Just Dreaming

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  For all you dreamers out there

  All that we see or seem

  Is but a dream within a dream.

  EDGAR ALLAN POE

  “SO LET’S TALK about your demon. Have you heard his voice this week?” He leaned back, folded his hands over his stomach, and looked expectantly at her. She peered back at him out of those unusual turquoise-colored eyes that had captivated him from the first. Like everything about her, as it happened. Without a doubt, Anabel Scott was the most attractive patient he had ever treated, but that wasn’t what fascinated him so much. It was the fact that even after so many hours of therapy, he still couldn’t figure her out. She always managed to surprise him, to get him to drop his guard, and he hated it. Every time she made him feel he was inferior to her, he was upset—after all, he was the qualified psychotherapist, and she was only eighteen years old, and severely disturbed.

  But it was going well today. Today he was in control.

  “He’s not my demon,” she replied, looking down. Her eyelashes were so long that they cast shadows on her cheeks. “And no, I haven’t heard anything. Or sensed anything.”

  “Then that makes it—let’s see—sixteen weeks since you saw or heard the demon, or sensed his presence, am I right?” He intentionally let his voice sound a little superior, knowing that he was provoking her that way.

  “Yes,” she said.

  He liked her meek tone of voice and allowed himself a small smile. “So why do you think your hallucinations have gone away?”

  “I guess it could be…” She bit her lower lip.

  “Yes? Speak up.”

  She sighed and put a strand of her gleaming golden hair back from her forehead. “I guess it could be the pills,” she admitted.

  “Very good.” He leaned forward to scribble a note: ak, d.s., v., hr, vk. They were nonsense abbreviations; he was just making them up as he went along. Because he knew that she was reading them upside down and trying to work out what on earth they meant. With difficulty, he suppressed a triumphant grin. Yes, she had certainly aroused a sadistic streak in him, and yes, he had given up the proper professional approach to treating her long ago. But that didn’t matter to him. Anabel was no ordinary patient. He wanted her to acknowledge his authority at long last. He was Dr. Otto Anderson, and one day he would be medical director of this psychiatric hospital. The institution where she was presumably going to spend the rest of her life. “Pills are essential in the treatment of a case of polymorphous psychotic disorder like yours,” he went on as he leaned back again, relishing the expression on her face. “Therapeutically, however, we have done much more than that. We have identified your childhood traumas and analyzed the causes of your false memories.” That was a great exaggeration. He knew from the girl’s father that she had spent her first three years of life with a dubious sect that performed rites of black magic, but Anabel herself couldn’t remember anything. And his attempts to find out more by means of hypnotism—which he had used even though it wasn’t really allowed—had not been successful either. In fact, they knew no more than they had at the beginning of her treatment. He wasn’t even sure whether the causes of Anabel’s psychotic disturbance really did lie in her childhood; he wasn’t sure of anything about her. But never mind—what mattered was that she saw him as the experienced psychiatrist who could read her mind, the man to whom she owed all her insights. “So at last you are ready to accept that your demon existed only in your imagination.”

  “Stop calling him my demon.” She pushed her chair back and stood up.

  “Anabel!” he said sternly. And it had been going so well. “Our session isn’t over yet.”

  “Oh, yes it is, dear doctor,” she replied. “My alarm clock will go off any moment now. I have a date to see a course adviser about my studies, and I mustn’t oversleep and miss it. You’ll laugh, but I want to study medicine so that I can specialize in forensic psychiatry later.”

  “Don’t talk nonsense, Anabel!” A strange feeling came over him. Something was wrong. With her. With him. With this room. And why was the air full of the scent of his mother’s lily-of-the-valley perfume all of a sudden? He nervously reached for his pen. A date to see a course adviser about her studies? Ridiculous. They were in the closed department of the hospital, and Anabel couldn’t go anywhere without his permission, not even out onto the grounds. “Sit down again at once. You know the rules. Only I can end our sessions.”

  Anabel smiled pityingly. “You poor thing. Don’t you realize yet that your rules mean no more here than—what did you call them?—false memories?”

  He felt his heart miss a beat. There was something buried deep inside him, a thought or a recollection, information that he must bring to the surface. That was urgent because it was important. A matter of life or death. But somehow he couldn’t get at it.

  “Don’t look so shocked.” Anabel was already at the door, laughing quietly. “I really must go, but I’ll come and see you again next week. That’s a promise. So until then, sweet dreams.”

  Before he could say any more, she had closed the door behind her, and he heard her steps going away down the corridor. The little monster knew perfectly well that he wasn’t going to give himself away by running after her, thus showing everyone that he couldn’t control his patient. But this was the last time she’d act up with him that way. She wouldn’t end the session against his will again. Next time he’d enlist the support of some of the male nurses. Maybe he’d have her strapped down—there were a number of methods that he hadn’t exhausted yet.

  When he closed Anabel’s file and put it back in the drawer, he still had that faint lily-of-the-valley perfume in his nostrils, the scent that reminded him of his mother. And for a split second, he thought he even heard his mother sobbing as she called his name.

