The Pure Life of Dreams

May 26, 2025June 24, 2025

Jwee is having a Baby

Jwee and I are lying naked in a white room, our limbs enfolded. There is a soft pale lighting emanating from the window. On Jwee’s right arm is a line tattoo of two overlapping crosses, one cross red and upside down next to the black one.

As we caress each other I write this sentence down using a large ivory-coloured ballpoint pen. The tip of my pen is the size of a roller ball deodorant but the words come out clearly in black ink on the page, though the sentences are written in a disconnected form, written wherever there is space on a parchment which I have placed along the arm of our chaise long.

No matter, because as a whole the sentences will paint the full picture.

Jwee looks up at me, her perfect tan round face in mine. Her beautiful smile with her trademark blue wire rim braces is more radiant than ever.

‘I will have the baby,’ she says. She is talking about Zach’s baby. This Zach is not Leif’s son as introduced in previous dreams. This new Zach is Jwee’s unfaithful and crotchety Western lover living in Bangkok.

I’d first met Jwee next to Twister’s in Nana Plaza six months ago. In that encounter Jwee told me that she wanted a second child, a sibling for her eleven year old daughter, but being already thirty six meant that her biological clock placed her on borrowed time. I tried to remain positive.

(One day, dear reader, I will publish the full story of beautiful Jwee, but for now the story will remain hidden on the other side of my parchment, waiting for the sequel to Flying with the Cormorants.)

‘You mean in England?’ I ask her.

‘Yes.’

It means that Jwee will come to England to have the baby, and Jwee and I will be able to carry on our affair after it is born. I can barely contain my joy. I hope that it means she will move from Thailand permanently, or that at least, we can spend a lot more time together while she’s in England.

We lie together in a cool jasmine shade, still and in silence, on the chaise long. Presumably the baby is Zach’s, not mine, but no matter.

Down the left side of the elongated parchment I write the next scene.

Jwee and I stand together waiting to board the airport people mover. Jwee is behind me. She’s wearing her white thigh length boots with her long wool grey dress. To my right is Zach and another bargirl who stands in front of him. To the right of them is a third couple waiting to get on.

We are waiting for the train doors to open, so that we can climb aboard. The doors are solid iron and painted a uniform beige.

Jwee takes my arm and swings my hand in hers. Her fingers feel soft and tender in mine. Zach does not seem to mind that I am pairing with Jwee, after all he has another woman for the night. He doesn’t know about Jwee and I. He doesn’t know that when Jwee comes to have the baby, Jwee and I will continue to have our affair.

I hope this dream means that Jwee is truly pregnant as she wanted.
Photo by Mark Fischer via Flickr.

May 12, 2025June 1, 2025

Back in Love with Sophie Priest

Sophie Priest was from the Home Counties but when I first met her she was working as a librarian for John Lewis on Oxford Street. I had no idea why a department store would have need of a librarian but no matter.

As I described in my Asian stories, Sophie had a black centre-parted fringe which framed an angelic face dotted with light brown freckles under hazel eyes and I loved her, even though she did not believe it.

Sophie was now living in a flat share near the house on Brookfield Avenue where Elaine and I grew up. I was back with Sophie on a trial basis and I still loved her so I was on my best behaviour. (Sophie had been cut from the Asian stories for reasons of expediency though her description had been retained and attributed to Bertie.)

That day I had to clear out my work place before going back to Sophie’s flat. Evening was already settling in and I was the only one in the office after Duc the Wanker (not to be confused with Duc the Blind Rickshaw Driver) had left.

From the window of our shared office on the second floor, I looked out across the housing estate rooftops with their burnishing remnants of sun, and called Sophie to warn her.

‘I’m going to be later than I thought,’ I told her with some trepidation. ‘Maybe seven o’clock?’ I added.

We were going to have dinner together. I pictured her picking up my call and leaning against the side table in the foyer corridor of her flat. Sophie would be wearing a white top and jeans, not the tight black wool skirt of old. Also her hair was brown now. She’d dyed it, and it was slightly wavy, not straight, and she no longer had her bangs.

I preferred her old hair colour but as stated, I loved her anyway and wanted to make it up to her.

‘That’s fine,’ I heard her say from the the other end of the line. Then I put down the receiver and hurried out of the office to my car.

Traffic was heavy as usual along the M40, right up until the Hangar Lane Gyratory but the most annoying part was the final walk to her house. Sophie lived the same side as our old house but to get to her flat you had to walk up Hangar Lane to the top of the hill, then turn right into the estate, then walk back down again to her flat. There was no cut through from what I could see, and by the time I had parked and begun the walk it was already night.

I walked up the hill past the shops on the corner, along the tree-lined sidewalk and past the chain link fence of an ill-lit car dealership. A man was walking out from the dealership entrance and for a moment I thought he must have found a cut through – unless the other end of the dealership had another chain link fence.

I continued up the hill past an opening where large brown boulders interrupted the tree line. Perhaps there was a cut through there instead? If I climbed over the boulders? But I was already near the top of the hill so I kept moving. For some unknown reason I crossed Hangar Lane at the zebra crossing and when I saw the commuters spill from the tube station I caught up with a woman to ask her about the cut through.

