Living Next Door to Alice

Living Next Door to Alice by Chris Green

The past filters into your consciousness when you are least expecting it. It arrives surreptitiously at night. On waking, you find an episode from long ago waiting for your attention. Sometimes it reveals a memory you can easily relate to. Other times it comes shrouded in mystery. It may seem unimportant, but something suggests it has come up for a reason, and you need to focus on it to unravel its meaning. This morning, it is one of the latter. Something perplexing here. It is not a memory I can recall revisiting before. But it stubbornly refuses to go back in the cupboard.

I am in a house in the country with Beatle, Yvonne and Rebecca, and a girl who I cannot place. I have no connection with these people now. I have not seen them for years, although if you go further back, I knew Beatle well. It is high summer. One of those evenings when it will never get dark. I am open to this as a possibility. There is something transcendental about this place. Time Passages, the Al Stewart album from way back, is playing. The mystery girl, who reminds me of a fairytale character, asks me to drive her to Bath railway station. It is not far, she says, about twelve miles. She says I can use her Land Rover.

I cannot recall, and perhaps it doesn’t matter whether I end up taking her. Or whether I make out with Yvonne. There is nothing to hang on to, here. The substance has already gone, yet at the same time, everything makes sense. It is not unlike the feeling of déjà vu you get when your brain suggests you have experienced a particular moment before. I cannot explain it, but I sense a moment of great clarity about this evening, a lifetime ago.

It feels like there is a corridor to another realm, a different consciousness to the one I inhabit from day to day. Nor does it end there. It offers a link to an earlier experience in those hinterlands around the Wiltshire-Somerset border, where magic abounds. This one takes place beside a rural railway station and a fast-flowing river. There is a pub that sells spiritual sustenance, there is a solar eclipse, and Burt Reynolds is riding the white water rapids like he does in Deliverance, but there are no duelling banjos. Trains stop regularly at the station, but no one gets on and no one gets off. I am reminded of that poem. I am with my old friend Tony Flags, Domino and Lucy. The Lucy in the Sky Lucy, that would be. With diamonds. Tony takes a swim in the river. He has gills.

This part of the country is overflowing with mysticism. Halls of ancient peace. White horses carved into the chalk landscape. It is the ley line capital, a magical place where anything and everything is possible. The Vale of Avalon is the home of Arthurian legend. Stonehenge and Glastonbury, the homes of myth and magic. Here, you heal mind and body through the agency of spirit. There’s a sword in every pond. You can walk on water. There are starmen waiting in the sky. There are oddball characters to greet you everywhere you venture. It has been a magnet for artists and poets over the years. William Blake and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood have strong associations. Lewis Carroll would have been drawn to these parts to populate his wonderland with whimsical characters.

Historically, I have not taken esoteric ideas too seriously, but I’m wondering if it might be best to keep an open mind. Such erstwhile epiphanies, if this is what they are, don’t have a habit of sticking around. They offer fleeting glimpses into an elusive dreamland. The magician might sparkle in satin and velvet, but these are not your day clothes. Inevitably, the mundane kicks back in, and you put away your nighttime thoughts.

But the following morning I awake once more in a state of grace, or am I still dreaming? I am floating in a cloud with a deep sense of connection to everyone and everything. Am I dead, I wonder? Is this the afterlife? Saskia, who I know to be dead, tells me I am not dead and puts a very good case forward for being alive. She has introduced me to Molly, she says, and Molly is looking after me. Molly seems to be doing her job as I feel an extraordinary sense of well-being. The ethereal music, Saskia tells me, is called Sweet Lullaby. It is a haunting mellow floater. The music, Saskia and I appear to be coalescing. It is becoming hard to tell where one ends and the others begin. We are one.

Like the other ecstatic recollections, this long-forgotten episode seems well worth revisiting. But this does not mean I need to get carried away by these nocturnal visitors. In the big scheme of things, they do not seem important. Saskia and I were little more than ships that passed in the night.

Maya, my anxiety counsellor, is always banging on about the danger of getting sidetracked by random chatter. She says these are dreams, Phil, vague recollections of past events, nothing more. They are not happening now, remember. Dougal in Father Ted might struggle with the dream reality distinction, but it shouldn’t be that hard for an intelligent person like yourself to get it. Maya has a habit of coming out with binary oppositions to make complex things sound simple. I suppose this is what I pay her for. She is not big on dream interpretation. Simple is good is her take. I need to concentrate on the here and now.

