Passenger

This week, I have mostly been in the bowels of dissertation hell ahead of the final deadline for my master's course on Monday. I don't generally have exam dreams like the one in Tuesday's story, but I do have coursework dreams. In them, I am living a carefree life until I realise I have a deadline very soon and have done no work at all. Oddly enough, I haven't had any of these during my dissertation. I suppose dreams, like stories, often aren't about what they're about. As a fun game, see if you can work out which academic anxieties have been sublimated into this week's other stories.

This week's daily stories

Monday

By the time her postcard arrived, my house had already burned down. The postie left it on the ash pile where the front door used to be, along with the bills, and a note saying “We tried to deliver your parcel but you were out”. A pint of milk sat nearby on the cracked doorstep. When I stopped by to collect it all, a man came up to me. He said he was sorry to interrupt, but how much did I know about Battersea Dogs & Cats Home? I told him it wasn’t a good time. He said that was fine, and asked if he could use my toilet.

Tuesday

In the dream I am in an exam I haven’t prepared for. The usual thing, old anxieties standing in for new. I’m wise to it now, even asleep. At some point, I remember that my schooldays are over, and I fold the paper into an aeroplane, or pull the fire alarm, or just wake up. This time I take the third option. I wake in a cheap plastic chair at a square little table. I have dribbled on the exam paper a little. There are ten minutes left.

Wednesday

All my life I have been frightened of the stars going out. I suppose I must have seen it on the television when I was small. But now there are a thousand more stars in the sky, and the night is more beautiful than ever. When I stand underneath it I think this ought to frighten me even more. But I can never feel it.

Thursday

Clara and Tom had a wishing-well in their back garden, only there was no hole. It hadn’t been filled in, either. It was never there. They got their handyman to come and build a wall and a roof and a crank, and they hung an old bucket from it with a new rope. Turn the handle, and you can hear the bucket go donk on the clay. How can it be a wishing well, I asked them, when it’s not even a well? But I suppose they know better than me. They get everything they wish for.

Friday

It made him a laughing stock, that book. It would be one thing if nobody had read it, but you see it all over. In charity shops, in remainder bins, next to gurning faces on YouTube. And there I am, trapped in the dedication. Without whom this book couldn’t have never been written. The only gift he ever gave me.

Saturday

On a still night, I can hear them singing from my doorstep. For a week I thought it was my imagination. For a month I thought it was next door's radio. Now I know it's them, just over the lake, singing together for the joy of it. I could take a stroll and hear them up close. I could join them, if I asked. But it is more beautiful this way, drifting over the silent water.

Sunday

They told her she should take up painting, for the stress. She painted the new moon, the bottom of a mineshaft, the inside of an oyster. They said she might at least try to take it seriously. She said: there is the pearl, the gold, a world all bathed in earthshine.

I have been reading...

• The New Tribe by Buchi Emecheta. I'm always struck by Emecheta's very matter-of-fact style. There's a lot in it that dispensers of writing advice would object to: she tells instead of showing, plays loose with points of view, and drops vertiginous quantities of exposition in a sentence or two. But she does it with such elegance, and such a keen understanding of the human heart, that it feels not clumsy but truthful.
• Various books and papers on alienation, technology, and education. I will spare you the full bibliography.

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This week's story: Passenger

If he had given me time to think, I might not have taken the deal. One cannot choose soundly under pressure. I see it in everyone, so at least I cannot blame myself. I am sure that half the world would take it too. I gave up my own body, burnt up like flash paper, and in exchange I flit between the bodies and minds of others. When I am settled in a person, I see and feel and know as they do, but I may not influence them. I will live as long as their are minds to live in, but as a passenger. I may look, but never touch.

It is a strange thing, to inhabit a person, to feel all that they feel, to know the thoughts that provoke them to action, and then to watch their body do a thing wholly alien to you, a thing you are sure you would never have chosen. Once I was a boy who caught a mouse in his hands, and I thought: how wonderful, to be so small and feel a smaller heartbeat against our skin. I remembered all the gentleness of my youth, just as the boy threw the mouse into the canal. Yes, it is strange. But as I grow settled in it, I find it is not so different to how I inhabited my own life. Perhaps we are all along for the ride.