The Interpretation of Dreams

Dr Selznick asked the lady opposite whether she would prefer to kick off her shoes and lie on the couch. The lady opposite knows she has holes in her socks so declines. The walls are painted a sumptuous shade of eau-de-nil and she notices that all the leaves on his cheese plant are serrated, unlike hers. She approves of his style. It is old-school and unpretentious, and he writes with a fountain pen. This object, once so commonplace, fills her head with a plangent nostalgia. 

‘So, Emily Davison. Why is that name familiar?’ he asks.  

‘She was the suffragette who ran in front of the king’s horse at the Epsom Derby in 1913,’ she says mechanically, because she has said it a thousand times at least. 

‘Ah yes! Poor woman,’ he says.

‘Poor horse,’ she responds. 

She wonders if she has done the right thing booking this appointment, but there is something transfixing about paying for someone’s undivided attention. This never happens. It is a pleasure which must be paid for. He smiles at her and she realises that he has a nice face. He is flirting with a little sandy beard and he is, as her son might say, built. 

‘Would you say you were a fanciful person?’ he begins. ‘By that I mean, do you believe in the paranormal, do you visit fortune-tellers, are you a believer in cosmic forces … like karma, for instance?’

She is not about to waste this precious time by querying his prompts, and so she tells him that, 1. She tries very hard not to believe in ghosts because she doesn’t want to be haunted. 2. She has visited fortune-tellers in the past, but only because they are the only other practitioners where you are the single focus, and 3. No. She doesn’t believe in karma. It is simply coincidence when bad things happen to bad people and good things happen to good people. It is just religion’s way of keeping people in line so that they can look forward to the prize money. It helps with the wonders and the terrors of existence.

‘Very good,’ he murmurs, writing something down. She settles herself in the lavish pleather chair and assumes that she has passed a sanity test with her replies. 

‘And now tell me about this dream?’

‘It started perhaps thirty years ago,’ she began. ‘It’s hard to explain it —'

‘All dreams are hard to explain.’

‘Yes, I suppose they are,’ she says, feeling slightly mesmerised by this man with the fountain pen. ‘Well, I don’t always remember the specifics of it. There have been perhaps three times when I have recalled certain images. And it is not in real time, but it concerns something that I may have done years ago, when I was a teenager or maybe early twenties.’

‘Would you describe it as a nightmare?’ he asked. 

‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘The feeling I have when I awake is nightmarish, but as I say, the dream itself is fragmentary. It’s more about the waking than the sleeping, if that makes sense.’ 

‘I think so.’

‘Well, when I wake up, I am absolutely convinced that at some time in my younger days, I killed someone. The three times I have recalled elements of it, the crime has always happened in or around the house I grew up in. Once it was a pile of rubble in the back garden. Once it was the cupboard in my old bedroom. And the other time was on the old railway line behind the house.’ 

‘Do you dream about the … murder?’

She shakes her head. ‘No. It is the aftermath I dream about. You see, I know where the body is, and so something happens to trigger a fear of discovery. Someone moves into my old house and decides to dig up the garden. Or someone decides to clean out the cupboard in my bedroom. That sort of thing. I know that, after all these years, I’m about to be found out.’ 

‘And who do you think you have killed … in your dream?’ he smiles. 

‘I have no idea, but I think, I think it must be another young person. A male. But you see, although I was a little free with my favours in those days, nothing terrible ever happened to me. Everything was amicable and freely given. Whatever the cause of this dream is, I don’t think it is sexual. Or perhaps I did something when I was out of my mind on something.’

‘Did you take drugs,’

‘Never. But I used to drink a lot.’

He pours a coffee and passes it to her. Brown sugar lumps, nice touch. 

‘So,’ he says. ‘Your dream is about the fear of discovery rather than the commission of the murder?’ She nods. ‘And on a scale of 1 to 10, how much does that thought distress you?’

