The Last Dream

I'll tell you something.

You've planned your own death. A quick stab from your heart while you're pruning the apple trees you planted fourteen years before; the aneurysm at the summit; a blackout after dancing through the night; a last breath in your sleep. Without the terror of prior knowledge, but also at a reasonable time on a day when it doesn't matter if you leave. At peace with those you care for, your papers in order.

If you don't believe me, try these alternatives.

Alzheimer's strikes in your late fifties. You forget names and faces and are revisited by all your griefs.

A tumour metastasises and spreads into your brain. The crunching migraines are bad enough, but you become so irritable that even those who love you best wish you gone.

An unstable hillside engulfs your home. You lie in an air pocket, your legs crushed. The diggers vibrate above you and you can't make yourself heard. You die of thirst.

The first thing you notice is numbness in your hands or feet. Over the following five years your muscles atrophy, though your mind remains alert. During your final eight months you're unable to form recognisable words. Swallowing is the last function to go.

The doctor finds some wonky white cells in your routine blood test. After you hold your breath for six days he stutters over ‘leukaemia’, and tells you four months—if that happens, and don't misunderstand me, I'm not wishing it on you, but if it does, however gutsy or philosophical you are, the biggest word in your world will be NO.

That's when you'd see you had your death worked out all along. Maybe you've left the details for later, but you know the general outline. Scheduled for some time well after three score years and ten.

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When I was in my twenties, I'd open up my map of the city and black out all the streets where I'd slept with a woman. But it felt undignified, carrying on like that into middle age.

I met Alison two years ago at an ex-girlfriend's dinner party. She was wearing some low-cut thing, and the skin above her breasts glowed. I remember thinking she'd put herself together well.

After I moved in, I discovered she got the sheen on her skin by sloughing her body with a soft-bristled brush before showering. Call me fastidious, but I don't like the thought of padding round among her dead cells.

When she's talking, her eyes slip sideways. She's always working something out. That's what made her more than another line on my map. Her hard waist was a clue to how she forged through life. At the time I thought we both knew what it took. She said she liked the way I'd sat, after the dinner, with my hands on my knees like a kid in a school sports photo. She probably thought it left her some room to manoeuvre.

She tells me investment in landscaping returns approximately three hundred percent more than investment inside the house. We have French doors, an extensive deck, terrazzo planters, a gas barbecue and native trees. Hardwood outdoor furniture. Bricks, not gravel, on the drive. Now she wants a baby.

At work, I'm the sperm that makes it. I survive the asteroid, break out from the hull of the capsized liner, walk untouched from the burning plane.

This city's full of people who believe in collaboration. It's a load of toss. I have six months to justify my existence, or I'm out on the street. I can't afford to be generous with the competition or suppliers. I screw down the margins of the smaller businesses we give work to. They walk out of my office thinking I'm a bastard, but I'm also God: my will be done.

Sydney. I've had a long day fighting over a contract, and later I'm due at a hospitality dinner. I break into the minibar and switch on the TV, surfing until an emaciated man in a hospital bed gets my attention.

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The voiceover tells me initial diagnoses of multiple sclerosis and clinical depression were incorrect. The man is suffering from ‘industrial strength insomnia’—he can't sleep at all, is hallucinating and has lost control of his muscles.

The familiarity of his symptoms tightens my breath. I've heard it before, I think, although I wasn't paying much attention at the time.

It's a relatively new disease, they say. First ‘described’ eleven years ago: one year after Dad died.

After quarter of an hour I switch off my cellphone.

Hang out a ‘Do Not Disturb’ sign.

Watch this man die my father's death.

Alison barely escaped with her life. That's how she puts it.

I feel more alive than ever, she said afterwards. When she felt her arms guiding the steering wheel, taking her through that gap between the truck and the bank, she knew, just knew it wasn't her time. Not like that poor man behind her. But if he'd followed her through, he might have pushed her over the cliff.

You never know when you're going to go, she says, contradicting herself.

Women's fertility declines after thirty, she says.

