When Gerald woke from the edge of a dream, he had a vague sense that someone was lying beside him. He felt calm at this invasion, not numb or horrified or outraged. Perhaps, he felt thoughtful. Yes, in fact he even found himself reflecting on the way his mind was occupied with reasons and possibilities: Maybe a friend or some relative decided to stay the night and there was no room downstairs. But what occasion had created such circumstances? All my relatives are down South and a safe distance away. He couldn’t think of anyone he knew well enough to have invited them to share his bed. Not that he could remember ever going to bed. Gerald lived in a permanent present and he had got so used to this that no event or occurrence was unfamiliar or unreasonable.
Gerald allowed himself to drift between sleep and consciousness like he was fainting; bobbing on a lake beneath a heavy grey sky. From the edge of a half dream, Gerald sensed the body beside him move gently. Then words were being spoken.
“Gerald? Are you awake?” The voice was so gentle it could have been imagined. Gerald assumed the voice was a woman’s. It was light in that way. “Gerald. Wake up.” There it is was again. “Gerald.” Quite insistent now. “Gerald, wake up. You’re scaring me. Don’t pretend. I know you’re awake. I can see your lips moving.”
Whoever was speaking was right. At that instant, Gerald was aware that his mouth was awake and independent. He frowned a frown that was his own. And he sighed, almost just to feel the experience of his own sigh: the air being pushed out of his chest like that.
“I think you had a nightmare. You cried out. It made me really jump.”
She knows my name. So, she knows me; knows who I am. Gerald was content enough to allow his thoughts to wander over the realisation. He was comforted by the idea that this person beside him was not a stranger, that, in some way, he was safe. But his meditations were interrupted because the person beside him, their body, was moving. He could feel the weight of them in the mattress and then something touch him on the side of his face. Something gentle. Maybe a finger. And something in that touch made him freeze and he did not dare move.
There was a silence and then Gerald felt the finger slip away and a head, the side of her head and its weight, press upon his chest. Yes, there was the impression of the softness of an ear, and hair, maybe. The bone of a cheek on the bone of his sternum there. And, after a short moment, perhaps, a dampness. How aware is our skin. How sensitively does it possess a mind of its own, like another person telling us what’s happening. He felt the head rise and fall with his breath. And then, as if the person beside him, with their weight heavy on him, sensed a faint irritation, the pressure rose as gently as it had pressed down that time.
It lifted like a bird off a thin, bare branch. The damp shadow on his nightshirt cooled against the skin. And the bird became a cloud’s shadow on a hillside moving away in the day. Like this, she rolled away from him. “I’ll see if the boys are up. I’ll make the tea.” Her words were familiar but the voice was so distant, now.