For seven years the end of summer had meant for Laura and Rose a return to the old house, and to school — Founderston Girls’ Academy, where they had begun at eight years of age, after two years of patchy learning with day tutors. These tutors were always being encouraged to go home early by either Laura’s father or Rose’s mother. The dreamhunters might arrive back home at any hour, leather coats covered with the white dust of the Place. Over-excited by the dreams they had caught, Tziga and Grace would want company, and cuddles from their daughters, before they had to go out and sleep, in Tziga’s case at a hospital, and in Grace’s at the Rainbow Opera.
At the end of every summer, the girls often found themselves anxious about going back to school, because, every summer, they had been drawn back into the family culture of late nights, broken sleep and napping during the day. The girls often arrived back at school as dazed and feverish as their dreamhunter parents, and full of irregular habits they had quickly to give up. This year Rose and Laura were more nervous than ever because, this year, it was possible that they would not be returning to the Academy at all.
ON THE LAST day of the term before the summer holidays Laura and Rose’s classmates tried to talk to them about what would happen. The other girls needed to talk — Rose was very popular, and would be missed, and her friends were aware they might have to do their mourning before the fact of her departure.
After the final assembly the girls’ class gathered in their favourite meeting place, the peach tree in one corner of the quad. Everyone swapped gifts. Laura and Rose passed out their presents — carefully chosen gifts for the girls they really liked, and beautifully wrapped, pricey soaps, perfumes and manicure sets for those they liked only diplomatically. Mamie Doran was one of these, and, as Rose handed her a ribbon-festooned tray of soaps, Mamie said, ‘How will we manage without you, Rose? In the choir, and in goal at hockey? And who will counsel Jane when Miss Melon is stern with her, or console Patty when she breaks out in blisters again?’
‘You could take up the slack, Mamie,’ Rose said. ‘And it’s not as if we’re going to the other side of the world!’
‘But it’s such a different life. Alife apart,’ said Mamie, falsely sentimental, and as though to suggest that this was what Rose and Laura in fact thought. As if Rose and Laura were disdainfully shaking the dust of some provincial place off their feet.
Rose, being Rose, moved into Mamie’s attack rather than away from it. ‘Mamie,’ she said, ‘I promise to blow you kisses when you’re eating ice cream on the balcony of your father’s suite at the Opera.’
Mamie Doran’s father was the Secretary of the Interior, a man whose power and influence were, according to some, now greater than the President’s own. Mamie wasn’t popular, like Rose, but she had her followers and, when she could be bothered, she was very good at managing the opinions of others. Now Mamie seemed to be determined that everyone should discuss the possibility that Rose and Laura wouldn’t be coming back to school. Like the cousins, almost every girl in their group had attended the Academy for seven years. Founderston Girls’ Academy was their universe, a universe in which, year by year, they all rose nearer to the exalted status of seniors. Some were already the womanly heroes of the cricket and hockey pitches. And soon they would play the leads in end-of-year productions, edit the yearbook, chair the school council.
One girl, a girl too dependent on Rose’s morale-building presence, and made bold by Mamie’s chiselling, said, ‘How can you think of leaving?’
‘Aren’t you scared?’ said another girl.
Mamie looked keenly at this girl, then smirked at Rose and Laura.
Mamie Doran, unlike the other girls, was prepared to talk about where the cousins were — or might be — going. She knew something about dreamhunters. Ten years before, when they were all little, Cas Doran had headed the government commission that produced the legislation that controlled what dreamhunters did. The Dream Regulatory Body reported to Mamie’s father. So Mamie could talk about ‘the industry’.
‘Well,’ said Mamie, ‘dreamhunters are an independent and unmanageable group of people — I can see the charm for Rose.’
Rose said, ‘Money’s the charm.’
Mamie turned pink. For a moment she held her breath, then she said, ‘I’m surprised to hear you say that, Rose. Dreamhunters must also have professional ethics. And they have to think about public safety.’
‘Oh, I can do all that and think about money too,’ Rose said. ‘And fame. And what outfit to buy for my début at the Rainbow Opera.’
