Sing me to Sleep

by Helen Moorhouse

  Once she had paid, Jenny slid the purse back into her pocket and glanced around her at the small, low-ceilinged room laid out, refectory-style, with Formica-topped tables and mismatched wooden chairs, eight per table. A cluster of them, however, had been pulled into a semicircle under the TV, which perched high on a shelf at the back of the room. There were students there, some on the chairs, some lounging on tables or leaning against the supporting columns that were dotted throughout the room, all of them with their eyes fixed on the TV. Jenny scanned them all and realised she knew none of them.

  And it was at that moment, as she glanced up at the TV, that Ed Mycroft, the front two legs of his chair in the air as he leaned back and rocked, turned and did a double take at the tall girl in the faded denim dungarees, the red-and-white striped top and the vile mustard cardigan, her auburn hair pulled to one side over her shoulder in a simple, thick plait. Her skin was pale and unblemished, her eyes among the most vivid green he had ever seen. She was holding a plate of curry chips and staring at the TV, like everyone else. Her nose was a little too big, her eyebrows a little too thick, her lips pale pink and pursed shut as she concentrated on the screen. Ed’s first thought to himself was that she looked nice, but when he thought about her later – when he couldn’t stop thinking about her later – he realised that for some reason the layout of her face, the combination of features, made her the most beautiful creature he had ever seen and that that was the precise moment he had fallen in love with her.

  For Jenny Adams, it was the TV that mesmerised her. She had given up watching Top of the Pops after she came to Darvill’s – she was never home on a Thursday night in time to watch it any more, so there was something comfortingly familiar about the crowd clapping around the presenter as she introduced the next band – one of two Manchester bands that night, she said, and the obligatory crowd cheer went up. And when it started, the song was like nothing that Jenny had ever heard before. A man with a distinctly simian appearance, wearing what looked like a pair of pyjamas on backwards, was swaggering backward and forward, waggling his microphone and singing. To his right was a guitarist wearing a top covered in crosses, swinging his head from side to side in time to the music. To the left, the bassist had his hair slicked back into a ponytail. The drummer wore a white sunhat. The song chugged along, guitars chickering, the singer’s voice low, a constant wah-wah sound throughout creating a rhythm that couldn’t be ignored. Jenny stared, transfixed, as she began to feel every beat of the song and had to try hard to stop herself from moving in time. As mesmerising as it was, she was still far too self-conscious for that.

  It took her a while to notice the young man with the dark brown hair in a sort of pudding-bowl cut who was staring at her, his chair about to topple over. She glanced at him, glanced back at the TV, glanced back at him. His face was solemn at first, but as the chair suddenly jerked back too far underneath him and looked like it might finally fall, and he grabbed at the nearest table, grimaced, and righted himself, his face broke into a broad grin. He’d just saved himself from looking very foolish, thought Jenny, trying to look back at the screen – trying not to smile herself – but being drawn back to his face. She thought at once that he had too many teeth – but as his floppy hair fell onto his face and he beamed at her, unable to stop himself from giggling at his near escape, Jenny couldn’t help but smile back, feeling her cheeks go red as she did.

  She looked down at her feet and smiled again, before turning away to walk toward the table she had mentally selected. Where she could eat her chips and then disappear back to the library to get her work done. She was stopped in her tracks, however.

  “Great tune, innit?”

  She glanced back at the group under the TV, at the boy with the hair and the teeth who had finally spoken to her. Jenny glanced back up at the TV set. The singer was still waggling his mic, absorbed in the music. It was a great tune, she thought. Better than great, in fact.

  “They’re brilliant,” she admitted, her voice small.

  The student nodded, smiled again and glanced back at the TV. “Stone Roses,” he said. “They’ve got an album out – you should get it.” He smiled again, his mouth closed this time, the smile sincere.

  Jenny smiled back. “I will,” she said, nodding, and made another attempt to reach her table.

  “What’s your name?” she heard him say.

