The Playmaker by Thomas Keneally Page A

hospital. Ralph was passing the Bryants’ shack, the slab bark shutter of its one window propped open, when he was surprised by a flat statement from within the hut. “I am famous for dreams too.”
    He saw through the window that Dabby Bryant was there, talking to him directly. She could not have seen him coming, so her statement, so exactly timed for his arrival at the window, was somehow based on foreknowledge.
    Ralph stopped to face her. He could feel the extremities of his face burning. He had become the most notorious dreamer in the colony, with his night cries and his wailings. Aboard the Friendship , across three oceans and through eight whole moons, he had with his dreams attracted complaints from Captain Meredith and gross Lieutenant Faddy. Faddy had once told him those who cry out in their sleep were not fit to command Marines. That was the only time in his life Ralph had ever proposed a duel to anyone.
    Now that everyone was on shore, it seemed even the convicts knew about his loud dreams. Perhaps Dabby Bryant had heard him cry out at night in the Quarter Guard tent.
    â€œI heard you when you stayed at Mr. Harry Brewer’s tent there. You are heard all the time, poor fellow, wailing away like that.”
    And not only wailing away, but keeping his journal of dreams so that Betsey Alicia could later interpret them to him.
    â€œIt is someone else you’ve heard,” Ralph stupidly claimed.
    â€œOh,” she said, “it’s a known thing. Mr. Brewer sees ghosts, and you have your plague of dreams. Everyone knows you dream that your wife and son are dead. They die every night for you, between the lightning and sunrise. So much to bear!”
    Ralph felt a flush of anger. “My dreams aren’t for picking over, you know.”
    â€œListen here,” she told him, extending a brown hand through the window and grabbing his wrist. The familiarity of her touch took him by surprise. “I have dreams like a Pharaoh. When I was fourteen and asleep in Fowey, I was here on this exact shore. I saw Will Bryant—it’s none of it a surprise to me. These days and nights, I have dreams I cannot utter. I know I will be an old woman in Fowey—that is one of the dreams.”
    â€œDreams aren’t to be directly interpreted,” said Ralph, grateful that the attention had turned from his sleeping self to hers. “You should reconcile yourself never to see Fowey again.”
    â€œOh,” she said, “if we have made the longest journey in the history of lagdom, is there any surprise if I could make it back the other way?”
    I will go back, he thought, pitying her, and I will remember you and this place only as an anecdote to be related at a northern fire. Yet he certainly loved her olive skin.
    She maintained the hold on his wrist. “Listen, darling! You go following your wife into a field, don’t you? The field is all ploughed. There’s snow on the clods. Yes, the field is all ploughed. And she wears her wedding dress. And from her breast she takes a louse. With her eyes fixed on you, she gives the louse to you. And you don’t know what the louse means, darling—death or hate.”
    Ralph tried to get his wrist back from her now, but to his surprise her hand held it.
    â€œOh, duck,” Dabby said, “what a sad little lord you are!”
    He was free all at once. He walked to the door, halted in front of it, and began weeping. She had so neatly presented one of his chief dreams! He entered the hut and Dabby put her arms completely round him, vice-like. There was no child here. The infant Charlotte, a favourite throughout the encampment, must have been with one of the other women. She drew Ralph down onto a low cot which held a feather mattress she and Will had somehow acquired. The bed was so close to the clay floor that snakes and scorpions and giant ants could have struck the sleeper without leaving the earth. But in the circle of