(1989) Dreamer by Peter James Read Free Book Online Page B

right without pulling in one direction. She wriggled her shoulders, tried to ease the back up. She’d already gone out, once, to her bedroom, and ripped out the shoulder pads. Now she felt she wanted to go and put them back in. She wriggled her shoulders around again and felt the label scratching the base of her neck.
    Archie shoved the rim of his Sauternes against his damp lips, tilted it and made a noise like a draining bathtub. A thin rivulet of wine dribbled down onto his tie. He had food all over him as well. She wondered if his wife dumped him in the washing machine when they got home. ‘This is good,’ he said condescendingly. ‘Really quite good indeed. Gets mugged by the trifle, of course.’
    She glanced at Bamford O’Connell, sitting on her left. One of Richard’s oldest friends. With his raffish, centre-parted hair, his crimson velvet jacket and ancient yellow silk bow-tie, he looked more like an Edwardian dandy than a psychiatrist. His wife, Harriet, frumpily bohemian, who always looked as if she ought to be wearing sandals even when she wasn’t, was sitting in the middle of the table, lecturing Peter Rawlings, a stockbroker, on ecological responsibility. Green Awareness.
    ‘You see all we are is sponge, we’re just sponges,’ she informed him in her shrill, earnest, church bazaar voice. ‘We absorb our environment like sponges.’
    ‘There’s a Futures market in sponges,’ Peter Rawlings murmured.
    It had been a mistake putting them next to each other. They had nothing in common and he was looking bored. She wished she had him on her right instead of Archie Cruickshank who was now slouched in his chair, staring thoughtfully at the ceiling and making an unpleasant slurping sound.
    Archie. Every business had its share of ghastly people who had to be – teeth-clenchedly – tolerated, humoured, fawned over. She had her share too. Like Jake, the copywriter.
    Sucking up, they called it at school. Nothing changed. You went through life sucking up. Then you arrived in heaven, clutching your notebook full of credits, likeAunt Angela, for the Biggest Suck Up of all. Hey God, that was a great place you made. Only seven days? Wow. How did you do it? You made a few little booboos, but they’re minor really they are, didn’t matter – well, OK, it would have been nice if you hadn’t taken my Mummy and Daddy and dumped me with two of the most miserable people you could find, it would have been nice if I hadn’t had four miscarriages and then nearly been killed by my little Nicky, and if you hadn’t nuked Hiroshima. It would have been nice if my husband hadn’t bonked that little—
    It would have been nice if that aeroplane hadn’t crashed.
    Her throat tightened and her stomach knotted with fear. It seemed suddenly that the volume control in her head had been switched off, and she could see everyone but not hear them.
    She felt icily cold. Alone.
    163 DEAD IN BULGARIA AIR DISASTER
    Everyone in the room had stopped in freeze-frame. Then the movie started again. Her ears felt hot. Boiling. Archie began to eat his trifle. Other than lecturing her on wine he had asked her nothing about herself except to inquire how many children she had, three times so far. His wife, with peroxided hair and enormous boobs, was at the far end of the table trying to wrest Richard’s attention away from Andreas. She looked more like a stripper than the wife of a banker.
    ‘This is wonderful trifle, Sam,’ Bamford O’Connell said in his rich Dublin brogue.
    ‘Thank you.’ She smiled, and nearly blurted out, ‘Actually it’s Marks and Sparks,’ but just managed to stop herself. It had worked fine. She had taken it out of the container and bashed it about a bit.
    A short, compact ball of energy, with a wildlyexpressive bon-viveur face, O’Connell attacked another spoonful with gusto. He made life seem like a feast, whether it was eating, drinking, talking, or even sitting. Absorbed in studying others, he gave the