By day Thomas puts on respectable clothes and goes to work. His income will pay for the roof over their heads, the clothes on their backs, the shoes on their feet, schools, holidays, teeth, etc. He feels virtuous and rather successful.
By night Thomas dreams that a violent wind has blown through their house, sweeping up all his and his wife’s underclothes and scattering them across the gutters of the suburb where they live. He wakes up anxious and excited.
By day Thomas works in the garden, digging the flowerbeds for spring, or pruning the roses, or mowing the lawn, or cutting the hedges to keep things in order for other members of the family to enjoy, if they should so desire. Resting on his spade amid strong smells of soil and yew, he feels that perhaps something has been achieved.
By night Thomas dreams an earthquake shaking the hillside and his wife transformed into a unicorn galloping madly around stones and clods and broken fences. He wakes in a sweat.
By day Thomas and his wife go to a furniture warehouse to order a fitted kitchen. It is a pleasure to examine the smooth stone and steel of the work surfaces and open the heavy doors of quality appliances with their padded rubber insulation and shiny interiors. Installed at home, these items will be handsome and practical. Signing an expensive order, both he and Mary feel quietly satisfied.
By night Thomas dreams a strange strong humming sound. He goes down the stairs from bedroom to first floor, from first floor to ground floor, from ground floor to basement, then down more stairs, narrower and narrower, and still more stairs, deeper and deeper, a pitch-black staircase, leading down down down into the belly of the earth. Now the hum is a roar and suddenly he is standing on the brink of an underground river that runs swift and black through a mass of stone beneath his well-appointed house. Preparing to dive in, he wakes with a start.
By day Thomas reads newspapers and magazines. He is concerned about the economic crisis. He is concerned about youth unemployment. He is concerned about levels of immigration. He is concerned about global warming. And about the fate of Bristol Rovers, his old home team, who are fighting relegation. Over breakfast, lunch and dinner he and his wife and children discuss these things and his mother’s cancer and listen to on-the-hour radio bulletins. It seems life is a constant battle to preserve the wealth and security they have accumulated.
By night Thomas dreams a gypsy boy running off with his laptop. After a long chase, he catches the boy and is amazed by his beauty, his long black ringlets and friendly, seductive smile. After the boy hands back the laptop, Thomas can’t find his way home. He is lost.
By day Thomas works out, running or swimming or rowing, to make sure his body is fit enough to keep doing all the work he has to do to make his income and pay for the new kitchen and keep the garden in order and worry about everything he has to worry about. Sometimes he pushes himself very hard, especially on the running track, checking his heart rate regularly through a device on his arm. Later, after a shower, he feels a welcome glow of self-righteousness.
By night Thomas dreams excavators toiling around a simply enormous boulder that is blocking the flow of a major river. It seems impossible that man-made mechanics could ever shift such a huge obstacle and he wakes with an angry energy on his skin.
By day Thomas plans advertising campaigns and contacts clients and writes letters and lunches with business associates and takes his car to the mechanic and has his blood tested for PSA and cholesterol levels and generally feels life is a hectic treadmill. But once every few weeks, by night, if he is lucky, he sleeps with his girlfriend and then there are no dreams because actually they hardly sleep at all, though after lovemaking Thomas tells her about his quakes and gypsies and tumultuous waters and wistfully she wonders why he doesn’t come and live with her since they are always so happy together.
He can’t, he says.
Returning home, Thomas guides his newly serviced Audi down the ramp to the impressive three-vehicle underground garage beneath the well-kept garden. A remote raises the big door and as the car enters a light comes on automatically, illuminating stacked firewood against one wall, bicycles on racks on another, a tool cupboard, packing cases, a bobsleigh, skates, backpacks, books, a red and white Vespa, tennis rackets, guitar cases, amplifiers, an electric piano, a broken scooter. Turning off the ignition, Thomas sits and stares at it all. How many reassuring things, he thinks, tokens of past life and pleasures. After a while the light goes off, but Thomas continues to sit and stare. In the subterranean quiet of his garage on the comfortable seat of the dark sedan he might be an Etruscan prince embalmed in his ship of death.
This is a good place to grow old in, Thomas thinks, a safe place to fall ill and eventually to die in, surrounded by loved ones and household gods.
But Thomas is not old. He is not ill. He is not dying. His beloved is not here.
‘I am full of life,’ he mutters out loud. ‘I am brimming with vitality.’