I'm sleeping badly. Sleep experts talk about unhygienic sleep habits. Makes me think of dozing with a finger up your nostril. But what they mean is drinking before bed, insufficient exercise, naps in the daytime. Some even recommend a separate zone for sex, so you don't associate arousal with those cool sheets.

Someone'll sleep well tonight, Mum always said, during afternoons of French cricket and bodysurfing and sand castles and rolling down the dunes. We didn't worry about erosion; we were erosion, scrabbling at the bank as the sands crumbled over our feet.

My PA tells me our bed may be on a ley line. She offers to visit with her homemade divining rods. I've seen her testing them by the watercooler. They're made from dismantled coat hangers.

I would like to sleep amorally.

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At our wedding reception Alison grasped Mum's hand and said, ‘I'm sorry I never knew Gordon.’

Mum smiled. ‘Yes, but you've got him right here.’ She took my hand and gazed into my eyes as if she were the bride.

Alison grabbed my other hand and said, ‘I'll make him very happy.’

We stood there in a little circle: Alison, Mum and me. Or Alison, Mum and Dad, depending on how you looked at it.

She kept her family name. Marcott. Last week she told me our children will be Something Something Hambleton Marcott.

‘Won't that get confusing?’ I asked. ‘Maybe we should call one of them Something Else.’

She lowered her eyebrows and looked up at me.

‘Why Something Something?’ I continued. ‘Why not just Something?’

‘Every kid deserves a middle name,’ she said. Alison's first name is Ernestine.

‘Why not Marcott Hambleton?’ I didn't care.

‘I'm the only daughter of an only son. My family name must carry on.’

‘What about my name?’

‘It'll go on through your cousins.’

‘You can't be the only Marcotts left.’

‘But of this line,’ she said. The crimson was edging up her neck. I know that sign. I shut up and kissed her heated skin.

Afterwards I suggested we could make a new name. Hamblecott. Mambletott. Cottlecon. She grabbed her dressing gown and disappeared into the bathroom.

I'm dozing off when something detonates inside my brain. I actually hear the twang, like a tight wire has snapped. I'm wide awake.

My sister is an astrologist.

Every morning my PA brings the stars into my office. She stands in front of my desk and reads hers aloud. I've never revealed that my own flesh and blood has forecast her future. When she's finished with her own life, she offers to read mine. I always decline. She reads it page 74 anyway. I suspect Joanne of including a higher proportion of menacing comments in the Gemini write-ups.

Two days after I return from Sydney I knock on her door.

She's chewing, and swallows, eyeing me, before she speaks. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Hi.’

‘What's happened? Is Mum OK?’

‘She's fine.’

‘Yeah right. I bet you haven't called her for weeks.’

It's only been a fortnight. Approximately.

‘Can I come in?’

She steps aside. ‘You should ring next time you want to pop by.’ Her incompetent sarcasm is refreshing after the sharks I deal with.

I seat myself at the kitchen table. There's a smell of mince. She clears a plate onto the bench and sits down, eyes narrowed. Apart from the hard, sour expression and lack of wrinkles, she could be our mother. Wide fair face and big hips. Born to bake coconut loaves and pour glasses of milk.

‘Where's Head Girl?’ she asks.

‘At home.’

‘Is this a social call then? The business whiz remembering he has a family?’

‘I want to ask about Dad.’

‘Oh for Christ's sake.’ She pushes her chair back and stalks to the sink, runs the taps. ‘I knew it.’

‘What?’

‘Knew this guilt trip or whatever it is would happen one day. Well, you're ten years overdue. I'm deliriously happy and work is going well, thanks for asking, so you can piss off now.’

Joanne's not one to hold a grudge. She'll fling it at you every chance she gets.

‘Yes, you went through it all’—I match her speed and decibels—‘I'll go if you want, but it won't hurt you to answer my questions.’

She stops splashing and lets her yellow gloves drip onto the brown lino. ‘Bastard.’

‘Can I make myself a cup of tea?’

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It's like business. Retreat. Stand your ground. Take a step where they won't notice.

