The Dream Speaks Back

The Dream Speaks Back

Leslie Tate, Sue Hampton, Cy Henty

Copyright

Published in Great Britain in 2019

By TSL Publications, Rickmansworth

Copyright © 2019 Leslie Tate, Sue Hampton, Cy Henty

ISBN / 978-1-912416-99-8

The right of Leslie Tate, Sue Hampton and Cy Henty to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.

Front Cover: So what are we going to do now Daniel? – painting by Cy Henty. Concept a collaboration between Cy Henty and Daniel Maher.

Back Cover: Sue Hampton, Leslie Tate and Cy Henty, photographed by Katherine Paley.

For other photos and copyright holders, see end of book

DEDICATION

Cy Henty: for Dylan, Dad and Dan.

Sue Hampton: for Paul.

Leslie Tate: for Rosemary and Robert.

LIFTING THE STONE

—— Leslie ——

I woke up this morning in a short, soft bed, tucked behind the door of a room the size of a train compartment. In my mind it was half-dark, so I could see the cupboard at the bottom of the bed and the planes and rockets on the wallpaper. Outside I could hear birdsong and the chink-chink of a milk float; inside was quiet. My eyes travelled the room, exploring the long wooden box beneath the window and the thick-lined curtains. The box had a red-cushioned seat which became, as I watched it, a low chest of drawers where my mum on washing days would stow away my socks and undies. That’s in the top two drawers, both with plastic handles, while the wide drawer beneath has everything I need for my imaginary journey. It’s as if there’s a weight pressing down on the box; it’s bowed in the middle like a worn sofa, and the big bottom drawer often jams.

The room is a capsule on a launch pad and I’m counting down, but only because I know it’s too early to get up. As I count I imagine my dad’s voice telling me to stay where I am. He’s the Deadwood Sheriff behind the door and he’s got me covered. If I’m at the window when he bursts in, he’ll shout, Get yourself back to bed!

The room opens out into a house, a three-bedroom semi, with floral wallpaper and matching curtains. Inside is empty and unreal. The exact size is hard to make out. Look up, it’s a cathedral; down, and it’s a doll’s house; close your eyes and it’s a dungeon. There’s a faint, reflective glow all around, like water in a bowl. Outside, the walls are castle-thick, with concrete front steps, pebble-dashed bays and black-painted drainpipes; inside, it’s a stop-over camp where no one can see me. The words of my mum echo in my ears: If you make your bed you can lie in it. I’m the stowaway child in a silent house; I’m steering the ship. 

When it’s time to get up my mum is there, setting out the table. She’s a short, busy woman with peery eyes whose hands move quickly. Eat up, she says briskly. My dad’s there, too, chewing toast. His face is thin and bristly and his mouth moves up and down, slowly. I can’t tell what he’s thinking. Sitting opposite me, I think he’s on guard, maybe to defend me but maybe as a warning. The word he uses for being like this is ruminating. He’s a large grazing animal preparing for the day.

In my mum’s world it’s all about tasks. She wants us to get through breakfast before anything can go wrong. She’s hard at it, worrying about the day ahead. Once she’s taken me to school the place will be hers. I know, because she’s said so, as we walk. When she talks like that she speaks out loud in a matter-of-fact way, as if I wasn’t there. Of course I’m also being talked to, as her friend. I like it when she does that because it brings us together. Sometimes she’s the singsong lady on the phone, and at other times she’s silent. That’s when I feel the struggle inside her and begin to worry. It’s as if there’s a pipe leaking in the bathroom, filling up the house. The weight of water slows things down; it blocks up the windows and the doors. Inside, we’re running out of air and space. The house is a black box with the lid jammed down. It takes an effort not to cry.

Today is an are-you-ill? day. I’m being asked if I feel all right. It’s said like a challenge, for my own good. When I don’t answer, my face is looked at and further questions are asked. I’m being given a chance to change my story; but I’m aware that if I’m really sick it won’t end there. I’ll be asked about what I did to make myself poorly. It’ll also be on my record. So I’m in the spotlight, and my best chance is to agree while saying as little as possible. I’ve a secret hope that my illness might be enough to keep me off school. 

We eat in the front room. It’s back to breakfast, as if the illness questions never happened. Did I imagine it? Or was I acting as some sort of mind reader? Could I sense my mum’s thoughts, hearing the words off colour and peaky at a distance, like talk from another room? Or were they all part of my story, a dream of being cared-for because I was special? Whatever she’d said, her words carried weight. They seemed more real than my thoughts or the food on the table. Even in silence I could hear her words. They sounded like rain on glass.

