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(diaryland) December 09, 2010 - 1:50 p.m.

Chapter Thirteen � Lascia ch�io Pianga

Luckily, dinner was just on the verge of being assembled at Rhys� house when Bryn rang.

What Rhys heard on the phone was mostly a lot of, �Mfffmmmm,� so that generally meant that he was down in the dumps, or Feng had been yelling in his ear too much in the mornings again.

Dinner at Rhys� house was the most normal thing in the world, not in a banal way. In a comfy way. You could always count on it. There was no butt rock or people trying to surprise you in the hallways, or too many guitars on people�s beds, or stacks of rancid empty Big Ms all over the place. Sure, there was messiness around the edges and on the coffee table, and a bit of food smudged on magazines, but it was just all at the right levels. The house was a hundred years old, and clutter looked like it was in its rightful place.

Rhys� wife Pippa made a curry and they all sat around the thick, dark table talking with their mouths full about TV shows and what Cedric had said that week (very little), and what new things he�d managed to wee on.

Cedric was finally put to bed with incredible difficulty and the rest of them sagged into a deep red couch in yellow light with the curtains open and watched Foreign Correspondent, like their parents used to do when they lived at home. Presumably, they still did it now, but Bryn was never around at that time. Their Dad always fell asleep on the couch now, as soon as the sun went down. Plus, they lived out in woop-woop.

When Pippa announced that she was exhausted and just had to go to bed, and Bryn was forced to look at the time and realised that the second last train was swinging by soon, he felt a tear go into his right eye. His right eye always seemed to feel more subtle emotion than the left one.

He didn�t want to go home, to the hard, cold apartment. He�d not felt this way about his own place like that before, but the feeling he had when he thought about going home was about thorns and metal.

Rhs must have noticed Bryn�s bummed out look a little bit. �Come on, young champion,� he said. �I�ll drive you home.�

�Thanks,� said Bryn in a small voice, feeling a modicum better. He liked it when Rhys took care of him instead of taunting him with competing eyewear.

Off they went, drawing ever closer to that apartment in a car with a baby seat with a mobile on it back to the place that he didn�t feel like going back to, across the road from the creepy reserve that now held the itinerant Sorry that he would rather not think about. But the closer he got, the more he thought about it.

�Hey, so I heard that you hurt your head really badly on the toilet door after I left the party,� said Rhys. �Were you OK? You blacked out, right?�

�Yeah, and Feng just kept on playing his Majesty of Footscray songs after that. I don�t know how I got into bed, and the weirdest stuff happened to me when I woke up. Nothing feels right anymore.�

�Shit.�

Bryn thought a bit more deeply.

�Nothing�s felt right for ages, actually. Ever since I finished uni. Every day, it gets worse. I�m getting farther and farther away from things. That bloody trip overseas just made it worse. Fuck, I don�t even know what I�m saying anymore. I just feel a bit shit right now.�

�You�ll get there,� said Rhys. �I kind of now what you mean. But one day, you�ll find the right girl and all that, and you�ll be happy. I felt a bit lost after uni as well, feeling a bit aimless, like the most fun I�d have was in a pub with my mates, and going off and having random adventures, but now I�ve got Pippa and Cedric, and we just do normal, small stuff now and it�s the best. The best ever.�

God, that sounded so, so. Something. Bleh.

Bryn leaned his head back onto the headrest hard and shut his eyes. The first thing he saw was Marcelle, or at least as much of her face as he could reconstruct. She was just a fuzzy blur in a theme pub now. She wasn�t even the right girl like what Rhys had been talking about, but a lump rose in his throat rapidly and his mind ran away.

Bryn thumped his head on the headrest at least eight times. Then, he opened his eyes. They were already at his place.

�Hey, man,� said Rhys. �If you ever need to stay over at my place for a night or two, there�s no problems. OK? I know that Feng can be a handful at times, and besides all that, sometimes it�s just good to hang out with your bro.�

�Yeah,� said Bryn, and got out of the car like he was walking through molasses. He stood on the kerb and waved like the queen as the dark blue pudgy car drove away.

Bryn stood on the kerb in the exact same spot for a long time. The night got darker. The reserve across the road was sentient like Hal. The inky trees rustled and talked. Bryn watched their indistinct forms as best he could, half thinking, and half just being there, standing around on the side of the road. The early November air became less pleasant.

When a series of shivers went through him, he knew it was time to go inside.

He walked up to the bottom of the stairs and rustled in his pocket. Thank fuck; his keys were actually in there. He hadn�t left them on the kitchen table at Rhys� house or something stupid like that. He leapt up the stairs because it made him feel better. The outside was so heavy in the night.

He creaked the key in the front door and squealed it open a little bit. He crept in, and proceeded to sneak through the lounge, not that there was anyone there.