‘No. You can fuck off.’

‘Oh, come on Joanne—’

‘No, I don't want you here.’ She does, naturally, while she tells me what I already know, biting off the words with her tight lips. ‘We hadn't heard from you in bloody months. Mum was frantic. I spent two weeks' rent money running up phone bills. And then when I finally tracked you down you wouldn't bloody come home. So now you can go. Go.’

Although I might commit sins of omission in respect to Mum, no one can accuse me of consciously hurting her. And I picked up, on my occasional visits back to the farm, that she chose to forget, gratefully accepting the gradual brightening of her life: the trips arranged by her Women's Institute friends, and Len's inevitable courtship.

I can't ask her for the details of Dad's illness.

‘Oh God, I'm turning into my mother,’ Alison exclaims when she makes small mistakes in public: forgetting to put out the soup spoons, or introducing those already acquainted. But her mother is not a forgetful woman. Alison doesn't see the true resemblances. Once, in a rare moment of self-revelation, she told me she was twenty-two before she realised that not every woman uses a daily laxative as a method of weight control.

I've never heard a bloke say he's turning into his father. I guess it's a given.

The bedroom air is drying out my eyeballs. There's a boulder sitting on my forehead.

Our voluble receptionist once told me she cleans her house in the middle of the night. Every night. She's probably the least annoying person in the company, but she wakes up at 2.30 a.m. and vacuums and dusts the house for two hours.

None of her three babies slept well. Between them, they disturbed her every night for five years. Almost a decade later she still can't make page 76 it through to the alarm, though the rest of the family slumbers happily. Like a little elf, she climbs out of bed and cleans the ‘living areas’, which, she assured me, are far enough from the bedrooms that she doesn't wake anyone.

I reckon everyone in that house has a vested interest in her insomnia. I met her husband at the last Christmas function. He had the glazed look of a man who never needs to fight.

A colleague told me the best way to get back to sleep is to dwell on your last dream. It's supposed to entice the brain into those slow rhythmic waves. It works OK when Emmanuelle Béart's been twined round your waist, but not so well when you've just seen your old schoolmates strung by their ankles from a gallows, twitching as the blood pools in their heads.

‘It must have been great, having young parents,’ Alison says. This is one of our conversational reruns. ‘When your Dad was the age you are now, he had an eleven-year-old son.’

When my Dad was the age I am now, he had ten years to live.

‘It didn't make any difference,’ I say. ‘When you're eleven, anyone over twenty seems beyond the grave.’

I remember watching fourth-form boys, unable to imagine being so old. Now I can see every decade. The waves rush past my feet and I can't stop leaning forwards.

I am sitting at my desk, trying to make sense of things. Here is my stapler: me. Joanne is my holographic desk toy. My father is a box of paper clips. I can't find anything to stand in for Fatal Familial Insomnia. Maybe it's the desk.

One family. Not mine, although I suppose it could be. Six generations. Two hundred and eighty-eight relatives. Twenty-nine of those woke themselves to death.

Chances: one in a hundred million; or one in two, depending on your origins. If a parent died from it, you have a fifty per cent possibility of collecting the gene when sperm and egg collide. If you did, you'll develop the disease. No question.

The gas company sent me a complimentary phone pad with this page 77 month's bill. ‘Dial before you dig’ is scrawled in mock handwriting across the bottom of each page.

The hospital won't give out information over the phone. The ‘Clinical Care Co-ordinator’ will answer my questions if I put my request in writing. I have to check my passport for the approximate date of his death.

Two weeks later, the Co-ordinator's secretary rings me with an appointment time. I take my Internet printouts with me, and the photocopy from the Merck Manual I found in the library. We have an informative meeting. She informs me about my father's last months, and I inform her about Fatal Familial Insomnia.

She offers to refer me to the Genetic Counsellor.

I leave, euphoric with my special knowledge. My forehead may be marked, but I will become superhuman to meet this monster. The lines down the middle of the road are straight and white forever. The air explodes through my open window and I gun the engine at the lights. I do the work of ten men that afternoon. I am invincible.

