The Dream Maker E-Book

Mikka Haugaard

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

A story of love, death and betrayal in which nothing is quite what it seems

Das E-Book wird angeboten von und wurde mit folgenden Begriffen kategorisiert:

Leseprobe

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

THE DREAM MAKER

Mikka Haugaard was born in Denmark in 1953. Her father is Danish and her mother American and she grew up bi-lingual. She studied classics at Cambridge University and did research in Roman history. She now teaches classics and psychology at a London school and lectures for the Open University. She is married with two children.

Dedalus published her first novel Gabriel’s Bureau a dark, fast moving thriller in 2005.

Contents

Title

Dedalus Original Fiction in Paperback

1 The stranger in my bed

2 Please touch me

3 Killer hands

4 Max

5 Meeting Ophelia

6 Being There

7 Tina

8 Understanding love

9 Rome

10 Memories of Leningrad

11 Mary’s dream

12 People and places

13 Tina goes out

14 David

15 Fame

16 A party for Paul

17 Breakfast in via Giulia

18 Afternoon

19 Evening

20 Epilogue

Dedication

Copyright

1

The stranger in my bed

“I do like Max,” said the sultan. “I even prefer him to Ali Baba, but I don’t know about Boris.”

“He’ll grow on you, and anyway you can’t have Max without Boris,” replied his wife, the beautiful Scheherazade, holding tight the reins of fiction. “The choice is yours …”

And the sultan knew that she had won because no treasure in the world, be it gold or emeralds, can compare to a good story.

*

I’m going to start with the present. The past will catch up with us soon enough.

A few hours ago I was standing in a small shop down the road, a little lost and a far cry from sober. Leaning on the counter, I discovered that I needed help. I wanted to go home. I had something to go home for, but I had forgotten what. The owner knew me well. I was relying on that.

“What have you done to yourself?”

Done? I’m not much in the doing business, not these days, but I felt my face, wondering how much had happened to it.

“I think someone hit me,” I said. “Down by the river. I remember a little bit of that.”

The man behind the till shook his head.

“Your eyes are all swollen and you need a doctor with that nose. Steve will take you home.”

His son shrugged his shoulders and didn’t move. He’d seen me too often, hardly able to stand but insisting it was otherwise. His father was more tolerant.

“Help her home. She can’t walk. She won’t make it on her own. Take her shopping, will you? A mango and a piece of cheese. What kind of shopping is that? She doesn’t eat and look at the state of her. You should take care of yourself, Rachel,” he said to me kindly. “Help her Steve. Can’t you see that she needs help?”

“How did she make it here then?”

“A miracle. There are always some of them around.”

And, as if to confirm what he had said, I began to slide slowly, very slowly, till I found myself lying on the floor.

“Ophelia,” I said searching for dignity, “lay among the flowers like this. Her body drifting with the current and surrounded by flowers. Her hair …” and touching my tangled knots, my sad strands, I continued, “her hair enclosing her face like a lion’s mane.”

I reappeared in my flat clutching Steve’s arm.

“Are you all right?”

This is what they all say before they go, a shy question mark at the end begging the answer they always get. Yes, I’m all right.

A man’s body lay on my bed. Was I all right, was he all right?

“Who is that?”

“Let me think …”

But nothing came to me. I couldn’t remember him at all.

“Shall I wake him?” Steve asked.

“I don’t know.”

The man on the bed sat up suddenly looking at me and expecting recognition.

“A friend of mine,” I explained trying to remember who he was and peering at him with blurred vision. “A good friend of mine.”

“Since early this morning.” he smiled. “Very early this morning. You could say last night or dawn. I brought you home.”

Home. Not much to say about that. Not much to say about this high-ceilinged room with its bed, table and chairs and enormous bookcase. The photographs on the walls, I shall say something about them of course. In due course. Everything in due course.

“I brought you home.”

“Thank you,” I said humbly watching Steve leave closing the door carefully behind him. “Thank you.”

