Graham Joyce: Dreamside

Lee inspected his face in the mirror and awarded himself a high slob rating. That man in the mirror, with the lantern jaw and the pouting bottom lip which girls had once found endearing, was now getting jowls. He could do with losing a few pounds. Would Ella be able to see the winsome, athletic, wise-alec twenty-year-old that he had once been?

It didn’t occur to him that Ella herself would have aged. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t thought of her in the decade since she had fled the university, putting two thousand miles and an even greater psychic geography between them; but in his mind she had remained always the same. Unforgettable Ella; delicious, hypnotic, superior, erotic Ella; Ella undressed, Ella with her clothes on. There came, in equal measure, deep tormenting sentimental memories and sharp sexual reminiscences. Ella vibrant with arch cleverness and smouldering undergraduate sexuality.

Memories clung to him like the tentacles of a deep-sea creature; or perhaps that was him, sucking at memories that should have drifted free long ago. But the problem was his. All relationships post-Ella had been held up to her light by way of comparison, and inevitably in those dazzling rays they palled. Scratch the surface of Lee’s feelings for any woman and you would find Ella, impossible to erase or surpass. What could others hope to do, when she ghosted the shores of his memory and seeded his dreams like that?

The only consolation to Lee, if consolation he was looking for, was that he knew that Ella could never get over him. They could live neither with nor without each other.

And now she had contacted him, after nearly thirteen years. He was going to meet her, and he was afraid, just as he knew she too would be afraid.

Ella Innes. Why did you have to come back?

Ella was late. Lee had been expecting her at around seven, and it was already after nine. He had spent two hours twitching in his armchair, jumping up from time to time to look out of the window. It had been dark for several hours and the winter sky was folded with snow.

He was physically afraid of meeting her: if she didn’t show up, he wouldn’t be in the least dismayed. He was already prepared to dismiss the morning’s telephone call as a phantom, another dream; it would be better, far better, if the whole thing had never really happened.

Then there was a roaring underneath his window. He leaped from his seat to see headlamps blazing in his drive, clouds of exhaust in the frosty air. Lee hurried outside.

She was already climbing out of her car, an open-topped vintage sports model. She wore a flying jacket three sizes too large and a red scarf wound around her neck. She closed the door and stood motionless in the dark, looking at him.

What were they supposed to do? What was appropriate? To hug her, of course; he wanted to, but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even look her in the eye.

“You came down in this?” he said surveying the car. It was a fully restored spoke-wheeled 1935 MG Midget. “With the top down? In the middle of winter?”

Her breath was visible on the cold air. “It’s broken. I couldn’t fix it.”

Lee walked around the car and began fussing with the convertible roof. “It’s probably just a clip,” he said.

“Lee,” said Ella gently. “Leave it.”

Lee looked down at his hands. He felt ridiculous. When he looked up, he saw that her eyes were fixed on his. “Of course. Let’s go inside.”

With the door closed behind them, Ella looked around her as if she used to own the house. When she nodded, it was as if to confirm that she found everything much as expected. Lee took her bag. “Your hands are freezing!”

Ella’s smile was a reflex. “It’s been a long drive.”

“Maybe a drink of something?”

“Yes, something, thanks.”

That was how she was; always ironic. Silver moon-and-stars earrings glimmered at her ears. They left momentary tracers in the air as she flicked her hair from her eyes. Her hastily applied lipstick looked as if it came in one piece and could be lifted off like the milk-skin from hot chocolate. Ella looked interesting rather than beautiful, and she dressed neither for the attention of men nor for the critical approval of other women. Lee was hypnotized; she was more compelling now than she had ever been as a girl of twenty.

He didn’t miss a detail: her nose perhaps a couple of degrees too steep; her dark hair, long then, now worn shorter; and something like a faint cloud of suspicion in brown eyes. Underneath her flying jacket she wore a baggy pullover and slacks. She was busy unwinding the red scarf from her throat.

Her bag, a large, split-leather holdall with a broken zip, was stuffed full. Lee stowed it against an armchair. “Bohemian; you look bohemian,” he said, trying to imitate her teasing manner.

Ella followed him into the kitchen, where he poured overlarge brandies and set coffee to brew. “I know I’m a mess,” she said. “You look smart, that’s good; and you look well.” She flashed him a microsecond smile and bandaged the scarf around her hand.

“I don’t know why, but I feel dull against you.”

“You haven’t got what it takes to be dull.” In her flying jacket she looked like a wounded refugee from some fiery aerial combat. “I see you work in advertising.”

“It’s a job. I turn in every morning. Then I come home.”

She looked at him. He felt compelled to carry on talking. “I mean it’s narcotic. That’s how I like it.”

“You sound disappointed.”

“No; I really do like it like chat. But when I’m happily numb, narcotized, nodding my way through life, then the you-know-what starts over again.”

Ella stuffed the scarf into her pocket. “That’s what I’m here to talk about.”

“Oh dear. Pandora wants a little chat about her box.”

“Not my box; our box.”

Lee turned towards her. “Ella, I don’t want it opened up. I don’t know what’s going on, but it scares the liver out of me and I really don’t want it opened up.”

Ella put down her glass and took hold of his wrist. “Look, I don’t want it opened up again any more than you do. I’m as frightened by it as you are. I guessed—hoped, even—that you’d be having some of the same experiences as me. I only got in touch with you because—”

Lee put his hand to her mouth. “Can we sit down?”

They moved through to the living room, Ella discarding her scarf and jacket as she went. They sat and nursed their brandies.

“I got in touch with you,” Ella continued, “because of what we had together. What we did.”

Silence. “I’m starving,” said Ella suddenly. “What have you cooked for us?”

“Cooked? God!” He hadn’t even thought about food. “I’ll phone for takeaway, shall I?”

“No food in the house, eh?” She smiled. “I couldn’t help noticing the bachelor feel to the place.”

“I noticed you noticing.” Then Lee bit the biscuit. “Ella, will you be staying here tonight?”

“I thought I might. Unless it would be easier if I found a hotel.”

“Don’t be ridiculous. You’ll stay here.”

“Fine.”

“Fine.”

“Only… Just so that it’s clear.”

“So that what’s clear?”

“Look; I didn’t drive two hundred and fifty miles with my foot flat down on the accelerator after an absence of twelve years to start our relationship up again. I couldn’t stand to have that opened up, as well.”

“Understood,” he said, waving his hands in the air, “I was just about to say that the spare room is ready for you. So you can calm down.”