The New-Build Estate That Dreams the Same Man

We bought on a new-build estate precisely to sidestep all of this. Two years old, raw and clean, laid over a green-belt field the developer's brochure showed as empty pasture. No creaking history, no previous owners' sorrows in the plaster. Forty identical-ish executive homes and their identical-ish young families, and nothing to haunt us. That was the pitch. We believed it.

It came out, as these things do, at a residents' barbecue — the summer social where forty households pretend to know each other. Someone, a few drinks in, made a joke about a bad dream, an odd recurring one, and someone else stopped laughing and said, carefully, 'What man?' And the first person described him, and the second person went quiet, and within twenty minutes there was a cluster of us standing apart from the sausages, comparing a dream we had, it turned out, been having separately and saying nothing about, out of the ordinary reluctance to mention that you've been dreaming of a stranger.

The same man. In old-fashioned clothes — a labourer's clothes, someone said, from a long time ago, waistcoat, collarless shirt, a flat cap, boots. Standing at the foot of the bed, or in the garden, or once, chillingly, in the half-built frame of the house as it had been mid-construction, in the dreams of people who'd moved in after it was finished. And always, in every version, the same question, or something so close it was clearly the same: he asked about his orchard. Where was his orchard. What had they done with the trees. Who had taken the orchard. Patient, not angry, just endlessly, sadly asking a field full of new houses what had become of his orchard.

A third of the estate, we established that afternoon and in the weeks of comparing that followed — thirteen or fourteen households out of forty — had dreamed him. People who'd never met before moving in. Different rooms, different plots, the same man in the same old clothes asking the same question about trees none of us had ever seen, on a field the brochure swore was empty pasture.