Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  She moved her hips, and mine met hers, and she gasped and we ground into each other, racing, crying out, and I circled there, and for the first time in our lives, we came together.

  In the morning, there was an email containing a section of novel on my computer. I had begun to expect it.

  We had our own corner of the house. There was a small yard by the cellar where moss lived and snails sucked and where we grubbed among the ferns that glared pale green above the soot. We played and planned there. It was inside, in the dressing room, that we merged and became one.

  I tried very hard to be good. I tried to temper myself like metal, but the wrongness in me came back, and I made myself thinner, until the roar of hunger in my head frightened me.

  As the new child grew inside the womb like a tumour, I knew that the time had come to enact the plans that were stirring so brightly in my mind. One afternoon in the dressing room, we considered the dimensions of a baby’s chest.

  I think I had realised for some time who was sending me these emails. I had known without wanting to, and in my wilful ignorance I skimmed them, unsettled and feeling faintly stalked, before deleting them from my computer and, to a lesser extent, my mind. But the more I thought about Sylvie, the more I was drawn to read her strange fiction. I read and then erased the latest instalment. It was quarter to nine.

  I took a detour through the little garden hidden at the back of Mecklenburgh Square on my way to the office. I was early, as I often was now, and as I wandered through that secretive serpentine garden with its glasshouses and graves, I realised that I was not about to walk straight to work. I meandered towards the far gate, kicking at the frost tussocks, propelled by unspoken purpose. I had last seen her on Marchmont Street turning the corner towards Tavistock Square, yet I didn’t know exactly where she lived. The editorial assistant would have her address on file, but I couldn’t remember ever having asked her, and in any case, I could hardly loiter on her street. I could walk instead among the frost and delivery vans for no apparent reason, and satisfy some terrible, unformed compulsion.

  Marchmont Street was dead. Only the newsagent, narrow and sagging-ceilinged as a cardboard-box home, glared yellow light. I went in and bought some chewing gum. The sky was bruising, and I wondered if it was going to snow. Of course she wasn’t there, a shadow in a dull mac coming to buy a newspaper. Tentatively, I turned towards Tavistock Square. Tax is coasted past. The windows on the square were largely dark.

  I had to stop myself. I had to stop myself right now. I turned, my heart racing, and sped back, jogging down Gray’s Inn Road until I arrived at work, my lungs stretched sore with frozen air.

  ‘MacDara.’ I grabbed the phone. ‘Tell me, tell me about what’s happening,’ I said hopelessly.

  ‘You sound like a heavy breather,’ he said.

  ‘What’s happening?’ I said, attempting to control my breathing. ‘With you?’

  ‘You mean – you know I can’t talk,’ he said in a low voice.

  ‘I – I,’ I said, and then I had nothing to say.

  I had to see her again, once more, to kill it. It had to be today. I worked in a fitful fashion, fiddling with my flatplan, then paced around the office, then phoned a few of my journalists instead of emailing them, to waste time I didn’t have. I was under pressure from the deputy editor to find a more famous author for the interview slot, and I had to put in some calls.

  At twelve twenty-five I suddenly knew that if I left for lunch now, right now, and walked west towards Bloomsbury, I would bump into her. The knowledge came to me as a gift of premonition. I rose, a feeling of madness sifting like sand through my head as I grabbed my keys and wallet, and forgot about my coat. I hesitated, knocking my chair so that it rolled into my desk.

  I stood there hopelessly.

  ‘Got a writer to meet,’ I said to the books page assistant, who nodded. ‘Has to be early,’ I said. He looked up at me. Heat constricted my torso.

  The rush of air outside calmed me. The temperature cut straight through my jacket, and I plunged my hands in my pockets, aware that I couldn’t skulk back in like an idiot for my coat. I lolloped along Theobald’s Road in a cloud of breath, the air sawing at my lungs, and headed west until I hit Brunswick Square. People wandered about, sharply delineated in the cold. I was in Bloomsbury, and I hadn’t yet seen her. I looked around wildly.

