![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
carmillaSUMMARY: “Poor things,” she’d said. “Poor silly things. Leaving the city of dreams.”
Dave remembers when the neighbours moved house. He’d been about eight at the time, and the little cul-de-sac where he’d lived had been short on excitement. Break-ins and bottle fights didn’t count; they were life, not special events. This had been special. They’d booked a huge hovervan, the biggest he’d ever seen, and they’d packed their life up neatly in cardboard boxes and stowed it all away. They were wine boxes, mainly; the local hypermarket always had heaps of them piled up at the back. The van had driven off, and they’d come to say goodbye before they followed it. He can’t remember their last name, though he thinks it might have been Atwood – or maybe Birch? Some kind of tree. He doesn’t remember them that well, to be honest. He does remember Sally, their daughter, and the bright blue dress she wore for parties with her hair in pigtails, and her bright pink bubblegum smile. He remembers how Mrs. Tree had got quite emotional, and promised to write (they’d like to visit, but New London was such a long way away...) and hugged his grandma and thanked her for all she’d done for the family – which hadn’t been a lot, so far as Dave could tell, but then grown-ups were odd.
And he remembers how his grandma waved at them, when they drove away, with a wistful smile on her face; waved until they were completely out of sight, then looked down at him and ruffled his hair.
“Poor things,” she’d said. “Poor silly things. Leaving the city of dreams.”
The city of dreams. Not dreams-come-true, not daydreams, but dreams, where anything at all could happen. The city didn’t dream like Oxford did, all spires and books and murder mysteries. It dreamt like a dog on its back, snuffling and whining and pawing the air, always active, always alive.
He didn’t answer her, but silently he’d sworn that he’d never do something so stupid as to leave.
It’s got to be coming up on three million and six years since he last saw Liverpool, but the memories have hardly dulled. He can still see the ugly plastic dome the National Trust set up over the Liver Birds, still hear the news vendors shouting “Buy-your-e-CHO!”, fifty voices with the same inflection, still smell the stagnant canal and taste the equally stagnant lager sold in pubs along its banks. It wasn’t that there was anything great about his memories, for the most part; he’d got drunk a lot and shagged around, occasionally in love, occasionally in gaol – lived a fairly average life. He’d been poor, he’d been burgled, once he’d been mugged at knifepoint. It hadn’t been anything special, on the whole. But it was his life. And somehow, nothing he’d done since had felt quite as real as when he’d been at home.
Home; that was the thing. Home was where the top layer of the pavement was formed by years of compressed chewing gum. Home was where the council had decided to invest in the country’s first hoverbus-only transport system, because the wheels of the old busses kept getting nicked. Home was where there was a church on every other street, and a pub opposite every church. He’d once spent three days trying to have a drink in every single one of them, and finally passed out, stark naked, curled up in the lap of the statue of Queen Victoria outside the magistrates’ court; his arresting officer had called that very convenient positioning. Home was where all his mates talked in accents like his, and if there’d been a soft southern bastard like Rimmer around, they’d simply have sped up until he hadn’t a hope of understanding what they were saying. Home was where everyone supported the Liverpool Hawks or the Everton Gliders, and he’d been called a cop-out by refusing to take sides and following the Jets instead. Home was the Docks and the Everyman, the two cathedrals and the Chinese gate, huge and incongruous in the middle of a main street.
Home was... gone.
When he daydreams about Earth, he doesn’t think about going back to places he knew before. Liverpool, London; he wants to keep the memories pristine, untainted by imagination or the thought of change. He thinks of Fiji, an endless field, his horses and sheep and cows, and (because it’s a daydream), Krissie in her white dress that flutters in the wind from the sea. But the grassy meadow in his mind is like the park at the back of the magistrates' court, a long slope of rolling green where the kids who dress in black lie around in the summer, and when he opens the back door of his imaginary house he’s in his grandma’s kitchen, and the door’s glass is broken and covered with brown paper, and on the fridge there’s a picture of stick-figure Sally in her blue dress and pigtails, and there’s a copper jelly mould hanging on the wall.
