Half-life

I am still having trouble sleeping, even after five weeks, and not just away from home. It is a Sunday night, and I have just rolled over for the fifteenth time and buried my face in an alternate pillow, as if there was any chance of that making a difference. The sheep I have been counting are starting to misbehave. Instead of jumping over the stile they've begun to perform a mystery play. A young and tender lamb is garlanded with Ox-eye Daisies and symbolically whipped with strands of Meadow-sweet, an older sheep has donned a wolf-skin and circles her, answering each plaintive bleat with an eerie howl, while the remainder chant “We shall not be shorn till the moonlight fades”. And then the picture stops, without the enticing link that says “click here for unlimited downloads”.

Mixed images float in and out of view, a glimpse of a cubby under the stairs painted pink, where a bald-headed man stoops over a cot and cooes, a television that contains a family of hamsters, a car that I'm following far too closely behind, and then finally I am forgiven.

Waters rush noisily around a sloping rock, swirling together in a plait that rolls and coils around itself between two smooth gyrating surfaces that hint at hidden fish. The air is hot and wet and cool at the same time, and spray tingles on the skin. Tall trees stretch up above to a blue that is not of a temperate zone, and in the distance snow shimmers on the peaks of violent mountains. There is a sense of danger lurking in the bracken floor beneath the trees that goes as quickly as it comes, with just a rustle. Kingfishers swoop and swerve across the surface of the pool, challenging to other to flinch first as they aim their spear-like bills towards each other. And underneath the rich chocolate of the water lie the dreaming fishes, locked into their laminar world of flow and eddy, waiting to be teased and taunted.

I come awake, alive, tingling, feeling the blood in my veins and the breath in my body, refreshed. I have been let into the great blue yonder again, I am no longer an earthbound outcast. The alarm clock realizes it has dozed and lost the game and bleats only once before I flick the switch and rise, at half-past-three, Monday, England, Earth. This dream might be an easy one to place, for my youngest brother is out in India on a fishing trip, stalking the elusive mountain carp.

The bed beside my rumpled imprint is empty, the door into the main room pulled close, and behind it light glimmers. This is strange, and I pad silently through towards the kitchen and an appointment with the coffee-maker. Passing the open door to the sitting room, I see that a baby girl lies face-down upon the sofa, head turned towards me, eyes closed, mouth open, little hands palm-up beside her as though she had tripped and fallen and still lay shocked. I pause for a second, asking myself if she is alright and should I turn her over? Another one of my selves has momentarily made contact with me, someone with a life that has run more smoothly than mine, and we gaze together as though both of us were fathers, he telling me that they always look like that. Then I recognize that it is my partner's youngest grandchild, and my other self says goodbye.

The coffee bubbles gently into the jug as I listen to the story, youngest daughter's partner has just been offered a new job, and they cannot arrange childcare in time, since both of them need to work their hearts out just to have next-to-nothing, so grandchild was delivered to our door last night, as I watched sheep confront their hidden urges. I carry bags and a flask of coffee out to a cold car as Madonna carries child to a warm bed. Rumbling gently through the blackness that is Wessex before dawn, I have a disturbing thought, what will a young thing make of the strange male smell to the bed she now slumbers in? Will it disturb her? Will it soothe her? What dreams will she have to brighten up her life?