BLAIR DOESN’T DO DREAMS
Everyone in Port Brokeferry gets something through the mail. And Blair delivers them all. Postcards, letters, birthday cards and parcels, bills and circulars. Not on Sundays, of course, or on post office holidays. But everyone at sometime has something delivered. From one end of the village to the other; from the green at the last reach one way to as far out the other as Jess’s Ship and Pamela with her small gifts for him when she has been gone. There’s even mail for Berlie’s when it’s here, two weeks each year, and he hands those letters and small packets and filled orders for parts and bulbs, to the man called Wallace who is in charge. Blair even delivers to himself. Not posting them through his own door, that would be odd. But laying the new mail on the edge of his kitchen table until he has made himself tea and can sit with time to read what has been delivered.
Everyone in Port Brokeferry, except one. And Blair does not deliver anything to her, never has, for it is her job to sort through the mail and so anything that is for her she sets aside and does not slip into his postbag.
Blair does not always remember his dreams. Is usually in too much of a rush to get into the day and to collect the new mail that is to be delivered, door to every door. He thinks he maybe doesn’t do dreams. Would say as much if you asked him. ‘Not like Sinnie,’ he’d say. ‘Sinnie and her dreams all clear pictures and she recalls every word spoken and the colours and the smells.’ No, Blair would tell you, he does not dream.
Except he does. He wakes on Sundays and holidays and he has slept later than usual. And he lies half in sleep and half awake, and he thinks about the day ahead and the different it will be from all his other days. And he remembers his dreams then, bits of them. Only he does not believe they are dreams. Thoughts are what they are, he thinks. Fanciful thoughts on what could be and what isn’t.
But in truth they are snatches of things Blair has dreamed. And in one of his dreams he is knocking on Izzy’s door and handing her a letter. He pictures her standing with one hand outstretched, waiting for the letter he has taken from out of his postbag. And she says she has a secret and she asks him if he wants to know.
Blair holds out the letter for her to take. He shakes his head. He knows secrets about all the people in Port Brokeferry. He knows things he wishes he didn’t. He knows the minister loved a girl with blond hair before he came to the church and the minister sees that girl in Corinne Downs and he fights against what he sees. He knows that Callum looks in through windows when people are sleeping, and that he spends the longest time looking in on Margaret, his wife, turning and turning in her dreams. And he knows that Grace has waited for the boy called Kelso, a whole year she has waited, and he knows why that is.
‘It is a secret about me,’ says Izzy. In the dream, that’s what she says. ‘It is a good secret.’
And Blair knows about the order Izzy made, for a bottle of German cologne, and he knows about Johannes and Izzy’s mother and the years of postcards from a place called Koln and small parcels that stopped coming.
And Blair says he does not want to know the secret that Izzy wants to tell him. Instead he hands her the letter and something else.
And beside his bed, in the waking real world, is a small bottle of perfume that Pamela gave him, one of her small gifts to him, a bottle shaped like a cresting wave in frosted glass. She gets lots of free samples and she thought maybe Blair could gift this bottle to a girl he likes. And in the dream he hands it to Izzy, wrapped up like the small parcels that used to come for Izzy's mother. But only in the dream and in the part of the dream that the waking Blair does not remember. So the bottle sits by his bed, undelivered.
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