We’re finishing off breakfast and my mother’s eyes are on the clock. It’s a school day, and I’m already thinking about the journey and waving goodbye at the gates. I hear children singing and see my wild boy self, running in the yard. The wind is up and my words come in snatches. Suddenly I’ve lost my footing and I’m falling. It happens in a breath and I’m sprawling, looking up at the sky, feeling nothing. It’s a nice place to be, like playing all day on a beach. Someone leans down and asks me if I’m OK and for a moment I’m tucked up in bed. When the pain begins it’s all down my arm. My skin feels swollen, as if it’s been too close to an electric fire. The wound is gritty and when I’m taken to the nurse she tut-tuts and scrubs it with a flannel. If I wriggle, her fingers grip hard, and if I cry out she tells me to act like a man. Afterwards, my arm aches then goes limp. As I rise from the chair I can feel it hanging like a broken branch. I hold it out of sight so my mum and dad don’t suspect anything.

I’m in bed again, propped up on pillows. On the cupboard by the bed there’s a clock, a hankie and a glass of water. My pyjamas smell of Vicks and my head’s full of cold. The taste of medicine is still in my mouth. The door’s wide open, so I can hear my mum as she’s coming upstairs. Putting on my sad face, I get ready for her visit. I’m stuck in my room, only allowed out to use the toilet.

School tomorrow for you, she says in her no-nonsense voice. I can hear my grandma in it, adding the word lad at the end.   

After she leaves, the room changes to a hospital: an isolation ward. I’m between ice-white sheets in a bed of my own. My condition is serious but I’m bearing it bravely. Secretly, I enjoy being ill; it relieves me of responsibility and softens what people say. As I lie looking at the ceiling, it seems possible that I might be unwell for a very long time. I’ve aged, turning into a pair of eyes staring out of a tired face. I can picture myself leaving the ward, leaning on a stick with my parents at my side. Their voices are hushed and they walk at my pace, which is slow and deliberate, like a funeral procession. The funeral is mine, of course, or will be mine if they’re not careful. I’ve a light in my head and a swelling inside that no one can see. At any time I might blow up and fill the room as the Red Balloon Boy and float off through the window.

When they find I’ve gone I’ll be watching through a camera from above. I’ll scare them with voices that come from the cupboard. When my dad pulls it open I’ll switch to the chest of drawers, then to the light bulb, then beneath the bed. I watch him search the room while my mum backs off, calling my name. After they’ve left I hear them downstairs speaking in whispers. My mum’s voice is shaky; my dad’s comes in bursts. Some of the words I hear are worried, mystified, baffled. They sound strangely familiar but not-quite-right, like a TV impersonator or long-distance caller speaking on the phone.

When I hear my dad phoning the police, I realise suddenly what I’ve done. I want to run downstairs and ask him to stop: I’m OK, I’ll plead, it was all just a joke. But I can’t. There’s a weight on me of fear or guilt for who I am; I’ve fallen in the playground and they’re coming to get me. In any case I’m too ill – really sick, weighed down with illness, tingling all over and beginning to sweat – and the fantasy has stopped. I’ve run home from school and sneaked in the back door, with questions to answer. I try an excuse but no one believes me and I get told off. Now that’s over I’ve brushed my teeth and I’m in bed. As I count down, my breath comes slowly and sleep is near. When I wake I’ll be myself, waiting to get up ...

I’m just a boy waking in the morning in a short, soft bed in a room the size of a train compartment, making my way to heaven.

—— Sue ——

The little girl liked the things inside, where she couldn’t see them. Not with her eyes. Feelings were so deep in there that no one else felt them, except Daddy – if they were looking at the same tree or bud and holding hands. Stories were magic like that, because the feelings weren’t really on the page but catching anyway. They burst out of the book and when the story ended they were still part of her. And somehow, inside they were hers. Even if a million zillion children had read The Snow Queen and The Lord of the Rushie River, Gerda and Susan were her best friends, and the sadness was a kind of secret between them.

The girl was a child who cried because stories made her, and if they didn’t she might not read them again. Sometimes living on the outside felt very hard, and made her cheeks hot and her voice papery. The inside was a safer world where imagining made things real. Her outside was a lump. She’d heard a big boy say so in the street even though Mummy tried to talk over him and make her face bright. And her hair was wild and rough, not pretty. The pictures in stories were never like her but that didn’t matter because inside she was brave and kind like The Ugly Duckling with feathers all stubby and brown. One day she might squidge out of her skin and fly, like the Red Admiral that landed just by Daddy’s foot. He believed in fairies.

Daddy loved the garden because it never hurt anyone. So the little girl loved it too. He bought a small stone lion like Aslan, and every day she went to see him by the hedge. Leonard was always the same but always new. If he’d had adventures in the night, like Sparkle the lion troll from Hamleys, who flew around her bed because he was a prince in another land, he was always back by morning. He didn’t smile because he knew about sadness. Lions did, especially if they were really Jesus.

There was a plum tree near Leonard but she was scared of the wasps. She was afraid of biting into the soft and shiny red skin, because some things that hid inside were scary. Like trolls under bridges but they didn’t stop with THE END. Neither did the world under the top step in the back garden, the bit that sloped down to the railway in a wall of flowers.