  Later, Ed would admit that he couldn’t bear to watch her go, and that he cursed himself at not being able to think of something wittier to say.

  “Jenny!” she called back over her shoulder. He was nice, she knew, but she wished he’d just stop talking to her right now. A few heads had turned to look in her direction which made her feel very uncomfortable and, besides which, she wanted to listen to the end of the song in peace, to feel the music again.

  The boy responded by smiling again. “I’m Ed,” he replied. “Ed Mycroft. See you around?”

  Jenny Adams took a moment to look at him again and suddenly felt herself very much there, in the canteen at college with a rather good-looking boy smiling at her and the best song she had ever heard in her life playing in the background. It was a moment that neither of them would ever forget. Or would ever want to.

  “All right,” she replied and this time walked away, a new feeling that she couldn’t quite understand running through her veins, almost unnoticed. What Jenny Adams didn’t realise at that moment was that her future had begun.

  Chapter 3

  1997

  Jenny

  Ed always looks tired these days. And he gets home from nursery with Bee far too late. She’s only little – she can’t cope with a twelve-hour day. And she needs time with her dad, but they never seem to spend any time together in the evenings. He doesn’t bath her as often as I’d like him to. But she goes to sleep by eight o’clock and thankfully she sleeps through now. For a long time there were the night terrors, and not even Ed could console her when she had one of those.

  He’s not looking after himself at all. He should eat more veg for starters. But I know he’s exhausted after the long days at work. The peppers in the sweet-and-sour pork he seems to survive on will have to do for the moment.

  Then he tries to work a bit – turns on the computer and starts fiddling away. That used to drive me nuts when I was alive.

  That feels strange.

  When I was alive.

  He still does it though. Doodles away – all those complicated animations that he’s so good at. I know his heart isn’t in it at the moment, but he tries, bless him. And his bosses at Brightwater Animations are patient with him, under the circumstances.

  I always sit on the armchair just inside the living-room door while he works, waiting for him to finally wrap everything up, and make himself a hot drink before lying down on the sofa. And then I watch Ed as he watches Newsnight. It’s then that I miss him most, inches away from his face, the light from the TV flickering blue on his features. Some nights he just falls asleep there and wakes in the early hours of the morning. Most times he drags himself to bed then. Sometimes he doesn’t bother. A few times he’s cried because he thinks no one is looking. But I am. I’m watching over him all the time.

  Well, not all the time. I’m not always here, in our house. When I’m not here though, it’s not like I’m anywhere else. Not like I’m anywhere at all, in fact. I seem to just cease to be.

  Finding myself with Ed, with Bee, in our home, is something that just happens – like waking up suddenly, thrown into a scene as it unfolds. I wish that I could control that but I can’t. When I am here, I just am. That’s how things are at the moment.

  When Ed falls asleep, that’s when I get the urge to go to Bee. Sometimes I kiss Ed goodnight. He can feel something, because he always bats me away, like a small fly or a cobweb. I wish he knew it was me. I miss him.

  With Bee, I can cover her in kisses and she never minds. She sleeps so soundly now as I sit there in the rocking chair beside her bed. The one I used to hold her in to rock he
r to sleep with a lullaby when she’d wake from a bad dream. And sometimes there didn’t need to be a dream – I’d just rock her and hold her and lavish kisses on her and smell her hair and touch her cheek and sing her back to sleep.

  I miss my little girl. More than I’d miss my own heart.

  Watching her like this, I see so much that I would have missed if I were alive and asleep in the other room. She’ll shuffle in her sleep on occasion, and sometimes talk – she’s asked for all sorts – a puppy, a dragon, Barney the Dinosaur – and then she turns over and drifts off again.

  And as I watch her, the house gets darker and quieter and settles for the night but I stay on watch. I wish I could sleep in my own bed of course. I wish I could have a cup of tea, or a glass of wine, or a packet of cheese and onion crisps. I wish I could watch EastEnders or switch on Mark and Lard in the morning but I can’t. All I can do is be. And watch. Watch my family and make sure that they’re okay.