But these are powerful flashbacks. They have a lot of weight behind them. They appear to have a message. I sense I might benefit from taking notice. At the very least, the evocations offer a welcome distraction from the depressing state of the world at the present time and the heavy shit that is about to hit the fan. By taking them seriously, I seem to be inviting other forgotten adventures to appear. I suppose if I believed sufficiently in intuition, I could describe it as lucid dreaming. But whatever it is, the random epiphanies keep coming.

Each morning there is a new one. There’s always plenty to talk to Maya about. There are lots of things to relate. Like the recollection of the volcano erupting that day at the jubilee celebrations in Camberley all those years ago, the trip through the plush Palladian villas on the rolling hills of Swindon that I hadn’t revisited for a long time, and my first trip to the moon that I had completely forgotten about. I explain to Maya how excited I am that these long-lost memories keep reappearing.

‘Let me stop you there, Phil,’ Maya says.

Sometimes I wish she would lighten up a little, but I guess she has a job to do and you can only cover so much ground in the allocated fifty minutes, especially as we often spend ten minutes talking about music or culture or other things that have nothing to do with the task at hand. My fault, I suppose, the departures, but we have discovered a mutual appreciation of Mahler, Talking Heads and Smiley Smile. And although our tastes in film are different, we both agree on Stanley Kubrick and Roman Polanski.

‘These recollections seem a little different from the others, wouldn’t you say, Phil, inasmuch as there is a strong possibility they refer to things that never happened in the first place.’

I thought this might be coming but to emphasise it, she takes out the dream/ reality diagram, and mentions the dim-witted priest from Father Ted, a reference which, to be perfectly honest, is wearing a little thin. She draws another binary diagram to supplement the other one. This one reads, memory/ false memory. Although I have limited experience, I have the impression Maya’s direct approach is unusual for an anxiety counsellor.

‘I can remember the jubilee celebrations,’ I say.

‘That’s as maybe,’ she says, ‘but where were you? Not Camberley, I suspect. Why would you be in Camberley? That’s the other side of the country, and it’s a cultural desert. There’s nothing there. It’s wall-to-wall Daily Mail. You would struggle to find a sentient being in Camberley. And another thing, I’m certain there are no Palladian villas or rolling hills in Swindon. I’ve been to Swindon. It’s not like that at all. The trip to the moon? Come on! Your astronaut credentials are not strong, Phil. Look! I like you, but if you are not going to take these sessions seriously, there’s no point in spending your hard-earned cash coming to see me each week.’

‘I sometimes get details wrong,’ I say.

‘False memory,’ she says, pointing once more at the diagram.

‘The volcano may have been metaphorical,’ I say. ‘It could be that Amy, the girl I met at the jubilee celebrations, came from Camberley. And it may not have been the jubilee celebrations. It was a long time ago, you understand. Ditto the Swindon one. Now I come to think of it, it’s possible Swindon may have actually been Tuscany. You know, in Italy. …… Easy mistakes, though, wouldn’t you say?’

‘The moon?’

‘Not sure what that is about,’ I say. ‘It may not refer to a memory at all. Or the moon.’

‘Shall we put that one down to false memory too?’

‘But there’s another one,’ I say. ‘It’s just coming back to me. I’m in Pakistan. Or Kurdistan. Or Stanistan. Daley Roller and I have strayed over the border. Daley’s my boss. It is afternoon, or would be afternoon, but time does not exist here in the badlands. Through the haze, we catch the occasional glimpse of the dome of a mosque or a distant minaret. These seem oddly one-dimensional, as if they have been drawn by a child. As we approach, they fade into nothing. There are few roads. We are in a rural part of the country. The ramshackle farm buildings are in an advanced state of decay, and there are no animals or crops. We pass peasants along the track. Each has a spectral aspect. One or two of them issue guttural threats. We are not welcome here. Their words echo in the sultry silence. Although it seems foolhardy, we carry on, regardless of the peril carrying on might hold. By and by, time returns. The sun starts to move across the sky once more, and Daley and I decide to head back. We are due to finish work soon, but we still have a job to do, although we are not sure what the job is. As we approach the border, we see that in the distance a group of men has gathered, probably thirty or more. Some are wearing dark robes, others are in western dress. They seem watchful. They are biding their time. As we get closer, they spread out and place themselves at intervals along the route. They now block all the likely paths we might take through the scrub. Some of them are armed. We are afraid we will not make it back to our familiar world. We are already fading away. We are doomed. This is it.’

‘Come on now, Phil!’ Maya says. ‘That’s clearly a dream. And not a particularly interesting one. Look! How many times have I told you? Dreams don’t mean anything. They are not, as some people would like to think, a window to the soul. That’s just hype and propaganda. People never used to take much notice of dreams. Seeing them as significant is a recent development. I blame all those songs about dreams a while back. The Everly Brothers, Blondie, Fleetwood Mac. No end to the songs about dreams. The Jung Brothers’ Follow that Dream. Do you remember that one? Number 1 for nineteen weeks.’

