ANDREW ENSTICE
Andrew Enstice grew up in England and was educated at Emmanuel College Cambridge, where he held an open scholarship. After completing his MA at Cambridge, he took his PhD at Exeter University. He came to Australia for a visit in 1980 and what with one thing and another, has been here ever since.
A former scriptwriter-producer with Granada Television in the UK, he has acted as script adviser and writer for a number of film and video productions. He has also written and directed for the theatre. He is twice winner of the Bridport Arts (UK) poetry award, and winner of the St Kilda Short Story Prize. He has written many academic articles and papers for journals, magazines, and conferences in Australia, Europe, Britain, and the USA.
Andrew Enstice is the author of Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind, which critic John Halperin called “a genuinely important book”. With Janeen Webb, he has completed an edited collection of essays on myth and fantasy, The Fantastic Self, and a controversial study of Australian racism, entitled Aliens and Savages: Fiction, Politics and Prejudice in Australia.
He is currently a senior lecturer in literature at the Australian Catholic University in Melbourne.
In the story that follows, Enstice reminds us of the ominous darkness and numinal brightness of dreams... and the fragments of poems and memories that we carry with us forever. Here then is that very special dream ... the one we will all dream.
* * * *
The darkness was an old friend. He wrapped it round him, comforting.
There was no way of telling how long he had been unconscious, how long awake. He slipped seamlessly between sleep and waking, the patterns of dream absorbing the other senses: sight was still denied him.
They had not removed the bandages then. But he felt the absence of discomfort where the drip had fed into his arm. He was comfortably cocooned, tucked neatly into position, arms folded, his head cradled in what felt remarkably like satin covers.
He had gradually grown used to the hospital routines of being tested and measured and analysed and X-rayed and then rolled into a convenient corner to await return to his room. There were times when he felt like a parcel, bundled, wrapped, delivered, marked “return to sender”. It encouraged patience (he appreciated the pun: one word had led to another, and another, language unfolding into a private universe he could substitute for the shared world of the senses; it gave him something to hold on to, a game to amuse him in the long hours alone and waiting).
Other senses were returning now. He was aware of voices around him, muffled voices. He imagined the partitions that screened him from the busy world. The occasional fragment of speech came through, a louder voice perhaps. Male. Impossible to recognise the speaker: he wondered idly which of the doctors would make himself unpopular by loudly lecturing his colleagues. Farnley? Yes. A man of clear opinions, firmly delivered. Polowski? Loud, certainly, but too explosive. There was a droning quality to the voice, something that hinted at a man who liked his conversations one-sided. Apshaw then. Perhaps.
The trouble was, they were all so damned opinionated. He felt sorry for the nurses, who had to wear it every day. At least he was the patient, the nominal focus of their professional concern. And he could escape at any time, burrowing down into his private world, away from the hectoring, lecturing, tedious voices that pursued for a while but eventually fell silent, petering out in distant volleys of anger and pique, fired randomly at unseen passing nurses.
Then the sound of Sister Jones rose up to memory, brisk hands tucking the sheets, inserting the thermometer, efficient, undeviating, a vocal, yapping terrier who followed him down and down and down. And that specialist — what was her name? — the one who sounded as though she was rapping out orders on parade.
There was some trick of acoustics, some shift in position perhaps, that brought the voice through clearly for a moment.
“... a special kind of man. John was ...”
Not much to go on. But then, he was used to that. A life made up of fragments, broken sentences, phrases littered through the darkness like scraps of paper in the roadway on a wet day. He was used to picking up the scraps, tucking them away in the corners of his consciousness, arranging them to see their effect. In his private universe, reality was a scrapbook.
He opened the book now, at the page marked “John”.
What Johns did he know? Uncle John, of course, dead long since. There was a distant memory there, a roar of sound, the swell of ten thousand voices raised in angry unison. Uncle John was the one who had introduced him to football. Uncle John, a vague blur of a face — never much of a memory — but a crystal voice, smiling, warm. Uncle John, who met his end on the terraces, leaping to his feet with the crowd, with one accord, roaring out the challenge of life in the instant of his death.
He smiled at the memory. Turned the page. John. John. A cousin? Someone’s child, perhaps? Godsons, from the time when they all did that kind of thing?
There was John Mearson of course: the rich, salt taste of hot buttered toast; late-night arguments punctuated with the voice of Joan Baez singing Yeats’ “Inisfree”; or was it “The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland” — how did it go? — “Why should those lovers that no lovers miss/Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss?” It seemed to make sense when they were young: John Mearson, the best of friends at college until he walked in one day with Evie at his side. The look on his face — that was easy to recall. Though, come to think of it, John’s face was also blurring now. But the expression of mingled pride, and awe, and tense suspicion — that remained. He had borne Evie in like a prize, and when she left, she took their friendship with her.
But what would John Mearson be doing in the hospital? Too much coincidence. He turned the page.
And came up with a shock against another faded memory. John. John ... Evans? Again, the face was misted over, as though in the darkness vision lost clarity as it lost its significance. But some details remained sharp. The multiple flecks of colour in hazel eyes; the mouth, with its sheltering black moustache; a mole beside a crooked nose, broken long ago in some childhood football game.