It lasts until 3 a.m., when I wake from dreams of paralysis and slavering cockroaches that erupt from my skin.

He'd been admitted to a secure psychiatric ward after their second visit to the specialist. The first was precipitated by Mum's concern about the numbness in his legs. He was walking with a cane, and already experiencing panic attacks based on ‘batophobia’—the fear of being near high buildings. According to the medical notes, Dad curled up on the centre line of the town's high street and rocked until he was carried to the pavement.

The pinch-nosed Co-ordinator doesn't seem to realise she's talking about Gordon Hambleton, adopted son of Marjory and Bill. He ran a 600-acre sheep station, lifted rocks the size of kauri stumps, felled macrocarpa. Lines radiated from his eyes like the spokes we used to draw around every sun. He loved to lean over the stockyard rails with his mates, assessing flanks and wool. Did he feel the first nervous twitches there? Push past Len, run gasping to his truck?

He was only getting four hours a night when they first saw him. They diagnosed MS, but none of the treatments worked. Their next page 78 attempt was clinical depression; it fitted with the insomnia. He went home with some pills, but was back four weeks later after a ‘violent episode’. Mum never told me about that.

His muscles twitched involuntarily and he hallucinated worms and snakes crawling out of his orifices. He slept one hour a night. He screamed, but couldn't produce tears. He smashed his head against the bed rails until they tied him down. He forgot who he was. It carried on for months. By the end he was mute. He went into a coma, and died.

It's like a big game of Base, with everyone running free, trying to get back without getting caught. If you're insufficiently quick or devious, you're tackled from behind or grabbed, and you have to sit out the rest of the game on arbitrary ground, chewing split nails and pulling linen thread from your sandals.

But even if you do get back, it's still an ending, although you pretend to triumph. Everyone finishes one way or the other.

For Alison, my hair becomes symbolic. It's been seven weeks. I used to make a point of never letting it find traction on the tops of my ears.

She says it makes my head look fat. ‘You look—blurry,’ she says.

She's perplexed by my inertia. I've stopped moving in her direction.

My doctor writes a prescription while I eye up his narrow white bed. He cautions me against dependence. ‘You can get by on one or two good sleeps a week,’ he says.

How many sleeps to the end?

When does possible turn to probable? After fifty per cent? So where do we stand with a fifty-fifty chance? No man's land. Teetering on ignorance. The answer's written into me—Joanne too.

Diagnosis through DNA sequencing: not the kind of thing your local GP does. Not a decision you can make by accident.

Imagine if you had an absolute guarantee of drowning between the ages of forty and forty-five. You'd never go to the beach. Or maybe you'd figure the opportunity cost was too great, all those missed waves. page 79 You might just as easily drown in the shower, you'd think. Slip on some soap, knock yourself unconscious and block the drain with your head. You might reckon you could outwit death, throw your voice and have him look the other way as you sprint past and slip up a side alley.

A clear decision not to take the test, to live with ambiguity, might be noble.

I ignore my choice.

The disintegration of my marriage bores me.

She snipes, I close up. She cries, I walk out of the house. Our conversations are transactional.

We don't discuss what we're losing, because we know it isn't much. Certainly not enough for the next forty years. It's difficult to remember what drew us together. Maybe we assumed that we shared the right instincts.

I know she'd like to run through all the scenes to the finale, but I save us both the drama and move out to a motel.

My office is being cleaned. It's a very thorough clean, but whoever's doing it has gone off for a coffee break, because although the desk and shelves have been cleared and wiped, they haven't put my things back.

I smile, though, and think I will arrange a bunch of flowers for my PA, who must have noticed the green islands in the mugs. As I'm thinking this, she arrives, breathless, in the doorway, and reaches out a hand as though she'd like to tug me away.

‘Oh—I didn't see you. Barry wants you in his office.’

I nod, recognising that she's flustered because she needs to replace my files and pen holder and so on. Barry and I will have to make conversation about clients for a few minutes.

