A Book of Dreams Page 18

  It was late afternoon and I walked slowly through the grass and flowers, feeling a peaceful kind of relief. I had the feeling everything was going to be all right. Look, even after Makavejev left, the flowers came out, and I walked through a mass of swaying colour across the fields: Indian paintbrushes, daisies and, hidden beneath their leafy camouflage, wild strawberries.

  As I came over the top of a small rise I could see all of Orgonon: the weedy, overgrown meadows rolling right up to Tom’s bright lawns extending from the laboratory, and barely visible through tall trees at the top of the hill, the Observatory. And then moving backwards across the green lawn in front of the lab came Tom’s truck. He backed his old red Chevy pickup right up to the cloudbuster platform and I walked over to see what he was doing.

  When I got there, he had opened the tailgate and was throwing timbers from the platform onto the truck. The cloudbuster was gone, crated up in the barn. Tom pushed his hat back on his forehead and explained that the wood was rotten and that sightseers who came to Orgonon often ignored the ‘danger’ signs and clambered up the rickety steps to crank the cloudbuster around like a toy.

  He shook his head and grinned. ‘Why, last summer Bea told me I ought to come over here and chain it down. That’s right, chain her right down because people was coming up and messing with it all the time.’ He leaned over and spat a quid of brown tobacco juice onto the grass. ‘Once some folks came up and messed with it five days in a row and didn’t we have rain every day for a week!’

  He raised his eyebrows like Groucho and spat some more.

  We talked for a while in the late afternoon sun and then I got up on the old platform and started handing pieces of the rotten structure to Tom, who threw them into the bed of the truck.

  We stood there together in the late-afternoon sunlight with his old Chevy idling and pouring clouds of blue smoke over us, passing pieces of wood over to the truck slowly and methodically, not talking, just working together. We worked easily together as if we had been doing it for a long time and it was as if the swinging arcs of wood were already there and all our arms had to do was find the place in space where they were.

  Soon the truck was nearly full; the platform nearly gone. Soon grass would be growing where the platform had been, but nothing would be forgotten. And when I straightened up to wipe away the sweat I saw that the long golden sunbeams had come down and stretched out across the treetops as the sun sank into shimmering leaves etching brightness against the sky’s edge. For an instant I thought I could look across that thin line glowing on the horizon and see through to the other side. I closed my eyes and it was still there, happening again and again, over and over, and I am not afraid of going there now or afraid of having been there. And when I opened my eyes, the light had already gone and I was here.

  Tom rested too. He took out his tobacco and took a bite as we watched the dusk settle over Orgonon. He offered the plug to me, grinning. He said,

  ‘Try it. It’s good.’

  Copyright

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  ePub ISBN 978 1 78418 354 7

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  First published in Great Britain in 1974

  This hardback edition first published in 2015

  ISBN: 978 1 78418 270 0

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing 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 including this condition being imposed on the subsequent publisher.

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  © Text copyright Peter Reich 1973, 1989, 2015

  The rights of Peter Reich to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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  Grateful acknowledgement is made for permission to quote lyrics from ‘Party Doll’ by Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bauer. Copyright © 1957 and 1958. Copyright renewed © 1985 and 1986 by Longitude Music Corp. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Longitude Music Corp.