  I stormed across the street and legged it, three steps at a time, up the stairs of the Brunswick Centre. Would she be loitering in the cinema foyer? I could hustle her into the steaming warmth – oh, warmth – of the Chinese opposite, whose hot salted scents were twisting my stomach, and we could talk to each other. Where was Lelia? What if she had decided to do a shop at Safeway’s? Had we got any food at home? I tried to rack my brain, swinging from foot to foot, but my mind was numbed, and I could only picture an empty fridge with a crust in it, like some symbolic image from a children’s film. Oh, Lelia. Oh, fuck.

  My newly sprouted psychic radar appeared to detect waves that then faltered, and I felt seasick as another conviction gripped me: she would be on Marchmont Street. I ran, hobbling, my feet needled with ice; the street was busy and hooting and litter-strewn, and she wasn’t there. I ran back and burst into a cafe, where the warmth began to settle on the frozen surface of my jacket, my lungs still fiery with ice. Fuck this, I thought. I had known I would bump into Sylvie Lavigne if I left the office at that precise moment. And I hadn’t. Yet I had known. A new verb was required, I thought crossly, and pictured a committee of etymologists, the name ‘C. T Onions’ springing into my mind as it did whenever I thought of a dictionary, the editor of the old hulking Shorter Oxford I had frowned over during my schooldays forever linked with the word: one of the tiny irritations that lodged in my mind and buzzed there, baring currents of insanity.

  I felt indignant and fantastically foolish, standing in a haven of cheap pine and stainless-steel tea pots, fiddling for my mobile. Yet I had to do this. I had to kill it.

  I pulled an icy sliver of metal out of my pocket and found the number I had kept when she first texted me.

  ‘Hello,’ I said when she answered, and as I heard her voice, I smiled. ‘Can we meet?’

  ‘OK,’ she said.

  I stood there in the warmth. I had forgotten about Safeway’s. I cowered in case I was spotted, a shivering wreck in a nasty cafe. I waited.

  Sylvie arrived wearing a scarf, her mac tied around the waist, and she looked more European, like a slender little Frenchwoman in the war with her shadowed eyes and pale skin.

  ‘Let’s walk,’ I said, and I caught her arm in mine, and we walked silently towards Brunswick Square, where the great horse chestnuts canopied winter twigs and the ground was stubby with cigarettes on bald earth, and the new mothers perambulated serenely among the men drinking Special Brew.

  ‘Jane Austen thought that the air was superior here,’ she said.

  ‘In Brunswick Square?’

  An aeroplane flew overhead, its lights flashing, and the image was always scored in my mind afterwards: that plane passing by, choosing that moment to fly low in a thickening grey sky.

  ‘It’s going to snow, isn’t it?’ she said. We stood in the pathway near the horse chestnut.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking all around me. ‘I think so.’

  The horse chestnut roiled above me as I leaned down, so cold I felt I was moving through ice – I was in the Arctic; I was stiffened by ice; I had died – and my lips met hers with a shock of cold-warm flesh. Time halted and fragmented into distinct split seconds. Her mouth moved minutely with a small, stiff twitch, then she pulled her head away from me. Humiliation rushed through me. The skin on my neck flooded with childish wounded pride.

  ‘I–’ came a voice from behind me.

  I turned around and gazed at Catrin, standing beside us on the path. In my confusion, I recalled with a jolt that she worked in King’s Cross. Her expression bore the terrible studied blankness of knowledge.

  ‘I–’ she said agai
n, the beginning of fire just visible in her cheek as she turned her head from us and walked away. My bowels tightened; I felt sick. This was followed by the strange sensation that I felt nothing at all.

  Ten

  Richard

  I crashed in there. I ran two, three steps at a time up the stairs to our flat, and rammed at the keys so that the locks shot open. My mind was blank. She wasn’t there. I made myself some coffee. If I rushed; if I turned the taps on so that the water gushed into the kettle, making the metal vibrate and sending harsh spray over me; if I acted mechanically and fast, then my life was normal. I ripped open an envelope. It cut my finger. The brief moment of pain felt reassuring. I took out an onion and pressed a knife against the skin at its end; it wobbled dangerously beneath the blade. Dumbly, I chopped. The sky was a glowing dark blue outside the window. It was an ordinary day. A sense of relief suffused me: the significance of what I had done subsided behind a screen of normality. And the humdrum seemed sublime. Whatever had been wrong with my life before? Nothing. Yet I hadn’t known it.

