I Dreamed The Same Canal For Thirty Years

I have worked on the front desk of a doctors' surgery for twenty-six years, which means I have spent twenty-six years listening to people explain their symptoms to me as though I can do anything about it except type. I mention this because I want you to understand what kind of person is telling you this. I am not a spiritual woman. I do not have crystals. I have a laminated sheet of the appointment codes taped to my monitor and a drawer of other people's biros, and the closest thing I have to a belief system is that most things have a boring explanation and the boring explanation is usually correct.

So when I tell you about the dream, understand that I have spent thirty years trying to find the boring explanation for it, and that I failed, and that failing has annoyed me more than it has frightened me.

The dream started when I was nine.

I know it was nine because we had only just moved to the house on the hill, and I remember waking up in a room I did not yet think of as mine, with the boxes still stacked against the wall and my mother's handwriting on the sides of them. I remember lying there and looking at the boxes and feeling that the dream had followed me from somewhere, which is a stupid thing for a child to feel, because I had never had the dream before. But that is the feeling: not I have had a new dream, but it has found me.

It goes like this, and it has always gone like this.

I am standing on a canal towpath in the evening. Not night. That specific hour when the light has gone orange and low and everything looks like it has been varnished. There is a lock ahead of me, maybe forty yards, and the beam of the lock gate is painted black and white, and the paint is flaking on the underside where the wood is wet. There is a smell of the water, which anyone who has grown up near a canal knows and nobody can describe properly — cold, and green, and a bit like a coin.

To my right, in the long grass at the edge of the path, there is a pair of trainers.

They are placed neatly. Not thrown, not tumbled. Side by side, toes pointing at the water, the way you would leave them at the end of a bed. They are white, or they were white. And the left one has a broken lace that has been knotted back together about two-thirds of the way up, so the bow is small and mean and sits off-centre.

And I know — I know the way you know things in dreams, without being told, as a fact that arrives fully assembled — that I must not look at the water.

That is the whole dream. There is no monster. Nothing comes out of the canal. I stand there and I look at the trainers and I feel the pull of the water in my peripheral vision, a sort of gravitational insistence, and I do not look, and I wake up with a taste in my mouth like I have been sucking a two-pence piece.

I want to be clear that this is not a nightmare. I have had nightmares. Nightmares are loud. This was quiet, and the quietness was the problem. I would wake up and lie in the dark with my heart going and nothing to point at.

I had it perhaps four or five times a year through my childhood. Sometimes twice in a week and then nothing for eight months. There was no pattern I could ever find, and believe me, I looked — I was the sort of teenager who kept a diary with a lock on it, and for about eighteen months I logged the dates. I still have that notebook somewhere. Full moons, no. Exams, no. Illness, no. Whether I had eaten cheese, no, obviously.

I tried, at about fifteen, to have the dream on purpose. I had read in a magazine that you could steer your dreams if you concentrated on something before you fell asleep, and I lay there for four nights in a row thinking hard about towpaths, and got nothing, and on the fifth night when I had given up and was thinking about a boy in the year above, there it was. Orange light. Flaking paint. Shoes.

That is when I stopped trying to be clever about it. You do not summon it and you do not avoid it. It comes when it comes, like weather.

The other thing I did, which I have never admitted to anybody, is that I went looking for it. I was sixteen and I got the bus out to three different canals within about twenty miles and walked them, looking for a lock with a black-and-white beam and a bank of long grass on the right-hand side going towards it. I found four locks that were close and none that were right, and I remember standing at one of them in the rain in a denim jacket feeling profoundly stupid, and getting the bus home, and never telling a living soul until now.

I did not, at any point in those years, think the dream meant anything. I want to stress that. I thought it was a fault. I thought of it the way you think about a knee that clicks — a thing your body does, of no significance, mildly interesting to nobody but you.

My mother's reaction was the strangest part of my childhood and I did not understand it until I was much older.

I told her about it once, over breakfast, when I was maybe eleven. I said I kept dreaming about a canal and some shoes. And my mother, who was buttering toast, stopped buttering toast. She did not look up. She said, "What sort of shoes." Not as a question. As a flat request for information, the way you would ask someone what size of screw they needed.

I said trainers. White ones. And she said, "Right," and went back to the toast, and that was the end of it, and she never asked me about it again in her life.

