I'm sitting in a churchyard in a car with my mother. It seems this is my mother though she does not look like my mother. She is young. There is a story in a bottle in the ground about two girls murdered at a service station hotel in 2018. Raped and murdered. They'd stopped and met two men and danced with them and the one was shouting at one of the girls, he dragged her off the dance floor to the room. I was thinking, "This has nothing to do with me because..." First I thought because too long ago or too far away but it was neither, then because I'd have sensed the threat, I was older. But I knew I was making excuses because it was probably dangerous to do all that driving around on my own and that I should be more careful. As I was hearing about - and seeing - this story, I was drawing on these lamp shades. For some reason. Drawing lines on paper lampshades. The man in the story was psychotic, he'd suddenly turned against the girl and dragged her into the room to rape and murder her - with the same thing happening to the other girl as a kind of copy. The cats were in the back of the car. I'd been feeding them. And at the place we'd stopped, there was a message carved into the stonework saying if there is one Irina something... I couldn't read it. Was it a call for a witness or a lost person? And a suggestion that the place was there to look after people. Then, all of a sudden, the driver, my mother is driving determinedly down this track and I know this track and it's a muddy, stony bridleway not a road, we'll never make it. She's just driving down it - a track I know in Devon and have dreamed of repeatedly. She has this fixed look on her face and I am screaming at her, what are you doing? Are you punishing me? Trying to scare me? She won't answer and then it's like the same scene but she's now, though she doesn't look like him at all, become my father and I experience the same fear at his refusal to look at me or stop and the same fear at getting stuck, though I think I can walk out, even with the cats, and in my nightie with no shoes on. It's not too far to the farm from here. But somehow it's the end of the track and I drag him out the car and he's a tall young man, naked, and I wrestle him to the ground, like in the recovery position but subdued, and I am hitting him and screaming what the fuck? And I say, "You know that she did exactly the same to me yesterday! I'd almost expect it of her, but you? What the fuck were you doing? Are you trying to kill me and the cats? Both of you? Are you in this together?" I am so angry and hysterical that I wake up.
Yes, a dream. but it was so unsettling that I came downstairs for a pee and a drink. My throat is sore. The "throat cancer", obviously. My glands are up and I've already given up booze and know I should give up vaping but here I am typing and vaping, puff pull.
Ah! That reminds me of Shamela, the satire of Pamela and Clarissa. You don't know of what I talk? Or rather write? Here. In the novel, which is in the form of a diary, Fielding writes, "Scratch, scratch." To show the awareness of the self-consciousness of writing about writing... or whatever. I knew what this meant in 1991 when I was studying it at Oxford. That;s all I remember. "Scratch, scratch."
Why did I want to write this here? I didn't want to forget the dream. I wanted to share it with Elly. I wanted to understand what it was saying to me. The betrayal by mother and father, by Anima and Animus? By my inner feminine and masculine? The fears of being taken along the wrong road by both guides? What, at this point in my life, is the wrong road anyway? And the strange doubling, the two girls, the two parents doing the same thing. What's the significance of 2018?
I suppose, in the dream, I made it through.
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