Daniel's Dream Read Online Free Page A

by-laws, have I?’
     
    Lisanne realised that her complaint sounded foolish, but she knew she was not being stupid, that she had genuine reasons for concern, She wondered whether she should ask him about the sleeping tablets, but decided against it for the time being. She would have a good look round before sounding the alarm; there was probably a perfectly good, perfectly simple explanation.
     
    She sighed. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said after a short pause, ‘I’m being silly.’ She attempted a conciliatory smile, which elicited a small response in kind. 
     
    There followed an awkward silence as they stood there, opposite each other, neither of them sure what to do next. It was the sort of awkwardness that one might have witnessed between two adolescents on a first date rather than between two adults who had been married for five years and known each other even longer.
     
    It was Daniel who broke the impasse. Unable to sustain eye contact and silence simultaneously, he allowed his head to fall forward, as if he had dropped something on the floor and needed to find it. There was something irredeemably sad about the gesture, and Lisanne, who both felt her own pain and isolation and also sensed Daniel’s deep anxiety, felt her heart go out to him. She wanted to reach out to him, to put her arms around him, to tell him how much she still loved him, But she knew the gesture would make him bristle with discomfort, and for all her sympathies she didn’t think she could cope with that additional snub just now,.
     
    ‘I’ll uh... I’ll put the kettle on,’ said Daniel, pleased to find an excuse to get away.
     
    Lisanne nodded. ‘I’ll be right down,’ she said, and turned back towards the bedroom. Suddenly, and quite against her better judgement, she found herself calling out after him, saying out loud the question that had been circling around in her head since she had woken up, the question she so desperately wanted to ask.
     
    ‘Daniel, where are the sleeping tablets?’
     
    Daniel stopped in his tracks, He looked up, expecting to see her hanging over the banister, but she was not there, her voice, disembodied, echoing between the walls on the landing. He knew immediately what this was about, understood that, despite its casual delivery, the question was anything but innocent. He frowned, unsure whether to feel angry at the intrusion and its implication or touched by her concern. Sadly, in most matters, he had ceased being moved by his wife’s concern weeks ago. Which, even more sadly, left him only one response.
     
    ‘The tablets? Oh, I uh . . . I swallowed them. The whole lot.’
     
    That did it. In a flash she was there, peering frantically over the banister, her light-brown shoulder-length hair falling forward from her face so that he could barely see the desperation in her eyes. 
     
    ‘Just kidding.’
     
    ‘Daniel!’ 
     
    ‘Well honestly, Lisanne... what did you think?’
     
    ‘I was just -’
     
    ‘They’re in the bin,’ he interrupted curtly. ‘I threw them out. They just give me headaches. Okay?’
     
    Lisanne wasn’t sure whether to smile or scream. The knowledge that Daniel might have died in the accident still made her feel sick. That he might attempt to take his own life made her feel even worse. So it was with desperate irony that she had to concede there were times when she could, quite frankly, kill him.
     
    Lisanne had first met Daniel at a dinner party, hosted by mutual friends with the express intention of introducing this mismatched pair of workaholics to each other. As the hosts would have happily admitted, it was a shot in the dark. Although they were both fine people in their own right with many virtues to recommend them, neither Lisanne nor Daniel was, at that time, a particularly sociable individual. “Difficult” was the word that most readily sprang to mind when any attempt was made to explain why two