A Dream of Wessex by Christopher Priest

was turned off. She heard the driver’s door open and close, boots scraped on grit, and the main doors at the back were opened. The driver called to someone and a second man appeared, presumably from within the house. Outside, wind and rain on her face again, the blankets lifting to allow a cold draught to blow on her, and then she was on a second trolley, wheeling down a corridor laid with soft, rubbery tiles. There was a good smell in the house: food and people and paintwork. Somewhere a telephone was ringing, and from behind a closed door she heard a radio playing. Two girls passed the trolley, smiling down at her, and she saw that they were wearing ordinary clothes, jeans, woollen sweaters.
    Julia’s arms were folded across her stomach, and she raised them clear of the blanket. She lifted them and held them over her head, as if stretching after a long sleep; and luxuriated in the use of her muscles again. She let them drop immediately: she was weak and stiff, mentally exhausted.
    They wheeled her into her room - the same old bed, the large window overlooking the grounds - and brought the trolley alongside the bed.
    Marilyn had been following, and she came and stood beside her.
    ‘I’ll tell Dr Eliot you’re here,’ she said, and Julia nodded wearily.
    She was lifted from the trolley to the bed, and the sheets were pulled over her. As Marilyn and the two attendants left the room, Julia breathed out loudly, a sigh, a great gasp of pleasure, and she lay against the soft pillow and closed her eyes. Whether or not Dr Eliot came to see her Julia did not know, because within a few seconds she had fallen into a deep and natural sleep.
    She awoke to daylight, and the feel of her hair lying across her face. She moved instinctively to brush it aside, and at once a nurse, who had been waiting in an armchair on the other side of the room, crossed to the bed and leaned over her.
    ‘Are you awake, Miss Stretton?’ she said softly.
    ‘Mmm.’ Julia turned without opening her eyes, stretched, pulled the sheet around her shoulders again.
    ‘Would you like a cup of tea?’
    ‘Mmm.’ She was still waking, still in the half-world between awareness and dreams. She heard the nurse speaking into a telephone, heard the clatter of the receiver as it was replaced. She wanted to sleep for ever.
    ‘The doctor will come as soon as you’ve had your tea.’
    She wasn’t going to be allowed to drift back.
    ‘Breakfast,’ Julia said, and struggled up on the pillow. She looked blearily at the nurse. ‘Can I have breakfast?’
    ‘What would you like?’
    ‘Something cooked. Bacon ... lots of bacon. And eggs. And I’d like coffee, not tea.’
    ‘You mustn’t overdo things,’ the nurse said.
    ‘I’m not ill, I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten for ... how long was it this time?’
    ‘Three weeks.’
    ‘That’s how hungry I am.’
    Only three weeks. They had brought her back so soon! She had never before been in the projection for less than two months, and it was usually much longer. She should have been left alone, because there was always so much to accomplish. David Harkman ... she remembered then that her retrieval had prevented her from seeing him in the evening, and in spite of the fact that her rational mind was in control, she felt again the sensations of curiosity and excitement that had so distracted her alter ego.
    Although there was now, in addition, a sense of frustration.
    The nurse had continued to look disapproving at Julia’s request for breakfast, but nevertheless she had gone back to the telephone and was speaking to the kitchen.
    Julia sat up in the bed, and arranged the pillow behind her. Many of her belongings were on the bedside table, and she picked up her hairbrush. It was impossible to wash the participants’ hair while they were in the projection, and hers was always greasy and tangled after retrieval. She brushed it, hearing and feeling it crackle. It made her scalp feel good and fresh. She found a mirror