Free I Was Dora Suarez by Derek Raymond

had been through a place. They were thorough, all right; the trouble always was, though, that they were thorough but not absolute; that was because they often didn’t take enough time to think out what they were looking for. Thus, they would ignore what I would seize on, thinking it unimportant; conversely, they would preciously gather up in their special bags items that turned out to be of no interest at all.
    What I wanted from Betty and Dora immediately was traces they had left – writing, letters, a scrawled note, even – anything that spoke of them.
    Locking myself into it against all interruption, I began existing in that golgotha. I searched among the boxes, trunks and suitcases. There were over a hundred of them in the kitchen alone. But except for a few of her clothes at the end of her bed and a bra and slip hung out to dry in the bathroom on a line, there seemed to be nothing of Dora’s.
    What was it Wilfred Owen had written on the Sambre front in 1917?
    Oh what made fatuous sunbeams toil
    To break earth’s sleep at all?
    It struck me that rooms like these, situations like these, were the front line of the eighties – but this flat seemed to me to be worse than what I usually got, because the very people that the dead armies had fought to protect had been murdered in their turn, and this time there had been no one to protect them.
    Such light as there was in the flat faded as I searched it and waited for the ambulance to come until I had to turn the lights on; the afternoon assumed a short, steep winter slant, dulling the high windows a grimy yellow and blackening the plane trees outside, while in the basement flat someone played the same Chopin prelude over and over and over.
    I had the most marvellous dream the night before I went down to Brighton; in it I met the sweetest woman I am sure I have ever seen. I was lying in bed in a strange room in a hot, foreign country; but the southern light was dimmed, altered by half-closed shutters, and the high room was cool. I was just wakening in the dream with a feeling of regret at some absence, but tenderly and without sadness, when suddenly she came in and knelt beside me on the bed.
    It was most certainly a very old-fashioned room I was in, I should say at least a hundred years old, with a green iron bed standing on a six-sided, tile-patterned floor, terra-cotta, perhaps; Iseemed to be in some foreign country hotel. She wasn’t beautiful or even all that young; she was well dressed and thickset. She smiled at me, reaching out to stroke my face, and said: ‘I have no name.’ But I had only to look at her when she appeared in the dream to think, ‘Ah, good, you’re finally here – now there’s two of us, together we can get something done at last’; and thinking this in the dream had a deeply pacifying effect on me. The single swift movement with which she gave herself to me in her day-clothes gave me no time to think, and I couldn’t be expected to know the whole of what she conveyed in the space of the dream; but there was nothing hurried in the first close look of our faces. I really just remember my astonishment at the slenderness of her hands, at the intense bronze shade of her face, and at her hair, which was short, knotted quickly and practically at the back of her head. Also her hair was scented in a way I couldn’t recapture afterwards; she was the face of a goddess on a thousand-year-old coin that has never been touched, found, damaged or exchanged. Smiling into my eyes, she pulled the skirt of her street suit swiftly up over her hips and we met immediately in my arms. We had no time for anything more, but I managed to say: ‘You are the most heavenly woman I have ever met,’ and she said: ‘I know, and you have been looking for me for a long time, and so I have come because you believed and knew I would come’ – and so we made love and I woke in a state of great peace, knowing that somehow I was sure to be all right.
    Later in the dream I