  ‘Hello!’ she called. Click of lock, echo of door. A baby inside her. I felt a slap of shock.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked, her smile switching off.

  How could I? How could I? I was frozen, trapped within that moment in a chamber of static, interference, snow. No no no, I wanted to bellow. The sensation of seeing her was much worse than I had anticipated. I had tarnished it. The perfect thing had been violated, as it had in nightmares, when I had woken excited yet relieved from dreams of infidelity, with her always there on the pillow beside my waking body: me faithful, her faithful, our own nest of cotton and night sweat. And she was pregnant.

  I never knew what home meant to me until that day.

  The word ‘home’. It had once been a house in Cornwall, that chalk-white, grubby-fingered rose-twined bedroom wallpaper against cream wood, and particular corners of flagstone and wainscot and slope, old walls, and a river, and some snail-wet grass, and at the end of a pilgrimage of gritted toes and stinging nettles and pines, the sea. And now, at this moment, it meant this. Lelia in a doorway in a wooden room with me.

  I coughed. I smiled, and the smile stopped beneath my eyes, impossible to complete.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked again, coming towards me.

  I hugged her, my nose filled with the movement of her hair, and I betrayed her even by touching her.

  The memory of Sylvie flickered against my eyelids.

  But I hadn’t kissed her. My lips had only met hers for a twitching fraction of a second. Did that count? Perhaps not. Oh God, perhaps not after all. Familiar Lelia smell was rising up to me like ether, blanking out the guilt. Perhaps, on the scale that God and normal people agreed upon, it amounted to a glitch so minor it could be discounted.

  But there was Catrin.

  I went and sat on the loo, queasy. And then I remembered that this was what Lelia had to suffer every day. ‘Sweetheart,’ I muttered into my skin, my face pressed into my hands.

  In the night, the phone rang. My heart expanded and contracted with a wallop that made me fear a coronary attack. I leapt up, disorientated, and virtually skied down the staircase in my clumsy haste.

  ‘Sorry it’s a bit late,’ said MacDara.

  ‘You cunt!’ I hissed, relief and irritation tangled together.

  ‘What?’ said MacDara.

  ‘You woke me up.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘Where are you?’ I asked, sleep-muddled.

  ‘At home. Downstairs,’ he whispered.

  Home, I thought. MacDara. Catrin. My heart slammed into my chest cavity again. I wanted to bang the receiver down before he confronted me.

  There was silence.

  ‘She’s disappeared. Bloody gone,’ muttered MacDara into the receiver.

  ‘What?’ I said, my sleep-logged thought processes tugged in different directions. ‘Who?’ I said feebly. ‘Oh, you mean–’

  ‘Three days. She’s fucked off. I’ve rung and emailed several times, and nothing.’

  ‘You weren’t supposed to,’ I said vaguely, my heart just beginning to calm itself.

  ‘Yes, whatever. Anyway, she’s ignoring me. It’s never been anything like this.’

  ‘Three days, MacDara.’

  ‘You know how it is.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ I said. I pictured him padding up his thick carpeted stairs – that show-off’s carpeting he had bought – to bed, where Catrin lay like a monster in her lair rolling my future about.

  ‘Another thing,’ he said.

  My heart pincered.

  ‘There was a kind of unspoken agreement we were going to do it,’ said MacDara. ‘The full thing. We were building up to it.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I was getting horny as hell. I was having to go to the showers at work. And now she’s buggered off.’

  ‘Go to bed,’ I said quietly. ‘Don’t worry. Let’s talk tomorrow.’

  He put the phone down. I thought of standing in the hall, waiting for him to call me back once he’d heard the news.

  I went to bed and lay down with a sense that the night was already buoyed by dawn, and sleep was an impossibility. The hours that followed were fragmented with frantic calculations. Calm assessments of probability were ambushed obliquely by terrifying scenarios involving a combination of Lelia, Sylvie, MacDara and Catrin, chance meetings, phone calls and miscarriage.

