Bad Dreams and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley

Author:Tessa Hadley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

Bad Dreams

A child woke up in the dark. She seemed to swim up into consciousness as if to a surface which she then broke through, looking around with her eyes open. At first the darkness was implacable. She might have arrived anywhere: all that was certain was her own self, lying on her side, her salty smell and her warmth, her knees pulled up to her skinny chest inside the cocoon of her brushed-nylon nightdress. But as she stared into the darkness familiar forms began to loom through it: the pale outline of a window, printed by the street lamp against the curtains; the horizontals on the opposite wall, which were the shelves where she and her brother kept their books and toys. Beside the window she could make out a rectangle of wool cloth tacked up; her mother had appliquéd onto it a sleigh and two horses and a driver cracking his whip, first gluing on the pieces and then outlining them with machine stitching – star shapes in blue thread for the falling snowflakes, lines of red stitching for the reins and the twisting whip. The child knew all these details by heart, though she couldn’t see them in the dark. She was where she always was when she woke up: in her own bedroom, in the top bunk, her younger brother asleep in the lower one.

Her mother and father were in bed and asleep, too. The basement flat was small enough that, if they were awake, she would have heard the sewing machine or the wireless, or her father practising the trumpet or playing jazz records. She struggled to sit up out of the tightly wound nest of sheets and blankets; she was asthmatic and feared not being able to catch her breath. Cold night air struck her shoulders. It was strange to stare into the room with wide-open eyes and feel the darkness yielding only the smallest bit, as if it were pressing back against her efforts to penetrate it. Something had happened, she was sure, while she was asleep. She didn’t know what it was at first, but the strong dread it had left behind didn’t subside with the confusion of waking. Then she remembered that this thing had happened inside her sleep, in her dream. She had dreamed something horrible, and so plausible that it was vividly present as soon as she remembered it.

She had dreamed that she was reading her favourite book, the one she read over and over and actually had been reading earlier that night, until her mother came to turn off the light. In fact, she could feel the book’s hard corner pressing into her leg now through the blankets. In the dream, she had been turning its pages as usual when, beyond the story’s familiar last words, she discovered an extra section that she had never seen before, a short paragraph set on a page by itself, headed ‘Epilogue’. She was an advanced reader for nine and knew about

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