YOU HAVE BEEN in my dreams again.
Ever since it struck me that if the ending of your novel was so true to life the rest might also be, my mind has taken to seeing you in compromising situations. Sometimes you are a child pornographer based in Paris (in my dream the Eiffel Tower looms over you and your camera) and just recently, last night in fact, you were in black evening jacket, against a villa with shutters of a particular shade of blue that is common in Provence (or at least the decor magazines will have you believe it so). Your companion, dressed in Coco Chanel, sat beside you (I recognised her as the Deputy Minister, one of the women in the Limbo Files you left behind) as you steered a silver convertible through the violet twilight of narrow rural roads. I watched you stop when a cyclist treated you with that typical Gaelic disdain of the rich, forcing you, the rich woman’s escort, to make way for his two-wheeled means of transport. She turned her small elegant head toward you as she crossed her legs, the expensive red sandal with its gold strap drawing your attention to her slim ankle, her half smile mocking. You rested your hand on her trouser knee − how intimate that gesture was! I felt the frisson that passed between you as a sexual pain.
With the random vagary of dreams, I found myself with you between her silken sheets that night. You could not know that I was there, but I was, in that rabbit hole of a sensed reality, watching as you covered her with strokes and kisses, shivering with desire, calling out to you not to do it, putting my own hand to my wet vagina, feeling my pubic hairs as if it was your hand feeling hers, recalling your touch through watching you give her sheer pleasure, hating her, hating you, trapped in my role of voyeur. Watching her cry out with a strangled shriek of release. How ugly she was, just then.
I woke, drenched in a thin sheen of sweat, my hands clenched around the sheets. The sound of booming waves seemed extraordinarily loud, as if I had washed up onto the cool wet sand of the shoreline. It was a warm night so I had drifted off to sleep with the windows open. The relief of coming back to known things! The sea, our Camps Bay apartment, Simone sleeping in the room next door. From the immense futon bed we chose together, the bad dream (that’s all it was, I reminded myself) came back to me with hyper clarity. As it did, a question flitted through my mind: Did the Deputy Minister contact you directly, or was it her PA who made the appointments with Monsieur Kaas, a favoured escort, just as she arranged for the drycleaner to pick up and deliver on certain days? Ever the project manager obsessed by the minutiae of plans.
How can one suffer from jealousy in a dream? You, the professional dreamer in our family, will say that it is entirely possible. But she is real enough. Your masculine presence at her side is captured in a press photograph taken on the quay at St Helena. There you are, unaware of the lens zooming in on the long dark hair curling on the collar of the white linen shirt bought in Paris, the one you iron with such care. You’re surrounded by expensive luggage and the unmistakable leather travel bag you brought into our apartment the day we moved in – so many signs, impossible to mistake one’s own husband.
Men hate women who weep.
Do you remember us then? How we were before you performed your first vanishing trick? Making love was the easy part. That was the part we did together. But we told each other nothing of who we were, of what had formed us in our childhood, as if we could live beyond that, outside its shadow. In Lady Limbo you wrote to tell me what you had done but you are missing in all those pages; you have again disguised yourself spectacularly well.
Through my open window I see distant stars lighting up the planet. We are lost stars; I will never be whole again without you.
You will smile to know that an unlikely companion soothes me on these restless adulterous nights: Bonaparte’s biography with its yellowed pages and small print, left behind on your bedside table, research for your trip to St Helena. It gives me a certain savage satisfaction to know he will spend his final days on the most remote of rocky outcrops, far from Josephine and France, the two declared loves of his life.
Will it shock you to know that I am almost grateful for the pain the green-eyed monster inflicts? Ever since Nicky’s funeral, when you told me with heartless insouciance that you were leaving and might never return, I have attempted to be truthful with myself where you are concerned. Will it cause you to doubt my love if I admit that your occasional faithless presence in my sleep is preferable to the insidious talons of my other dream, the recurring nightmare concerning our adopted daughter?
In my other dream I am Simone’s shadow, and I am also myself, watching her being taken further and further away from me. There are small changes in the scenery from time to time but the substance remains the same, a chauffeured car heading towards a flaming sun, and then poof … she’s gone. The chauffeur is faceless, just a uniform sitting behind the steering wheel; he is only a symbol; he could be anybody. The unfolding of events is so vivid, the scent of lavender so intense, the beating of cicada wings so insistent, that I wake up sickened and overwhelmed.
Will you find it unacceptable if I tell you that I am starting to forget you in other ways? It’s there in all the small things. I no longer walk into the kitchen expecting to find you there with your knives arranged around you. I have packed your almost new toothbrush (how you detest tatty toothbrushes) and your few other toiletries into a box and taken them to the shelter for street kids. Your clothes I long ago donated to the International Red Cross, imagining they might be of use to someone in a tsunami zone. I have adopted a minimalist attitude to sentimental excess − only the Zanzibar wedding photo remains on the sideboard, so guests are not made uncomfortable by your absence. So you see I am slowly starting to live without you.
Did I mention that I no longer look for your car? It bothered Elijah Bloom, the private investigator I hired to find you, who never managed to trace it. He said it was a puzzling loose end, and out of character with the rest of your plan – that you had made a point of disappearing from my life as cleanly as possible.
Cleanly?
Mr de Luc’s car was missing without explanation; Elijah couldn’t let it be. If it is true that ghosts are restless vestiges of unfinished business, then this might be something to keep Elijah hovering on the fringes of the world of the living.
Now that he is no longer around, I find myself obsessed with these small anomalies, the peculiar inexplicable gaps in the story of your disappearance. Meanwhile, in my everyday life I let you go: I try and shove you out of the flat we once inhabited together, spring cleaning and replacing the old with the new (the white leather suite was too much Bauhaus and not practical). I have bought a huge battered brown leather couch on eBay which acts as an island against the back wall upon which we and the cat can eat, sleep and do pretty much what we please, and from which Simone and I occasionally watch television together. Although these days it’s usually a DVD; the news is filled with dictators and despots and crumbling democracies, the animal programmes thrive on the predation of one species by another, or the same species upon itself, and the television comedy programmes are not funny any more. They have titles like ‘Drop Dead Diva’ and ‘Life on Mars’.
Everybody is either single or crazy in ways that don’t make sense to me.