Steve Erickson - These Dreams of You

“My father strongly discouraged it.” The Yank adds, wryly, “He, uh, knew something about showgirls.”

“Or perhaps,” says Jasmine, “just showgirls playing your sister.”

I’ll bet, she thinks, that he married the very next girl he went out with. So when Bob laughs, “The very next girl I went out with, my brother stole — the girl after that , I married,” she’s startled: Did I say it out loud? she wonders. Turning to her slightly, Bob doesn’t break his stride. “Well, then, mate,” says Reg absently, stopping in the street to look around or maybe just slow the pace, “you needed to nick one back from him. Jaz, is this the way?”

On the corner is a closed Wimpy Bar. “Nearly did once,” says Bob. No, I didn’t say it out loud, thinks Jasmine. “But he wasn’t the sort—”

“She’s the native home-town girl,” Reg nods at Jasmine.

“—who had girls stolen from him.” The park comes into view.

“I’m not a native and yes it’s the way and,” says Jasmine, “there’s the park.” She turns to Reg. “Can we go now?”

“But let’s walk him the rest of it,” says Reg.

“I want to leave.”

“Where are you from?” Bob says to her.

Oh don’t bloody bother. To Reg, “I want to leave.”

“It’s all right,” Bob says to Reg, and points through the trees of the park at a large house lit from the outside, red brick and white columns visible in the lights. “That’s where you’re staying?” says Reg. As the three stand in the street peering at the house, a downpour opens up above and Reg dashes to the Wimpy Bar to take cover under the overhang; Bob follows, though never breaking from his determined stroll. Jasmine remains in the road. “Are you daft?” Reg calls to her. “Get out of there,” but the rain comes down and Jasmine doesn’t move, staring at him, arms folded.

“I’m going home,” she says.

“What?” calls Reg. A few feet away, he can’t hear her for the rain.

“See you at the session,” she says and turns on her heel and walks off, and when Reg calls after her, “Cheers,” she doesn’t answer. When Bob calls, more softly, “Goodbye,” she doesn’t answer that either. Bloody hell, she thinks as she splashes down the road in the rain. The Bloody Impossible Dream. She shakes her head and soon is gone from the men’s sight.

Reg shrugs to the Yank under the Wimpy Bar overhang. “She’s upset with me,” he says, “we’ll sort it out tomorrow.”

“I’m the one she’s angry at,” Bob says.

Reg is surprised. “Why would she be angry at you?”

It’s becoming cold in the rain. Reg pulls his coat around him closer, but the other, barely noticing, says, “Evil has become a quaint word, hasn’t it?”

“Uh,” says Reg, “well. ‘Evil’? Don’t suppose I’ve heard it since Church, whenever the last time that was.”

Watching Jasmine disappear in the distance, Bob says, “How long have you been together?”

“Not that long,” says Reg. Now he doesn’t want to tell the other man they’re not really a couple. “Met her through the record company. She’s there to keep an eye on us in the studio, and soon I suppose I was keeping an eye on her.”

“What were you doing before you made records?”

“Laying bricks back home. Started the band with another bricklayer. Still me day job, construction.”

“Do you write your songs?”

“Sometimes. One we’re doing tomorrow is by a cat from your hometown, New York—”

“I don’t have a hometown. . ”

“—but sometimes I change a lyric or two. . ”

“. . anymore.”

“. . if I think we can get away with it. Make it a bit our own, you know?”

“No one gets angry at music.”

“Are you having me on? People get angry at music all the bleeding time.”

“No one will kill you for it, though.”

“Not yet.” In the shadow of the Wimpy Bar, the Brit sees the same blue glint of the Yank’s eyes that Jasmine saw. Bob says, “You, uh, don’t have to go the rest of the way.”

Doesn’t occur to him, thinks Reg, to spot me a few quid for a cab. “So what is it then,” he says, nodding at the large house through the park trees, “if not a hotel?”

“Ambassador’s residence.”

“You’re staying with the ambassador?”

“I lived there as a boy. Queer to be back.”

“You lived in the ambassador’s house as a boy?”

“The scene of. . ” says Bob, and stops. “Whatever can be redeemed, I suppose,” he finally finishes. “But then my religion would make me believe that even if I didn’t want to. My father, uh, his judgment in world affairs was something less than his judgment in showgirls.”

They continue watching the rain come down from under the Wimpy Bar overhang. Still pulling his coat close, Reg lights another cigarette. Bob says, “What’s your girl’s name again?”

“You’re not making a move on me old lady, are you?” Reg says it like he’s joking.

Bob snaps, “No.”

“Just winding you up a bit. What with stealing birds from your brother and all. Jasmine.”

“Nearly stole.”

“Right, nearly.”

“Didn’t I say nearly?”

“You did,” Reg assures him.

Sticking his head out from beneath the dripping overhang, Bob surveys the skies. “She’s African, isn’t she?”

“What?”

“Your girl.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“From South Africa.”

“Don’t remember, mate, I get all those places confused, if you want to know the truth. Same thing, aren’t they? No, she’s from that country with the emperor cat. The one the rastas think is Jesus.”

“Haile Selassie.”

“Yeah.”

“Ethiopia.”

“That’s it.”

“Abyssinia. The beginning of the world. He was at my brother’s funeral.”

“What?”

Bob says to Reg, “My brother was better in every way.”

“The emperor of Ethiopia was at your—?”

“But he had his weaknesses, and she was one.”

“Bob? I’ve sort of lost track who we’re on about.”

“And we couldn’t have it anymore. And when she didn’t want to let him go—”

“Right. We’re not talking about the London bird from the theatre anymore.”

“—she came to me,” but he stops, a man who resents having to explain anything to anyone. “I made her heart sing, for a few hours.”

“She said that?”

“She’s gone now. He’s gone too.”

Bob says, “I was the one. . not born with gifts. I was the one about whom people said, This is a boy without gifts. I wasn’t the son meant for anything, I was never meant to be the great man. Runt, they called me, sissy they said. Mama’s boy, what shall we do with him? Not born with gifts, I had, uh, only my will. My brothers and sisters were born with gifts, then one by one they were gone and left no more shadows in which to hide. No longer were their gifts for me to serve, when I no longer was a middle brother but the oldest. . when I was left by default then I made out of my will what I could. You know, most of my life,” he says nodding at the house in the distance, “I would have beaten any man who said or hinted that my father had anything to redeem,” and up until he says it, Reg wouldn’t have imagined this small man beating up anyone; but now he can. Bob turns to Reg. “Sooner or later you have to see the sins of the father for what they are. Your Mr. Churchill understood things more clearly. It doesn’t mean I don’t love my father. It doesn’t mean I didn’t spend my life trying to make him as proud of me as he was of my brothers and sisters.” He looks back at the house. “I do worry if tomorrow is a mistake.”