He comes out from behind his desk and shakes my hand. Very jolly. We sit in the client chairs. Then he points out that we've lost a large contract because I've ‘crapped up’. If he'd been told about the tender a few weeks ago, he would have written the proposal himself. It was a sure thing. But now the client is pissed off, and has gone to page 80 our major competitor. A very big mistake. Significant bottom line implications.

While he's telling me this, I look at the photo of his blonde wife hugging his blonde daughter. They gaze benevolently over his shoulder from the bookcase behind him, spreading their domestic bliss around his papers. I know that when he's away from his desk they smile at the naked women pole-dancing on his screensaver.

On the way home I get a haircut.

My finger smudges the newsprint and I open my eyes to ‘cosy 2 bed cntrl city sun spot’. The landlord won't let me take it over the phone. I have to show up and inspect the rotting carpet and the mirror tiles, the burn marks on the formica. When I pull out the deposit in cash he's happy enough. He's crunched four flats into this old villa.

I tell the outgoing tenants I'll buy any furniture they don't want, and become the owner of a stained double mattress, a stool, and a bookshelf made out of odd pieces of timber.

I sit on my stool and consider decisions I'm not making. After several hours my lower back is throbbing. I move to the floor and lie with my knees up, gazing at the ceiling. It's remarkably white, given the condition of the rest of the flat.

In the evening, shouts and laughter come through the wall, and carry on until early morning. Sometimes furniture is dragged across the floor.

On the second day, I discover that the sun slants into the kitchen window between 11 and 1, at such an angle that it warms a narrow strip of the peeling lino. I pull the mattress into the kitchen and lie in the heat, shifting my shoulders to follow it across the smelly cotton. The blood in my eyelids glows orange, and is interrupted by moving black puddles. I get up only to buy white bread and meat pies from the corner shop.

Over the hill, the city pulses. I have fallen out of time.

Every night I return the mattress to the small bedroom, and listen to the noise from the flat next door. Even though I know I won't sleep, I try to breathe from my diaphragm. I chew the inside of my page 81 cheek. There's silence for a few minutes, then it starts up again. The muscles at the back of my neck tighten. I massage my head and wonder how far I could poke my fingers into my eyes.

Bless the thalamus.

A printout of a cross section is folded in my trouser pocket. I hold it up to my eyes. It looks like an irrepressible fungus; if the photographer had dipped his camera a little lower you'd see the log. The sunlight intensifies the pixel dots, and the creases that run from the thalamus's frilly edge to the centre, where a dark god lies curled.

This is the only piece of paper I've brought with me. I know all the rest.

I know the thalamus is a kind of traffic policeman for the brain, ensuring that communications between mind and body arrive in the right department. In sleep, the thalamus becomes less efficient, allowing the vegetative state I now hunger after.

I know my father's disease degrades the thalamus and everything it regulates: how I sleep, the pumping of my blood, and my body's core temperature.

On the fourth night I decide to get angry. I choose this, despite knowing I won't sleep even if all the world is hushed.

Their front door is open. I follow the noise into a large, barely furnished room. It's full of bodies, though when they slow down I count only five.

A girl in dungarees sees me as she comes up from a somersault, and glares. I can tell she thinks I'm perving. Her stillness catches the attention of the others.

‘Who are you?’

‘I live through there.’ I point.

A young man steps forward. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘Yeah, there is. I'm trying to sleep. Keep it down, OK?’

‘Shit.’ The girl turns away and raises her arms, lets them fall.

As I walk back down the corridor I hear him say, ‘See it as a creative restriction.’

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When I go out in the morning he's sitting on their doorstep, rolling a cigarette. I don't acknowledge him, but his voice follows me down the path.

‘Sleep well?’

I turn. ‘Yeah. Well enough.’

He smiles as though he knows the futility of my attempts.

‘What's with the noise? Don't you people have jobs to go to, essays to write?’

He laughs. ‘What you saw—that's our real job.’

This is where I should shake my head and walk to the shops. But I say, ‘What?’

