THE WAY TO THE HOUSE

You used to think that you had a recurring dream when you were a child. You’d walk up a green hillside, and only when you got to the top would you see a large mansion, down in the valley below. You’d feel strangely drawn to the house, as if it were the most important thing in the world for you to go there. But in the dream, the walk down into the valley seemed to last forever, and you never made it.
You *used* to think that you remember, because you know now that it can’t be so. As an adult, on holiday with your own family, you went to a part of England you’d never been to before as a child or an adult. Laughing and joking with the kids, and promising them sweets at the top before you turned back, you walked up a green hillside, and there below was the house. You went very quiet, handed the kids sweets to keep them busy, and felt very strange, as if you might faint, and suggested you all retrace your steps to the car.


The walk back to the car seemed to take a very long time. During it, you decided that you must have had deja vu, that weird trick of the brain that makes your memory store an experience before you mentally process it, so that when you do, you are sure you have been there already. Your recollection of a childhood dream must have been the way your brain rationalised it. You dismiss your worries, sure that was the answer.
But then you think again a year later, when your mother dies and you have to clear her house, and in a battered blue box in the loft you find drawing after drawing that you had made when very young, a long green slope down, a mansion with exactly the right number of windows, and in one of those windows, in every drawing, a shape like a figure. Maybe just an accident with the pen. Maybe. Maybe you’ll go back on your own this time, and finish the walk that is the way to the house. Maybe.