Читать книгу Hybrids: Saga Competition Winner - David Thorpe - Страница 10

In this dream I’m being chased by a rhinoceros around my parents’ garden. I don’t know how old I am.

It begins after the rhinoceros and I have been together in the garden for a while. Suddenly the rhinoceros takes a dislike to me; I can see the change in its eyes. It fixes me with a stare that sees right through to the guilty core of my soul that I thought I was able to keep hidden from everybody. But with its single horn it has successfully probed through my layers of protection, torn the veils of illusion I carefully hung up, tossed aside the blankets of lies I’ve spread and pierced the many masks of normalcy I’ve spent years laying down. And it’s done this so casually and quickly that I’m defenceless.

So the rhinoceros is charging at me and I’m looking around for somewhere to avoid it. I dodge round the pampas grass and the yucca plant, still in flower, but my muscles are damaged and I can’t jump or somersault over the wall. I forget the narrow passage down the side of the house through which I could escape since it’s too tight for the rhinoceros. I fail to spot the rain butt and how I could leap on it and shin up the drainpipe on to the roof of the rear extension. And so I’m powerless to escape from the path of the charging rhinoceros with its unblinking eyes permanently locked on to mine.

This being a dream, the rhinoceros never impacts upon me. I never feel the splintering contact of the first or even the second horn.

Instead, just before the moment of connection, the dream cuts back as if in a loop to the beginning, and here I am hanging out with the rhinoceros again, in the same garden, on the suburban lawn, with the low wall and the pampas and yucca. But this time I know that the rhinoceros is soon going to realise how guilty I am deep inside, and then bristle with immense dislike, work up a head of steam beneath the metallic sheen of its armoured hide and finally launch its attack. Again, I am completely unable to do anything about it.

There’s that look in its eyes again, that timeless stare of cold hatred and judgement, a moment strung out for eternity when we both know what’s going to happen next. But I can’t move until the rhinoceros moves, and then it does, and I’m trying to make my body work, but it won’t, limping, tumbling over the low wall, falling to the right. None of it works, the rhinoceros looms larger and larger and…

Back to square one again.

This time it’s just the same, but I’m aware of the house, my home, the blank windows staring at the garden, at me, but seeing nothing. Is nobody inside the house? Why don’t they notice what’s happening? Why doesn’t anybody come out and save me? Anyway, where does the rhinoceros come from? Does it belong to us? Have my parents bought it as a pet? Or has it in fact sprung from within my own mind, this being why it knows me so well?

There’s no time to think. It has that look in its eyes again. Oh well, here it comes: the pantomime chase like an old silent comedy. And the point of the horn heading for me but never quite making it because…

The two of us. The garden. The pampas grass and the yucca. The high hedges and fences all around to stop the prying eyes of neighbours. I look at you, for you are the rhinoceros and the rhinoceros is me, looking at me. The two of us stare at each other, knowing everything there is to know about anything, especially about me. And then you charge, or I charge, and really, then, I realise that this is why it’s happening.

The rhinoceros, with its two probing, mineral horns and iron hide, its composite organic/inorganic form, transformed into a monster of hate, and I, we are the same thing. We absolutely deserve to have become each other, in the absence of any onlookers to save us, and to feel the guilt we hold. Together we are me and my nonhuman, electronic, plastic, silicon and copper parts. My nanochips, my digital parasite, my rhinoceros.

And slowly I wake up.