Pillow Talk

by Freya North

  The Walleys look a little put out. You don't want to get on the wrong side of them. Creepy and in the background they might be, but you don't want to give them voice.

  ‘I can't thank you enough,’ Arlo suddenly says. ‘Thank you so much – both of you. No – really. Thank God it was you who found her. Poor Petra. We're so pleased it was you, Mr and Mr Walley. Can you imagine if it was someone else? Someone who didn't understand these things – someone who isn't as discreet as you two, nor as wise? We are so grateful.’ Arlo is making a mental note to buy them a bottle of whisky, each, the very next day.

  ‘Well, all right then,’ says Walley One, a bit miffed to be praised rather than insulted.

  ‘As you say, good job it was us,’ growls Walley Two.

  ‘Lock your door,’ Walley One says as he mooches off into the dark.

  ‘Keep the girl dressed,’ says Walley Two as he follows his brother into the murkiness of their night.

  Petra is shaking. Arlo eases his sweatshirt onto her properly. ‘Come on, you,’ he says. ‘Cup of tea. Let's get you back inside. Let's get you warmed up. I have chocolate too. Come on, Petra, chocolate tastes especially good in the middle of the night. I should know.’

  She sips. Arlo has added lots of sugar, muttering something about sweet tea being good for shock. He has placed small chunks of milk chocolate on her knees which he replenishes each time she eats one, breaking them off from a very large slab. If she talks, she talks, he quietly decides, sipping a mug of highly sweetened tea himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ Petra says and she looks sheepish. ‘I'm so sorry.’

  ‘That's OK – but are you OK?’

  She shrugs. ‘I'm – appalled.’ She casts her eyes downward. Her feet are dirty. She tries to tuck them in to each other. ‘It's toe-curlingly embarrassing,’ she says. Literally – she and Arlo both think.

  ‘You sleepwalk,’ Arlo says and it is not a question.

  She darts her gaze up at him, and then away. ‘Well – sometimes.’

  ‘More than sometimes. I've watched you – you do it at the Stables, you do it here. You build towers out of loo rolls. You put houseplants in the fridge. You put shoes on the window sill. You bash into things yet you don't wake up.’

  Petra buries her face in her hands.

  ‘You go walkabout, starkers, through the grounds of one of the UK's leading public boys' schools.’ Arlo says it so sensitively that he almost manages to raise the corners of Petra's mouth. But her shoulders droop and she looks absolutely defeated by it all. ‘It must be bloody awful for you, Petra. Christ, it must be a strain.’ And he really, truly means it. Petra can hear his utter commiseration in the timbre of his voice.

  ‘It is,’ she nods. No eye contact, as yet. ‘I didn't know you knew.’

  ‘I do know.’

  ‘You didn't say?’

  ‘I didn't think you'd want me to see.’

  ‘I don't.’

  They sit in silence. They eat more chocolate because it gives them something nice to share, something to do other than talk.

  ‘Have you always done it? The sleepwalking? Is there anything you can do? That I can do? That can be done for you?’ Arlo puts his mug down and walks to the kitchen. Comes back with the washing-up bowl full of warm water, brimming with soap suds. He kneels down, places her feet in the bowl, a towel across his lap. He can look up at her downcast face, catch her eyes, at this angle. He holds her gaze for a moment. Then, gently, he bathes her feet. Each toe in turn. This little piggy went to market, he says. This little piggy stayed home. This little piggy went sleepwalking squeak squeak squeak out into the big unknown. A teardrop falls to Petra's knee. Arlo puts his finger over it, as if it's an ant that is to go no further. ‘Don't cry,’ he tells her. ‘You're safe with me.’ He sits beside her, draws her feet onto his lap and rubs them tenderly, turbans a towel around them.

  ‘I started when I was about eight,’ she tells him. ‘I've sleepwalked ever since. In some periods of my life more often than in others. I went deaf in one ear for five weeks when I fell down some stairs. I've found myself naked, locked out on the fire escape of a country hotel at my friend's wedding. I have wet myself countless times. I peed on a pile of toys belonging to a friend's kid sister. On my ex's armchair. I've walked right out of my flat and been picked up by the police. Clothed, thank Christ. I've had black eyes, grazed knees, bruised shins, sprained wrists, swollen jaw, split lip.’ She pauses. She toys with a piece of chocolate until Arlo picks it up and places it in her mouth. ‘I hate going to bed because I never know where sleep will take me.’

