Bad Dreams (33 page)

Earth to God, Earth to God!

Soften the hearts of thy Holy Assessors, and let them look with favour upon these the works of thy devoted servant.

Pete flexed his fingers in the air over the keyboard. He reached into himself for that moment of
Zen
calm, and was poised to pounce…

Upstairs, a Heavy Metal riff started. The ceiling began to vibrate with the thudding bass. Shit! Ten o’clock in the morning! What a time for the Dickhead Twins to start jiving to their record collection!

Lunacy in the Age of Reasonn
, he typed,
by Peter Aston.
He rolled the page up and saw the error. He knew he was out of Tippex, but still felt he had to look through his desk drawer.

Oh Lord, grant unto me liquid paper and I shalt sin no more…

‘I couldn’t work, and I couldn’t think,

I couldn’t face the day until I had another drink,

I asked my doctor, what could I do?

He said, “Son, Deep Depression got a hold on you…”’

The intro filled the room. ‘Shut the
fuck
up!’ he shouted, knowing he had no chance of being heard through the rhythm ’n’ racket fuzz-tone guitar. ‘Some people are trying to work!’

He pulled the paper out, tearing off a jagged triangle. He crumpled both pieces into a ball, and tore the ball into shreds for good measure. The shreds went into his waste-bin, with the rest of his false starts.

‘Sometimes it’s lack of mon-eeeeee,

Or maybe lack of friends,

But ya know Deep Depression

Gonna getcha in the end!

I heard my doctor talkin’,

And he weren’t bein’ vague,

He say Deep Depression

Is worse than the PLAGUE!’

Didn’t they know it was finals time? Didn’t they realize that he had to have three copies of this damn essay on the dean’s desk by four-thirty this afternoon or face a
viva voce
Inquisition? Didn’t they want him to get his degree?

They were dancing, now. Heavy feet clumped and stamped up above. These ceilings were like two sheets of hardboard sandwiching a cavity. Why did he have to get thrown out of his digs in town and be moved back into a Hall of Residence?

He knew this album by heart – it was by a band called Loud Shit – and ‘Deep Depression’ was what passed for a slow, quiet, smoochy number. From here on in, it was pure rending metal, 100 mph on the rpm, accompanied by the sounds of large animals being slaughtered. Most radio stations could not even mention the
title
of the last Loud Shit single they had banned, ‘Why Don’t You Fuck Off?’. He tried to exclude the din from his thoughts, and summoned all his powers of concentration.

He got a new sheet in the typewriter, and, choosing the keys carefully, at least managed to get his title and name down properly. Then he typed his examination number, and referred to his notes. He had all the quotations, he had the central argument, he even knew exactly what he wanted to say. That put him ahead of most of the others in his seminar group. Except Bloody Basil. That velvet-coated capon must have been born in the Eighteenth Century. No one could have gone through that many obscure philosophical treatises otherwise. He was the kind of slimeball clod who thought epigrams were still in fashion.

The chorus was a couple of decibels louder.

‘Deep Depressionnnnnn!

It’s the worst by far!

Deep Depressionnnnnn!

Makes me feel below par!

My health is in ruins,

And my life is
Hell
!

Since I caught Deep Depression,

I don’t feel well.’

Pete shut the row out of his head, and launched into his essay. 2,500 words. That was not so much. Five sheets of his typing. And at least 750 words would be eaten up by quotations. Plus a page and a half of bibliography and footnotes. It was almost nothing, really. But, of course, he could not afford to turn in a nothing essay. Pete knew he was on the cusp between a first and an upper second, and this was the one that would tip him either way. This meant the difference between a cushy post-graduate spot researching in the sun in some Californian Summer Camp University and a year of gloomy teacher-training followed by a lifetime of slamming English Lit into the heads of natural born lathe operators in Birmingham. Allowing half an hour to stroll to the Humanities Block, he had six hours. He did not even have to produce a page an hour.

He kept typing, turning scrawled shorthand and underlined passages from much-used books into something approaching respectable prose. He was getting a headache from trying to type louder than the music.

‘You meet them in the café,

You see them on the train,

With the Deep Depression,

They look like they’re in
pain
!

