OFF HUNTING WITH OPHELIA

When dreams and reality collide...

It might have been the end of the world, but it wasn't, though to Danny it was the end of his world in a very personal sense.

It had started with a dream. Lying lazily on his bed on his own one lazy afternoon he drifted off to sleep instead of reading a boring Shakespeare play for homework which was what he was supposed to be doing what with his exams not far off, and that dream came along.

And in that dream he was with a girl.

Now there might not seem to be anything unusual about that, a lad of his age dreaming about a girl. After all, he was eighteen and many boys of eighteen will be seen at some time or other with a girl, or if they’re lucky and hit the jackpot, several girls. But his problem was he had never even held one by the hand let alone walked down the street with one or (he blushed even though he was in his room alone) kissed one.

His was a totally masculine life. Mum had died way back, so long ago that he couldn’t remember much about her except that she coughed a lot. His brother was two years older than him and out at work most of the time, when he wasn’t courting Jessica, who he never brought home with him. His father, a dedicated Reverend, huffing and puffing when he wasn’t in his church enjoying the company of people who weren’t his sons and muttering little pieces of wisdom with his eyes shut, was rarely around.

School, he still went to school being the bright one of the family and doing “A” levels, was boys only. Even the teachers were all men, though there had been a French mistress when he’d been at the start of his teens, a young brunette who knew what boys liked and gave it to them in the form of a short skirt or dress and a tendency to bend over revealing a great deal that shouldn't be revealed to young teenage boys. But that had been then and now it was all male.

Even the school cat was a tom.

In truth, there was a girl living next door, though next door was a fair distance away. She was about his age and he supposed she might be called pretty, but he hardly knew her. They’d sometimes pass each other on the street and she’d smile at him and say “Hi Danny!” in a cheerful voice, and almost inaudibly and absurdly shyly he’d respond with a “Hi, Jane” before passing on, even when she paused as if she wanted to say something else to him.

He didn’t understand girls. He didn’t know anything about talking to them or what they might want him to say to them. Girls, he knew, lived different lives to boys. They wore skirts or frocks and they sometimes grew their hair so long he marvelled that it didn’t get hopelessly tangled when they were in bed. And they smiled a lot with teeth a bit white that boys’ teeth.

He hardly ever smiled at all. After all, there wasn’t a great deal to smile about. There was Vietnam, there was a cold war that sometimes threatened to bubble out of control, there were rich folks like he thought Jane’s family might be, and poor folk like his.

And then here he was dreaming of being with a girl.

He didn’t know what girl it was, just that it was a generic shape that was a girl. It had, he didn’t like to be too graphic, his father wouldn’t approve, a chest that protruded more than his did and other differences he couldn’t quite get his head round.

It was the scenery around them in the dream that shocked him. He saw himself, and he knew it was him because of the way his reflection in the mirror was exactly the same whenever he looked in it. And he saw her, pretty (he assumed, though he didn’t have very much idea of what pretty really was) and they were in a church.

Not any old church, though, but his father’s church. And father was there, which was only right and proper, but he was with a woman. Not his dead mother, obviously, but a woman who was draping herself all over him, and he wasn’t protesting or trying to push her off. Meanwhile he and the generic woman were sitting in a pew, together yet not together. His imagination didn’t have much to go on when it came to the together bit.

“Danny,” whispered the girl he was with, and he suddenly knew who she was though he’d hardly spent a moment in all his days looking at her.

“Jane,” Danny responded, and they were sitting in a pew next to each other and she stared at him through eyes he knew could see into his very heart.

“Let’s run away,” she said, “Danny, just you and me. Run far away so that your dad won’t ever find us, and we’ll live in a cave somewhere like stone age folks did, because they were happy and we’re not.”

And he knew she was right. The men and women in animal skins and with lines of ochre paint on their faces just had to be much happier than he was. And he knew instinctively they were happier than the girl as well.

“Right then,” he agreed, “let’s go. Let’s leave the mess of grown up life behind and find a cave. There are some, I know there are, I read about them. I could go hunting. That’s it. Go hunting in the forest and you could cook what I catch while I tell you how lovely you are.”

“I am lovely, aren’t I?” she whispered, and he knew she was from the smile on her face, the way it involved all of her face from her pretty mouth to her beautiful eyes. “Come on, let’s go, now, while the time is right and your father’s making love to that woman over there…”

He looked, and his father’s trousers were down and his surplice hitched up, over his shoulders, and the woman, an elderly crone with wrinkles and spots, was grinning at him with both aged arms round his neck. Meanwhile, what in the name of everything holy was his father doing, that upright ungendered man always aware of his deity gazing forlornly at him from somewhere a universe or two away?

“Why’s he doing that?” he asked Jane.

“Don’t you know, you silly boy,” she said, “she’s one of the three witches and they’re promising him that he will be king!”

“Dad as king? Cool!” he replied, or rather the dream him replied. The real him was confused and got mixed up with Shakespeare and Macbeth and witches on a blasted heath.

“And who are you?” he asked, knowing it was Jane from next door, but needing that knowledge to be confirmed.

“I am Ophelia,” she whispered, and suddenly he knew she was lying.

“Ophelia’s the daughter of Polonius in Hamlet,” he told her, “and the witches are in Macbeth.”

“I know,” she smiled, “I’m Ophelia Jane from next door… and anyway I don’t know anything about Hamlet or Macbeth, you silly boy. Call me what you like. Names don’t matter, not when you’re on the cusp of running away. Just kiss me.”

“I’ve never kissed a girl,” he told her.

“Then pretend I’m a boy and kiss me.”

“I’ve never done that either,” he blushed. To his mind most boys were too sweaty to want to kiss. And you didn’t do it, did you, unless you wanted everyone to call you names?

“You have kissed a boy, haven’t you?” she asked, seeing the look on his face.

“I kissed my dad once. But he’s a man, not a boy. On his cheek to say goodnight, and he kissed me back, on my cheek.”

“Is that the only kissing you’ve ever done, Danny? On cheeks? Then come here and kiss me properly…”

“But what do I do?”

“You must know that! It’s nature. Lips on lips and tongue on tongue…”

“Tongue on… Not that!”

Then the entire scene, himself and Jane, the church, wobbled as a new noise broke through the barrier that separated two worlds, that of dreaming and the drab one of reality.

“Danny!” called his father’s voice, his real father’s and not his dream father’s

The sound of that voice broke into the dream, not from what he was doing with the crone but from the other side of his bedroom door and reality.

He stirred himself and sat up. “Dad?” he asked.

“There’s a girl here for you. She says she’s called Ophelia.”

“Ophelia? I don’t know any Ophelia!”

Then his eyes fell onto the text he’d supposed to be revising but had dosed off and fallen into dreamland. “Hamlet,” he whispered.

“She says you’re running away, Danny, the two of you. She’s a pretty girl so you be careful if you’re in the wilds with her or you might, you know, find yourself going too far. Come on then before she loses interest and goes away to find another boy!”

He followed his father down the stairs and there was Jane at the door, smiling like he’d never seen her smile except in the dream.

“Ready?” she asked, and she patted a pack she was carrying, “I’ve got a tent in case we can’t find a cave,” she said with a grin, “you bring yourself and something to eat, and we’ll be off!”

“Be off?” he asked, confused.

“In time for you to go into the forest hunting,” she said, “and if there’s nobody watching, you can kiss me too!”

His father coughed and grinned, and went back into the vicarage while he learned what Jane meant by kissing.

And then they were off.

© Peter Rogerson 30.04.22

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