‘Ten,’ she says immediately. ‘It’s horribly powerful. I know that it’s extremely unlikely I’ve killed someone. It’s just not me, really. I’m not placid, but I’m never moved to extreme emotions either. I don’t think I’ve so much as shouted in the street. But having said that, if the police knocked on my door this afternoon and arrested me for an historic murder, I’d go without complaint. I’m simply not one hundred per cent sure I’m innocent. It’s like living with a creeping dread. That’s the only way I can describe it.’ 

He is silent for some time, scratching away with his pen. Eventually she is compelled to ask him whether the dream is common.  

‘It is not uncommon,’ he said. ‘I’m sure we can get to the bottom of this, but we’ll need another session.’ He raises an eyebrow, perhaps wondering if she can afford it. Perhaps he can tell she has holes in her socks. 

‘Of course,’ she says, and they make arrangements for the following week. 

*****

This time, Emily is wearing new socks and so she takes the couch option. It negates the need for direct eye contact. She supposes this is where the nitty gritty begins. 

‘Tell me about your childhood,’ he says. 

‘It wasn’t much fun,’ she says, looking at the ceiling. 

‘When did it stop being fun?’ he asks.

‘I’m not sure it ever was. My father left when I was about four. It was still quite uncommon in those days. The last thing he did before he left was to show my brother where the stopcock was. My mother was only about twenty-seven then, and she was very attractive. Almost immediately, all the women in our street stopped talking to her. She had become a threat, I suppose.’

‘That must have been very hard for you all.’

Emily feels as if she is going to cry, so she bites her lip. ‘I was just a little girl. I had no concept of that. I recall children making fun of us because we had free school dinners, but we must have got used to it. When I talk of my mother, to you, it’s with hindsight. All the way through my childhood I was insensible to her feelings.’

‘That is normal for children,’ he reassured her. 

‘Umm. I have always suspected that other daughters would have been kinder.’ She sighed, deeply. ‘Much of it has been lost, probably because I don’t want to remember. I know that I walked into her bedroom one day and her mattress was soaked with blood. She went away for a while, and it was only much later that I was told she’d had to have an emergency hysterectomy. She was barely thirty, and she had no one to talk to about it; no one to support her through this enforced menopause. When I was seven, we moved to Lancashire. My mother’s parents lived there, and we all squeezed into their bungalow. I shared a double bed with her, and one morning I woke up to find myself covered in vomit. It was my mother’s. Unable to get her usual vodka, she had taken to drinking white spirits, and the bottle was under the mattress.’ 

‘Was she trying to kill herself?’ he asked. 

‘I don’t think so. She was an alcoholic by then. I think she just needed to drink something and she couldn’t buy it in front of her parents.’ 

‘So you’re remembering certain images quite clearly,’ he said, bringing her coffee. 

‘Yes, and all of it is bad.’

‘Was she ever aggressive with you?’

‘God no! She was placid. For most of my childhood she was asleep with a bobble hat on. She listened to Edith Piaf all the time. After a while she stopped feeding us. It’s funny, but I don’t recall us ever being hungry. I think me and my brother just lived on toast and cereals. We were healthy, in any event. There is one memory that …’

‘Please,’ he said. ‘You must try to say it out loud.’

‘I remember coming home from school and she wasn’t there. And what I remember the most is that I wasn’t worried about her. I was furious. There was no food in the house and everything was in darkness. After about an hour, she came home laden with Christmas shopping, looking completely beat. She had a nosebleed. And it was only much later that I realised how difficult it all was for her. Taking the bus, carrying it all home, no husband to help, not much money and a brat for a daughter. I just shouted at her and went to my room.’

‘Does that memory disturb you?’

‘Yes. They all do. I was unpleasant to the very last.’

‘What else?’

‘Too much to mention. It was all miserable. When I was sixteen or seventeen, she just packed her bags one day and left for London. She got a job at the Waldorf Astoria for a while, but they eventually fired her, presumably for drinking, and she ended up in a small basement flat in Pimlico.’ 

‘Did you visit?’