Dave remembers when the neighbours moved house. He’d been about eight at the time, and the little cul-de-sac where he’d lived had been short on excitement. Break-ins and bottle fights didn’t count; they were life, not special events. This had been special. They’d booked a huge hovervan, the biggest he’d ever seen, and they’d packed their life up neatly in cardboard boxes and stowed it all away. They were wine boxes, mainly; the local hypermarket always had heaps of them piled up at the back. The van had driven off, and they’d come to say goodbye before they followed it. He can’t remember their last name, though he thinks it might have been Atwood – or maybe Birch? Some kind of tree. He doesn’t remember them that well, to be honest. He does remember Sally, their daughter, and the bright blue dress she wore for parties with her hair in pigtails, and her bright pink bubblegum smile. He remembers how Mrs. Tree had got quite emotional, and promised to write (they’d like to visit, but New London was such a long way away...) and hugged his grandma and thanked her for all she’d done for the family – which hadn’t been a lot, so far as Dave could tell, but then grown-ups were odd.
And he remembers how his grandma waved at them, when they drove away, with a wistful smile on her face; waved until they were completely out of sight, then looked down at him and ruffled his hair.
“Poor things,” she’d said. “Poor silly things. Leaving the city of dreams.”
The city of dreams. Not dreams-come-true, not daydreams, but dreams, where anything at all could happen. The city didn’t dream like Oxford did, all spires and books and murder mysteries. It dreamt like a dog on its back, snuffling and whining and pawing the air, always active, always alive.
He didn’t answer her, but silently he’d sworn that he’d never do something so stupid as to leave.
It’s got to be coming up on three million and six years since he last saw Liverpool, but the memories have hardly dulled. He can still see the ugly plastic dome the National Trust set up over the Liver Birds, still hear the news vendors shouting “Buy-your-e-CHO!”, fifty voices with the same inflection, still smell the stagnant canal and taste the equally stagnant lager sold in pubs along its banks. It wasn’t that there was anything great about his memories, for the most part; he’d got drunk a lot and shagged around, occasionally in love, occasionally in gaol – lived a fairly average life. He’d been poor, he’d been burgled, once he’d been mugged at knifepoint. It hadn’t been anything special, on the whole. But it was his life. And somehow, nothing he’d done since had felt quite as real as when he’d been at home.
Home; that was the thing. Home was where the top layer of the pavement was formed by years of compressed chewing gum. Home was where the council had decided to invest in the country’s first hoverbus-only transport system, because the wheels of the old busses kept getting nicked. Home was where there was a church on every other street, and a pub opposite every church. He’d once spent three days trying to have a drink in every single one of them, and finally passed out, stark naked, curled up in the lap of the statue of Queen Victoria outside the magistrates’ court; his arresting officer had called that very convenient positioning. Home was where all his mates talked in accents like his, and if there’d been a soft southern bastard like Rimmer around, they’d simply have sped up until he hadn’t a hope of understanding what they were saying. Home was where everyone supported the Liverpool Hawks or the Everton Gliders, and he’d been called a cop-out by refusing to take sides and following the Jets instead. Home was the Docks and the Everyman, the two cathedrals and the Chinese gate, huge and incongruous in the middle of a main street.
Home was... gone.
When he daydreams about Earth, he doesn’t think about going back to places he knew before. Liverpool, London; he wants to keep the memories pristine, untainted by imagination or the thought of change. He thinks of Fiji, an endless field, his horses and sheep and cows, and (because it’s a daydream), Krissie in her white dress that flutters in the wind from the sea. But the grassy meadow in his mind is like the park at the back of the magistrates' court, a long slope of rolling green where the kids who dress in black lie around in the summer, and when he opens the back door of his imaginary house he’s in his grandma’s kitchen, and the door’s glass is broken and covered with brown paper, and on the fridge there’s a picture of stick-figure Sally in her blue dress and pigtails, and there’s a copper jelly mould hanging on the wall.