  Chapter 4

  1992

  Ed and Jenny

  “Jen.”

  “Mmm?”

  “Wake up, Jen.”

  “I’m awake, Ed. What do you want?”

  Jenny batted away Ed’s hand as he tugged repeatedly on a lock of her hair with his right hand. The fingers of his left were entwined in her left fingers, his left arm holding her underneath her back as they lay curled together on the double bed, with its faded sheets, in the holiday apartment in Cefalù. They were fully dressed, back from lunch at a restaurant outside the Duomo and warm with local wine. Through the open balcony doors at the foot of the bed a warm Sicilian breeze was blowing over them, gently lifting the hem of Jenny’s dress and letting it drop again. Ed wiggled his bare feet against it and sighed contentedly as he shifted his arm from underneath her and propped himself up on it to look at her for a moment.

  There was no change in the girl he’d seen in the canteen that November night. Jenny was like that. Constant. Steady. Hardworking. Old before her years, sometimes. Dependable. Three years now she’d been in his life. Had it really been that long, Ed wondered. And how had he managed before her?

  Not long after they had first encountered each other in the canteen, they met by accident on a cold Saturday afternoon at Stamford Bridge. After that, they had almost hunted each other, each gaining enough knowledge of the other’s daily routine to orchestrate another chance meeting. Their first proper date had been to see a special screening at Ed’s college animation club of Pink Floyd’s The Wall. Ed had watched the movie – for the fifth time by his own declaration – in rapture. Jenny, however, had watched Ed and realised that she liked him far more than she’d thought she had, far more than she’d decided she was going to allow herself to.

  On the bed in Cefalù – their first proper holiday if you didn’t count the disastrous weekend to Whitby – she opened her eyes for a second and then closed them again lazily, as if she thought better of it. “I’m snoozing, Ed,” she grinned and he smiled back, running the forefinger of his right hand around the outside of her face and then down the centre, along her nose, bringing it to rest on her lips. Jenny responded by snapping at it and catching it gently between her teeth for a moment before allowing him to remove it. Ed smiled, rolled onto his back, propped himself up on both elbows and looked out the balcony door. The net curtains blew in the breeze, framing a perfect shot of the beach: the Mediterranean spread out before them, cobalt blue against the cloudless sky. The scene was a still life – last night’s bottle of wine, empty on the balcony table, along with the two glasses that they had used while they talked late into the warm night with its soundtrack of crickets and the faint rush of the tide on the beach below. The green plastic deckchairs on which they had sat still faced each other, ready for more conversation.

  “Do you know why we’re here, Jen?” asked Ed, thinking how pleased he was that they were. It had been difficult to convince Jenny to set aside her responsibilities for a week.

  Jenny rolled away from him on to her side and sighed as she spoke. “Because we’re celebrating the super-duper new job for you and finally being released into the wild out of Darvill’s for me?”

  There were still four days of their holiday left before Ed returned to London to start as Junior Animator at a company called Brightwater Animations. They’d plucked him straight from Darvill’s – a friend of a friend of one of his lecturers was the managing director of the company and, in casting a net around his contacts for talent, he had snared Ed, who had created quite a buzz with his final-year project. “They said they wanted to snap me up before Disney came and got me,” Ed had boasted jokingly. Jenny had rolled her eyes at the joke. He’d cracked it every time his new job had been mentioned. She was thrilled for him, of course she was. But whenever Ed’s future cropped up in conversation, she was beset, against her will, by a niggling fear of what awaited her when she got home, when this paradise holiday was finished.

  There was no prospect of a bright career ahead for her, she knew. History of Art students didn’t get snapped up quite so quickly as incredibly gifted young cartoonists. Instead, she had the prospect of a full-time job in Movie Kingdom ahead of her – either that or unemployment. What niggled at her most, however, was the fact that she didn’t even know what it was that she actually wanted to do.

