Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  She rang me.

  ‘Honestly, Richard, I do need to be left alone for a while,’ she said, then enquired about my health and her post.

  ‘Where are you?’ I said rapidly.

  ‘At a friend’s. I’m fine.’

  ‘How long do you want to be away for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lelia, her answer intensifying the pain that hit me the moment I heard her guarded tones.

  ‘Look–’ I snapped, but to no avail.

  I went to bed and ground myself into the mattress with my mouth open against the pillow, and even as I mourned Lelia, an insistent thought flickered perversely through my mind: I could now have Sylvie. For the first time, I could legitimately bring her back to my pigsty and fuck her stupid.

  Where are you? Dearest love, I miss you.

  She ghosted through my existence, inciting streaks of sexual fury. In my despair, my hostility even swung to its opposite extreme: I could go with her, perhaps, throw my lot in with this strange, treacherous being with her unexpectedly beautiful little body who turned me on and snared my mind. I shuddered at the notion in the morning. All I wanted to do was to eradicate her from my mind and life. Yet whatever I desired, Sylvie Lavigne herself, like MacDara and Lelia, had quite gone.

  Increasingly, I found her in other people’s newspapers. I picked up a new anthology of short stories that had come into the office, and there she was. I flung it down on the floor and stormed upstairs to Peter Stronson.

  ‘What’s happened to Sylvie Lavigne?’ I said to him, coughing as I spoke.

  ‘Sylvie Lavigne?’ he said, attempting to look blank. ‘She’s doing the Atwood for me. I think.’

  ‘That’s not for a while.’

  ‘I think she’s editing her novel.’

  I snorted.

  ‘She’s been speaking to an agent about it.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You know – Lachlan.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘I suggested him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She didn’t seem to know anyone.’

  I laughed, inappropriately loudly.

  ‘He’s an old mate,’ said Stronson, looking embarrassed.

  I stared at him for a fraction of a second to scare him a bit, and glanced at his wedding ring.

  ‘What do you think of her?’ I said, enjoying myself.

  ‘She’s very good. Authoritative. Colourful.’

  ‘No – her.’

  He paused for a fraction of a beat. ‘Well–’ he said. ‘Socially.’ He laughed. ‘She’s wallpaper.’

  I laughed again.

  ‘Isn’t she writing for you?’ he said.

  ‘She hasn’t for a while. I haven’t spoken to her,’ I said.

  There was a silence. ‘Where is she?’ I said.

  ‘Where is she?’ he repeated, as if caught. ‘I don’t know. She seems not to – at home, I suppose,’ he said.

  I raised my eyebrows at him deliberately, and walked off.

  A new week began. I wrote to Lelia in Golders Green, again alluding to my crime without delivering a full confession, and outlining, with honesty that was painful to summon, my guilt and love. The idea that she was now heavily pregnant and might need money troubled me on a daily basis. I sobbed and cursed and hit walls for her. The fact that she had left me made my jaw feel heavy, as though I had been punched with grief, and I would do anything for her bossy ways, for her growing bump with its intangible baby kicks, and her dear familiar voice in my ear. I stretched out, laying my arm across the cool pillow as though I might find her there. I wolfed down Indian takeaway and burped and farted; the more evil and protracted the farts, the more satisfying. Cereal stuck to the oily spillage on the hob. I arrived at work unshaven.

  I could shag anyone, I realised. During a short-lived angry fantasy, I even managed to blame Lelia for my own infidelity as I mulled over the possibilities. There was a neighbour I’d always quite fancied, and the assistant in the health food shop on Marchmont Street was a well-known local fox: I’d once dragged MacDara in there to cop a look. I could seek out my lunatic actress of a former girlfriend and spend an energetic afternoon in a hotel for old times’ sake. Such plots kept me briefly sane as I chewed them over at three in the morning; they were laughable by the time my alarm rang.

  On Saturday, I woke in the afternoon and switched on my computer, like a tic. The Hotmail address was there.

  I tried to stop the poison that was running through me, but I could not staunch it, and then I thought that I must cry until my heart punched out its own life. All that I had ever wanted was a family: a family that would look after me and take me to its breast and be mine, like other girls seemed to have.

  Yet I had dreamed of institutions. I had read of Lowood with its loves and tuberculosis, and early in my girlhood, I was sent from my own home to a girls’ high school. And then later, when all the world was in turmoil and dressed in black, I was to be banished to another place: a harsher place, an institution for girls such as myself, over whom God despaired, and whose evil had brought only abandonment. It would be no better than a charity school for foundlings with its diseases and foul air, and there I would live out my earthly years.

  I would not go, I screamed. They bound me. They forced sal volatile and punishment upon me. I screamed and screamed until I injured my lungs and spat phlegm. I would not have nothing.

  Where was Sylvie? Another chilling thought inched up my spine and spread over my scalp. Were they all together somewhere: Lelia and Sylvie and the baby-to-be? Was she, caught up as she was in her own obsessive little mental world, planning to harm Lelia to punish me? For the first time, the distaste that had been accumulating spilled into fear.

