Every night, Dave Gahan out of Depeche Mode visits me in my sleep.
When he appears to me, he’s usually surrounded by a sort of bronze radiance, like a cross between the sun rising behind him and glow of someone who’s had their Ready Brek. He looks about thirty or thirty-five – older than Master & Servant, younger than he must be by now. Early Nineties, Enjoy the Silence-era, I’d guess. He wears a white T-shirt and blue jeans; the demotic Jesus look. His hair is cropped hard against his skull, shot through with a badger-sheen of silver, the sort of hair you want to stroke against the nap, like velvet. But I don’t touch him. Instead, I watch, and listen. He speaks to me and I hear his words; I understand them. It’s a message for me, for everyone, that I have to carry back to the waking world; that’s what he comes to tell me. That’s why he comes.
He’s not a good-looking guy, Gahan: Martin Gore, the lyricist, was always the pretty one, in a bleached-blond, starving rent-boy kind of way. Gahan was jolie-laide, if you’re being generous. That fleshy, Mediterranean look; heavy eyelids, black eyes and hair, attention-grabbing ears, a fleshy nose, full lips. (Christ, why am I talking about Dave Gahan’s lips? I’m a married man! Well, divorced. The point is, I’m straight). I don’t fancy him. I wish it was that simple. I don’t even listen to their music, really – or at least, I didn’t until the dreams began. But there’s something amazing about the guy’s voice when he sings, a yearning, despairing quality that makes him sound like he’s halfway between coming and crying. And there’s something compelling about that sensual sort of ugliness. Something sexy, beautiful, almost.
And every morning I wake up feeling wonderful; feeling marvellous, actually, as though there’s sunlight coursing through my veins. And, of course, every morning I’ve forgotten what it is I’m meant to say.
On the plus side, before Dave started coming to me, I hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in about a year. I went to the doctor but she said there wasn’t much she could do if I didn’t want to take sleeping pills, which I didn’t. I told her I’d thought I might be able to get alternative therapy, hypnosis or something, on the NHS, but she just laughed and told me to take more exercise. That’s all bloody GPs ever say: stop smoking and take more exercise. I don’t know what they do in their seven years at medical school, but it can’t be that hard.
Exercise didn’t work; I just lay awake feeling even more knackered. Smoking joints before bed worked a bit, but then I felt like crap in the morning. Staying up late on the internet and getting into arguments with people about politics just made me angry, and even more tired. Functioning on two hours a night is no joke: I started to make mistakes at work. My supervisor put me on a formal warning. I stood in Boots and stared at the sleeping pill shelf for ten minutes, then went and bought camomile tea instead.
Camomile tea didn’t work either.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m not ungrateful for Dave’s interest, for his choice of me as the conduit for his message. I’m quite flattered, actually. I mean, I’ve got no idea why me, especially, but I’m sure he’s got his reasons. And the sleep is something quite blissful; deep, refreshing and healthy, the sort of five-star sleep most people only get once or twice a month.
It’s more waking life that’s the problem, since the visits started.
You see, after a few weeks of being told the message, and understanding everything, and promising to relay it, and then forgetting it every time I woke up, I started getting a bit frustrated. I started to wonder, you know, what was so difficult about just calling me up, or sending an email? It’s not like he’s dead, and the only way he can speak to me is through dreams. I’m not hard to find, you know. I’m in the phonebook.
The more I thought about it the more annoyed I got. Not that I could stay angry with Dave; that golden glow of his, the sense of wellbeing that radiated from him and pervaded me, physically and emotionally, saw to that. More angry with myself, I suppose, that I kept on forgetting what it was I was meant to tell the world. And then one day I was standing in the queue at Woolworths and Personal Jesus came on and suddenly I thought – ah! Lyrics!
I went out and bought every Depeche Mode CD I could, including Gahan’s solo album Paper Monsters from 2003 and all the live stuff. I sat and listened to every single album track, plus the variant edition B-sides, taking notes and seeing if anything sprang out as being part of, or even a clue to, Dave’s message. My sister noticed when she came round for dinner, especially when I wouldn’t turn the greatest hits off while we were eating because I wanted to decipher the third verse of Everything Counts.
“I didn’t know you liked Depeche Mode so much,” Suzanne said cautiously, spearing a tortelloni.
“I didn’t,” I said cheerfully.
“So why are we listening to them?” she asked – reasonably enough, I suppose.
I put my pen down on my notebook and stared at her.
“Because I’m trying to work out what he’s saying.”
She didn’t ask me about it again, except just as she was leaving.
“This isn’t another one of your obsessions, is it, Robbie?”
I kissed her on the cheek.
“I’m fine,” I said.
When I’d waved her car off I went back inside and did something I’d been itching to do all night. I got the rare 7” single of Policy of Truth out of its sleeve and placed it carefully on the turntable, listening with my ear so close to the revolving vinyl that I could hear its soft hiss. But this didn’t get me any further, even when I played it backwards.
I needed to do more. Get closer, somehow. Understand.
I’m sitting in the Twenty-Third Street branch of Starbucks, with a cold cappuccino in front of me and a pair of binoculars around my neck. Gahan is browsing vaguely in the window of the Barnes & Noble opposite. My patience has finally been rewarded and he’s left his apartment without the wife and kids, thank God, for the first time in three days.