“Is that mango for me?”

“Yes,” I lied.

“I had hoped for something more to eat. You mentioned a Chinese takeaway.”

In my state? Surely not? Even a miracle could not have guided my tottering steps and steadied my poor frame for that epic journey.

“A Chinese takeaway?”

“Well I wasn’t sure you would make it. But you insisted.”

“I’m afraid that all I’ve got to repay you with is this, this mango.” I sat down heavily on the bed.

“I’ll have it then – just the mango. The other stuff I’ll give you back.”

“The other stuff?”

“The string of pearls.”

“The string of pearls?”

“For taking you home – and for a fuck. Yes, love.” He smiled mischievously. “But you can have them back. What’s in the bag?”

“Bread and cheese. Did you say for a fuck?”

“Yeah – you wanted that. And in what state, in what state.” He shook his head absorbed by the bread and cheese.

“You should see a doctor when you have sobered up.”

My poor body. And not for the first time. Hamlet was right. Get ye to a nunnery. Fat chance.

“There is butter in the fridge. I’ll bring knives and plates so we don’t mess up the bed.” An attempt to regain a little ground. Some dignity here. I rose and waved feebly at the kitchen.

“This is a comfortable flat.”

He cut the cheese carefully. Had I asked him to stay?

“A very comfortable flat.”

Apparently.

“You have a lot of books.”

“I write books.”

“Write books?”

“I am a dream maker.”

“Did you write this? ‘She couldn’t take her eyes off his suntanned body and her kisses, like playful butterflies, woke him with their soft touch’.”

The book lay open on his knees; bread and butter on one page, while he read the other with difficulty. The grubby sheets covered his legs, and with a laugh he wiped his hands on them mocking my timid smile.

“Yes,” I said proudly, “I wrote that.”

“That’s not you. That’s Tina Faithful. Pure Tina Faithful.” He read on, “‘She looked long and hard at his buttocks before tapping her long nails teasingly on his thigh. “Shall I draw blood?” she asked. Before he could answer …’” He whispered, “That’s Tina Faithful, that’s her style.” I thought I heard the word ‘inimitable’. “And look,” he closed the book to reveal her name heavily embossed on the cover.

Silently, my mouth full of cheese, I pointed to the inscription on the first page in a large clear schoolgirl hand. “Thanks for all the help. Tina.”

2

Please touch me

Tina Faithful looked into her huge handbag expecting to find everything there.

“I was sure I put the contract in here. Anyhow, I’ve been told that it says all the usual things, and the advance is brilliant, although they can’t be sure that it’ll sell because it’s a first book.”

It did sell. Boy, did it sell, but I shall never forget Tina standing there with her bag on the table; the only table in that flat.

“They’ve given it to us in cash. I suppose they took one look at me and figured that I didn’t have a bank account. Maybe they even think that I don’t know what a bank account is. They want the book, but they spoke to me like a piece of shit. Anyhow here it is: five thousand pounds.”

She opened the bag and I remember the revelation of money, the feel of cash. Slowly she extracted the bundles placing them on my side of the table, pushing them over towards me, waiting for me to take them and laughing in my eyes. Or at my eyes. My tired eyes. I continued smoking.

“Count them Tina. Count them for me. Just count them slowly for me.”

“You’re beginning to sound like that book – like the book you wrote. Count the money yourself. Five thousand pounds. Have you ever seen so much cash?”

There on the breakfast table I rearranged the bundles, placing them between the mug of coffee and the ashtray counting slowly while Tina looked at me triumphantly as if she herself had printed the notes. And I paused between each thousand with a humble flourish, as if each represented one of my wild phantasms, my lightly spawned creations, my women of easy climaxes, and my men whose terse dialogue anticipates even terser action. And the name Faithful, that’s mine too. She has supplied some of the plot and all of the research. She has discovered all I had to know about guns and explosives and banks and money and smuggling. Before I was rich, when the Max trilogy was only an idea, she persuaded someone to pay for my visits to Los Angeles, Saint Petersburg and Cairo, and introduced me to someone who claimed to have worked for the KGB. But I have peopled this rich landscape and supplied her with my fantastics.