  ‘Can't anything be done?’ he asks. ‘Can't anyone help?’

  ‘I went for trials at the world-famous sleep centre at Loughborough University,’ Petra says, ‘and for more tests at the renowned sleep clinic in Harley Street. They monitored me, night after night. They glued electrodes onto my scalp, onto my body – a polysomnogram which monitors brainwave activity, heartbeat, breathing. There was a CCTV which showed me ripping the pads off – and I was really tugging hard. I had little bald patches after that.’

  ‘I don't have the excuse of electrodes,’ Arlo teases gently and Petra smiles.

  ‘I've tried sedatives – Valium and Xanax – but they made me feel dreadful, drugged almost. I've tried internal alarms and buzzers on my doors and motion sensors in the room – but I never wake up.’ She shrugs. ‘Just one of those things, I suppose.’ She pauses.

  ‘Have you tried going to bed early?’

  ‘Doesn't help.’

  ‘Staying up very late?’

  ‘Makes no difference.’

  ‘Therapy?’ Arlo asks. ‘Might it not be linked to some childhood trauma?’

  ‘But I was only eight years old – what does an eight-year-old have to worry about?’

  ‘Your parents?’

  ‘They were fine then. They didn't split up until I was fourteen.’

  ‘Sorry – I didn't mean to—’

  ‘No one understands,’ she says. ‘My mum used to get quite cross. My ex would get so impatient with me – as if I did it on purpose. And then he'd use the details for dinner-party conversation. My friends tease me mercilessly. As if I do it for their entertainment. For God's sake, would I truly choose to humiliate myself to this extent? Eric has always been very caring, Kitty and Gina worry for me – Lucy too – but no one can really help because I can't help it.’

  ‘But Petra, why do you think you do it?’

  Petra thinks long and hard but her expression says she's nowhere near an answer.

  ‘Do you fear dreams? Nightmares? Are you afraid of the dark? Of silence?’

  She shrugs. ‘I don't think so. My dreams are mostly very boring – usually just me returning to my childhood home and walking about. What I'd love most of all is simply to wake from having a really good night's sleep.’

  ‘Me too,’ says Arlo and Petra touches his cheek. ‘What can I do?’ he asks her. ‘For you? What can I do to help? There must be something that can be done.’

  ‘No one can do a sodding thing,’ Petra says and she's petulant and fed up because she's starting to feel very very tired and more than a little sorry for herself. ‘I'll always do it,’ she confesses. ‘I've resigned myself to the fact. There is no sodding cure.’

  ‘I could put a lock on the bedroom door?’

  ‘I'd go through the window.’

  ‘I could lock that too.’

  ‘I don't want to live in a prison. My dad put a lock on the outside of my bedroom door for a while. I hated it. It terrified me. I couldn't even get to sleep in the first place, knowing it was there. Say I needed to get out? Perhaps I need to get out, perhaps that's what it's all about.’

  ‘But you don't want to spend too many nights being ogled by the Walley Brothers.’

  ‘God, tonight was particularly awful,’ Petra says. ‘One of the worst. To be so out of control. That's what a specialist told me – it's about brain activity. It happens within the first three hours of sleep – the deep, drea
mless, slow-wave sleep. It happens when the brain doesn't move from one sleep state to the next – the cortex of the brain, responsible for consciousness, stays asleep, but the area controlling the sensory system and movement is awake. The conscious part may be sparko but the subconscious is up for action. It's called a hyper-arousal state, apparently. I've given up on a cure.’

  ‘Lobotomy!’ Arlo says it with relish, he wants to lift her mood, he wants to change the subject; he doesn't like to see her so despondent and dark.

  Petra looks at him, very straight before softening. ‘Thank you. And I am sorry. And if you get involved with me, you may have sleepless nights.’

  ‘I am involved with you and I already had sleepless nights anyway. It'll be a nice change, having something other than the cracks in the ceiling to watch.’

  ‘Listen.’

  They listen. Birdsong.

  ‘It's dawn.’

  Outside the window, the thin light of the new day is slipping through the dark like the tail of smoke from a spent match.

  ‘We could go to bed?’