I read it in the papers,

I seen it on the news,

They say Deep Depression

Is
twice as bad
as the BLUES!’

The pile of books by his bed collapsed, but he was not distracted for more than two seconds. He swivelled in his chair to take in the major volume spill, then turned back to the keyboard. His fingers flew, stubbing on the keys. It was not ten past ten yet, but he was two-thirds of the way down his first page, and gaining…

He had books to back him up, but he would not need them. Yesterday, before the essay titles went up, he had been into the library with three extra cards, borrowed from friends. He was a Johnsonian, so he had all the secondary texts out. Taking Bloody Basil’s familiarity with Locke and Bishop Berkeley into account, he had grabbed everything hard-to-get on them in the hope of stealing some of the silver-spoon-in-his-mouth slug’s thunder. Bloody Basil had his Oxford donship sewn up already. He was practically out of this redbrick hellhole, the bastard. But it was not over yet. Not by a very, very considerable length of calcium carbonate.

The thumping upstairs sounded more like tag-wrestling than dancing. He only knew Thommy slightly, and his orange-haired girlfriend (Clare?) not at all. But he had heard them at nights. When they were not screwing they were fighting. Four o’clock on Friday morning was their favourite arguing time. The York House Student Union Rep called Thommy the RG, which stood for Resident Git. Clare had bruises sometimes, but it was difficult to tell under her multi-coloured make-up. The mutants were made for each other, Pete thought.

Another chorus of ‘Deep Depressionnnnnn!’ There was shouting mixed in with the song now, and sound effects from a Sylvester Stallone movie. Grunts and thumps and yelps and cracks. It was as if Thommy and Clare were beating living hell out of each other, then finishing off the job with teeth and claws.

Ten-twenty. First page done. Pete placed it face down on the desk, and had another sheet in the roller before his heart could get to its next beat. He knew his accuracy was way off at this speed, but he could always borrow some Tippex and fix the errors. Once it was on presentable paper, the rest was polishing.

He would have won. It would be all over, three years of study, between drinking, wenching and doping. At least he had been studying all along, not like his best mates Phil, Neil and Stef. They had done two-and-three-quarter years of drinking, wenching and doping, and spent the last term-and-a-bit in panicky over-reading and catching-up. Typical Lower Seconds.

‘We gotta try to stop it,

We oughta see it banned!

There’s a Deep Depression,

Spreadin’ through the
land
!

We need to seek a vaccine,

We need to find a cure,

Gotta say, “Deep Depression,

Don’t Bother Me No Morel
”’

Crash!

The whole place shook with that one. Pete bit his tongue, and tasted blood. His little finger got lodged between the ‘o’ and ‘p’ keys, and he scraped gouges pulling it free.

Someone screeched over the music. It hardly sounded human. Thommy must have landed a hard one on Clare, put her down for the count. There was banging on the ceiling, and each bang was accompanied by a whiny grunt. Pete knew someone’s head was being smashed again and again on the floor of the room above.

He thought he ought to do something, but deep down he knew his essay was more important. He could not afford to play social worker and wind up with missing teeth. Someone must hear all this noise and do something. Soon.

Last chorus, slower and even louder:

‘Deep Depressionnnnnn!

When will I be free?

Deep Depressionnnnnn!

Makin’ me feel off key!

My health is in ruins,

And my life is
Hell
!

Since I caught DEEP DEPRESSION,

I DON’T FEEL WELL!’

The words stopped, but the music went on. The banging on the ceiling was in time with the drumbeat now. Pete could hear words – one word – under the bangs.

‘Fuck-pig! Fuck-pig! Fuck-pig! Fuck-pig!’

It was a hell of a voice, like the possessed little girl’s in
The Exorcist.

There was nothing for it. Pete knew he had to give up and get involved. No essay was worth more than someone’s life. If that was not how he felt, it was how he knew he
ought
to feel. How could he explain to the police that he kept on typing while someone committed murder five feet above his head?

It was easy.
I couldn’t hear a thing, officer, I had my Sony Walkman on, loud. Beethoven. Ode to Joy. It helps me think, gets my ideas in order. I’d miss World War Three that way…

‘Fuck… pig! Fuck… pig! Fuck… pig!’

