Lennox inhaled a long breath, the air
whistling through clenched teeth, and woke up screaming.
No, he didn’t, but he’d like to have done so. It was one of those damned dreams that persist when logic told him
not to worry because consciousness was only moments away. He was speeding along the motorway to the airport with his girlfriend,
Allie. Arguments at home fizzled out on holidays, as laughter on warm beaches replaced snarling in the wet and cold. As he
drove under a bridge, a shock of sunlight made him shut his eyes.
Bugger, they’ve refused to reopen.
“Allie, I can’t open my eyes, am I still
in the fast lane?”
No reply. Of course not, it was a dream and she slept.
He should decelerate – just slowly before he meets a bend, but then will vehicles behind notice his brake lights in
time? Heat worked up from his knotted stomach and pumped out as perspiration from his forehead – stinging his closed
eyes.
Slowly, he lifted his foot off the accelerator and
with one hand on the steering wheel stabbed blindly at the dashboard for what he hoped was the emergency flashing lights.
He put his left indicator on just in case all he’d done was activated the fog lamps.
“Allie, wake up!”
He used his free hand to find her shoulder to nudge
but nothing seemed to be there.
Had she climbed into the back seat to lie down? He
brought that hand up to his face and used his fingers to try to prise open his eyelids. A blink of light snapped in but before
he could focus, a bang in the front pushed him into a rapidly inflating air bag. A thump from the rear yanked him backwards.
He breathed out noisily in tune with the deflating air bag.
“No!” he yelled, and at last found he could
open his eyes.
“It’s only a minor collision,” Allie
said.
To his astonishment, he found her in the passenger
seat next to him. How did she… of course this was only a bloody dream. Wake up, Lennox!
Allie seemed remarkably cool compared to him. “We’ll
miss the flight if we stop to exchange details. Come on, get going.”
Bashing the flopped air bag out of his way he saw that
by some miracle he’d blindly driven onto the slip road for the airport. There was an empty lane in front where he’d
expected a queue of domino-bashed vehicles. A horn beeped to his rear, and the reflected driver waved him to go on. With a
shrug, Lennox restarted and drove on to the airport car park. After the agonisingly slow security checks they found they were the
last to check in.
Jogging while scrutinizing the information screens
Lennox didn’t see the baggage trolley eager to make his acquaintance. As his face hurtled to the marble floor tiles,
his alarm jangled him back into consciousness.
***
The aroma of rich Italian coffee lured him into the
kitchen, where Allie wearing her bright red kimono was dropping thick bread into the toaster. He opened his mouth but she
pre-empted his greeting.
“I had a weird dream last night, nightmare really.
I never dream, so that’s extra disturbing,” she said, not looking up.
“Funny you should say that. I—”
“Then you hit me, look.” She slipped the
silky garment off her right shoulder.
Lennox’s eyes wandered straight past her
shoulder to her exposed breasts. No matter how many times he’d seen, fondled, kissed, and sucked he could never tire
of their exquisiteness.
“You’re not looking,” she said, rearranging
red so that only her shoulder remained exposed.
“Sweetheart, there’s nothing, oh, a little
pink. Sorry.” Did he say that? No, but maybe he should’ve done, instead he shrugged his own shoulders and caught
the toast.
The trauma of Lennox’s nightmare abated with caffeine
and buttered toast.
“Go on then, what was your dream about?”
he said.
“Airport; you’d forgotten your passport.
Nightmare – you had to come back here for it.”
His mind cartwheeled with the coincidence of both their
dreams relating to the airport. He nervously laughed and said:”Did I make it back in time?”
“Dunno, you hit me and I woke up.”
***
Lennox chewed a pencil at work. Being a newspaper
cartoonist took concentration but his mind bifurcated; one to last night’s nightmare and two, the holiday in Sorrento next week. Others from the paper were going too – a reward for winning the National Colour Supplement of the
Year Award. He smiled every time the mouthful swam into his head.
Griffiths, the sub-editor stuck his head round the
studio doorway and nodded. His face, grey and saggy, needed a sunny vacation more than anyone else.
“I’m not going, Lenny.”
“You’ve not lost your passport?”
Griffiths shook his head. Bits fell
out of his mop-hair. “Too much work on.”
“And the real reason?”
The sub looked at his feet; scuffed suede shoes. Lennox knew
Griffiths had hefty child maintenance that drained his salary, but this trip was on the
house. Perhaps he needed just a little extra. “I can lob you a hundred if it helps. Pay back when you can.”
Griffiths looked up and smiled. “That’s
very good of you, Lenny, but you know I’m allergic to flying.”
“I thought you were cured – hypnosis.”
“It all came back last night. A nightmare. I
was falling through a cloud.” Griffiths shrugged apologies and left Lennox to shake his head at the coincidence. Spooky,
but nothing was going to stop him going on this bash.
