Read Online (1989) Dreamer by Peter James - Free Book Online

away.
    Sam jumped, shivering.
    Someone walking over your grave, her aunt used to say grimly.
    She tried to switch off the weird commercial that was playing in her mind in her twilight half-awake state. The hypnopompic state, she had read in an article once.Hypnogogic and hypnopompic, when you saw weird things as you drifted off to sleep or woke up.
    She relaxed for a moment, but then felt a sense of gloom creeping around her, enveloping her. Something bad. Like waking up after you got drunk and knowing you’d done something you regretted. Only it wasn’t that. It was something worse, this time. She tried to think but it eluded her. Her index finger was hurting like hell. She freed it from under the sheet and peeled off the thin strip of Elastoplast bound around it. There was a crash which shook the room.
    ‘Bugger.’
    She looked up, blinking against the brightness of the bedside lamp which Richard had switched on, and saw him lying on his face on the floor, his legs pinioned together inside his trousers. He hauled himself up onto his hands and stared around the room, with a puzzled expression.
    ‘Are you OK?’ She glanced at the clock. 0544. He was late.
    ‘Think I’m still a bit pissed.’ He rolled over, sat on the floor, tugged his trousers off, then pulled them on again slowly, getting each foot down the correct leg this time.
    ‘I’m not surprised, the way you and Bamford were carrying on.’
    He rubbed his head and screwed up his eyes. ‘We drank nearly two bottles of that port.’
    ‘Why don’t you have a lie-in?’
    ‘Japan’s going bananas.’
    ‘It can probably go bananas without you.’
    ‘Could be up four hundred points by now.’ He sat down on the bed, screwed up his eyes and wiped his face with his hands. ‘I’ve got a mega hangover,’ he said. ‘A serious wipe-out.’
    He stumbled into his shoes, kissed her and she smelled the fumes on his breath.
    ‘I wouldn’t drive,’ she said. Take a taxi.’
    ‘I’ll be all right. Fucking good evening,’ he said. ‘Great scoff.’
    There was a click, and then the room went dark. She lay back and closed her eyes again. She heard the front door slam and the room was very silent, suddenly. So quiet you could hear a pin drop.
    Or a light bulb explode.
    She fell into a deep sleep.
    She was woken by the roar of a bulldozer outside. A launch travelling fast up-river, crunching through the water. Someone was whistling ‘Colonel Bogey’. She slipped her feet out onto the thick carpet and sat on the edge of the bed staring at them; the varnish on her toenails was chipped. A few traces of hairs showed on her calves; time for another waxing; she smelled the foul smell of the wax, and still had the small yellowy mark on the front of her shin where the idiot girl had burnt her last time.
    There was the sound of a pneumatic drill, then a louder noise, from above: an aeroplane coming into the City Airport a few hundred yards up the river.
    She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror on the wall, and sat up straighter.
    Deportment, young lady.
    She ran her hands into her long brown hair and squeezed it tightly; she lifted it up and let it flop back down, giving herself a sideways glance in the mirror. Nice hair, rich, brown, chic.
    Chic.
    She could smile about it now, because it no longer mattered. But the sting had stayed with her for years.
    That morning in London thirteen – fourteen – yearsago, when her aunt had taken her, under silent protest, to the Lucy Clayton modelling school.
    ‘It’ll do you good,’ her aunt had said. ‘Give you confidence.’
    She could still see the withering scorn on the reedy interviewer’s face. ‘You’re too small,’ she had said. ‘Much too small. Five-foot five, are you? We need five-foot seven here. At least five-foot seven, I’m afraid.’ She had pushed Sam’s face around as if she were a horse. ‘Quite a nice face dear, very English Rose. You’re really quite pretty, dear, quite chic.’ The woman had