No way would PC Plodder believe that.
You’re nicked, my son!

He stopped typing, and listened. The beating went on, and the swearing, and the crying. There was a screeching scratch and a major crash, and the music shut off. The stereo had sustained some severe damage. He stood up, looking around for a weapon…

If he was going to separate those two, he would need something pretty hefty to back him up. A bazooka?

In the corner, he saw his tennis racket, unstrung and unused since spring. There are no sportsmen in finals, either. He reached for the racket, but something made him look up.

The gaps between the beats were longer now.

‘Fuck… pig! Fuck… pig! Fuck… pig!’

With each blow, the lightbulb jerked like a lynch-mob victim at the moment the noose snaps his neck.

‘Fuck…’

There were three spots, penny-size, of red on the light brown ceiling.

‘…Pig!’

Pete cringed, knowing somehow what could come next, knowing what would happen, but horribly unable to do anything about it.

‘Fuck…’

There was a rending, splintering
crack!
and an abbreviated howl of animal pain.

‘…Pig!’

The spots were larger now, and more numerous. A droplet gathered on the underside and fell, splashing the back of one of the essay pages. A crack had appeared in the ceiling. The red hissed and smelled on the lightbulb.

‘Fuck…’

Pete stood like a statue, conscious of the fragility of his flesh. The howling was constant now, louder than the music had been. He could hear other people shouting, thumping on the RG’s door, trying to get in on the act.

‘…Piiiiiiiiiig!’

A head was forced through the crack in the ceiling, and hung dead above Pete. Most of the skin was gone, and the lower lip had been torn away. One eyeball exploded out of its socket like a crushed
crème
egg. Blood ran in leaky-tap trickles, falling on Pete’s hands and face. The thing still shook; whatever was pushing it downwards would not leave off savaging the head’s owner.

Pete did not know if it was Thommy or Clare or someone else.

But he did know, as he bent double to regurgitate his breakfast over a scattering of library books, that whoever it was had not got the worst behind them yet.

The head screamed and screamed and screamed. Its owner was still alive.

PART ONE

OUT OF THE ANIMAL ROOM

T
wo days before Pete Aston sat down to write about the Age of Reason, Monica Flint, President of the University Students’ Union, was feeling silly. With a scarf over her eyes, she was being escorted to a ‘secret location’ like some John Le Carre character left over from the Cold War. Cazie Bruckner was really pissing her off.

As they drove, nobody talked. Derm played reggae on the Austin’s old cassette deck. Monica had no idea where she was going, although she assumed it would be one of those anonymous houses, shared by four or five students, in the sprawl that would have been a suburb if the town planners had got it organized early enough. She guessed Cazie would have Derm drive around at random a bit to make it difficult to judge the distance from the Old Pier, which was where they had picked her up.

Cazie, who had been called Corinne before she came to the University and caught Politics, was functionally insane, Monica thought. No matter what, she would not have been a likeable girl.

Monica had long since given up trying to guess which way the car was going, and was wondering just exactly what it was about Cazie that got up her nostrils. They were both feminists, and agreed on most issues that came up. But one of the things feminism underestimates is women’s potential for not getting on with each other.

It could not be jealousy, not really. Cazie came from money – her Daddy was some robber baron industrialist specializing in corporate rape and hostile take-overs – and she did look stunning with her white face and Louise Brooks haircut, not to mention her slim Jamie Lee Curtis thighs. But Monica was not about to underestimate herself; her physical attractiveness was not open to dispute. Since the braces had come off her teeth, she had not had any complaints. There was no
Dynasty
-type catfight between the two women. They did not even have to do business very often.

If only Cazie were not such a self-righteous nut…

The car stopped. They were there. The door opened. A hand took Monica by the upper arm and guided her out. She bumped her head slightly on the doorframe. She felt cold night air on her uncovered cheeks.

‘Can I take this thing off now?’

A pause.

Monica knew what was happening. Derm and the girl with them, Clare, were looking to Cazie for orders. A nod or a headshake.