I really feel very embarrassed bothering you like this.
I have this… dream.
Again and again, it comes to me in the night.
I am…
… air. Or not air; I am a cloud within the air. No, that’s not right. Not a cloud; that’s far too like the weather.
I am breath.
That’s what I am. My body is breath, my thoughts are wind, my fingers are the warm curling whispers from air vents, my toes are the rattling of old papers along the ground, my hair is the swaying of leaves and the singing of glass in the high towers.
I dream of the night, of the city at night, when everything is sleeping, that beautiful hour before the sun comes up when the roads are empty of all traffic except for the street cleaner and the late-night painter of lines; when the lights burn in empty offices where only the woman in rubber gloves moves between silent stations.
I sweep above the goods train creaking along empty railway lines; I dance through the tunnels where the engineers walk with grubby faces; I spin round the TV set of the lonely security guard in the too-quiet car park. I am everywhere they are, these people lost in the dark; and sometimes, to delight them, I tangle a plastic bag in my arms and a newspaper round my ankle and let it spin round me so that they may look up and see, in the detritus of the day, that I am there, walking beside them. That they are not alone.
And when the moon is hidden and the street lamps are flickering, I walk along the city wall, and it is as real to me as any paving stone in London. And outside the demons of the night howl and hammer and scream for admittance, all the nightmares that mankind has tried to lock away–the spectres and the ghouls, the ghasts and the ghosts, the devils with pointed faces and the wendigos clad in the skins of the fallen–and my dog is beside me, and he howls and growls, and they cower and are afraid, and I feel pity for them, and my dog does not.
That’s my dream.
Every night it comes to me, and sometimes even when I am not sleeping I think I hear him, my dog, howling, calling to me, trying to find me.
Then I wake and remember what I really am.
I am a cleaning woman from Wembley, widow of a loving husband, and I cook an excellent prawn madras.
All the rest is just… longing, I suppose. Longing, and wishing for something more.
Nothing I can’t live without.