�Hey.�

Woah, there was. An acidic wave of shock went through all his kilometres of veins at the same time. He froze, just moving his eyes, frenetically, to see where the voice was coming from in the blue-back apartment.

He knew that the voice was the voice of the cactus.

�Bryn, it�s just me. It�s just Adelaide. Sorry if I scared the bejesus out of you.�

From the extra sonic information, he figured out where she was. She must have been lying on the couch in the TV pit.

He didn�t want to, but he went over there anyway. It would have been weird not to, just for a sec.

�Hi,� he said.

�Hi, Bryn. Look, sorry about scaring you yet again. It seems to be pretty much all I ever do at the moment. It�s just that I was going to stay in Feng�s room, but the giant piles of paper in there gave me a bit of anxiety and when I get tight in my chest, I get worried that I�m going to have another kind of episode thing. So, yeah, that�s why I�m out here.�

�OK,� said Bryn, feeling uneasy.

�Yeah. I kind of want to explain this more to you. I�ve had this problem since I was a kid, in fact it was only when I was a kid up until I was about fifteen or so, and they gradually petered out and went away, and finally stopped two years ago. If I had a high stress level, or a big surprise, sometimes a few hours afterwards I would feel hazy and then start to slip out of consciousness. It�s a thing in my brain. It�s kind of a fit. I thought I�d grown out of it, or it had gone away mostly, and I�d been having check-ups at the hospital every six months since I was eighteen, but then I was in your room the other night, and it just happened again. It means I can�t drive, ever.�

�OK,� said Bryn.

�So I�m out here, stretched out in a big space, and I feel alright now. You know, I think that part of my affliction is that while I sometimes lose parts of my memory before I black out, I remember every single dream I�ve ever had.�

�OK,� said Bryn.

Adelaide didn�t say anything for a sec. Bryn didn�t want to say anything else to fill the void. He listened. He could hear Adelaide�s breathing. He could also hear something outside. It was the singing of night flowers, but it wasn�t very strong.

Then, Adelaide said, �I had a dream about you last night.�

�Oh,� said Bryn. He was afraid she�d say that. It�s like it had been said before she�d said it, out in the air in the TV pit. He didn�t want to know what the dream was about, but he knew he was going to find out anyway. No choice.

He sighed.

�I had a dream about you where you were in this box, about a metre by a metre by a metre, in a field with mountains behind, and the box was lead, and you were trapped inside there, but it was like I could see you from the front of the box in my imagination. It glowed in there, and you were all cramped, and you were stuck. And I saw everyone you ever knew, all walking away from it. There were thousands of people walking away. Some were very close, but they were still turned away from your box, and they were all walking.�

Bryn thought about this for quite some time, until Adelaide�s breathing and the sound outside became louder than his thinking.

�Were you in the dream, too?� he asked.

�Yes,� she said. �That�s how I saw it. I was the only one standing there, facing you.�

�Well, thanks for that,� said Bryn. �Your dream will probably give me nightmares in about an hour�s time, when I hit some R.E.M.�

�Sorry,� said Adelaide. �I just thought I should let you know about yourself in my dream. I thought it was the right thing to do.�

�OK. At least I wasn�t naked, like one of those nude dreams,� said Bryn, trying to make light of the situation.

�You were naked,� said Adelaide.

�Oh,� said Bryn. �Great.�

She could have humoured him.

�Sorry,� she said, and left it at that.

The night had a chance to be heard again for a while.

Bryn stretched his back and cracked the base of his neck. �Um, I�m going to head off to bed, now,� he said, attempting to sound pretty casual after yet another unsettling nocturnal conversation.

�Sure thing,� said Adelaide. �I hope you can get some good sleep tonight. I know I will now.�

Bryn shivered. �Goodnight,� he said, and scuttled off to his room.

He dove into his wrinkly flannel pyjamas and got under the hospital corners of his eminently comfy bed. He could still hear those infernal night time flowers, and Adelaide�s breathing.

Was the door closed? Yeah. It must have been some pretty fucking loud breathing on her part, then.

He lay there, ultra confused. His eyes were wide open, and little green sprites generated by his brain danced over his eyelids, while he thought about that conversation with his pyjama legs halfway up to his knees, under the doona.

Naked in someone else�s dream? Aren�t you supposed to be naked in your own dream? What is the motivation for being naked in another person�s dream? He was only joking when he�d suggested that. Everyone with their backs turned and walking away from him? That�s pretty much exactly how he felt.

He shut his eyes and they stung. He opened them again, not that it made any difference in the dark, dark bed in the dark, dark room.

What was with, �I hope you can get a good sleep. I can now.�? Hm? What did that mean? What did any of it mean?

He suddenly aware of a sensation in his heart, like if someone was handling it inside his chest. It felt awful.

�Why are you making me feel like this?� He whispered at twenty decibels.

He went to sleep. No dreams, no nightmares.




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