  “In answer to my question, you’re partially correct,” said Ed.

  Jenny shifted again. She’d forgotten that there was a question, reminded as she was of the little concerns that she was trying so hard to keep from her mind. The Mediterranean breeze again teased the soles of her feet through the open balcony doors. She scowled suddenly. For once, she didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to break the spell of the siesta they had enjoyed. She just wanted it to last forever. To just be here, with Ed by her side, just being . . . content. For a moment before Ed started the conversation she had drifted off completely, having pushed even her father from her mind for a few minutes. Suddenly reminded of real life, she worried whether Mrs Thompson from next door was actually doing as she had promised and checking in on him every other day. Was he eating? Had he washed? Jenny suddenly felt cold, lying on her side, her eyes closed tight. She felt the weight on the bed shift as Ed lay back down beside her and folded his arms behind his head.

  “You’re only released into the wild until the term starts at Cambridge,” he observed casually.

  Jenny opened her eyes, the spell in the room that she had tried to recall now well and truly broken.

  “You may as well know that I’m not going to Cambridge, Ed,” she sighed. “You know I can’t . . . my dad . . .” The sentence was left unfinished, the conversation one that they’d had a thousand times before.

  Ed didn’t say anything but Jenny felt the change in the air and she squeezed her eyes shut tight again.

  There was silence for a few moments.

  “Let’s not talk about that, Ed, okay?” she pleaded, still with her back to him. “Let’s just forget about everything except the good stuff till we get home, okay?”

  Silence again.

  “Okay,” Ed grunted eventually.

  Jenny could sense that he wasn’t happy about that proposition but that he wasn’t going to argue with it this time. She allowed herself to sink back into the bed again and sighed with relief.

  They fell into silence again. A long silence, but one that thankfully seemed to clear the air. After a while the room began to feel, imperceptibly, light again.

  Ed wiggled his feet in time to a tune in his head and the mattress, not the firmest that they had ever slept on, jiggled underneath them both. He paused for a moment and then began again, wiggling his feet harder, knowing that it was irritating Jenny who was suddenly forced to put her hand out to steady herself, to prevent being jiggled off the edge.

  “Ed!” she giggled. “Stoppit! You’re ruining my holiday!”

  The overreaction made him guffaw and the two of them laughed aloud together for a while, each giggle leading to another. As it died down eventually, Ed mo
ved his head on the pillow closer to Jenny’s, so that his crown touched her temple.

  “You’re meant to ask me why I said only partially correct,” he said, reverting to their previous exchange.

  “Why did you say only partially correct?” sighed Jenny as if going through the motions. Still she lay with her eyes shut, revelling in the warmth of the afternoon as if she was lying in a bath, unwilling to break the physical spell of that feeling.

  “Because there’s something else that I thought we could celebrate while we’re here.” Ed’s voice had grown soft, yet serious.

  Jenny continued to ignore it, and him, in her effort to drift back to her former state of complete relaxation.

  There was silence again.

  “Jen.”

  “Mmmm?”

  “Wake up, Jen.”

  “I’m awake, Ed. What exactly do you want?”

  “I want to marry you.”

  There was a long silence. A silence as Jenny allowed the statement to sink in. A silence where she couldn’t turn to look at him because she felt dizzy with shock and emotion, where her mind filled with a thousand questions. But only one answer.

  “All right then.”

  The air felt electric suddenly, but they remained silent. They could think of no words. Instead, Ed closed his eyes and turned so that his face was buried in the back of her auburn hair. He pressed himself against Jenny’s back and she, in turn, pressed back against him. She reached out with her right hand, until her fingers found his, and they twined their hands together tightly, resting them on Jenny’s thigh. Ed pressed his face even further into her hair and inhaled deeply as a tear made its way, unbidden, down her cheek, unseen by the man with whom she had just agreed to spend the rest of her life.