The International Writers Magazine: Dreamscapes Fiction

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Away for the weekend • Alan Stokes The top was down and we were pushing ninety. I had my head back and was screaming and laughing and had been doing so since we hit the motorway and Trish let rip. It was the first time I had been out the city for years. Plus I dropped a tab before we left and it was starting to kick in now.

But what beat everything was the music. After I squeezed into the car I slid the box out from under my seat and found The Doors.
I hadn't listened to The Doors for years. Or to anyone else for that matter. Before I met Trish I was living in a kind of void. Trish reckoned this was because a lot happened to me during my twenties and my brain had simply shut down.
We stopped at a service station. Trish was starving and needed to eat.
" You coming?"
I lit a cigarette, shaking, and said I would find her in the restaurant.
" I told Stewart we would be there by eleven. We haven't got long," Trish said and left.
I dropped another tab, tossed my cigarette away and went and sat on the toilet and chatted to myself for what I believed was a minute or two but was in fact over an hour.
" Where the hell have you been!" Trish demanded.
I explained but Trish didn't believe me. She said I was a liar. Then walked away, shouting, choosing words she knew I wouldn't understand.
I knew Brixton well. A long time ago I came here to visit a friend and ended up staying for ten years. That was when I began taking music seriously and joined a band. At one point I was described in a magazine as the leading guitar player in London.
Her brother's name was Stewart. But I didn't call him Stewart. I called him Baldy. I don't know why, but it just came out that way. If he was bald I could maybe understand it. I often called bald people Baldy. I also called fat people Fatty. My mouth ran away with me back then. It was like it had a mind of its own.
It didn't matter, though. Stewart didn't hear me. It was like I wasn't there. It was like I didn't exist.
" What's wrong with him?" I asked her.
" He gets like this sometimes," Trish said, squatting down and staring into Stewart's eyes which had not moved or blinked since we had let ourselves in. " That's why I bring a key."
After that things got weird.
Trish mutated into a cartoon character. Then I was no longer sitting next to Stewart but in a field surrounded by rabbits.
Then I was on stage and my fingers were a blur. And the crowd was going crazy, baying me to go for it.
So I went for it. That one note or maybe that series of notes when everything crystalizes into something bigger and better than what it actually is.
Then I'm on a beach, grinning, looking at the sea, shielding my eyes because the sun is burning, really burning.
" I'm back, Trish."

© Alan Stokes April 2005

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