At the bottom of her bag, Tina found the contract which said that she would get twenty percent of my royalties. That seemed a lot for her name and her assistance, but my present preoccupation was the money, the bundles of cash which seemed to dwindle in the counting.

“But Tina, I asked for more. We have so many debts. You should have asked for more.”

“More than five thousand?”

She made the figure sound huge. “It’s a first book. That’s why he won’t give more as an advance. And …” she paused drawing an envelope out of her bag. “Here’s a thousand, just from me. The money in this envelope is just from me because of our partnership.”

She smiled a little uneasily putting the envelope firmly on the table, anticipating my answer, and, next to it, a bottle of champagne. I took the envelope and I drank the champagne. I knew that she had stolen the money, and that she had probably stolen it from me. But that is Tina …

Tina, my Tina, my friend of easy promises and unfailing determination.

“The problem with you,” she would say trying to survey the chaos of my life, “the problem with you …” and then she would stop and look uncertain as if she had found herself suddenly in a strange place where the relationship between the total and its parts is too elusive. I would sense her mind ticking, adding and subtracting, wondering whether I was worth so much bother; because I can be such a nuisance, such a waster of other people’s patience. A relentless consumer of time, other people’s time. But the more she thought, the less she had to say.

“Well, one of your problems is that you drink.”

“Really? Thank you Tina.”

Tina, my friend from schooldays. Murphy was her name. Is her name, except on the spines of books. In most lessons we sat next to each other, and ours was one of those friendships that grew out of childhood and never lost the mystery of childhood.

And I’m not one for mystery, I can tell you. I have no patience with mystery, but I’ve allowed a little bit of it in my life. Just a little bit, and Tina is one of those little bits, Tina and the count, that old liar, and Max, of course; Max shares this dimmed glow although he’s fiction and one shouldn’t, perhaps, lump real people and fictitious people together. I’m not one for mystery, and I’m not one for intimacy, but I know that everything is always better if someone touches me: a hand on my shoulder, a hand on my hand, my legs, my body. It’s amazing what touching can do to this old wreck.

We were arm in arm, friends nudging and giggling and sharing secrets which Tina also shared with the world, and had to share with the world because of her natural exuberance, the wonderful excess which was Tina. Is Tina.

She was most herself in the morning, feet dangling, sleep heavy, elbows on the bed, but ready to see you. Always ready to see you, brushing aside that sleep for the comings and goings of the day. She was Tina when eating in unashamed bursts of pleasure, licking her fingers. She was Tina when unravelling the sad plots of her stories with the feigned astonishment of a failed birthday party magician. “And you won’t guess what he said.”

And finally she was Tina the wrecker, Tina the greedy.

All this happened over several years involving many people, but as one of them is a lover and the other a son – within such a grand context I’m rather marginal – it has a certain ebb and flow about it which commands attention. One might even say a certain grandeur.

“What are you writing, you drunken old cunt?” Demands yesterday’s saviour lying on the bed, petulantly consuming cheese for lack of anything better. Why do I invite such language? Or am I not listening? Did he say cow?

“The story of Tina,” I reply, “Tina Faithful. You’ll want to read it. And even if you don’t want to read it, I’ll want to write it. There is an alluring fire in the writing of it that will keep me going, I can tell you. And that’s what it is about, keeping me going – which is a lifetime’s occupation and with a poor reward, if ‘drunken old cow’ is all you can say.”

Why can’t I say cunt? But I have an aversion to such words. He rises languidly out of the grimy sheets which enfold him – mind you his body hasn’t seen a shower too recently – stretching his young body with its fine masculinity.

“Please,” I want to say, “please touch me.”