He stretches back on the step. He looks like he could doze off anywhere. ‘We're devising a piece of theatre.’

‘So rehearse in daytime.’

‘Nah. We've all got day jobs, shit work in cafés and stuff. Flatting together gets us rehearsal space.’

He's safe in his knowledge of how things are. I go for fresh milk.

They are there again the next night, and the next. Lying on my mattress I hear them come home one by one, hear the cupboard doors bang in the kitchen, the hot water tank straining. The girl is the loudest.

One morning I thump on their door. My eyes are skewered on kebab sticks that penetrate to the back of my head. I thump until the door is flung open. It's the girl.

‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘I want to talk to—to—’

She turns from the door and yells, ‘Sam!’, disappears. I wait, looking at the threadbare carpet.

A door down the hall opens and he staggers out. ‘It's six o'clock, man.’

‘Isn't there funding for people like you?’

‘You're crazy.’ He hitches up his boxers. ‘But since you ask, only if you're established. They want you to win prizes and shit. Before you get any money.’

‘How much?’

‘Well.’ He speaks fast. ‘Round fifteen grand. It sounds like heaps, page 83 but not when you think about hiring equipment and space, and advertising and stuff.’

‘Is it any good? Your play?’

‘Yeah, the story rocks. We've got love, conflict, the whole caboose. But it's looking shonky, whether it'll happen. We need more time.’

‘Creative restriction?’

‘Maybe. But being too tired to think … or when one of us has a late shift. Mostly it's a bind.’

‘What do you call yourselves?’

‘Guile.’

Later, when I hand him the cheque, he doubts me. ‘Is this real?’

‘Bank it.’

‘Yeah. OK. I'm not telling the others, though. You might be playing silly buggers.’

I don't see him for a few days. Then he comes racing through my door late one afternoon, and leaps around my mattress where I'm lying in the kitchen.

‘It's fucken real! It's real! You've given us fifteen fucken grand!’ He smashes down next to me and grasps my shoulders.

‘You're our hero, man!’

He does a couple more laps and thunders out the door. I hear him through the wall.

‘Quit your fucken jobs!’

The flat and I play host for the first time. They bring through joints and beer, and sit against the walls, watching me.

The girl is suspicious. ‘There's a contract, right? You want a part?’

‘No. I want to see it work, though. I want you to get an audience.’

‘Is it real money? You a dealer?’

‘No. Just rich.’

‘Why you living here then?’

‘First flat I found.’

Sam's impatient. ‘Don't question it, man. We've only got five weeks.’

She turns at the door. ‘You can't be in the play.’

I stay on my mattress while they hire a warehouse on the waterfront.

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Even though I know it won't make any difference that they've gone, even though I know I'll stay awake until 3 or 4 a.m., I fall asleep. I fall asleep.

They're out every day, and late into the evenings. When she's home, the girl seems determined to show me that her silence hasn't been bought, but I sleep anyway. I sleep through the days and whenever else I feel like it.

My father visits, bringing woolshed grease and his echoing whistle. One night I wake and know he's been lying close beside me; I can still feel his weight on the mattress.

I didn't think to make my privacy a condition. After the first two journalists turn up wanting interviews with the ‘hermit philanthropist’, I stop answering the door.

On opening night I walk through the city to the warehouse.

The foyer is empty. All the punters are inside, waiting to be entertained. I walk past the stacked seats, my head lowered, and into the centre of what Sam has told me is ‘the round’. It's square. The chattering hushes.

I've told him I want to say a few words. He was reluctant. It's special, that moment before the action starts.

Fifteen grand, I reminded him.

Someone up there is scratching at his stubble, and trouser legs are rubbing against the plastic seats. If I lift my head, I will see them ranged above me.

I have to take a deep breath before I can unhitch myself. The wrapping crackles off a lolly. I look up. There they are, caught in this windowless place as if already underground. But Sam and his mates are waiting somewhere in the dark to make a reality of pretence.

‘I'll tell you something,’ I begin.