I am in the bedroom of the flat in London where I used to live. It is a lovely room, facing south, with two large windows through which I can look down into the quiet street or up into suburban sky. In my dream, as in my memories, it is snug and warm, with sunbeams patterning the bristly brown carpet and dust particles dancing in iridescent swarms.
I sit on my bed with its crisp white sheets, and suddenly it is evening, the curtains are closed, and the room has become cold. Pete is there, with his head turned away so that I see only his profile. Someone else is also in the room, a woman in a short skirt and knee-high boots, with long straight brown hair cut across in a fringe. (I think the boots are unwise, because the woman has incredibly thin legs.) She is wandering about looking at my things, opening drawers, making comments on pictures, taking books off the shelves.
Pete, still not looking at me, is telling me that he is leaving me, that he regrets having to do it, but he knows I will understand.
I feel as though my heart, my lungs, my liver and my bowels have been gouged from the front of my body. Agony and emptiness invade me. I say nothing, cannot, in fact, say anything, just gaze at Pete’s craggy profile and at his beautiful mouth as he speaks sensible, reasonable words, with which I can find no fault and make no argument. I am in shock, but I am not surprised. “So it’s happened,” I think to myself. “What shall I do now?”
And I wake in the darkness, believing the dream, and lie in bed rigid and panting, but with my mind already beginning to work, to chew over the remnants of my world.
I do not know how long I lie there, mourning and making plans. At last, tiny things start to burrow into my consciousness, carrying the pricklings of doubt. I hear the central heating come on with its characteristic hammer and grunt. I hear the bathroom door open and close, and the click of a light switch.
“Was I really in London?” I wonder, still half inside my dream. “In the light, in my flat? Surely that’s impossible—that flat was sold a long time ago. And if I wasn’t there, did any of it happen at all?”
And I remember how, years ago, a couple of months before I sat my A levels, I had a similar practice dream. In total, compelling detail, I dreamt that I received my results, and got three Ds, which made my planned course and university place impossible. I awoke, desperately disappointed and ashamed, and lay in bed for at least an hour, trying to work out what to do. I weighed up the pros and cons of resits, and wondered if I should stop trying to be an academic, and go to music college instead. I pushed my mind back to the exams themselves, hoping for a clue as to what had gone wrong—and found I had absolutely no memory of taking them.
Then I looked out of my window at soft spring drizzle falling on small-leaved trees, and my heart leapt as I realised that the future was still a clean page, its words yet to be written. But I was always grateful for the dream. It had given me a chance to practise my emotions, to experience in advance what, if the worst happened, they would be.