‘I do. Big reggae tune, back in the day. I used to have the 12-inch on vinyl.’

‘More crossover, really. But the Jungs went on to do some funky tunes. What about Intuition.’

‘And Out of the Shadow. That was pretty cool. Synchronicity had a wicked bassline. Yet they will always be remembered for Follow that Dream.’

‘Look! The alarm on my phone is about to go, Phil. Time’s up. Next time, we need to get back to talking about what’s really happening for you. None of this internal monologue. And absolutely no dreams. Why would you want to waste a hundred quid every week to talk to me about dreams? I need to know what’s going on in your life, not that surreal nonsense that spills out at night. Your real life. Perhaps look at how you’ve backed off from everyone and everything lately. You can’t let your world shrink any more. For the last twelve months, you’ve been telling me you don’t want to turn into your father. I wouldn’t like to think that was what was happening. Give it some thought, will you! …… Until next week, then. Don’t forget to watch the Zigi Freud concert on catch-up. I think Zigi is doing a few festivals this year. You might want to get along to one of them. It would do you good. See if you can get Alice to go.’

‘Alice?’

‘You know. The new neighbour you mentioned last week. The one with the big cherry tree and rose of Sharon in the back garden. You said you thought she might be a university lecturer or a saxophone player or something like that. I thought that sounded encouraging.’

Living next door to Alice makes it easy for me to see when she is admiring her cherry tree or her rose of Sharon in the back garden and even to see when her husband is not there. But this is a long way from seeing when Alice is admiring her cherry tree or her rose of Sharon and when her husband is not there, and when she might be able to take the time to go to a rock festival with me for a few days without her husband over a Bank Holiday weekend. That’s a big leap.

I catch Alice in her garden while her husband, Kieran, is at karate, and I strike up a conversation over the fence. After we have touched on Mediterranean sunsets, Henri Matisse’s paintings, and the new Channel 4 drama, The Spy Who Came in from the Shed, I feel we are getting on well enough for me to mention the upcoming Bank Holiday festival. Would she like to come? It seems Kieran is threatening to whisk her off to a top table tennis tournament in Torquay for their anniversary that week.

But perhaps all is not lost.

‘Do you know, I woke up with the feeling I would have a conversation with you about the Spy Who Came in from the Shed over the garden fence while Kieran was at Karate, Phil,’ Alice says. ‘Don’t you think that’s strange?’

‘It is pretty weird, yes.’

‘What do you think it is that happens to us in the night? Where does all this strange come from?’

‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘But my experience is the opposite of yours. I wake with the distant past spilling out onto my pillow.’

‘Perhaps it is not so different. Time is central to both our experiences.’

’I think I see where you’re going. You mean everything might be happening simultaneously, all the time, for eternity.’

Yes, but our brains are programmed to compartmentalise it. The separation of past, present, and future may be an illusion, but as Einstein suggested, it is a stubborn one.’

‘This must have been what Al was singing about.’

‘Hey?’

‘Al Stewart. Time Passages. It came up earlier. I was telling Maya about it.’

‘Maya? ….. Is she your partner?’

‘She’s my, er, consultant. ….. I don’t have a partner right now.’

‘I see. You don’t realise how lucky you are.’

‘H’mmm’

‘Kieran can be a monumental pain in the butt. He’s obsessed with sport. Not just football and cricket and normal sport. I could cope with that. His interest doesn’t even stop at darts and snooker. The other day I caught him watching Celebrity Foot-Golf on Sky. Kieran lives and breathes sport. He has a TV in every room in readiness for The Something or Other Games which start next month. It’s endless. It’s like living in JD Sports.’

‘The Commonwealth Games, I think it is. But I could be wrong. I’m not really into sport.’

‘That’s good. Perhaps you might like to invite me round later. I could bring a bottle of wine. Or we could go out somewhere. There’s a Darius Bro Retrospective at the Splash Gallery.

‘Bro? I like his stuff.’

‘Lots more happening, too. Red Sayles is playing at the Sunset Bar. The new Leif Velasquez neo-noir is showing at the Regal. Lenticular Clouds are playing at The Riverside.’

‘Lots of familiar names there.’

‘I had a feeling you might like them. And looking ahead, the ArtHouse Film Festival starts on Saturday, if you are into that. And there are pop-up events around the town at this time of year. We are spoiled for choice.’

‘What about Kieran?’

‘Kieran won’t notice I’m not there. He lives in a dream world.’

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