Free (1989) Dreamer by Peter James Page B

accessible to the layman in this concise dictionary of dream symbolism.’
    ‘“It lives beside my bed . . . essential waking reading.”’ The Times .
    She flipped through the index, then turned to the page headed ‘Aeroplane’, and scanned through.
    ‘Flying: The longing to lift off, get out of a rut. Erection and sexual fantasies. Aeroplane = phallus. Can also = womb.’
    She looked through some more pages.
    ‘Swimming. Often means sex. The struggle with basic impulses or other problems. Can literally mean worry about keeping your head above water.’
    She turned again to the review quotes on the back cover, reading them for reassurance. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll take it.’
    She left the shop, folded the paper bag around the book and put it into her handbag. She walked through the closed bric-a-brac stalls and crossed the street to the office, a narrow building sandwiched between a publisher and a shop that sold surgical appliances.
    The ground floor windows had black Venetian blinds, with the blow-up of a strip of celluloid running across, and the words ‘Ken Shepperd Productions’ repeated between the frames. She pushed open the heavy chromium-framed Deco door, and went into the stark airiness of the reception atrium.
    Sections of motor cars stuck out from the white walls, like strange modern sculptures. The front three feet of a red Alfa Romeo. The tail section of a Volkswagen Beetle. The seats in the waiting area were old leather car seats set into clear perspex pedestals, and the receptionist sat, looking slightly daft Sam always thought, behind the steering wheel of the sawn-off front end of a white convertible Cadillac Eldorado.
    ‘Morning, Lucy.’
    The receptionist stopped typing and looked up, a bleary-eyed confection of mohair sweater, blotched makeup and streaked wild hair, which she tried toshake away from her face, without success. ‘Oh, yah, hi.’ She paused. ‘Yah, morning. Gosh.’ She smiled sleepily. ‘Someone called.’
    ‘Anyone in particular?’
    Sam watched Lucy scrabbling through a pile of message slips. She looked as though she’d had even less sleep than herself. ‘Ah, somewhere here – yah. Rob Kempson, from Praiseworthy – wants you to come in for a brief – either—’ She peered at the note. ‘Yah, Monday or Tuesday morning. Could you call him as soon as poss? Yah – gosh – no others so far.’
    Sam took the slip and blinked, her eyes feeling slightly gritty, stinging from the chlorine in the pool and from tiredness. She walked past the life-size waxwork of Ken slouched in a wicker chair behind Lucy, presiding over his emporium from behind the copy of the Daily Mail that was changed every day, and glanced down warily, as she always did, to check that he wasn’t playing a macabre joke by sitting there in person, as he had done once. The waxwork sculptor had captured the details well: the denim shirt and the curling hair, black turning to grey, and the slightly ragged, slightly dented I’m-going-to-one-day-change-the-world-before-it-changes-me-face. Everything except the eyes which stared blankly, lifelessly, unlike his real sharp blue eyes.
    Windows of the soul. Strange things, eyes.
    The waxy sheen of his skin wasn’t like him either. The waxy sheen that did not smell of tobacco and talc and hairs and clothes and booze; the sculpture smelt of nothing and was cold to touch, shiny and hard.
    This is what he would look like when he was dead.
    She climbed the elegant staircase, past more sections of cars: the rear of an old London taxi recessed into the wall, with the door removed so you could sit in it if youwanted, the slatted, cobalt blue bonnet of a Bugatti, held to the wall by leather straps.
    The building was on three storeys, with a basement. Ken’s office was at the top, in the eaves, and his snooker room was in the basement which was also their viewing room. Sam’s office was on the first floor, and there was a tiny office further along occupied by