  ‘It's beautiful.’

  ‘Then let's get dressed, Petra. I know where I'm going to take you.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Everywhere peace, everywhere serenity, and a marvellous freedom from the tumult of the world – as my friend St Aelred said.’

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  Arlo's friend St Aelred turned out to be the third Abbot of Rievaulx Abbey and it was to these elegiac Gothic ruins that Arlo took Petra. They headed out on the Helmsley Road. Ahead of them Ingleby Bank, Clay Bank, the Wainstones and Carlton loomed through the dawn like benevolent mammalian masses. The drive through Bilsdale was stunning in itself, the moors shrouded by the early-morning mist like an ephemeral duvet blanketing the land while regular folk still slept. Because of the lie of the land from this approach, the Abbey was kept secret in a hidden valley. Then, two miles from Helmsley and eighteen miles from Stokesley, Arlo turned off the moor road and suddenly they were driving down a steep and twisting lane until they came to the village of Rievaulx. Like a small flock protected by a mighty, divine shepherd the little rustic cottages on their grassy knolls were positioned at the foot of the magnificent ruins. The Abbey itself stood silent and proud, as if patiently waiting for kindred spirits to share its secrets, its beauty, in the fitting privacy of a time not controlled by English Heritage.

  ‘We'll leave a donation later,’ Arlo said, vaulting the wooden five-bar gate. ‘I bring the boys here when I do devotional music with them. Helps it all make sense. I've often thought that in its ruined state Rievaulx is probably far more rousing and spiritual than if Henry VIII hadn't sacked it.’

  ‘Sing hey nonny nonny for the dissolution of the monasteries,’ Petra laughed and they walked through the grounds in silence. The magnificent run of arches: aisle, gallery, clerestory. Monumental stone, some columns soaring high, some reduced to little more than stumps. Some stone blackened from time, some stone pale and creamy. Petra touched her way around, feeling the lichen and beneath it the stone, hand-hewn. All for the love of God. ‘There's a sadness here – don't you think? A haunting beautiful sadness. A poetic melancholy. As if the ravages of war and of time have served only to strip the place back to its very core. Truly a heart of stone.’

  They continued to walk, round and through, over and again.

  ‘Look how the landscape is central to the impact of the place, as if the buildings have been absorbed into nature and yet the architecture captures the views, the land – containing it,’ Petra marvelled. ‘Isn't it amazing how something so solid like these hulking great pillars, these arches spanning God knows how many feet, in the context of the landscape, the air, actually seem so light, delicate almost.’

  ‘We'll have to make a trip to Fountains Abbey next,’ Arlo said. He paused. ‘And Bylands. In fact, why not give up your day job and come and teach architecture at the school?’

  Petra reddened. But for a secret moment, she did consider it. She walked on a step or two behind Arlo. Something caught her eye. A lone, late bluebell, growing strong and determined in the shadow of the transept. She fell to her knees so she could see its flowerheads up close. She glanced over to Arlo, but he was preoccupied, craning his neck in the refectory, lost in his own world here.

  *

  And suddenly she's back at school and it's double English with her favourite teacher Mrs Balcombe and it's Gerard Manley Hopkins who Petra loves. Then it'll be lunch and Walnut Whips and tales of Africa with Mrs McNeil. Followed by an afternoon at the boys' school for pottery. Perhaps Arlo will be there, shyly serenading her. Perhaps he'll just sit with her, strumming his guitar and humming to himself while she works the cold wet clay through her hands. They'll smile, now and then, without saying all that much.

  Back in the dawn of a new day, at Rievaulx Abbey, very much in the here and now, Petra cupped the bluebell flowers in her hands, gazed at them intently – their sentient little faces – and she thought again of Hopkins. There lives the dearest freshness deep down things. And in an instant, she knows she won't be teaching architecture at Arlo's school because she loves her day job far too much. And all of a sudden she knows what to do with her tanzanite; what it wants to be. She'd just been afforded a dazzling glimpse of how the finished piece might look. And the process of making it had belted across her mind like a film reel on fast forward.

