Diana’s invited me to meet her at the university where she’s based. It’s mid-September, just before the students return. I try to see that as a good omen. A fresh term, a new page. The chance to begin again.
“Take a seat.”
The office we’re in is cramped and airless, with breeze blocks for walls and not enough light. The whole place feels distinctly correctional, so I angle my chair toward the door. Just in case.
She introduces herself, asks how she can help. Though not unfriendly, her tone’s brisk and she speaks at a clip. She must be midfifties, yet she doesn’t seem nearly eccentric enough to be a professor. She has an ergonomic chair, for one thing. And with those Buddy Holly glasses, black skinny jeans, and canvas high-tops, she could easily have just clocked off from brainstorming straplines at an ad agency.
“Steve said he spoke to you. About my . . . condition.”
Unnerving: she’s scribbling on a notepad already, not looking at me. “You say you’re psychic?”
“Well, I don’t ‘say’ I am. I am.”
She nods just once. Doesn’t comment.
I shift awkwardly in my very un-ergonomic chair. “Is this . . . anything you’ve come across before?”
“Not personally. Can you tell me a bit about what you experience?”
In my mind again, a cliff edge. That doctor at uni, a sneer on his flaky lips. But I’m here now. So I take a breath, remind myself Steve’s already told Diana everything. And still she agreed to meet me.
I start with something simple. My dream last night. Tamsin, Neil, and Amber on a half-term trip to the local safari park in six weeks’ time. (Lions and tigers no credible threat, though monkeys cause minor damage to Tamsin’s car. I guess I’ll use YouTube to help forewarn them nearer the time.)
I keep talking, move on to Luke and my mother. To Poppy and the car accident, my sister’s pregnancy. I tell her about the not-sleeping and the tortured nights. About my dad. And then I tell her about Callie, about what I know will happen a few short years from now. Unless Diana can help me. Unless she can do something.
“I only dream about the people I love,” I reiterate.
The scientist in her flinches.
“Steve mentioned something about . . .” I look down at my notebook. It’s open in my lap, for prompts. “. . . my temporal and frontal lobes. And my right hemisphere?”
“Have you ever had a head injury, or a serious illness?”
“Never.”
“Does anything ever slip through the net? I mean, do significant things happen that you haven’t dreamed about?”
“Yes. All the time. I can’t see everything. There’s so much I don’t know.”
“Have you ever dreamed anything that hasn’t . . . come true?”
“Only if I take some sort of action. Do something to stop it happening.”
She doesn’t delve into what that might entail, asks instead about my medical history.
“Well.” Eventually she looks down at her notes and circles something (I’d kill to know what). “I’ll make some inquiries with my colleagues. We could potentially explore funding to carry out some research, subject to ethical approvals.”
“How long would all that take?”
She sidesteps the question slightly. “We’d have to look at funding cycles, decide whether to make an interdisciplinary application. That’s if you’re happy for me to share your information with my colleagues, make some initial inquiries?”
“Yes,” I say dully. But though I came here to ask for it, I feel strangely wrong-footed by the idea of scrutiny. Like I’ve been trapped somewhere dark for so long, I need easing into the dazzle of daylight. I try to refocus. “So . . . you think you might be able to help?”
After all these years, I’m still not sure I dare believe it.
Diana leans back in her chair as far as ergonomically possible. Bafflingly nonchalant, she glances again at her notes. Taps the tip of her pen against them. “Well, that depends on what you mean by help. Evidently we can’t change the future for you. But perhaps we could do something with the dreams themselves.”
“You mean, stop them happening?”
“At this stage, I really couldn’t say.” She clearly won’t promise something so outlandish as restoring me to normal.
A thought toboggans through me. I’ve been so fixated on preventing the dreams, I’ve barely stopped to consider what that would actually achieve.
Because if Diana can’t help Callie, is there even any point? Ever since I dreamed about her death, it’s Callie I’ve been worried about. Not my own jumble of lopsided brain cells.
“Something I haven’t asked,” Diana’s saying. “Does anyone in your family share your . . . condition?”
Inside my mind, a key begins to turn. “I . . . I’m not sure.”
“I’d like to run through your family history as a starting point.”
My breathing becomes rigid, mechanical. Why hasn’t this occurred to me before now?
I’m not even your father!
“Actually,” I say suddenly, shutting my notebook and getting to my feet, “don’t share this with anyone just yet. I’d like some time. To think everything over.”
“Take all the time you need.” Her tone implies she’s got a ton of other research on her desk that she’d frankly find far less of a ball-ache.
“Thank you for seeing me.”
“Give my regards to Steve,” she says. But I’ve already disappeared.
I walk back through the concrete maze of the university campus toward the car park. The place is eerily quiet, except for the whistle of an autumn breeze between the buildings.
Questions are strobe-lighting through my mind.
I’ve been focused on finding a cure for so long that I’ve never stopped to think about what would follow. Maybe cutting off my dreams would leave me worryingly adrift. Like the implausible anti-climax of a lottery win, the fingertip fear of a house offer accepted. Be careful what you wish for.
Because maybe what I’m actually wishing for is a way to stop the future from happening. And no academic in the world can help me with that.
The only person who can do that is me.