Can I see? she asked, every summer.

Are you sure?

Daddy understood that she needed to look, even though she wished she hadn’t. The stone slab was much too heavy for her to disturb but Daddy had laid it.  As he lifted it, she crouched on her haunches to be close. Not that she would ever touch. Underneath the smooth grey lid with the broken edges, everything squirmed and slid and crawled and scampered and it was scratchy and dirty. It had its own smell like grass cuttings turning brown and slimy. The beetles looked hard but she could imagine the feel of their legs, scraping softly as if they were hardly there. It made her scalp itch under her dry curls. Worms looked chewy and bendier than fingers. She’d seen a thrush once, eating one, but white of egg was slippery enough to make her gag. Just one mouthful, Mummy said, but she’d never get used to it. Her insides didn’t want it and heaved. But it was the snakes under the paving stone that she had to see. They were the magic. They were the Daleks and the ogre. They didn’t hiss or shoot forked tongues. They didn’t curl out of baskets and dance to music. But they were quick and green enough to wrap around her like ribbon. Except that they didn’t seem to care about her. Maybe they were blinded when Daddy stole the roof away. They were the kings of the soft brown darkness and their secret kingdom was just as they wanted it to be. That was why Daddy soon put the stone back again, so nothing underneath it was frightened.

The girl was frightened. The fear tickled but not in a giggly way. Her Clarks shoes with a bar and buckle were big enough to squash the snakes but she never would. Blood and bones were gaggier than egg white and imagining the softest sound underfoot was worse. Daddy said the creeping things were beautiful too but the girl didn’t have his grown-up eyes or his grown-up brain. The snakes that pretended to be grass swarmed when she closed her eyes. They wound their way into her hair until she was a witch.

She didn’t tell Daddy, though, or he wouldn’t lift the stone again.

—— Cy ——

Leslie: What do you think about the idea that general creativity comes out of retaining one’s childishness?

Cy: In a world where we are actively encouraged to systematically destroy our imaginative, playful, emotional, irrational, spiritual, surreal and artistic sides from a young age I believe, to an extent, that we become split in two. I’m not sure if it is retaining one’s childishness as much as retaining one’s fascination with the wonder and absurdity of life. Those who fight to retain these aspects of themselves are often beautiful and fragile people, while at the same time pushing society forward by being inspired or by perceiving the universe in a different way. They fight hard to retain their honesty and dignity in a world where people are expected to hide their true selves and toe the line. When my first comedy partner Sam Ball and I used to improvise in a warehouse many years ago, we would think of it as therapy in a way, but it was also play; and it is the ability to play that is lost. We would take on different characters, surprising each other, trying to outwit each other – but also often exploring many dark paths within ourselves and being quite brutal toward each other. Sometimes this led to hilarious results...occasionally we’d go too far and that material was rarely put on stage! Always we would share a drink afterwards and feel relaxed and happy. The play therapy had not only given us some great material but exorcised a lot of our fears as we tried to make sense of an often cruel and incomprehensible world.

My second comedy partner Al Ronald and I also play in the same way, and challenge each other. The philosophy of our partnership is to remind our audience of the dynamic, beautiful yet chaotic position we are truly in. On a rock, spinning around a huge radioactive fireball in a void. I try to remember this every morning. Is it worth worrying about the trivial? A lot of the constructs of society, it seems, are a dark theatre meant to distract us from our true reality – to direct us toward consumerism – and often toward a slavery of the mind. That instinctive and dynamic half of ourselves is chained up somewhere in the labyrinth beneath the domed ceiling of our skulls, and our mind's eye is blinded.

Leslie: I’m reminded of Baudelaire’s, Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recaptured at will.

Cy: Yes I certainly agree with Baudelaire. I don’t think it is immature to keep the artistic aspect of oneself alive, it is just that that part of us is often left behind in childhood because we are told to deny it, so that we will follow the often absurd rules of a selfish, mean-minded society. Truly, I believe human nature is loving and compassionate and that we are all imaginative and beautiful, and that if we can prise open the lids of our own mind’s eyes – or help even for a moment others to do so, through games, through comedy, film, art and performance, through being honest to ourselves, through being able to laugh at ourselves – if we can cut through the bullshit pumped at us daily by the media moguls and corporations, we will rediscover the will to live wonderfully in what is often a surreal and absurd reality full of chaos, both terrifying and awe-inspiring.

My love of acting, writing, performance and visual art is because it allows that part of me to be free – and I hope connect with that part in others – that spark, that incredible light that we often catch a glimpse of behind the windows of the soul. It is never truly extinguished and we need to fan the flames in order to ignite it once more.

INSIDE STORIES

—— Sue ——

Daddy wasn’t always home when the little girl went to bed but when his train was an early one they met him from the station, even if it was dark. There were so many men with raincoats and brown briefcases and polished shoes, but Daddy was different on