IRIS’S QUIET SLEEP

Iris is old. And dead.

Iris had never enjoyed a dream quite like it and that was probably because it wasn’t a dream at all.

It started with her eyes drifting shut while the television was on, an old edition of Midsomer Murders that waited for her eyes to shut before carrying on with the story with no televisual input.

It was a country scene with young women clippety-clopping down a lane on patient, sometimes snorting horses. The sky was sort of blue when it wasn’t a pastel grey, a nearby row of thatched cottages oozed history and charm, and coming round a bend towards the happy riders came an old rusty van.

At that point her eyes were closed. The sound was still just about penetrating the silence in her living room, clippety clop, clippety clop.

But the sky turned black and flashes of lightning flickered across it, accompanied by roaring thunder as if the gods were hammering her roof with a gigantic celestial hammer. And who’s this running down the lane? Chief inspector Barnaby... too old to be running like that, surely? But no, it isn’t him at all but one of the younger sergeants, and the D.I. is at home with his wife, it’s been a long day and he’s taking her up the stairs to bed. He’s saying something, but whatever it is is swallowed up by the raging thunder.

Then he looked her in the eyes, her closed eyes, and muttering something trivial.

“Wake up, Iris, wake up, didn’t you hear me nearly knocking your door down?”

So she did as she waas told and opened her eyes, and she was in paradise. And right in front of her, so close he might have been kissing her, was the village postmaster. She knew it was him. It had to be even though the quietest of whispers somewhere lost inside her head suggested that she wasn’t in a village and anyway even if she was it didn’t have a postmaster.

It was no good. She had to close her eyes. Thank goodness the thunderstorm was over

“Wake up won’t you, Iris?”

It was time for to wake up and reconnect with the murders at Midsomer. She’d once thought it would be nice to live in a county with so many interesting villages, but over time she’d changed her mind. So much divisiveness. So many murders.

“It’s no good. She won’t wake up, officer…” A voice out of the sludge of a world that’s been rocked with all that thunder. And muttering like nothig mattered any more, a reply, not from her, she’d forgotten how to talk, but from Barnaby.

“Get an ambulance…”

Then the other voice, cold, dispassionate, “I hardly need to get her on the slab, Inspector...

Inspector? Did I hear that right? Is that Barnaby in here? Actualy in my living room? It’s about time he came, it really is, the world’s in a mess and no doubt he can sort it all out. And what’s that he’s doing? Trying to find a pulse beneath my wrinkled old flesh? Go on, lad, I’m alive.

She hoped.

Silence. No, not quite silence. She could just about make out the whisper as the world comes to an end like the bible said it would.

She always believed the bible. even though Adam hadn’t.

Adam, you might ask?

She wept when he died. And it had come suddenly like some deaths do. One minute They had been in their chairs watching the television, or a decade or maybe longer ago, and next he was slumping in his chair and she knew from the dead light in his eye that’s what he was.

Dead.

And spooky the way they’d been watching Midsomer back then, and now, too. She was sure that’s what they’d been watching, like she was now.

He’d hated the programme and only watched it out of consideration for her because he knew how much she loved it.

She was sure the television was still on. She could, what was the word, almost, hear it.

She could hear as an ambulance hurtled to her screen.

Adam wouldn’t have let her have the television so loud. “What’s wrong you you, woman, are you going deaf or something? Turn the bloody thing down!

Then the thunder returned. That’s the trouble with storms these days, they come and go like they never did in the good old days. But there’s all this talk of climate change…

Adam’s come back to me! Only he would turn the sound down like that! But whoever it is the devil’s actually silenced the whole world!

“I’d best turn her telly off now,” said Barnaby, “she’ll not be needing it left on, not now she’s popped her clogs.”

Hey! Wait a moment! What’s going on? Leave me alone! I was perfectly comfortable sitting in my chair watching my telly, and not doing a living soul any harm!

“It must be a month since she died,” murmured someone else. Not Branabh, it isn’t his voice. Who was it? His sergeant?

It was all getting to be scary. A month? Died?

She searched through her mind until she found the way forwards, and very slowly tried to sit up.

“Just you let go of me!” she squawked. Or thought she did.

But she only farted.

“Bloody hell!” exclaimed Barnaby. “that’s ripe!”

© Peter Rogerson 17.06.22

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