I asked her about it once when she was dying, forty-odd years later, because you become bold at the end. I said, do you remember when I told you about the canal dream. And she said yes. And I said why did you go funny about it. And she was very tired by then and she said something I have thought about ever since. She said: "Because your grandmother had a thing she wouldn't talk about, and I always thought I'd got away with not having one, and then you came and said that."

That is all I ever got. My mother had what our family called, without ever quite saying it out loud, the feeling. She was famous for it in a small way. She once turned the car around on the way to a wedding and drove home and would not explain, and my father was furious for a fortnight, and then the man she had been going to sit next to at the wedding turned out to have been — well, it does not matter, but she was right, and my father stopped being furious, and nobody in our family ever mentioned it again. That is how we handled it. We handled it by not handling it.

My grandmother I barely knew. She died when I was six and what I have of her is one photograph and a smell of lavender and camphor that I get about twice a year for no reason. But my aunt told me once, at a funeral, with a sherry in her hand, that my grandmother would not have a mirror in a bedroom and would not say why, and that she had once stood up in the middle of a meal and gone out into the yard and stood there for a quarter of an hour, and come back in and finished her dinner, and never said a word about it. My aunt said this the way you tell a funny story about an eccentric relative, and then she stopped, and looked at her sherry, and said, "She was right about our Peter, mind," and would not elaborate, and that is my entire inheritance on the subject.

So there is a line of women in my family who have not talked about something. I do not know what to do with that. I have never known what to do with it. It is not a gift; a gift is something you can use. This is more like being related to a draught in a house.

Here is the part I find hardest to explain to people, and the part that convinced me, eventually, that something real was going on.

The dream aged.

Not much. Not in any dramatic way. But over the decades the details moved, the way a photograph you keep in your wallet gets soft at the corners, except this was the opposite — it got sharper, and it got more current.

When I was a child, the trainers were canvas plimsolls, essentially. Flat-soled. The sort of thing we were made to wear for PE. By the time I was in my twenties they had become proper trainers with a moulded sole and a stripe. In my thirties there was a logo on the heel that I could never quite resolve, the way you cannot read text in dreams. In my forties the tongue of the shoe was padded and thick and modern.

The lace was always the same. Broken, knotted, two-thirds up, bow off-centre.

I want to be careful here, because I know what a sceptic would say, and I would say it too if it were happening to somebody else. A sceptic would say: you are updating the dream unconsciously with the shoes you see every day, and you are misremembering the earlier versions, and memory is a liar. And that is completely reasonable and I have no argument against it except that I wrote it down. In the notebook with the lock, in green biro, aged fourteen: plimsoll type, no stripe, lace knotted. I know what I dreamed when I was fourteen, because fourteen-year-old me told me.

I got on with my life, in the way that you do. I trained, I got the job at the surgery, I married a man called Ian who fixes commercial ovens and who has never once in thirty-one years asked me a question he did not want the answer to. We had Daniel in the spring of the year I turned twenty-eight, and Ruth two and a half years after that.

The dream more or less left me alone during the years the children were small. I have wondered whether that was because I was so exhausted that I did not dream at all, or whether it went quiet on purpose, which is a mad thing to write down but there it is.

The feeling, though — my mother's thing — that turned up in me during those years, and it turned up in a very ordinary way.

It was never dramatic. It was more like a change in air pressure. Twice I got Daniel out of a room before something fell. Once I refused to let Ian take a job in a place I had never been to and could not explain, and it went bust nine months later owing everyone money. And once, memorably, I stood in the kitchen at half past six in the evening with a wooden spoon in my hand and became certain that my sister's marriage was over, and rang her, and she picked up and said "how do you always" and then cried for forty minutes.

And I want to be honest about the other side of the ledger, because everybody who tells these stories only tells you the hits. I have had the feeling and been wrong. I have been convinced Ruth's plane had gone down and it had not, it had just been sitting on a runway with the wifi off. I have been convinced my results were bad and they were fine. I would say I am right perhaps two thirds of the time, and that is not good enough to be a superpower and it is much too good to be comfortable. It is exactly bad enough to make you doubt yourself both ways.

The worst one was in the February before Ruth's GCSEs. I woke at three in the morning absolutely certain that my father had died, and I did not ring, because it was three in the morning, and I lay there until six doing the arithmetic of grief — the phone calls, the leave I would have to take, whether the coffin goes in the front of the church or the side. At half past seven I rang and he answered on the second ring and told me at length about a problem he was having with a fence panel.

