The woman is almost right in front of us now.
She sees our headlights, shields her eyes, but doesn’t move out of the way.
I scream as she hits the bonnet. Then watch in horror as her body bounces off the cracked windscreen and soars into the air. Her red silk kimono billows out behind her like a broken cape.
Amelia
‘Wake up!’
I say it three times, gently shaking him, before Adam opens his eyes.
He stares at me. ‘The woman, she—’
‘What woman?’
‘The woman in the red—’
This again. I should have known.
‘The woman in the red kimono? She isn’t real, Adam. Remember? It was just a dream.’
He looks at me the way a young child looks at a parent when they are scared. All the colour has drained from his face and it’s covered in sweat.
‘You’re OK,’ I say, taking his clammy hand in mine. ‘There is no woman in a red kimono. You’re here with me. You’re safe.’
Lies can heal as well as hurt.
He barely spoke to me when we came down from the bell tower earlier. I don’t know whether it was the shock of almost falling with the crumbling wall, or the bats, or too much red wine, but he got undressed, climbed into the unfamiliar bed – that looks just like our own at home – and went straight to sleep without a word.
It’s been a while since Adam had one of his nightmares, but they happen often enough and are always the same, except that he sees the accident from a different point of view. Sometimes in the dreams he is in the car, others he is walking along the street, or dreams that he is watching the scene from the window of a council flat on the thirteenth floor of a tower block, banging his fists on the glass. He never recognises me straight away afterwards – which is normal for us given his face blindness – but sometimes he thinks I am someone else. It always takes several minutes to calm him down and convince him that I’m not. His dreams have a habit of haunting him, regardless of whether he is asleep or awake. His mind isn’t panning for gold, it’s searching for something much darker. Tiny nuggets of buried regrets sometimes slip through the gaps, but the heaviest of memories tend to sink rather than rise to the surface.
I wish I knew how to make them stop.
I consider stroking the freckles on his shoulder, or running my fingers through his salt-and-pepper hair like I used to. But I don’t. Because I can hear bells.
After playing a creepy tune, the grandfather clock in the corner of the bedroom starts to chime midnight like an apprentice Big Ben. If we weren’t fully awake already, we both are now.
‘I’m sorry I woke you,’ he says, his breathing still faster than it should be.
‘It’s OK. If you hadn’t, the clock almost certainly would have,’ I tell him. Then I do what I always do: take out my pad and a pencil, and write it all down as soon as possible afterwards. Because it isn’t just a dream – or a nightmare – it’s a memory.
He shakes his head. ‘We don’t have to do this tonight—’
I take a silent register of his emotions, ticking off the familiar pattern one by one: fear, regret, sorrow, and guilt. It is the same every time.
‘Yes, we do,’ I say, having already found one of the few blank pages left in the notebook. I always thought I could excavate his unhappy memories and replace them with better ones. Of us. These days I’m not so sure.
Adam sighs, leans back on the bed, and tells me everything that he can remember before the edges of the dream fade too much to see.
The nightmares always begin the same way: with the woman in the red kimono.
Despite the attire, she is not Japanese. Adam finds it hard to describe her face – he struggles with features in dreams the same way he does in real life – but we know that she is a British woman in her early forties, around the same age I am now. She’s attractive. He always remembers her red lipstick, in the exact same shade as her kimono. She has long blonde hair like me too, but hers is shorter, shoulder length.
He doesn’t say her name tonight, but we both know what it is.
The order of what happens in the dream sometimes changes, but the woman in red is always there. So is the car in the rain. It’s the reason why Adam doesn’t own one and doesn’t drive. He never even wanted to learn how.
There is a teenage boy in the nightmares too and he’s terrified.
Adam saw it happen: the woman, the car, the accident.
Not just in a dream, in real life.
It was the night his mother died. He was thirteen.