“Have you got another dressing-gown,” he asks, “or is there only the one you are wearing?”

3

Killer hands

I’ll begin with childhood. Dabbling briefly in that distant time, I will resurrect only what matters. A few facts, a few feelings and the events of a particular day.

Tina was Tina Murphy and her mother was Julie, a good-looking woman with a large round face, solid temperament and warmth; someone who knew how to laugh and I have always been addicted to laughter.

“I don’t know where she has got it from,” she would say of Tina. Tina, her favourite, her youngest child; youngest of five. “I don’t know where she has got it from. And I don’t know where she is going.” Mr Murphy didn’t share her admiration. He was a quiet man with quick bursts of anger and contorted feelings. He didn’t much like his lively teenage daughter, instead he admired Axel their lodger who seemed to us to be always lurking somewhere silently in the house. His tiny room had been converted from a bathroom to allow for more space and a weekly income. That had been the plan, but Axel didn’t fulfil this plan because most weeks he didn’t pay, and Mr Murphy, a man for whom no detail was too small, didn’t notice.

“I don’t know where she has got it from. Not from me at any rate. I’m a loser.”

She loved to ponder Tina’s future, so different from her own. She relished unfavourable comparisons that emphasised her own smallness and the wonder of this child, her Tina, but Mr Murphy would not understand

“What are you talking about? Going where? Got what? I can tell you what she’s got: she’s a bitch, that’s what she’s got. She can be a real little bitch.” He would stop talking as suddenly as he’d begun; a quick eruption of words and, then, all sense of purpose gone, he would no longer be looking at you, but at his hands. His huge hands, that we called killer hands. Tina had told me about his killer hands.

“Your mum is a slag,” I had said, unsure of the meaning of the word. “A fat slag.”

A shrug of the shoulders. No denial. “My dad can kill people. He can kill your dad. He can kill your mum too. He has killer hands.”

“Really Tina?” I whispered, getting close and feeling a darkness descending on this comfortable bit of my world, the nursery with its toy train in which we were the only passengers. It was raining and we could hear drumming on the roof and the sound made an island of our safe cupboard. I think I must have been about five and here was Tina inviting admiration and awe with her obvious handle on the world. She knew killer hands. I didn’t know anything.

“Really?”

Tina had no doubt. “He has killer hands,” she repeated without hesitation.

Since then I had been fascinated by Mr Murphy’s hands, those big slabs of hands which he would keep occupied whenever he was expected to speak.

On this particular day Julie was, as usual, full of her admiration for Tina, but Martin Murphy wasn’t having it.

“I wonder what she is going to be. I wonder where she is going.”

“She isn’t going out,” said Mr Murphy suddenly, as if provoked, his hands covering an amazing amount of table. “She isn’t going out.”

“I didn’t mean that sort of going.”

“What other sort of going? What other sort of going, for Christ’s sake?”

“Going and becoming. Going and becoming. What is she becoming?”

“Nothing, by what her teachers say.” His hands stopped. “And she isn’t going out,” he repeated and kept repeating, insisting on the literal meaning of words.

“She is not going out. No, she is not going out. No she isn’t. She isn’t because of last time.”

“But she’s going with Axel.”

Axel Winter the lodger. I can see him sitting in one of the old armchairs in the Murphy’s lounge looking at his shoes, his hands resting on the arms of the chair. Axel was studying for a degree in History. He came from Germany and I have no idea why he was living with the Murphys but for some reason Tina’s father really cared for him. No one could have had less in common with Martin Murphy than Axel Winter but Axel would listen to him with deference, and say, “really Mr Murphy?”, with hardly a hint of a question mark, in a way that made you laugh.

“That’s all right then. He’s not like you. He’s careful.”

“Who says I’m not careful?”

“I do,” said Martin helplessly surveying his dead killer hands, “I do.”

“You idiot. Who else says I’m not careful?”

“I don’t care who says what. I know what I know.”