Tumbling down the hill.

My mother is looking round the kitchen distractedly. She’s not really concentrating on me at all, but looking for something, an ingredient for her dish or a cooking utensil. I know she finds my dream-telling a bore - perhaps I’ve forced these cathartic confrontations on her too many times now for it to be interesting, or she lost interest before the telling became less garbled and confused in style, before I learnt that attempting to form an image whole and with immediacy, like a bubble-world from my lips or a smoke-ship from my pipe, was a trick that would take time as well as enthusiasm. I press on to what I believe to be the end, despite the detached reception.

“And I was lying face down in the concrete, Mummy. I fell asleep there, I think, because I was woken up by a woman stabbing down between my shoulder blades with a spade, telling me to get off her property.”

“Well, what an unnecessary thing to do.”

“Yes, it was. It was horrible!”

Now I’m looking round the kitchen, because I realise what an unsatisfactory conclusion that was, and I’m looking for more words, hiding in those old beams, to jump out at me and join the crumbling discourse which is swirling restlessly in the air, awaiting completion. My mother’s partner smirks a few feet away. He is a broad black man, very calm and smooth in manner. I don’t note this as odd, but I’m not sure that I recognise him. His appearance on the scene must have been recent, and yet there are some characteristics that I could tell you automatically: that he smokes large quantities of cannabis, for example, and that he is truly black in the sense that he is acutely aware of his blackness and draws attention to it regularly. This has made my mother and I acutely aware that we are white, and we are not very happy about it. In fact, she is a little uncomfortable with both of these characteristics, although she desperately pretends not to be. 

Mr Calm is suddenly looking very alarmed, that peaceful face distorted by a foreign anxiety glaring from his eyes as he leaps up from where he was reading the newspaper. He peers out of the window, and then spins to face us, announcing shakily that the Police are here and that I am to help him hide the several hundred pounds worth of cannabis lying on the coffee table in the next room. I obey. Oh God, there’s so much of it! More than I remember. It’s spilling from every nook and cranny as I gather armfuls, wrestling them into boxes and draws with great urgency, and in vain, because they’re here now, inside our little house, and I can hear my mother asking what the problem is.    

They’re all gone. My mother, Mr Calm, the Police. The little kitchen - which seemed to pay tribute to the original kitchen of my childhood but was equally redolent of my piano teacher’s - and the smoky lounge have dissolved into mere memory. My mother was my mother but I wasn’t telling her my dream, and Mr Calm was almost certainly an illusion. The chaos of the sudden cannabis concealment is in sharp contrast to the delicious, summery scene in which I find myself now. David and I are taking a walk through a sloping field of green and gold towards an enormous barn nestled in the outskirts of a forest. This is a familiar landscape; it cannot be far from my home. Light-tickled greenness and perfect warmth remind me of the dream I thought I had told my mother before, so I decide to describe to David all that had occurred and thus enjoy a purge of images whose previous expression, being delusory, had merely opened a draw from which nothing was taken. It is the story of a terrible fall, beginning in the treetops and ending upon dark, rain soaked concrete beneath the threatening force of a spade’s head, and then ending a second time with a knowing look between me and Mr Calm, resignation to our imminent capture and an uncertain future in Police hands. 

The gleeful feeling of a project coming to fruition is among us. We work with a rhythmic dedication, but we are not tired, for there is a restorative joy in each moment of the creative process. The tree house is almost finished. Cool light splays through branches, rewarding sticky skin with the generous touch of an approaching summer evening and a sweetly buzzing sky which now begins to cease its bright, weighty heat and lift us up a little. Our feet no longer bear down on those wooden boards, but rise and hang from our bodies a couple of inches higher than the usual surface-bound position. I can feel my ankles breathing. We all smile silently at this new state of being. I shall leave now to pick up food and drink and then we’ll sit back in the treetops to an evening of pleasant inactivity and conversation.

Apple juice, olives, cheese, tiger bread, mushroom pâté and a bottle of Rioja are in the bag and out I walk, briskly but without noticeable nervousness, I think. The Police appear behind me within seconds. It doesn’t matter to them that I have paid for it all, counted out the hard coins one by one and handed them solemnly and reluctantly to the check-out girl. No - their sight is selective upon those they have deemed odious to their project, and I reek of bark and mud and wood smoke. I know that a chase would be useless, that I must find somewhere to hide because these men constitute a swift, brutish infantry well trained in the disposal of dirty children. Four seconds later I have thrown myself leftwards into the tiny driveway of a murky looking terraced house and now I am lying curled in a ball behind the wall, pressed up against bins. I even have my eyes closed. The sky has darkened way beyond what time should have allowed, so I banish the foreboding gesture of mystical time flight and welcome real blackness, scrunching my fingers into fists for efficient blockage. An imaginary soul is thus removed from danger, or so I hope. 