He hasn’t aged well, Dave. If I hadn’t seen some recent photos of him at a gig in Madison Square Gardens I would never have recognised him, to be honest – certainly not as the radiant creature from my dreams. According to Wikipedia, he’s 46, but he looks older: he’s thickened in the waist and the face, and his features, once blunt and soft, have coarsened. He looks – to be quite honest – like the sort of guy who cleans the toilets at a primary school. One of those grumbling, surly janitors who are always muttering darkly and frightening the kids.
My palms are sweating as I stand up. I leave a fan of dollars on the table and walk to the crossing, bouncing up and down impatiently as I wait for the WALK sign to click on. I cross the road to the bookshop and loiter in front of the opposite window, sneaking glances across at him as he checks out the selection of Harry Potters without much interest. He doesn’t look at me – doesn’t even notice me. Shouldn’t he feel something, now that I’m so close? Now that I’ve come to hear the message in person? Surely he must know why I’m here?
I sidle across casually and he shifts away. I clear my throat and he ignores me.
“Got the time mate?”
He clocks that I’m English; just another tourist, no threat. So far so good. He checks his watch: a posh Seiko. Nice.
“Half-past four.”
“Thanks.”
I keep staring at him, willing him to recognise me. Eventually he feels the weight of my gaze and looks back at me blankly.
“Can I help you?”
“I’ve come to –” my throat dries up, and I clear it primly, “I’ve come to hear what you wanted to tell me.”
His dark, heavy-lidded eyes narrow, and he frowns; half perplexity, half anger. I’ve seen that look before and I know what it means. Nutter, he’s thinking. This guy’s a mentalist. Which is pretty fucking rich considering it was him that got in touch with me.
“Listen,” I say quickly, “I’m not –” and I spin my index finger next to my head in the universal sign for batshit crazy. “I’ve just got a question. I’ve come all the way from St. Albans. Let me buy you a coffee. There’s a place across there.” And I point at Starbucks.
“I don’t want a coffee,” says Dave.
“Please?”
“What sort of question?” he says cautiously. I can see his body tensing, like he thinks I might jump him at any moment. Unlike a lot of Eighties pop stars (Boy George, say) I imagine he’d be quite tasty in a fight. A lot of muscle under that bulk.
“Don’t you know?” I say.
He shakes his head slowly. He’s still got all his hair, the lucky bastard, and it looks great. I want to ask him where he gets it cut, but I’d only freak him out. I wonder if maybe he doesn’t remember where he goes in dreams. Perhaps he doesn’t even know he’s been visiting me, the things that have passed between us. I reach into my memory for something he’ll understand. Something we share. His words, not mine.
“You’re my … own personal Jesus,” I say, “Someone to hear your prayers, someone who cares –”
His lip curls disgustedly as he recognises the lyric.
“Fuck off,” he says.
“No!” I yell, panicked, catching him by the arm of his leather jacket. He tries to shake me off but I’m not going anywhere, and he starts to look really alarmed. I hang on.
“Words are very unnecessary,” I tell him, trying to make a joke of it. “They can only do harm. You said that, Dave, not me!” He doesn’t seem to find this funny and instead of laughing, struggles to get away. I tighten my grip and pull him closer.
“Don’t worry,” I say gently, “I’m not going to hurt you. I just have to know what you wanted me to tell me, that’s all.”
“What?” He’s desperately avoiding my gaze now. I’m onto something, I know it.
“The message. You know. In the dream.”
Something falls into place behind his eyes. He understands at last, I can see it in his face.
“The … dream,” he says slowly.
“You came to me with a message. You came to me!” I remind him.
He nods, then speaks very calmly and clearly, holding my gaze dead-on like I’m a child.
“You’re mistaken, all right? Whatever … message you’re getting, it’s not from me, OK? I’m sorry mate. I can’t help you.”
“But -”
“Now leave me alone,” he says, his voice hardening, “before I call the police.”
I stand there, open-mouthed, as he backs away.
“Will the dreams stop?” I call after him.
“Yeah, sure. Whatever.”
“But Dave,” I whisper as he hurries across the road and vanishes into a J.C. Penney’s, “I don’t want them to.”
On the plane home, I think about what he said. About the message. Maybe he sent it years ago and forgot about it, and now it’s repeating in an endless loop, like Princess Leia’s message in Star Wars. Or maybe it was never even meant for me. Or maybe Suzanne’s right, and this is just another one of my silly obsessions.
But I felt so happy in that dream. I was sure the message was something wonderful, something only I would really understand. At last I was trusted. Special.
Back at the flat, finally, I lie awake until five, unable to get to sleep. It’s partly jetlag and partly fear. I’m afraid that if I do dream it won’t be the same. Dave won’t be there any more.
In the morning I call in sick the minute I wake up, and immediately start looking for flights to Spain. My subconscious must have mixed it up somewhere along the line, but now at last I know what I have to do, who I have to ask. Because Barcelona is the primary residence of lyricist songwriter Martin Gore, out of Depeche Mode.
And I think he’s got something to tell me.
© Jeff Wood, 2008
Personal Jesus by Jeff Wood was read by Ed Cooper-Clarke at the Liars' League Fame & Fortune event on 10 June 2008
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