  At this stage, that was all she needed to see; all her best works have germinated just like this. She knows that it is now stored, logged in her creative lobe, to be accessed whenever she wants, analysed frame by frame. She had caught sight of the end result and it's thrilling. Best of all, she knows she has the tools, the trade, the skill. Talent is Petra's greatest gift and she treasures it. The tanzanite was Mrs McNeil's great gift to Petra. And as Petra stood in the grounds of the beautiful Cistercian monastery, knowing just how she can do justice both to the stone and to Mrs McNeil's memory, her heart soared alongside the pillars of Rievaulx.

  ‘Can we go?’ she called to Arlo. She was so fired with the desire to work that she forgot all about her total lack of sleep.

  * * *

  By three in the afternoon, Petra was feeling all sketched out. Arlo had worked well alongside her, planning lessons and plundering his music collection for the purpose, listening to drifts and riffs with his headphones on. Every now and then, Petra picked up tinny hints filtering out and she'd think, Oh! I know that song.

  She closed her sketchbook and put it face down on the floor. Arlo was sitting cross-legged, his back to her, his shoulders swaying to whatever it was he was listening to. She padded over to him on her hands and knees. He turned and smiled, patted her head, then ran her pony-tail through his hand as if it was a cat's tail. She laid her head against him, kissed his shoulder. She pressed her ear against the headphone. I know this! I know this! It's Neil Young! It's ‘Heart of Gold’! She brought her face in front of Arlo's, her eyes alight, and sang the song at the top of her voice. He laughed, pulled the earphones down around his neck like a DJ. Still she sang and jigged and he gave her a round of applause.

  ‘All-time favourite Neil Young song?’ he asked her.

  ‘“Cinnamon Girl”,’ she replied, not having to think. ‘You?’

  ‘“Needle and the Damage Done”.’

  Arlo yawned. He was starting to feel hazy from lack of sleep. ‘God, I haven't felt this way for years,’ he said. ‘It's like doing coke, when you just do not sleep. Then you feel slightly delirious at precisely this time in the afternoon.’ He looked at Petra who was looking slightly aghast.

  ‘Coke?’ she asked, rather wide-eyed. ‘As in caine rather than a-cola?’

  Arlo laughed. ‘Not even sixteen cans of Coca-Cola could keep me going all night. Yes, Petra, the naughty coke.’

  ‘I've never tried it. I'm a bit square,’ she told him, looking a bit sheepish.

  ‘I did loads of it. I was a twat in the music business, remember,’ he said, looking a bit sheepish too.
/>   Petra yawned.

  ‘Am I boring you?’ Arlo teased.

  She laughed and shook her head. The whites of her eyes were a little bloodshot, dark circles underneath them, her skin pale. Arlo thought she looked beautiful. ‘I'm tired,’ she apologized.

  ‘Let's pop out for ours teas – as they say round here. Actually, I'm starving – I'll take you to Yarm for a slap-up supper. Then we'll have an early night.’

  ‘Or we could just have hot buttered toast in bed. Sod the crumbs,’ Petra said. ‘Anyway, I thought teachers were meant to be poor?’

  ‘As a teacher, I am poor,’ Arlo said, ‘but I also receive those healthy royalties from my music.’

  ‘A most eligible bachelor,’ Petra said. Then she blushed and looked away but not before she noticed that Arlo had reddened too.

  Later on, home from Yarm, Petra and Arlo found their second wind and, over mugs of tea and a lot of Neil Young, they talked until it was really a quite respectable time to go to bed.

  ‘Are you worried?’ Arlo asked her. ‘About going walkabout?’

  ‘A bit,’ Petra replied, pumping the pillow and pulling the duvet up to her nose.

  He turned on his side to look at her. ‘You sound worried.’

  ‘It's not just that – I take it as a given that most nights I'm off.’ She paused. Plumped the pillow again. Pressed her hand gently against his chest. ‘I don't know, Arlo – you know so much about me now. All my naked truths. You've seen me, literally, laid bare.’

  ‘I know you inside out,’ Arlo said and to prove his point, his fingers made a rather smug journey up between Petra's legs while he raised an eyebrow cockily.

  ‘Stop it – I'm being serious.’ She tried not to laugh, pushed his arm away. ‘My sleepwalking. My crappy parents. My disastrous relationship. My weak points.’

  ‘Your sense of humour, your beauty, your sweet sweet nature. Your prodigious talent. Your strength,’ Arlo countered, softly. ‘Your courage.’

  ‘So why do I feel a little vulnerable?’