Ханиф Курейши - Best British Short Stories 2020

Over a year earlier, several months before Zuzanna moved in with me, there were a group of us from work in the pub. It was a happy-sombre occasion. There had been a large number of redundancies. I’d somehow managed to hang on, but most of my friends had taken the money. Jack started by saying ‘I had the strangest dream last night’. Everyone groaned. ‘We don’t want to hear it,’ Lindsey said. ‘No, I do,’ I interrupted suddenly. ‘Tell me.’ I listened to what Jack had to say, and, without being asked, gave my interpretation. The others then told their dreams, so there was only me and Lindsey left. ‘Oh, go on then,’ she said, and hers was the strangest and saddest of the lot.

‘Now your turn,’ she said.

My brow furrowed. I couldn’t remember what I’d dreamt last night. Nor the night before. Nor, I realised, for endless nights before that.

‘I don’t dream,’ I said, finally.

‘You must have – you just don’t remember them.’

I went quiet, and they didn’t push me on it. A week later I put in a request for redundancy and it was accepted.

Experiments monitoring brain activity during sleep have indicated that even non-dreamers do dream, they just don’t remember them. I recall having dreamt as a child, but at some point I must have stopped remembering them.

That was when I’d set up the dream-consultation business. I realised it was partially vicarious, as I pored over the recollections of other people’s dreams, yet never had my own to share. Perhaps this immersion would help me; but after over a year of doing this, I still didn’t dream.

With Zuzanna away, I was free to spend my time as I wished. I copied the memory card from the CCTV onto my computer, and watched again the footage of my last client climbing the stairs and ringing the bell, and then coming in for her consultation. I had a phone number and email address for her, but as she’d not booked another consultation I didn’t really know how to use them without worrying her.

I had identified five regular spots where the Jehovah’s Witnesses assembled, and there were at least three there every day, usually a man and two women. That meant fifteen people in town every day, and I never saw the same ones twice at the same spot, which meant that, assuming they took Sundays off, there would need to be 4,500 over the course of a year. It couldn’t be possible that there were so many in a single town. I would just need to keep looking and eventually I would bump into Carol again, as if by accident.

What did I want to say to her?

I wanted to know if she’d continued to have the dream about Donald Trump after seeing me, or if I’d somehow cured her.

The communications with Zuzanna had become more haphazard. I always knew how to find her, of course. There were a number of geek channels that she had set up for discussing the software, and then again, there were the forums devoted to cryptocurrency. But non-work communications had almost ceased. I realised I hardly knew her. I even created an account under another name with the dream-consultation bot. Without dreams of my own, I recycled some of the many that had been told to me over the year. The bot was good. The explanations were plausible. I recognised my own contributions to the algorithm, but after a few days of this, I realised the bot was responding in a way that I never could have. Whereas I would hear twenty dreams a week, this software was hearing twenty thousand. And, just as Zuzanna had predicted, genuinely new dreams were rare.

By this point nearly everyone was having dreams about Donald Trump.

I only intermittently checked my bank account, so it was a surprise when the ATM ate my payment card. I went online as soon as I could get to a computer.

Zuzanna had withdrawn the last of our funds. How could I have been so stupid as to trust her?

But there was a message from her on one of the secure channels.

‘I’ve had to protect our investment,’ she said, ‘and here’s the key.’

She had sent me a link to an online wallet for her cryptocurrency. I used the credentials she had provided me with and there it was – my money had all been transformed into something virtual and, rather than stealing from me, Zuzanna had made me a multi-millionaire. But without Zuzanna around to explain how, I couldn’t easily transform this into any currency I could actually spend.

With my need for some petty cash, and having started biking around town all day to speed up my watch of the Jehovah’s Witnesses, I signed up to be a courier for one of the new gig-economy delivery firms.

It was a week after I started that I took the order for pizza. My bike was idling on the strip where the restaurant was, but the delivery was out of town, at the edge of our normal delivery zone. I worked out that I could make this my last of the day, and head back via a different route to where I lived. Zuzanna had asked for a face-to-face via video conference that evening. I picked up the delivery from the pizza restaurant and packed the boxes carefully before hoisting the backpack over my arms.

Although I knew the area I wasn’t sure of the actual address, as it seemed to be a side road on a quiet estate. I had to ease up when I got onto the estate to work out which road it was on. It was called the Orchard estate and so there was an Apple Drive, a Pear Tree Avenue and, tucked away, a Blossom Close. I jumped off the bike, but I wasn’t in a particular hurry, other than to get back for Zuzanna.

I found number five, a tidy, nondescript maisonette, with a sharp message on the glass of the porch: ‘No Flyers. No Hawkers.’

The door was opened after a couple of rings by a boy around twelve years old.

‘Hi. Pizza,’ I said, smiling.

‘Mum!’ he shouted.

There was a shuffling behind him and he just stood there. Given that payment was on the app I could just hand it over to him, but I thought I should wait for an adult.

A woman came to the door. It was Carol, my last client. With my cap on, advertising the delivery firm I worked for, and her focus on the pile of pizza boxes in front of me, she didn’t notice me at first.

‘Hi, it’s Carol, isn’t it?’

She looked up. There was recognition but puzzlement.

‘You came for a consultation. A dream consultation.’

She smiled.

‘This is funny, meeting you here,’ I said, but wasn’t sure what was funny about it.

‘I live here,’ she said.

‘Of course. I gave up the business,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t working out for me.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ she said. ‘You were very helpful.’

‘Was I?’ I said. ‘It’s hard to tell. Most people don’t come back, so I never got much feedback. But there’s an app now you can use any time you want and it lets you give a rating on how helpful the service was.’

‘An app?’

‘Yes, for interpreting dreams. You can download it to your phone. There’s always someone there when you want to discuss them.’ I didn’t want to tell her that it was a bot rather than a person. I should probably have brought a flyer. But, of course, I never expected to bump into one of my ex-clients doing this job.

‘Do you still dream of Donald Trump?’ I asked.

I thought she was going to close the door on me.

‘Doesn’t everyone?’ she asked, genuinely surprised.

‘I don’t,’ I said, truthfully.

‘You’re lucky,’ she said.

There was a voice from inside. A man’s voice.

‘It’s the pizza delivery guy,’ she shouted back.

‘I shouldn’t have come,’ she whispered. ‘Alan doesn’t know.’

‘Oh,’ I said, ‘well, I’m glad you did. You were my last client.’