  But then the voice and the perfume both went away, and everything was the same as usual.

  1

  DESSERT WAS TAPIOCA pudding, which would have taken my appetite right away if the Rasmus problem hadn’t done it already.

  “Aren’t you going to eat that, Liv?” Grayson pointed to my tapioca, pale, translucent, and wobbly in its glass dish in front of me. He’d already wolfed down his own helping of lumpy slime with pineapple jam.

  I pushed the dish his way. “No, you’re welcome to it. One more British tradition that hasn’t swept me off my feet yet.”

  “Ignoramus,” said Grayson with his mouth full, and Henry laughed.

  It was a Tuesday at the beginning of March, and the sun shone in through the tall, poorly cleaned windows of the school cafeteria. It cast a delicate striped pattern on walls and faces, bathing everything in warm light. I even imagined I could catch the smell of spring in the air, but maybe that was just the large bunch of daffodils lying on the teachers’ table, where my French teacher, Mrs. Lawrence, had just sat down. She looked as if she’d slept even worse than me.

  So there was spring in the air; Grayson, Henry, and I had
grabbed our favorite table in the sunny corner near the exit; and I’d heard a little while ago that there wouldn’t be a history test tomorrow after all. In short, everything would have been just wonderful, if I hadn’t had the aforesaid Rasmus problem on my mind.

  “Sometimes tapioca pudding can be delicious.” Henry, who had sensibly skipped dessert, smiled at me, and for a few seconds, I forgot our troubles and smiled back. Maybe things would turn out all right. What did Lottie always say? There are no such things as problems, only challenges.

  Exactly. Think how boring life would be without any challenges. Not that it had been absolutely necessary to add an extra challenge to the pile of them already facing me, anyway. Unfortunately that was the very thing I’d done.

  It had happened on the evening of the day before yesterday, and I still had no idea how I was going to wriggle out of it.

  Henry and Grayson had been studying for a math test at our house, and when they’d finished, Henry had taken a little detour to my room to say good night to me on his way to the front door. It was late, and the house had been quiet for some time. Even Grayson thought Henry had already left for home.

  I was genuinely surprised to see Henry, not just because it was the middle of the night, but also because we still hadn’t gotten around to officially changing our relationship status from “unhappily separated” to “happily reconciled.” Over the last few weeks, we had silently gone back to holding hands, and we’d also kissed a couple of times, so you could have thought everything was back to the same as before, or at least well on the way there—but that wasn’t it. The experiences of recent months, and things that Grayson had told me about Henry’s love life before I came on the scene, had left their mark on me in the form of a persistent inferiority complex about my sexual inexperience (or “being so backward,” as my mother put it).

  If I hadn’t been so happy that we were close to each other again, maybe I’d have taken the trouble to analyze the feelings smoldering under my happy infatuation more closely, and if I’d done that, maybe I wouldn’t have thought up Rasmus in the first place.

  But as it was, I’d put my foot in it.

  When Henry had looked around the door, I was just putting in the new mouth guard for my teeth. My dentist, a.k.a. Charles Spencer, had discovered that I obviously ground my teeth in my sleep (and I immediately believed him), so the mouth guard was to keep me from wearing the enamel of my teeth away at night. I couldn’t tell whether it was working; mainly it seemed to make my mouth water a lot, so I thought of it as my silly drooling thingy.

  At the sight of Henry, I immediately tucked it between the mattress and the bedstead, without letting him notice. It was bad enough that my pajama top and bottoms didn’t match, and didn’t suit me all that well either, although Henry said he thought checked flannel was amazingly sexy. Which led to me kissing him, kind of as a reward for the nice compliment, and that kiss led to the next one, which lasted rather longer, and finally (by now I’d lost some of my sense of time and place) we were lying on my bed whispering things that sounded like lines from soppy song lyrics, although right at that moment they didn’t seem to me soppy at all.

  So our relationship status was clearly heading for “happily in love,” and I was inclined to believe that Henry really did think I looked sexy in checked flannel.

  But then he stopped in the middle of what he was doing, pushed a strand of my hair back from my forehead, and said I didn’t need to be afraid.

  “Afraid of what?” I asked, still feeling a bit dazed from all the kissing. It took me a couple of seconds to realize that it had just happened in real life, and not, as usual, in a dream where no one could disturb us. Which was probably why it felt so much more intense than usual too.

  Henry propped himself on his elbows. “You know what. Afraid it might all happen too quickly. Or I might expect too much from you. Or want you to do something before you’re ready for it. We truly do have as long as you like before your first time.”

  And then it happened. Now, in the bright light of the school cafeteria on a fine spring day, I couldn’t explain it to myself … well, I could explain it, sure, but unfortunately that made things no better. Anyway, Henry’s choice of words was to blame. That infuriating your first time.

  It was the cue that brought my inferiority complex into play, and it also dragged its friend, my injured pride, along with it. They were both firmly convinced that Henry was somehow sorry for me because of my inexperience, or at least the expression on his face sometimes very much resembled pity.