‘All right, be facetious,’ Mamie said. ‘But at least I’m actually talking about dreamhunting, not just going “Aren’t you scared?” like Patty.’
Laura turned to Patty, and touched her arm. ‘We don’t know what will happen. I can’t think yet about missing school. I can’t think what I’ll wear at my début at the Rainbow Opera either. It’s all too far away, and uncertain.’
‘Well, at least Laura is taking it all seriously,’ Mamie said, and managed to sound as though she were criticising Laura as well as Rose.
‘Laura’s seriousness sounds like seriousness,’ Rose said, ‘and mine does not.’
Rose and Mamie might have gone on fencing, but Laura discovered one unclaimed present in their basket, looked at the card and realised that a classmate — a quiet, mousy girl — was missing, and they all had to go in force to look for her and fuss over her.
LYING ON SISTERS Beach, after midnight, Laura was thinking about that last day of term. ‘Rose?’ she said, then freed her arm from her bedroll to poke another stick into the flames. The driftwood caught and, for a moment, its salt-saturated timber burnt green. ‘Isn’t it strange not to be thinking about school?’
‘But you are thinking about it. You just mentioned it,’ said Rose.
‘I just realised I hadn’t thought about school all summer. I’ve only been thinking about our Try.’ Laura listened to her cousin’s silence. Finally Rose stirred, her blankets rasping softly in the hollow she’d worn herself in the sand. Rose said, ‘I’m trying not to be impatient for the time to pass. These last days at the beach are always so special.’
Laura, frightened by the prospect of her Try, and not wanting to be alone in her fear, asked her cousin, ‘Aren’t you nervous? I’m miserable with nerves whenever I stop to think.’
Rose was unperturbed. ‘But we’re so lucky, Laura. We have Ma and Uncle Tziga as guides. We don’t get pushed off into the Place in the company of rangers and a gaggle of poor, piss-pants kids with fortune-hunter parents.’
It seemed that Rose hadn’t considered that she wouldn’t go. That, like almost everyone, she wouldn’t be able to enter the Place, but would be left standing on the everyday road. ‘But —’ Laura began. She was about to say, ‘What say you don’t go there?’ Then she stopped. She could feel Rose’s confidence like the noonday sun, Rose’s confidence shrinking and blackening Laura’s doubts. If Laura were to say, ‘What say it doesn’t happen?’ she would sound mean. Laura felt the difference in their expectations like a poison between them, a contamination that only she was aware of. She decided not to say anything. She felt that her cousin’s confidence would contaminate her own luck — but only if she spoke, and spoiled it for Rose.
‘It’ll be an adventure,’ Rose said, as though she were reading Laura’s mind.
‘An ordeal,’ Laura thought. But her father would be there. Her father, at least, would understand her disappointment if she didn’t succeed. Laura was quiet for a time. A breeze had got up. They were sheltered from it by the rocks, but Laura could hear the flax bushes clapping. That, and the clucks and groans of roosting gulls.
‘Wasn’t Mamie a pain, though?’ Rose said, sleepily. ‘All her false sentiment about how the school will do without us.’
‘Without you,’ Laura said.
‘Oh yes. Perhaps she thinks I’m flattered. But the way she talked about our Trying, as if it’s never bravery we’re showing — it’s only pride. Implying that
we are horribly confident. We’re forward, so, if we fall on our faces, then it serves us right. And the other girls, saying “I don’t know how you do it”, and “I’d never have the nerve”.’ Rose hissed with contempt, ‘It isn’t admiration — it’s an effort to control us. To make us see sense, or show fear — or something!’
Laura could see Rose’s profile, her cocked elbows. Rose was gazing up into the stars and Laura knew her eyes would be wide — she’d be wearing her fighting look.
‘They’re so transparent,’ Rose said. ‘Honestly.’
Laura realised that Rose, in taking her friends’ concern as their attempt to make her feel fear, must be resisting fear. At some level Rose was nervous, too. As soon as she’d thought this Laura felt the late hour, the long day. She felt herself slipping, falling down into the soft dark below the clear black of the open air. ‘They’re your friends, Rose,’ she said sleepily. ‘They care about you.’