I wait. They’ve left. I decide to lie waiting a few minutes longer in case they too are lying in wait. 

 Light sleep descends, aided by the complete obscurity of night, and yet maintained in a state of twitchy awareness of my tightly parcelled body, willing itself to be invisible. I can’t open my eyes. I’m starting to feel quite dead. The Police can’t still be there...so get up, Rebecca! Leave this place before another day dawns and the tree house is finished without you!

“Get up and get out. Immediately. Move, child.” 

Pain sears through me, metal so close to skin I almost taste its bloody scrape. Unfurling, my eyes creep upwards to meet those of a very morose looking woman. She is holding a spade and she wants me out and off and gone without further ado. I am under no inclination to go against her wishes, and so climb to my feet, ankles tense and unprepared for the weight of this new day which is darkly cloud-filled and dense with smog and smoke from neighbouring houses. Before I leave I catch her eye, but she has two perfectly rounded black pebbles instead, and they say nothing. Not even hate; just solitary abandonment.

I state this all simply to David. By which I mean without too much emotion or bitterness, for I am more interested in the act of renewal which I am now experiencing, stimulated perhaps by the steadiness of our footsteps and the timeless beauty of the day, which has seemingly lulled me into a greater freedom of mind exploration. Nothing ended when the black-eyed woman pushed me down with her spade then hauled me up with harsh words. 

From this point I began to make my way down the street, away from the shop where I had bought the food and drink, and some part of me concluded that I was fleeing the Police and all my terrors too. But this in turn drove me away from the tree house and my friends. It was dawn, and now I remember how I wandered for an age in a fresh, early morning landscape never quite set alight by the sun which struggled pitifully on the horizon, anticipating some indication of development towards an end in my journey. The remnants of false, half-crazed and fearful sleep on an unforgiving concrete surface had beckoned delirium as I then beckoned the sun to warm my aching bones, and so, searching for a route back to some real, physical bastion of normality, I decided to walk the fifteen miles to the house of a friend. Through bleak and boggy rustic beauty I tramped, and yet the distance covered was a trickster of an ever-morphing landscape since the sun refused to move. He sat grudgingly there on that pinkish line, I his unwilling project Punishment and he presumably beneath some curse himself, for surely all suns wish to rise?

I stop talking. Perhaps it is a great shame to talk of such dark futility when we are, in reality, rambling so very peacefully through the most luscious of landscapes. I resolve not to tell anymore, partly because the path from my muddy morning misery to the house I share with my mother and Mr Calm is full of wordless stones and fallen banks, and partly because my mother’s boredom ought really to be a deterrent from excessive dream-telling. I wouldn’t wish to induce that same state in a great friend on such a glorious day when he has heretofore had all the good heart to lend me his ears without any express limits on how long I may abuse them. 

Yes. The stop is final. We walk silently now. Barely any time has passed: the story of my dream was a quick swipe at dispelling the anxiety therein encountered, and as usual ended unsatisfactorily. Suggestive words do not dare hang in the air as before, however, but are flushed into nothingness by the sun’s rays. 

David’s relaxed expression now takes on a glimmer of an idea. We look at each other and make the mutual decision to stop our plod over the ground with our feet leading us on in such a tedious, orthodox manner. Down onto the grass we throw ourselves, taking off shoes and socks, and then begin to somersault with great speed and some pain down towards the barn which has been patiently awaiting the end of unstructured dream gabbling to welcome us into dusty shade. Grassy tussocks bounce us unevenly down the hill. It seems so much steeper now that we’re tumbling, breathless, knees and elbows roughly jabbing into the soil, thrust into the earthiness of insects and buttercups. When we roll to a halt the barn invites us in.

The scent of hay is a sweet, balancing mouthful of dessert. It is dry and cool in here. I feel my eyes glisten delightedly in my head before bold shafts of light shooting down in wide golden bars from neglected sections of the roof, blowing a glow into the dust which floats serenely as a saintly vision in its path. Now that we are inside, though, the barn is starting to take on a rather horrible delicateness. 

David has walked away and I can hear the infantry squealing and squawking like angry pigs just outside. They’ll come crashing in here any moment now; the barn almost shudders at the thought of ugly, raucous penetration. An ancient monument to some former harmony, mercilessly left beneath wretched, steaming train tracks, suddenly begins to shake and I am coated with golden dust from head to toe. 

They do not use the door. They smash through the wall.