John Evans. He was — had been — John Evans. In another life. In another universe. It had been so long, he had forgotten. So long since he had felt the importance of a name, alone in the darkness. So long since he had needed to look in the mirror to reassure himself that he was real. So long since he had fussed over the minutiae of gradual aging, absorbed the microscopic changes of feature into each day’s redrawn map of himself.
All that had ended, that day on the football field. He had no memory of it, but they had told him, early on, how the low tackle had pitched him headlong into the goalpost, fractured his skull, torn the sclera of his eye.
Who knows how long ago.
“.. .John was an example to others, a shining light in the common darkness of our world. A man dedicated to ...”
It jerked him back again. He banged the book shut on that page. Closed the painful memory. Now, what other Johns did he know? Johns on the ward? It sounded like a eulogy — no-one made speeches like that unless their object was safely dead. Or very old.
Or retiring from politics. There were no politicians in the ward, so far as he knew.
Old John Haskin. Now, there was a possibility. A frail voice, a withered arm resting lightly on his, talking slowly of the distant past, of the woman he still loved, as she was back then, when she wore the flowered print frock and he carried the picnic basket, and the sun shone from a permanently cloudless sky.
The page turned. Old John slipped away, back to the flower-strewn fields of his past. There were other visitors, other hands touching his. Max, and Evie. Max, with his bullfrog voice, the patient, compassionate brother-in-law, solicitous for Evie’s anguish at her ruined husband’s bedside. And Evie herself, the warm touch of her, lips soft against the small fragment of his cheek that lay bare to the circulating currents of hospital air, the scent of her body, her breath mingling with his, her words whispering in his ear.
“Come on, John. You can do it. You know you can. The doctors say you can talk if you really want to.”
Talk. So much talk.
“Remember, John. Remember our first date? New Year’s Eve, and no buses or trains, and all the taxis were taken. Remember the queue — there must have been a hundred people, and the heavens opened, and we were drenched, and you gave me your jacket, and we walked in the rain. And then we were outside the Hilton, and I said, what are credit cards for?”
And when the clerk said, “double?”, they looked at each other. And she said, yes. He touched the memory gently, smoothing it into place. Turned the page ...
Something had changed. He was suddenly aware of the silence, deep and velvet. He let the scrapbook slip away, whirling down into darkness.
There was a bump, and he felt himself being rolled forward. No jolts from the trolley wheels catching; no jarring crash as they pushed him through the swing doors. He felt his senses sharpen, tuning to the slightest variation, straining to identify what was happening. He could hear music now. Vivaldi. His favourite.
The movement stopped, and stillness returned, as though a door had closed on the music. The silence was electric, full of some tension he could not identify. He held his breath.
The sound erupted all about him, roaring, wild. For an instant he was stunned by the force of it on unprotected hearing. And then he felt the heat, racing from discomfort to a tearing, clawing agony, and the light crept in on the edges of his darkness, red raw, visceral, and the smell of burning filled his nostrils. His senses were overwhelmed. He opened his mouth to scream, but couldn’t remember how. His senses melted, coalesced in white pain, vaporised. Arrowed upward, keening into the light.
* * * *
The small group of mourners had begun to disperse. An overweight, ruddy-complexioned man in his late thirties stood with his arm around a younger woman, comforting.
“You mustn’t blame yourself, Evie. You did everything you could.”
Evie eased herself away from a solicitous arm that seemed to have strayed towards her breast, and looked back at the building they had just left. Her eyes were red from crying.
“I know, Max. But I can’t help feeling we should have waited. There were so many times ... It was like he could see everything, hear everything. I’m sure he knew we were there.”
Max shook his head sorrowfully.
“Those were just reflexes, you know that. He was dead long before they turned it off. That wasn’t really John in the bed.”
Max resumed his protective grip on his sister-in-law, and turned her firmly away down the path that led towards the waiting car. The line of vehicles pulled slowly away from the kerb. Behind them, a thin trickle of smoke had begun to rise from the crematorium chimney, staining a brilliant sky.
* * * *
AFTERWORD
“Dream” was just that: the product of a restless night’s sleep.
It was one of those brilliant dreams you absolutely must write down while you’re still half asleep — most of which turn out in the morning to be a string of random notes between which the conscious mind can find no logical connection. This time, I seemed to have something (although, admittedly, not a lot — just a sketch of a square, box-like object, surrounded by what might have been garden sprinklers. Not much to go on, but enough to jog the memory.) The substance of the story was there. The rest — all those minor things, like characters, plot and coherent structure — took shape after I had buttonholed Janeen Webb at work and (as we all do from time to time to our long-suffering friends) bored her rigid with my dream. Instead of recalling an urgent appointment, she listened patiently, made some suggestions about ways of turning dream into fiction, and suggested I get on with it (still valiantly resisting the urge to look at her watch).
There’s just a possibility that the catatonic central character owed something to childhood memories of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ tales of Mars. I can still recall the pleasure of holiday reading on wet August days by the seaside in England. All the books that were absent from home on the grounds of literary suitability suddenly became an acceptable alternative to draughts with the bottle tops standing in for counters, or Scrabble without a dictionary, or jigsaws with the final three pieces missing.
As for the rest, well, some of the characters come straight from my own life (I still haven’t made it up with my former college friend), and the sleazy brother-in-law just insinuated himself into the story — it seems to be his style.
— Andrew Enstice