  Like at that exact moment, for instance.

  “Oh. So you think I’ve never … never slept with a boy?” I sat up and wrapped the bedspread more tightly around me. “I see what you mean now.” I laughed a little. “You took that virginity stuff seriously when you and the others were playing your demon game, did you?”

  “Er, yes.” Henry sat up as well.

  “But I only said I was a virgin so that I could play the game with you.” My injured pride was making me say things that surprised me as much as they surprised Henry. Meanwhile, my inferiority complex was applauding enthusiastically.

  I really liked the confusion on Henry’s face, and the way he raised one eyebrow. Not a trace of pity now.

  “We never really talked about it before,” I babbled, almost forgetting that I was telling downright lies, my voice sounded so convincing. “Of course I didn’t have as many boyfriends as you’ve had girlfriends, but well, there was … this boy that I went out with. In Pretoria.”

  Since Henry didn’t respond but just looked at me expectantly, I went on. “It wasn’t a great love or anything like that, and we only went out for three months, but sex with him was…” At this point, my injured pride suddenly switched off (damn it), and I was on my own again.

  And hating myself horribly. Why had I done it? Instead of using the opportunity for a genuine conversation, I was simply making everything worse. I instantly went bright red in the face because I saw no way of ending the sentence I’d just begun. Sex with him was … hello? Only now did I notice how intently Henry was looking into my eyes all this time. “Was … okay,” I muttered with the last of my strength.

  “Okay,” repeated Henry slowly. “And … what was this guy’s name?”

  Yes, you stupid injured pride, what was it? I ought to have thought of that before. The longer you hesitate before telling a lie, the less convincing it is. Any child knows that.

  So I said, quickly, “Rasmus.” Because it was the first name to occur to me when I thought of South Africa. And because I actually was a pretty good liar.

  Rasmus had been the name of our neighbor’s asthmatic chow. I used to dog-sit him, and for a hundred rands an hour, I took him and a pug called Sir Barksalot for walks with our own dog, Buttercup.

  “Rasmus,” repeated Henry, and I nodded, relieved. It sounded good. There could be worse names for imaginary ex-boyfriends. Sir Barksalot, for instance.

  To my surprise, Henry changed the subject at this point, although I’d already prepared myself for an interrogation. Or to be precise, he didn’t actually change the subject, he began kissing me again. As if he wanted to prove that he was better at it than Rasmus. It wouldn’t have made any difference if Rasmus had been real—no Rasmus in the world could kiss better than Henry.

  All that was two days ago now, and since then we hadn’t mentioned my imaginary ex-boyfriend again. Okay, so my inferiority complex had enjoyed its one tiny moment of triumph, but in the long run, the Rasmus lie was not good therapy. And that was why I had to contend with a sinking feeling in my stomach, even without eating tapioca pudding, and even though Henry was smiling at me.

  By now Grayson had vacuumed up my dessert and was looking hungrily around the cafeteria as if he expected to see a good fairy flying over to our table to hand out more dishes of tapioca.

  Instead of the good fairy, however, Emily swept past us, casting Grayson a glance for which she certainly ought to have had a firearms license. She�
��d have run down poor Mr. Vanhagen if he hadn’t saved himself by swerving toward the teachers’ table, while Emily went on her way to the counter where they served lunch, and where Grayson’s twin sister, Florence, was waiting for her.

  For several weeks now, Emily had been Grayson’s ex-girlfriend, and she had problems with that little syllable ex. I admired Grayson for his calm stoicism when he crossed Emily’s path. Even now he was just grinning. “I thought I’d had my day’s quota of scornful looks in English class.”

  “I think she’s upped the dosage.” Henry leaned forward to get a better view of Emily and Florence. “I’m no professional lip-reader, of course, but I’m just about sure she’s been telling your sister what you dreamed about last night. Wait a moment … the bunny-rabbit dream? Really?”

  Because winding Grayson up was always fun, and it also took my mind off my own problems, I went along with Henry at once. “You mean the dream about the fluffy toy rabbit? Do you think Emily will give you away?”

  Grayson put his spoon back in the dish and favored us with a mild smile. “How often do I have to tell you two that you’re wrong? Emily doesn’t know anything about the dream corridor. Apart from which she’d never go poking about in other people’s dreams. She’s far too sensible and realistic for that.”

  Unimaginative was more like it, but I couldn’t say so because Grayson had more to say. “I don’t know why the pair of you are always going on about it. I mean, nothing at all has happened for weeks now. That stuff is over and done with.”

  As always when he said that—and he said it fairly often, to convince himself that it was true—a part of me (the trusting part that liked a quiet life) hoped he was right. In fact, it was true that peace and calm had reigned in the dream corridors for weeks.

  “Arthur has learned his lesson. He’ll leave us alone now,” said Grayson firmly, and the trusting part of me that liked a quiet life immediately played the same tune: Right, we don’t always have to assume the worst! And people change. There’s some good in everyone. Even Arthur.