Thursday 29th December had that slow-motion feel to it that sets in between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve. Greg was alone in the house for the first time in a week and one hundred and forty pages into The New Media Generation. During the first ninety pages the author gave her views on news management and provided some good first hand anecdotes about editors making perverse decisions on what was news and what was not news. Her argument was that a lot goes on that would be useful for the public to know if only the information made it into the bulletins or the news pages. She then went on to make a series of points about the use of language in news reporting and Greg found he needed to put the book down and hear a few examples for himself. He turned on the TV news channel and adopted a critical ear.
A mobile phone started ringing upstairs. Kim must have left it behind, was Greg's first thought, but when he got upstairs the ringing was coming from Roy's room. It was the new one Greg had bought him for Christmas, he obviously hadn't got used to carrying it around yet. It was beside his bed and it stopped ringing when Greg's hand was about nine inches from it. He picked it up anyway and it seemed logical to switch it off as Roy was out, but then he remembered Michelle from the admin office at work. Her son had forgotten his phone one day and she turned it off. He went bananas, apparently, when he came back because he couldn't find out who might have called him. If it had been left on there would have been a 'missed calls' list he could check. Roy left it on and put it back by the bed.
There was a piece of paper sticking out from under the pillow on Roy's bed. Greg didn't normally poke around at things in Roy's room, but he had pulled it out and looked at it before thinking about it.
It was a poem, handwritten by Roy. Underlined at the top of the page was the title: True Dreams. Below the title: by Roy Curtis Barnes, and below that, the poem:
In my dreams
Women in black play violins
In reality
Women in grey think I'm dead
In my dreams
The ocean is giving and restful
In reality
There are shivering fathoms
In my dreams
My guitar sings to you
In reality
The blues are black and real
In my dreams
My thoughts are new and fresh
In reality
My mind is full of junk
In my dreams
I understand and live your pain
In reality
I look and can’t bear to see
In my dreams
Tomorrow will be different
In reality
Today will never end
In my dreams
I escape
In reality
The tunnel is dark.
After four lines the first bite of a tear was in Greg's eye. As he finished the poem he had to put it down quickly before he cried all over it. He sat on the bed and lined up the questions: did Roy really write this; has he written any more; did it come from the grief of losing his mother; does he need some help from a doctor, or me, or some kind of counsellor; how can I talk about it to him?
Greg was convinced the feeling of the poem was connected with Stephanie's death, particularly the line about women playing violins. Stephanie's mother played the violin and for a while she was a member of a professional orchestra. Stephanie would take Roy to concerts to see his Gran and, of course, they would always choose seats opposite the violin section. Roy was only five or six at the time but he enjoyed the spectacle of it all. The music itself didn’t impress him much, he would get bored and wriggle around, and they did have to leave early once or twice because he disturbed the other concert-goers. But Stephanie saw it as a unique opportunity to expose Roy to high culture and Greg had no doubt she was right to give it a try. He had not gone along himself and Stephanie never appeared to mind, but after she died it was another of those things he felt guilty about. He could have gone, but he really didn’t like classical music and he knew at the time that he might have influenced Roy against what his mother was trying to do. If ever he had fallen asleep and snored during a quiet bit Roy would have loved it and Stephanie would have gone ballistic.
The maturity of the poem troubled Greg as he read through it again. It expressed some pretty heavy stuff for a twelve year old and seemed to express it very well. Did Roy perhaps have some talent for this kind of thing? He did do well in English at school; perhaps it was a school exercise, perhaps they had been asked to write a poem about something personal. Greg couldn't imagine Roy reading it out in class, or even handing it in to a teacher. No, it just couldn't be a school thing. Most likely, it was a personal expression of something churning around inside Roy, which he had managed to perhaps resolve a little by putting it into words.
The temptation to hunt around for more poems was intense, but Greg resisted and slipped the poem back under Roy's pillow exactly as he had found it. He didn’t know how he would bring it up with Roy but he knew he would do. He was sure an opportunity would come, he must make sure he didn’t miss it when it did.
Back downstairs, the news reports were rolling along. A group of people calling themselves ‘The Real Millennium Association’ were planning a special New Year’s Eve celebration for the start of 2001. One of them was explaining to an interviewer why 2000 had actually been the final year of the second millennium. The next item was an update on the total amount killed in the Florida nightclub fire. It was now confirmed as five hundred and eighty one. Seventeen of them were British people taking a Christmas holiday in the USA, and a BBC reporter was interviewing the family of one victim from Yorkshire. Greg picked up the remote and tried another channel, he could not face any more news about that tragedy. It was so unbearably horrific and the news bulletins had of course been filled with it every day. Greg was concerned about the strength of the emotions he experienced as soon as any more mention of it came on yet again. It was kicking him right back to the level grief he suffered over Stephanie's death, and he could not cope with it. His thumb pressed through the channels while his eyes rejected every image. His brain finally swung the thumb to the 'off' button and his legs took him to the window. Fatty Tom was outside sitting in the middle of the drive looking towards the road. There was nothing there, but Tom stared at it as if nothing was something. Perhaps there was something there, perhaps the road and the house opposite and the lime tree a bit to the left were enough for Tom. He was a wise fat cat.