Entry Island by Peter May Page B

someone hammering at his ribs from the inside, trying to break their way out.
    It was just a dream, but so vivid that the same hopeless impotence felt by Simon when his lover faded from view lingered in his own consciousness like a black cloud of depression.
    It was the first time he had dreamed it, but this was a story he knew. He pulled his knees up to his chest, leaning his elbows on them and closing his eyes. And for a moment he was transported in his mind back to childhood. To his grandmother’s house on the banks of the Salmon River in Scotstown. An old timber house built in the early twentieth century and made gloomy by three tall trees that loomed darkly over it.
    He could almost smell it. That perfume of old age and dampness, of dust and history that permeated every corner. And he could hear her voice. Low, almost monotone, and always with an underlying sense of melancholy as she read to him and his sister from the diaries.
    He had not thought once about those memoirs in all the years since, and yet he seemed to recall them now with great clarity. Not in every detail, but with a striking sense of place and story. The story of his ancestor’s life, begun on his voyage across the ocean. The man after whom Sime had been named, whose story had ended in a tragedy that his grandmother had always refused to read them.
    Why had this moment suddenly forced its way into his consciousness? The tragic separation of Simon and Ciorstaidh on the quay at Glasgow. And why had his subconscious mind cast himself and Kirsty Cowell in their respective roles? He shook his head. A head that ached. He had no answers and felt almost feverish. Then it occurred to him that if he had dreamt, then he had slept. Although it hardly felt like it. He glanced at the bedside clock. It was just after 1.30 a.m. The television still sent shadows dancing around the room. The ice hockey match was over, but the channel had now surrendered its night-time hours to telesales of a machine for sculpting abdominal perfection. He could have slept for no longer than the real-time passage of his dream.
    He slipped off the bed and went through to the bathroom to splash his face with cold water. When he looked up he wasalmost startled by the pale, haggard young man staring back at him from the mirror. Under the harsh electric light every crease and shadow on his face seemed darker and more deeply etched. His soft brown eyes were weary and pained, the whites shot through with red. Even his curls seemed to have lost their lustre, and although his hair was fair, almost Scandinavian blonde, he could see the grey starting to grow in at the temples. Shaved short at the sides and back, but allowed longer growth on top, it gave him a boyish appearance, which seemed incongruous now with the tired blanched face whose reflection he could hardly bear to look at.
    He turned away to bury his face in a soft towel and went back through to the bedroom, dropping his clothes on the floor behind him as he went. He found a fresh pair of boxers in his bag and slid between cold sheets, turning on to his side and drawing his knees into the foetal position. He had slept once already tonight, albeit for less than an hour, and he so much wanted to return to his dream, to manipulate it as is sometimes possible when you are consciously dreaming. To achieve what his ancestor had been unable to do in life. To change its outcome. To hear her voice and find her on the boat, and release himself from that unkeepable promise.
    For a long time he lay, eyes closed, with kaleidoscope colours appearing like inkblots behind his lids before vanishing again into darkness. He turned over and focused on his breathing. Slow, steady. Letting his mind and his thoughts wander. Trying to relax his body, let the weight of it sink into the bed.
    And then he was on his back. Eyes open and staring at the ceiling. And although every part of him cried out for sleep he was wide awake.
    *
    It was possible that he had