Chapter 7
SEVEN
10 APRIL 2005
The dream. It came again last night and even though I’m awake now, the warm weight of the cat on my feet alive and reassuring and true, I can still feel its shadow. It clings to me like cobwebs, or like the veil of a bride before her father lifts it.
It makes me feel sick, bereft, ashamed.
Never tell people about your dreams, Orla, my grandmother used to scold, it’s boring and therefore rude. But no one except me will see this and why shouldn’t I be rude to myself?
I can go months, perhaps even years, without dreaming it. Sometimes I imagine I’m free of it at last, and then it comes for me again, the same as ever, only the details changing. Always, in the dream, I see her somewhere – sometimes in a familiar place, such as my kitchen; sometimes in a random location like a street I walked down long ago and believed I’d forgotten. Sometimes in a place that must exist only in my imagination.
Last night, it was in Spitalfields Market. Its vibrancy and clutter – the teetering racks of clothes; the shouts of the stallholders; the teeming tourists wielding cameras and students hunting for bargains; the smells of mothballs, incense, spicy food and stale sweat – were intensified in my sleeping mind into a frightening chaos, a dense thicket of sensation.
Then I saw her, just the back of her, same as always. I recognised her instantly even among the crowd, the shoulders of her coat and her flying dark hair as familiar as my own reflection in a mirror. That glimpse sent me hurrying after her, calling her name, desperate to catch her up this time, even though I never have before.
I shouldered desperately through the throng, my breath coming in gasps. I came close to her, then lost her again. The heel came off my shoe but I staggered on, her name rasping again and again in my throat.
I’m never in any doubt that it is her. I am always so sure that I would recognise her anywhere. And every time, I lose her. She slips away, lost to me in my dream just as she is in reality.
Every time, I wake feeling like this: achingly sad yet somehow purged, relieved that – at least until next time – it is over.
I can’t write any more today. I could fill three thousand pages, never mind three, without being able to describe this sense of loss, but at the same time I have no more words.
I will get up and feed the cat. I have decided to name her Maud, because I love the pilgrim soul in her.