‘Not that I know of,’ she breathlessly responded as she hurried into the station. As I followed her in, I wondered whether I should have entered the estate from the north, instead of walking south up the hill. It would have taken me past my old house, but that was fine.

I already had a tube pass so I pushed past the ticket booth and didn’t even wait for the elevator but took the stairs instead. The walls were still the brown and white tile of the 70s because the station hadn’t been refurbished like the others. And when I got to the platform I was disoriented and unsure whether I was standing on the eastbound line or the westbound. In the other tunnel across from the platform where I stood I heard the rumble of a train as it came to a stop.

Did I want that platform instead of this? I wondered.

‘Ealing Broadway! doors closing,’ I heard the announcer call out.

Damn it, and I hurried across the intersection to the other platform, which was slightly elevated from where I had been standing. Two men were helping to lift a disabled woman in a wheelchair onto the train by smoothing down a black rubber mat in front of the doors.

Would the doors close before I too could get on? Just then the men stepped back and I slid in next to the wheelchair and the doors closed. At the far end of the darkened carriage was a light marked ‘Ealing Broadway,’ and with relief I leant back against the standing rests at the front of the carriage.

I looked down, and in my hurry, I saw that my phone had pushed out a little from my front pocket. It could have dropped to the floor. I pushed it back into my pocket and now it was okay. Now everything was okay.

May 25, 2023July 26, 2025

Getting to the Party on Time (via the Angels)

We are going to a party at Siobhan’s friend’s apartment on the south side of the Embankment and are taking the train. So we get on at the Angel and take the lift, an old wooden box, down into the Underground.

The platforms we walk through are dark and grimy, brown muddied walls and hidden tunnels, and the service is running slow.

We wait on Platform 2 of the Central line, it seems like for an age, before a train finally arrives, but when it comes to a stop it is already full, people crushed together, all the way up to the ceiling.

The bodies are pressed flat against the glass and there is no way we are getting on. We will wait for the next one.

The next train is a flat bed, cargo only, with a thick plain white rectangular box which covers the deck. It speeds through the tunnel, and we continue to wait.

And the next train will be a passenger train but it will be a long time coming. We wait in anticipation but by the time it arrives the train is ill-lit from the inside and it speeds through the tunnel and disappears the other side without stopping.

It seems we’ll never get there.

“We’ll take the Circle or the District line,” I suggest. Only you have to exit the station and cross the road to the other side of the roundabout to get to the platform.

So we leave, ascending once more with the lift and cross over to the entrance of the Circle and District.

“We can take either line,” I say as we enter down into a dark corridor, intersecting rail line tracks to our left, cavernous walls dark and dripping with sweat. We have to hurry as the District line carriages clank across the lines and past us, towards their stop.

But when we arrive at the platform the problem is the same; though at the start, there were only a few passengers waiting, the crowd begins to pile up. People in dark clothing, faces barely discernible.

“We are meeting at The Kestrel,” says Siobhan. She means Reed’s place.

“But that is nowhere near the Embankment,” I say. “That is in Hammersmith.” I pull out a piece of paper to work out the directions, but it is too small to write on.

“I need something bigger,” and I turn back to her. “Have you got something?”

But Siobhan is distracted, she doesn’t reply and I have to repeat it. And only then does she pull out a larger piece of paper, the size of my hand, that I can use.

“We should go back to the Central line,” I continue. I am getting frustrated that we wasted all this time waiting for the wrong train.

We are exiting the station, onto the road that leads away from both stations, when I suggest we can take an Uber. The greying light of dusk is in the distance.

“Why didn’t you suggest that in the first place?” she says, spitting the words at me, but it was her who got us lost in the first place.

“I’m not going,” I respond, “I’ve had it!”

And I walk away, to the right of me a chain link fence, a construction site behind the fence, both stations further behind me.

“I’m not going,” I reiterate. I walk slowly.

And she follows me, she too is going the wrong way.

But this is it. Where we will really part.

I circle even slower back round the roundabout, time and fear crawls, me slightly ahead of her, until we are back on the Angel side.

I am practically at a stop when Siobhan comes up alongside, to my left. She has thick pale blonde hair and a slightly pudgy face, thick lips like Becky Farmer, unvarnished, and she is attractive at that very moment; it is eating me up.

“I want to fly around naked,” she says and she smiles.

We cannot do it. Part. I don’t want to.

“Will you do that for me?” I ask her. And then I kiss her full on the lips.

Photo via Wallpaper Flare

January 25, 2023January 28, 2023

Competing for Gina Lollobrigida

I am with a group of Italians waiting to take the train from Palermo to Milan. The group is a mix of men and women in their 40s. And one woman wears her hair short, and straight, with spiky brown bangs.

She is thin, tall, and not classically my type but she has a sexuality about her.

January 12, 2023February 5, 2023

What a Long Strange Trip

We are off on vacation but to get there we have a number of stops. And first up is Saudi Arabia by plane. We sit at the back and the seats are worn, brown leather, cracked, and I can’t get the buckle out from the slit up by my left shoulder.

“Forget it,” I think to myself as the plane takes off. “We will be OK.”