break? Leak? If they leaked would they leak inwards or outwards? How heavy is water? Why was I not crushed? Everything was above me. The shimmering surface, the lane ropes, the legs – kicking and still – the light. All of it above me. And the bubbles that came from my mouth fled upwards. And my hair lifted upwards. Everything natural wanted out of there. I glanced at a nearby drain or filter cover, whatever it was – an ugly sinister thing where you could easily trap a finger or a toe. The brightness was awful, the clarity utterly deceptive. I could see everything, and yet I suddenly expected a tap on the shoulder, a face in front of mine, a hand on my ankle – unseen before I saw it. I was swimming in a flooded hospital ward, a submerged asylum, a sunken abattoir, a place so full of ghosts that they touched every inch of my skin with their half-cold own.
Perhaps the fear is about sound. Sounds there are so hideously distorted. It is an inverted silence – all unidentified roaring and the thump of your own heart. It’s a muffling that suggests being buried alive; the prolonged, strangulated fade-out of dying.
Perhaps I watch too many films. Perhaps my fear isn’t my own at all but has been gifted to me by Hollywood. I’m sure my mind is full of a lifetime of images of trouble underwater. Of murder in the swimming pool. Of course, now that I try I can’t actually think of any. At all. Nothing specific. I can think of several celluloid underwater terrors at sea. But nothing in a swimming pool. I’m sure that they exist. They must. The relaxed swimmer, the pristine white, the lap of the water, the brightness. And then the underwater shot, the sudden odd angle, all sounds grotesquely altered, the light refracted, split and cutting, concentrated and threatening. The whiteness calling out for red. The sensual skin turned to vain vulnerability, the supporting water gone deep and thick and complicit. Everything suddenly stops.
My worries about dreams came back to me then, as my body came upright in the water and my feet sought out the tiles below me. For weeks I had puzzled over this. I think I’ve mentioned it. I had not been able to find a way of thinking about it that did not disturb and confuse me. It had started very simply over coffee one morning, as K and I sat in the kitchen with the radio on, not long out of bed. We talked about dreams. That isn’t unusual, but that morning I remember that our conversation had been prompted by a story on the news. The security forces all over Europe were reported to be very concerned about the theft from an Italian laboratory of various poisons and toxins and that kind of thing. Vials of anthrax or botulinum or ricin or something. And of course, their concern was that the theft had been carried out by terrorists who would seek to use these toxins in an attack. As we listened, K looked up at me and frowned.
—That’s very strange.
—What is? I asked.
—A lab, vials, all that.
—Oh, it’ll just be another false alarm. It’ll all turn up somewhere, or they’ll arrest another cell because of it. It’s the stuff that doesn’t make the news that worries me.
—No, that’s not what I mean. I mean it’s strange because I dreamed about it. Or something very like it. I think.
I said nothing. K often relates dreams to me. I’m used to it. It’s a regular thing. I don’t really like it – I never have. Something in me clams up slightly when someone, anyone – not just K – tells me their dreams. I seem to have an instinctual resistance to it. I sipped my coffee, and my mind focused more on the radio than on K.
—I was in a hospital, I think. All white and clean, and it had that disinfectant sort of smell.
—You can smell in your dreams?
—Apparently. In this one anyway. I was looking for someone. I’d come to visit someone, I’m not sure who. The place seemed deserted, there was no one around at all and there wasn’t a sound. It was all very creepy.
K smiled a little and squinted, trying to remember the details.
—Then this little boy appeared out of nowhere, wearing pale blue pyjamas, a real cute little kid, sleepy-eyed, straight out of a television ad for cough bottle or fabric conditioner or something, the only thing missing was the clutched teddy bear. And I asked him, could he tell me where I could find the Research Centre. I was very specific. And the boy told me that I would have to go and see Dr Harkin for my tests. And he took me by the hand, very solemnly, and led me down the corridor. The next thing I know is that I’m in a garden, outside the same building, and the little boy is gone, and there’s an elderly man leaning out of a window, on the same level as me, talking to me, and I know that this is Dr Harkin, and he gives me this long elaborate spiel about my tests not being very good, and that I may have to have my insides recounted, that there may have been some error in the counting.
K laughed at this point. Although I was hearing the account, and remembering it obviously, I had the definite sensation of not wanting to hear about the content of the dream, of wishing that K would shut up, that the recollection was profoundly uninteresting to me, at the very least.
—He told me to come in, and I had to find my way out of the garden into his surgery, but I couldn’t seem to find a door into the building. In the garden there were several people strolling and sitting around, and as I searched for the way back into the building, I realised that they, and I, were all naked. That didn’t seem to bother me, and nor did the fact that I couldn’t find a way back into the building.
Then the door was right there in front of me – obvious – but I couldn’t get in because it was cordoned off by the police. I approached a policeman and asked him, could I go in. He said no. He said that there had been a robbery and that all the diseases had been stolen. He said, Everyone is a suspect. Then he looked me up and down and said, The naked people are obviously not suspects as they have no pockets in which to hide the vials. And that was it. That’s all I remember. I am not a suspect.
—Good for you.
—Yes.
—Of course, all that means is that while you were dreaming about little boys and doctors and being nude in the garden, the radio alarm clock went off, and the news came on, and you heard the report about the Italian thing and you incorporated it into your dream.
K considered this and nodded, impressed.
—Very possibly.
I put my feet flat on the bottom of the swimming pool and pushed off. There was a rushing sensation, not unpleasant, although I could feel some kind of discomfort in my right ear, brought on by pressure no doubt. I reached out my hands for the surface and looked along the line of my arms. There was a horrible confusion of noise – a combination of my progress through the water, and changing pressures in my ears, and the general sonorous bellowing of underwater ambience. Well, that’s what I thought.
As I said, K telling me a dream was not an unusual thing, and given the fact that its similarity to the news report had been explained, it didn’t really stay in my mind. Other people’s dreams never do. I imagine that if you had asked me later that day, even an hour or so later, what K had dreamed of the night before, I would have been hard pressed to tell you. The only reason I now remember it so well is that, two nights later, I had the very same dream myself.
It was not exactly the same. The hospital I went to was not deserted, it was busy, and it was the same hospital in which my mother had a minor operation last year. In fact, in my dream it was my mother I was looking for, not the Research Centre. But, like K, I couldn’t find my way, until a small boy in pale blue pyjamas appeared and took me to see Dr Harkin. I too stood in a garden while the doctor spoke through a window. I’m not sure what he said to me, but it seemed to be about my own health rather than my mother’s. Like K, I could not find the door back into the building.