He lived another nine years. The feeling had been about nothing. Or it had been about something I never identified, which is the same thing as nothing, practically speaking.

That morning taught me the actual shape of this, which is that it is useless. It does not come when you need it and it comes when you do not, and it does not tell you what it is about, and there is no way to interrogate it. If a colleague at work behaved like that I would have them managed out.

Daniel was nineteen the summer it happened, and he had that year become entirely unrecognisable to me in the way that boys do — he had gone from a child to a set of shoulders in a doorway saying he would be back later.

The dream came back that June. Hard.

Three nights running, which had never happened, not once in thirty years. And it was the same and it was not the same, and I lay awake after the third one at about four in the morning trying to work out what had changed, and eventually I understood what it was, and I got up and went and sat on the stairs, because I did not want to be lying down with it.

In every version of that dream, for thirty years, I had been standing about forty yards from the lock.

In these three, I was closer. Not much. Perhaps ten yards closer. Close enough that I could see the water beading on the black-and-white paint of the beam.

I did not tell Ian. I am telling you that flatly because I am not going to pretend I behaved well. I did not tell Ian, because Ian is a practical man and I would have had to say the words out loud, and the words are ridiculous. I have dreamed about some shoes since I was nine and now I am standing nearer.

What I did instead was go to work. I did three days on the desk that week with about four hours' sleep behind each of them, and I was short with a woman about a repeat prescription, and I apologised, and she was very nice about it, and I went into the back and stood by the sink for a minute.

I have gone over that week so many times that I no longer trust my memory of it, which is its own kind of loss. But I am fairly sure of this: at no point did I connect the dream to Daniel. Not once. It had never been about a person. It had been about a place and a pair of shoes for thirty years, and the shoes had always been empty, and the emptiness of them was somehow the most restful thing about it. Nobody was in the water in my dream. Nobody was anywhere. It was a landscape with an object in it.

If I had thought for one second that it was about my son I would have chained him to the radiator, and I would like to be able to tell you that some part of me knew. It did not. That is the honest answer and it is the one that costs me something to write.

The Saturday was the twelfth. I remember because there was a thing on at the surgery about the flu clinic dates and I had the calendar open in front of me all week.

It was hot. It had been hot for about ten days, the sort of English heat that everyone enjoys for four days and then resents. Daniel came downstairs at about half two in the afternoon in shorts and said he was going out with Mattie and a couple of others, and I said where, and he said, "Just out," and then, because he saw my face, "the canal. Down by the locks. Everyone's there."

And nothing happened in me. That is the thing. That is the detail I have never been able to make anybody understand. I have told this story perhaps six times in my life and every time, at this point, the person listening leans in, because they know what is coming, and they expect me to say that I felt the floor drop out. I did not. I felt nothing at all. I said, "Take a bottle of water, it's stupid out there," and he said something rude and affectionate and went.

The feeling arrived at eighteen minutes past five, and I know that because I looked at the clock on the oven, which is the sort of thing you only do when something is happening to you.

I was standing at the sink. And it came the way it always came, that pressure change, that sense of the room going slightly wrong, except it was enormous, it was the biggest one I have ever had, and it did not have a shape. It was not Daniel is in the water. It was just a great flat wall of now.

I rang him. It rang out.

I rang him again and it rang out again, and I went and got the car keys, and Ian came into the hall and said "what?" and I said "the canal," and he did not ask me anything else, which is thirty-one years of marriage in one syllable, and he got in the car.

It is a nine-minute drive. There is a car park by the bridge and a wooden gate and then the towpath. I have walked that path four hundred times in my life. I walked it with my mother.

There were maybe twenty kids on the bank, and an ambulance already at the far end of the access track, and that particular silence of a lot of young people not knowing what to do with their hands.

Daniel was sitting on the concrete edge of the lock with a foil blanket round his shoulders even though it was twenty-six degrees, and he was soaking wet, and shaking, and when he saw me he did the thing he had not done since he was about eleven, which was to make a noise and put his face into my shoulder.

He was fine. He is fine. I want to say that now because I know how it feels to read one of these.

What had happened was this. A boy had gone in off the bank about two hundred yards up, where the water looks slow and is not, and had gone under. And two of them went in after him, and Daniel was one of the two, and between them they got him to the side and up onto the concrete lip by the lock, and somebody who had done a first aid course at work — a girl of eighteen, who I have since met and who is the most competent human being I have ever encountered — did what she had been taught and it worked.