‘I know. But they want me to stay with them, at school. They want me to fail.’
‘Not you,’ Laura said, and fell asleep — and into dreams, her own dreams.
Five
The ranger lay concealed in a thicket of brown gorse by the dry riverbed. His view of Tziga Hame was unimpeded by haze or shade. The scene was saturated with light, as though the sun had dissolved, whitening the air. It had taken the ranger hours to creep close to his quarry. The Place was silent, so there were no sounds to mask his approach, no birdsong, sawing insect chorus, or wind. For each movement he’d made the ranger had had to wait for Hame to make some covering noise. He’d been patient, and was now in a good position.
Tziga Hame knelt in a damp excavation in the dry riverbed. He had unwound the bandages from his hands in order to use them. His injuries were troubling him, and it was his pained gasping that had served to mask much of the ranger’s stealthy rustling. His hands were now gloved with a mixture of blood, blue clay from the riverbank and silver river sand. He was sculpting. A form was beginning to emerge from the long mound of sand beside his excavation. He worked quickly, as if against a clock, or in a competition.
This impression jogged the ranger’s memory. He remembered Hame’s picture in the Summertime Weekly, the newspaper of Sisters Beach. The ranger had seen the picture among other photos taken at an annual sand-sculpting competition. In the picture, Hame, barefoot, his trousers rolled, stood behind his daughter and niece — girls really too old for buckets and spades — and their competition entry, the recumbent form of a man made of sand.
It occurred to the ranger that this was what Hame was busy sculpting now — a recumbent human figure. Hame’s work was quick, but not crude. It seemed he had practised.
The ranger was puzzled, and attempted to make mental notes for the report he would have to give. A verbal report, since the man for whom he was tailing Hame wouldn’t want anything committed to paper.
For the last seventy-two hours the ranger had been chewing a grainy paste of Wakeful, a narcotic that dreamhunters and rangers used to stave off sleep. The ranger knew he was no longer at his best and hoped his watch would end soon. It must — for Tziga Hame had put his first wad of the drug into his own mouth forty-eight hours before. Hame would need to sleep soon. He hadn’t any time to muck around, yet here he was, digging, patting, shaping sand, like a child at play — except that he moaned as he worked. For, as he worked, Hame was driving dirt into the wounds on his hands.
The ranger had picked up Hame’s trail the day after the picnic. He followed Hame into the Place. The dream-hunter had led him deeper into that silent wilderness than he’d ever been on his normal patrols. Hame was hard to follow — he’d been followed before, by claim-jumping dreamhunters back in the days before the Place was patrolled. The dreamhunter was wary, and slow, and the ranger had kept nearly overtaking him. Hame was burdened with the usual provisions, food and water and a sleeping roll, but he also carried a movie camera, a big instrument with a collapsible crank and telescopic brass legs. Chorley Tiebold’s movie camera.
Hame had led the ranger deep into the pressing silence of the Place. And, as he walked, the ranger worked on his verbal report. He composed it in his head, and rehearsed it. It was terse. ‘I followed Mr Hame fifty-two hours In. He made camp at a place with a ruin, a burnt timber-frame building of some considerable size, standing at the edge of what appeared to be an expanse of dry seabed. Hame set up his camera, pointed its lens at the building and cranked its handle for two minutes by my watch. After that Mr Hame ate, then settled himself to sleep. He caught a dream.’
A bad dream the ranger could add, were he able to find some way of describing what he had seen.
The ranger had watched Hame struggle in his sleep, moving violently, but as though constrained, as though he were beating his forehead, elbows and knees against invisible walls. The ranger’s report would have to include an explanation of the wounds on Hame’s hands. But how to put it? Perhaps like this:
Mr Hame appeared to be distressed by his dream. He tore at his own hands with his teeth. I could not say for certain if he was asleep or awake when he inflicted these injuries on himself.
