‘Dan! That’s in-cred-ible! We have been talking of you, just now! About how you and Johann met for the first time …’ And now I can hear her calling to Johann. ‘Jo-hann – you won’t believe it! It’s Dan!’
I can make out several voices, laughter in the background. A table of friends. And Johann’s familiar ‘No?!’, that sudden and simultaneous explosion of surprise and questioning. And relief eases through my body. I feel myself untensing. I sense his bearlike warmth making his way towards the phone, cigarette in hand.
‘Hello, Dan? Yes, literally just as you rang we were speaking your name! A synchronicity, wonderful, no? Does that ever happen to you?’
‘Once or twice, yes. But there must be something in the air today, Johann, our subconsciousnesses must be speaking to each other because I had a strange dream about you last night.’
(I hesitate. On grounds of superstition alone I can’t bring myself to tell Johann about the fatal content of my dream. And anyway, what is the etiquette of telling friends they’ve died in your dreams?) I decide to be vague:
‘… It was quite disturbing, well actually, very disturbing, so I’m very relieved to hear your voice. And nothing’s been wrong?’
‘Well, my knee’s still a bit stiff, but no, apart from that, nothing. I’ve been in good spirits. And you? How’s the writing going?’
I tell him about the sense of deep concentration that the cottage by the sea has given me. And, conversely, how I’ve found it extremely difficult to focus being back in London. The proximity to means of communication. Even if they’re not used – the knowledge that the phone in the other room could ring at any moment, or that emails are piling up unread. And the simplicity of that room by the sea with nothing to distract you. The beauty of uninterruptibility. As Michel Tournier recognises in Vendredi:
the transformation which solitude was affecting in his own personality … he discovered that for all of us the presence of other people is a powerful element of distraction, not only because they constantly break into our activities and interrupt our train of thought, but because the mere possibility of them doing so illumines a world of concerns situated at the edge of our consciousness but capable at any moment of becoming its centre.
I also tell him about the fox cubs in the garden. Another exclamation of delighted surprise and then Johann says, rather elliptically, ‘The foxes are your paragraphs’, a reference perhaps to the unpredictability of what comes next. How the book that emerges is never the same as the book that’s planned, new ideas leaping into the pages like the young foxes. I refer back to the curious workings of the subconscious, and learning to trust this more, but Johann’s not having this: ‘But isn’t all this talk about “subconscious” just Freudian bullshit? Because what you’re actually describing is a way of seeing, at the very edge of what is possible, no?’
‘It’s like that passage in Austerlitz about the way we’ve been looking at history in the wrong way …’
‘Exactly! Yes!’
I hear him draw on his cigarette.
‘Let me tell you something which happened to me recently. I was in Spain, coming back by train, and we’d reached Barcelona station, where we were waiting for a few minutes. The train was very crowded, I was reading, but I must have been aware, at the very edge of my vision, of a certain agitation. There was a group of Chinese, or they may have been Koreans, I don’t know, but anyway, they seemed unsure about whether they should get off the train here. There was coming and going and some confusion, and maybe because of this (it’s very unlike me, I never normally would do this), I checked to see if my suitcase was still in the place behind me, between the backs of seats. It had sketchbooks in and the manuscript of something I’m working on. Anyway, it wasn’t there! The train was about to leave, I rushed off, very agitated by now, and there on the platform was my case, thank God. I got back on the train and it left almost immediately. Now, you could say this was my subconscious at work.’
‘But really it was your peripheral vision.’
‘Right! Yes, peripheral vision. Exactly!’
*
The other dream was three days ago. In fact, the trace of this dream was so indistinct that all I had on waking was the sense of a momentary imprint, the brush of a hand on the face. But, in that blurred state between waking and full consciousness – that inchoate drifting – as I had my tea, looking out over the garden, I knew my father had visited me in the night. And we had travelled somewhere together. But the more I tried to grasp the detail, the further away the dream slipped.
Then, out of this morning haze, with the suddenness of a radio tuning in, my mind jolts me back twenty-one years. Everything in violent clarity, half a life away. 23 September 1985. That night journey from the fringes of north London to Colchester. Details that can never be wiped from my memory – all vividly here again. Paralysed by shock. The uncontrollable falling of grief. In the upstairs room in Ayesha’s house, on what was going to be our first day of real independence – moving into that flat up the hill from Tufnell Park. And the moment before. That is what is hardest to think of now. The normality of that time. We had been waiting for Ayesha’s mum to give us a lift, piling stuff up in the hall downstairs, and we were lying on the floor upstairs with, of all strange things, Wogan coming from the television in the corner.2 And wired permanently in my memory, absurdly so, at the exact moment when the phone rang, we were watching Théâtre de Complicité do some routine involving a man being wrapped in vast lengths of Sellotape.
Ayesha is handing me the phone. It’s my brother. Strange, how would he have this number? I take the phone. He sounds out of breath.
But I cannot be sure what happens next. Or exactly what he says. I remember he doesn’t tell me immediately but instantly, from his broken voice, I know something devastating has happened. And then I’m throwing the phone across the floor. An instinctive reaction, a revulsion against what was coming, as if this action could stop what was happening. And in this pause, maybe only two or three seconds, I’m hyperventilating and swearing continuously. Ayesha is in the room looking on horrified. Somebody in the family is dead. My brother is about to tell me. My mind rapidly flashes the three possibilities past, over and over in a frenzied Russian roulette – mother, father, sister, Corinne, Mark, Meg, mother, father, sister. One is dead. Impossible. But real. This is happening. Maybe more than one dead? An accident? I retrieve the phone, kneeling on the floor. I somehow ask the question. Do I ask about Corinne first? I think so. No – it’s not her. Not possible to describe this moment, no words for it. Death passes to my father – it’s him, Mark. My brother is saying something about a fire in the fields, they found him in the top field, burnt. Insanely I hear myself urgently whisper down the phone: ‘But he’ll be OK, yes? He’s burnt but there’s still a chance, yes?’ I know this is impossible but I need to hear it. And if, by a miracle, there was just a breath, a misting of the mirror, then there is a way back. We will nurse him back, over months. Just a breath. And all is possible again. ‘No, it’s too late, he’s dead. He was dead when they found him.’