The boy lived. He is at university now. He sends Daniel a message on the twelfth of June every year and neither of them has ever made it a big thing, which I think is the correct way to be about it.

I met his mother about a fortnight later. She came to the house, which I had not expected, with a bottle of something and a card, and she stood in my hallway and could not do the thing she had come to do, and I put her in the kitchen and made tea and let her not do it for a while. Eventually she said, "He'd only had them a month." And I said, "Sorry?" And she said the trainers. She had bought him the trainers a month before and he had broken the lace on them within the first week, and she had told him to buy a new pair of laces, and he had not, he had knotted the old one, because he was seventeen and it was June and nobody buys laces.

I did not say anything. I have thought since that this was the moment to say something and that I let it go past, and I do not think I regret it, but I notice it.

There is a version of me that told her. That said: I have been dreaming about that lace since before your son was born. I did not say it because she had come to my house to be grateful and it was not my turn to need anything, and because I have watched, at the surgery, over twenty-six years, what happens to people when you hand them something they cannot put down.

Here is the part I did not see until later, when everyone had gone home and Ian was asleep and I was sitting in the kitchen at two in the morning with a cup of tea I had not drunk.

I had walked up that towpath at about half past five in the evening, in that low orange light, from the direction of the bridge, towards the lock with the black-and-white beam. And on the way, in the long grass to the right of the path, about forty yards short of the lock, there had been a pair of trainers.

Placed neatly. Side by side. Toes pointing at the water. They belonged to the boy who went in, because he had taken them off first, the way you do when you mean to swim and not when you mean to fall.

I had walked past them without breaking stride and I had not registered them at all, because I was looking for my son.

I went back the next morning. I told Ian I wanted to walk. The trainers were still there — the police had been and gone and evidently nobody had thought them important, or nobody had wanted to touch them, I do not know. They were white, or they had been white. The left one had a lace that had snapped and been knotted back together about two-thirds of the way up, so that the bow sat small and off-centre.

I stood on that path for I do not know how long. And I did the thing that I had not done in thirty years, which was that I looked at the water.

There was nothing in the water. It was flat and green and there was a crisp packet going round slowly in the eddy by the gate, and a moorhen, and the whole thing was so ordinary that I laughed, and then I was not laughing.

I have never had the dream again. Not once, in eleven years. It stopped that night the way a tap stops.

I have gone round and round it, and I will give you the two explanations I have, and neither of them satisfies me.

The first is the boring one, and I want it to be true. It is that I have dreamed of canals and shoes for thirty years because I grew up next to a canal, and because the canal is where the local danger was, and because every parent in a canal town carries that particular fear folded up in their chest. And that on a hot Saturday in June a thing happened that a lot of people had feared for a long time, and my old dream and the real day happened to share the furniture of a place that only has so much furniture. Towpaths have shoes on them. Locks are painted black and white. The light in June is orange at half five. And the lace — well. Laces break. Boys knot them.

That is a completely respectable explanation and I have offered it to myself several hundred times and it has never once made me feel better, and I have come to think that if it were the true one it would have.

The second explanation I do not have words for, so I will just tell you what it feels like instead. It feels like something showed me the same photograph, four or five times a year, for thirty years, and moved me ten yards closer at the end, and I still did not understand it until I was standing in it. And that whatever the point of that was, the point was not to prevent anything, because I prevented nothing. I did not save that boy. My son and another boy and a girl with a first aid certificate saved that boy, while I was standing in my kitchen with a wet plate in my hand.

The only thing the feeling did was get me into the car nine minutes early, which meant that my son had somebody to put his face into.

Maybe that was it. Maybe that is all it ever was, and I have spent thirty years thinking I had been handed a warning when what I had been handed was an appointment.

I have not told Daniel. He knows I turned up fast. He does not know why, and he has never asked, and I have noticed that he does not ask, and I have started to wonder whether that is because he is not curious or because he already suspects, the way my mother did not ask me about the shoes.

His daughter is four now. She is a serious child who likes lists.

Last month she told me she had a dream about a gate, and I said, "What sort of gate," and I heard my mother's voice come out of my own mouth, flat and level, asking for information, the way you would ask someone what size of screw they needed.

She said she couldn't remember. I said, "Right," and I gave her a biscuit, and I changed the subject, and I have thought about almost nothing else since.