heart starting to thump faster. One arm is over his face and his legs are sticking out from the half kicked-off duvet.

It’s like a moment of déjà vu. Everything is exactly as I saw it in my dream when I went through the second door. But that can’t be right. I can’t have seen it. I was in a dream. But I couldn’t have known that he’d spilled his water and soaked his bear and that his arm was over his face. I wouldn’t have imagined those things. Adam is the soundest sleeper I know. He normally barely even moves, but stays curled up on his side all night. None of this is anything I would have pictured if I was thinking of Adam sleeping.

I don’t know what to think. I can’t make any sense of it. And then it strikes me. I must have sleepwalked. It’s a small moment of relief, of logic, and I cling to it even though it doesn’t feel true. I haven’t done that once since I started the lucid dreaming. But that must be what happened. Maybe I was sleepwalking and half woke up or something. Saw the room, then went back to sleep and carried it into my dream.

When I realise there’s no point in standing there staring any longer, I go back to bed and look up at the ceiling for a while. The whole thing has unsettled me, although I’m not sure why. The way I couldn’t touch the bear. My invisibility. That never happens in my ‘new’ dreams. I can eat, drink, fuck, whatever. How come I couldn’t pick up Paddington? How come I didn’t have hands? It’s weird. And it wasn’t like the other dreams. Despite my lack of body, the dream itself felt more solid. More real.

I must have been sleepwalking, I tell myself over and over. I mean, what other explanation can there be?





PART THREE





37




ADELE


We are two strangers in the house now, circling each other warily, and – at least on David’s part – there is very little pretence at anything else. We’re barely even civil. He grunts answers to my questions as if he’s devolved into some Neanderthal beast no longer capable of full sentences, and he avoids looking me in the eye. Maybe he doesn’t want me to see that he’s drunk most of the time. I think he’s saving all his ‘normality’ for work, and doesn’t have the energy for it at home.

He seems smaller – diminished. If I was the shrink I’d say he was a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown. My friendship with Louise has completely knocked him. No, that’s not quite right. Louise’s friendship with me has knocked him. She was his special secret thing and that’s been ruined. He’s been fooled.

Now that the initial shock of the discovery has passed, I know he blames me.

‘Are you sure you didn’t know who she was?’ he asked me last night, hovering in the doorway of our bedroom, not wanting to cross the threshold. ‘When you met her?’

‘How could I have possibly known she was a patient of yours?’ I answered, all wide-eyed innocence. A patient. His lie, not mine. He might have been drunk, but he didn’t buy my answer. He can’t put his finger on how I knew about her, but he knows I did. My behaviour’s confused him though – this isn’t my ‘form’. In Blackheath I was far more direct in my approach, except Marianne was nothing but a potential threat to my marriage. Louise is – well, Louise is the great white hope of our happiness. Louise is wonderful.

I hate acknowledging mistakes, but I have to admit I was probably too obvious in Blackheath. I shouldn’t have let my rage get the better of me – at least not so dramatically – but that was different. And anyway, it’s all in the past. I never care about the past unless I can use it for something in the present, and perhaps Blackheath will turn out to be useful, in which case it won’t have been a mistake at all. The past is as ephemeral as the future – it’s all perspective and smoke and mirrors. You can’t pin it down, can you? Let’s say two people experience exactly the same thing – ask them to recount the event later and, although their versions might be similar, there will always be differences. The truth is different to different people.