  I had been unfaithful to a small number of my previous girlfriends, the resulting guilt varying from the troubling to the non-existent, accompanied by occasional pathetic spurts of pride at my own behaviour. With Lelia, it was different. The aim was lifelong monogamy. We had always stared mock-solemnly into each other’s eyes and quizzed each other about fidelity, one trying to trip the other up with deceptively casually delivered statements designed to mask lumbering traps:

  ‘That time you went out with Joe – the time you snogged him–’

  ‘I did not!’

  ‘Didn’t you? Really?’

  ‘No! Honestly. I promise.’

  ‘But it was near the beginning. I’m sure you said you were tempted, or something.’

  ‘No!’

  We imagined that by staring into each other’s eyes we would be able to read the signs of infidelity in each other, but our attempts always ended in laughter and renewed rituals of loyalty. There were rules: snogging counted. Future crushes of a temporary nature were to be half expected, mentally indulged, and then overcome. Any more prolonged or significant desires were to be confessed to the other in an attempt to ward off developments.

  A brush on the lips could possibly be dismissed; but, unaccountably, I had tried to kiss Sylvie Lavigne properly, and with intention came culpability. I shuddered. Embarrassment trailed guilt and whipped me in the face with its sting whenever I remembered that I had betrayed my inexplicable feelings to that mouse, only to meet rejection.

  I breathed in Lelia’s breath. Hot, thick, drowsy. I gazed at her peaceful face and caught the taste of nightmare.

  Catrin. If Catrin hadn’t seen me, I could have got away with it. I could have buried it guiltily and used it as a warning to myself, like an electric cow prod. But Catrin had seen me, coatless beneath a laden sky, bending over a woman to press my mouth to hers. Fuck. Shit. Bloody Catrin. The former alcoholic with her gentle Welsh tones and her pale face and steelier soul who now held the key to despair. I had always liked her. I hated her name. Catrin. What kind of a pig-ugly thumping anachronism was that? I hated her name, and now I hated her.

  I must have fallen into a brief, heavy sleep, because my pillow was dark with a dribble circle, and a dull stream of light filled the room. I jolted up with a shock: Lelia had already risen.

  ‘Lelia!’ I called in a panic, but there she was at the foot of the stairs.

  ‘Have you had a bad night?’ she said, and I nodded, and she held her arms out to me.

  My study seemed hushed as though waiting for something. I paced around,
distracted. I had to escape to the office. Lelia was preparing course work from home for the morning, and Catrin could call at any time in the next few hours. Worse still, Lelia had a couple of days of industrial action coming up. I was hoping she’d spend her time in Top Shop and the library, but nothing could be guaranteed. I wanted to stay hovering by the phone like a guard dog; I eyed it in misery, wondering whether I could somehow dismantle it without her noticing, and picturing myself ripping it from the wall so vividly that my arms tensed.

  In the office, I sat in a strip-lit void and worked, and no one contacted me: Sylvie Lavigne was silent, as I, in awful humiliation, had anticipated. Catrin had apparently not yet called to wreak havoc. Lelia didn’t ring. MacDara was still wittering on by email about his absent woman. I ignored him until, with MacDara-esque persistence, he sent me a new email in an oversized font demanding an answer, to which I replied in the guarded and sombre manner of the secret sinner who fears imminent blame.

  The day was white and grey, and I sat and waited, suspended in its blankness.

  I called Lelia, my bowels suddenly light and unstable, and she was simply Lelia, and funny, and tiresomely strict about the cupboard I hadn’t yet painted. I doodled on some paper as I tried to devise a way to tell her about my attempt to kiss Sylvie before Catrin did, but every explanation seemed trite and impossible. The day continued uneventfully. I had to put several pages to bed, but even a deadline barely penetrated my thoughts, despite growing pressure from above. In my disbelief that all evidence against me had failed to materialise, I began to revel in the blankness, praying for its perpetuation.

  I remembered Sylvie walking through Brunswick Square, and a worm of desire stirred. I groaned in my head and rested my chin on my hands. I made myself recall her dull persona, her dull face, and yet she wasn’t dull to me any longer.

  The snow had not fallen. The sky was still hushed and weighted when I returned home, and colder the following morning. Again, nothing happened. Lelia went to the university, and I worked at home. Lust came to me fleetingly, unbidden, and I forcibly distracted myself.