Animals - Keith Ridgway

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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. Unlike K, I remained fully clothed. My garden was deserted. When I did eventually find the door, my re-entry was blocked not by a policeman but by the same small boy, except this time he was naked. He told me that someone had stolen the diseases. At that point I became aware that my pockets were filled with vials. I woke up.

      Unsurprisingly, I think, I found this dream quite disturbing. I remember when I awoke from it that I awoke completely – I was immediately fully conscious and alert, and every detail of the dream remained as vivid as reality. I knew that I had had a dream that had left a huge impression on me, but for those first few moments I was not sure why. I lay there in bed, staring at the ceiling, going through it several times, confirming to myself that I remembered everything – that there were no parts of it which had evaded me. It was after dawn – the room was filled with a soft grey light – but the alarm had not woken me, the dream had. I turned to look at the alarm clock, and despite the fact that the radio alarm clock sits at K’s side of the bed and that therefore, by turning my head, I saw K directly for the first time since waking up, I honestly believe that it wasn’t seeing K that made me realise the significance of the dream, but rather the actual physical movement of my head which somehow realigned my thoughts, so that I recognised that what I had just dreamed was, largely speaking, not my dream at all. It belonged to K. The time on the clock was 06:13.

      I couldn’t get back to sleep that morning. It didn’t even occur to me to try in fact. I got up, as quietly as I could, and I went into my office and sat at my desk and wrote out, quickly, the details of my dream. I also drew rough sketches of what I had seen, recreating, as faithfully as I could, the boy in the blue pyjamas as he led me towards Dr Harkin; Dr Harkin himself, leaning from the window as he talked to me about my health; the garden, from several different angles, with its paths and flower beds and the small fountain at its centre; and finally the door back into the building, and my way blocked by the boy. All of this I did in a kind of daze, determined that I would record it all before it left my mind, as it inevitably would. Strangely, it never has left my mind. But perhaps the simple act of putting it all down on paper ensured that.

      When K finally got up – astonished to find me at my desk so early – I made some coffee, and while we drank it I recounted the dream. As I related each detail in turn I watched K’s face for the signs of recognition, surprise, even shock. But there was no such reaction. There was nothing. Nothing at all but a sleepy shrug. I was dumbfounded.

      —Does none of that ring a bell?

      —Ring a bell? No. Should it?

      —Are you serious? Have you forgotten?

      —Forgotten what?

      —Just the other day, at this exact time, you sat there, where you’re sitting now, just like that, drinking coffee, in your dressing gown, and you told me the same dream.

      K considered me, bewildered.

      —I did?

      —Yes you did! Jesus! I don’t believe you’ve forgotten.

      —I can’t, well … I do remember telling you about a dream … I do remember that. But I don’t … Really? Tell me what you dreamed again.

      So I did. I went through the details once more. K was silent, but this time I was sure that there was some recognition, that I was not mad, that something odd had indeed happened.

      —God. That’s a bit creepy. I do remember. It seems very like my dream. Yes. The doctor at the window. The little boy. The policeman.

      —There was no policeman in mine though.

      —No. But still.

      We went through the details of K’s dream and the details of mine, and we sought out the similarities and the differences. The differences were all fairly plain, obvious, matters of stark contrast, such as the atmosphere in the hospital at the beginning and, of course, the different endings. But the similarities – or more than that, the identicals – of everything else struck us both as peculiar in the extreme. We stared at each other, baffled, at a loss to explain it. What did it mean? Then I went to my desk and got the sketches I had made. K went through them one by one, examining each for several seconds before commenting.

      —No. This isn’t the boy I dreamed of. Mine was a bit chubby. He had curly hair, freckles. Yours is a bit, what, blond and blue-eyed?

      —Yes. He was thin too. A bit spectral, I suppose.

      —Well. Who’s this? Is this the doctor? Mine had no beard. Mine had glasses and no beard. And you have yours wearing a doctor’s jacket, is it? I can’t remember what mine was wearing. I suppose he would have been. I can’t remember. The window looks about right. The brickwork on the wall looks right. I think I remember ivy though. Or do I? Ivy, or high bushes or something.

      —Look at the garden ones.

      K looked at them, and immediately frowned.

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