A report was required to give directions, to record actions, to measure the duration of events. The ranger had stayed under cover and watched Hame suffer some horrible, mysterious ordeal. He had trembled with the effort of remaining still and hidden, of not rushing to the dreamhunter’s aid. He had never felt more alone — alone with his task and its limitations. Still he composed his notes. ‘At fifty-seven hours Hame broke camp and carried the camera back to grid reference Y–17.’
Back on to the known map. But how should the ranger describe what he was watching now, at grid reference Y–17? When Tziga Hame began to dig in the riverbed the concealed watcher had thought that perhaps Hame meant to bury the camera, or the cartridge of film. He saw Hame’s hands bleed, and listened to his hoarse breathing. He saw mad purpose in the man’s actions.
‘At grid reference Y–17 Hame dug a trench …’ thought the ranger, attempting to compose his report, to shape it, as Hame’s hands were shaping the long mound of sand — making a man of it. Hame was using clay as well, to fashion forms too delicate for sand to hold. He made hands from the clay and laid them at the ends of the arms. The shape he’d sculpted on the riverbed was that of a man with a broad torso and powerful limbs, a man half again Hame’s height.
The ranger cowered in the tunnel of dry gorse, his shirt collar clutched over his mouth, although the vegetable dust he’d stirred up had long since settled. He watched Hame scrape the blood and soil from his hands and use this paste to form a face for his sandman. Hame took his time, and took care. But why? This waterless crease of unpopulated land, this most remote of remotenesses, was no place to pursue a hobby or perfect an art.
Hame sat back on his heels and surveyed his work. He nodded slowly to himself. He took out his water bottle and splashed the last of his water over his hands to wash them. His injuries oozed blood through scabs of sand. Hame raised his hands up over his head, to ease the flow of blood, the ranger supposed, though Hame seemed to be praying. Indeed, the ranger imagined he heard Hame singing softly.
For long moments Hame remained in this incantatory position and the ranger, tormented by puzzlement and gorse prickles, was only able to get a little relief by formulating a final sentence, at last allowing himself to express an opinion: ‘Hame’s behaviour was highly irrational and I believe he requires further close observation.’
‘I’ve warned them,’ thought the ranger, though he hadn’t. He was miles and hours away from the end of his task — the delivery of his report — and alone with crazy Hame.
Hame finished his appeal to the gods. He put his hands down and stooped over his figure once more. He hesitated, one finger pointed at the figure’s face. Then he leant closer and wrote with a fingertip on its sandy forehead.
The ranger could have sworn that the air became suddenly humid, as on certain sorts of summer days the sun uncovers itself and creates a heat sink
from the water vapour in the air. But it wasn’t waterborne heat that thickened the parched air. It was something else. Something as stifling and invisible as humidity, but not made of water.
The figure, the man made of sand, got up out of the excavation. It stood up before Hame — stood up to face its maker. It shimmered, its surface blurring, the sand there in motion like smoke rising.
The ranger gasped and flung himself back through the tunnel in the gorse. He rolled free of the thicket, out into the open and ran. He heard Hame call out — an angry summons, or perhaps an order.
The ranger was fit and fast, and there were times, as he fled, when he imagined he’d finally been able to outstrip what followed him — till he caught again its soft approach, the hissing, sifting sound of its walk.
Six
The first thing Laura saw when she opened her eyes was a seabird, a shag, standing in the shelter of a big log at the high-tide line. It stood with one wing tucked into its side, and the other drooping, tip trailing in the sand. The bird was injured. Laura wriggled out of her bedroll and crawled towards it. She came closer, but it seemed not to see her, didn’t even turn its head until she was right beside it, and her human shadow was at its feet. Then it looked at her, dazed and exhausted, and shuffled a few feet away from her. It moved slowly, stumbling as it went.
Laura shook her cousin awake. For the next quarter of an hour they discussed the bird, what to do about it, what might have happened to it. There had been a big blow four nights earlier — perhaps the bird had been hurt then. They were planning to catch it in a blanket and carry it up to the house, when Rose’s father appeared.