‘Yes. I would stand at the door for ages, waiting for her to answer. Sometimes she would pretend she didn’t know who I was. I remember on one occasion she was actually sober, and I realised that I hadn’t seen that before. My entire memory of her is that she was always drunk. Anyway, she went to the toilet and when she came out, just a minute or two later, she wasn’t sober anymore.’ 

‘When the liver is chronically damaged, it takes an alcoholic seconds to get drunk,’ he said. 

‘Yes. That night I went out. I’d made some friends there during previous visits. When I returned, my mother was asleep. I can’t quite remember why, now, but I slept on the floor in her bedroom. I woke up to her stroking my face, and I pretended to be asleep. I often wish I hadn’t done that. I should have said something.’

‘Was that that the last time you saw her?’

‘Not quite. I saw her once more. I travelled up to London with my brother, his girlfriend and his girlfriend’s mother. There is an image … a tableau, that is as clear in my mind as if it happened yesterday —’

‘This is difficult for you. Take a tissue.’

‘Thanks. We were in Hyde Park and it was early spring. It was sunny but a bit chilly, which is the way I like it. I was striding ahead catching admiring glances and feeling pretty good about myself. I was a good-looking girl then. The other members of the party were straggling behind, presumably because my mother wasn’t walking too well by that stage.’

‘You were angry with her.’

‘Always. At some point, the mother of my brother’s girlfriend tapped me on the arm, and I marvelled at the sweetness of her face and mostly her normal, workaday sobriety. She said to me —’

‘What did she say to you?’

‘She said that my mother was crying out for me, and that if I didn’t go and walk with her, and slip my arm in her arm, I would never forgive myself.’ 

‘And you never have.’

‘I never have. It actually gets worse.’ Emily was tired of lying down and sat upright, aware that her head was throbbing. ‘She called me the day before she died. I have no idea how she got my work number, but I remember it was strange hearing her voice over the phone. I don’t think we ever had a phone conversation before. Anyway, she told me that she had been mugged and she had no money. Would I come to London and loan her fifty quid? She had no money for groceries.’ 

‘But you didn’t do that.’

‘No, I didn’t do that. I told her to fuck off and put the phone down on her. That’s what I did do. And the next day she died on the settee. A Polish man who lived upstairs told me that she had, indeed, been mugged and that he had leant her money. She was, he said tearfully, a great friend to him. A truly lovely, sad woman. He looked at me like I was a piece of shit, which of course I was.’ 

She told him she needed a cigarette and he, surprisingly, led her to the fire escape and smoked with her. It was strewn with psychoanalysed cigarette butts. 

‘You were the child of a chronic alcoholic. It takes serious drinking to be dead at forty-five,’ he said.

‘I know. It was very fucked up, but other people have it worse.’

‘Other people don’t matter,’ he said. ‘This dream of yours is quite obvious, really.’

‘Is it?’

‘Yes. Emily, you haven’t murdered anyone.’

‘That’s good.’

‘But you think you killed your mother, which is why this elusive ‘body’ is always somewhere close to your childhood home. The body is hers. The creeping dread you feel is guilt. Interestingly, you are disconnected from the ‘murder’ itself, but your preoccupation is with being discovered. Of the embarrassment it would cause. I am not suggesting you should be a porous emotional bucket, but it is important to be honest about your feelings. You are trying to tough it out, like you had to do when you were a child. Nothing to see here ….’ 

Emily touched the railings and looked at the carpark below, the business facade of the high street shops. And then, quite loudly, she said,

‘I’m sorry mum. I’m really, really sorry.’ 

He showed her a way out through the carpark. ‘I don’t think that dream will trouble you anymore,’ he said. 

‘Thank you.’

‘And tell your children. When you get home. Tell them everything you’ve told me. Make them understand that every time they tell you to fuck off, it will come back to haunt them when you’re gone. And then some good might come of it.’ 

When she reached the bottom of the fire escape she looked up. He was till there, watching her and lighting another cigarette. ‘You’re good at your job,’ she called out. 

‘I know,’ he replied.