  In my agitation, I had to move about. I had to do something. It was too hot. I caught a taxi on the square and asked it to drive along Endsleigh Street. Sylvie’s windows were high and blank behind their metal frames. A sole pigeon nodded on her balcony railing. I took the taxi round Gordon Square and then back again, ghosting the streets that she herself haunted, the leaves on the trees sooty, the grass paling.

  A memory of addiction came back to me as I gazed at the windows. I switched it off.

  I coasted through Bloomsbury, then asked the driver to return. If I went back to the flat, Lelia might have rung in the meantime.

  I glanced at our own windows, half-thinking, in my eternal lunatic’s optimism, that she would have arrived while I was out. If she had, I would walk into her arms, and I would want nothing as much again in my life. As I paid the taxi driver for my fruitless round trip, I scowled at Lucy, the local slapper. She gazed blankly back at me, her eyes blackened with make-up, her skin mottled with unsavoury blemishes.

  ‘Seen my wife?’ I said flippantly, to fill the void with the presence of Lelia.

  ‘Yeah,’ she said.

  ‘What?’ I said, turning to her.

  She emitted a bitchy little snort and shrugged. ‘With her post.’

  ‘She came to collect some post?’

  Lucy nodded.

  I waited.

  ‘Where did she go?’

  ‘She’s left you, hasn’t she?’ she said, a malevolent smile spreading over her face and further tilting her small sharp nose.

  ‘Yes, she’s left me!’ I shouted. ‘Where was she going?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Was she on her own?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Who was she with?’ I asked. I felt unsteady.

  ‘A friend.’ She shrugged again.

  ‘Who?’ I almost shook her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Lucy indignantly.

  ‘A woman?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Right. No one you know, then?’

  ‘No,’ said Lucy, as though insulted to be asked.

  ‘Listen, Luci– Lucy. Don’t you know where she was going?’ In my mind, I reached into my pocket and pulled out a twenty-quid note as a bribe. ‘Do you know anything?’ My voic
e rose.

  ‘Nope. Sorry. Better run after her, mister,’ she said, giving me a sly look as she disappeared down the steps to her flat.

  An unknown tabby cat was sitting by the geraniums in the area. The novelty of its presence lent me a surge of hope. When I reached the top of the stairs, the stillness of the flat in smeared sunlight filled me with the worst loneliness I could ever remember experiencing. The weave and dust on the collar of Lelia’s winter coat were picked out by a shaft of light. The fear that she’d actually left me took a fresh grip. A pile of proofs to read sat beside my computer. I went online for comfort, sweating in the heat. I would look up news and desperately Google anything that occurred to me; I almost felt like joining a chatroom. The madwoman had emailed.

  Once I lay in wait for the Hindoo, to frighten her. Emilia had gone visiting with her mother, and the orphan was taking the air. I lay so long, I became cold in my roost of grasses and I began to cry over my missing father, and all that my mother and I had lacked, and the poor failure of my life until now.

  A parting of ferns. A neat little shoe. The Hindoo stepped down by the river where the water ached and swirled. I watched her slender back as she came. I thought of clasping her there, to worry her a little, but I couldn’t punish her after all for soiling my love. Instead, the Hindoo and I talked of shameful things – of the gentleman and the maiden, and how they embraced and stifled the other until their breath was taken away and they flew to a place like death.

  The Hindoo was beautiful. That day, I wanted her for mine. She spread her charms to me; I showed her new worlds. I began to love my old enemy She was cold by the river, and so I warmed her. She lay back, her curls sleeked with light as she bent her head just so, and our words flowed and softened as the grasses parted and darkened.

  We talked then of my sorrow. I almost sobbed. I said, ‘I will die, that baby will make me die.’

  The Hindoo placed her hand upon my arm and tried to comfort me. Her mouth, that pretty curve of a mouth, became tight as a coin. ‘No,’ she said. ‘You must not speak in that way.’

  ‘I want it to die instead of me,’ I said.

  Twenty

  Lelia

  She had got to me. She was so sexy, so beautiful, so damaged, I had entered her world, and yet a part of me had already begun to dislike her.

  ‘Let’s leave,’ she said to me in the second week of July, after we had attended my midwife check-up together and Richard had failed once more to ask about our poor baby’s health.

  ‘Leave?’ I said.

  ‘I mean, let’s be together,’ she said.

  I’d recognised her at the beginning, of course, though I had only seen Mazarine for longer than a few moments perhaps six times, two decades before. There she was again, surely, that androgynous French child from the big shuttered doctor’s house, sitting at MacDara’s table. I knew her voice.

  It made me think – what was it that had once happened with her there, by the Loire? I could never recall it all, just as later I blocked out memories of the night before I left France.

  My third week in Clemenceau, I’d talked to Mazarine at last. Sophie-Hélène had to help her mother with the toddlers, and I was mercifully excused such duties. I wandered out of town past the raincoat factory, and dived down a lane that led to the old canal that ran parallel to the river. As I walked, I had a playful instinct that somewhere in the course of the day I would chance upon Mazarine. I was so fine-tuned by then to the feverish concealment of Mazarine and Sophie-Hélène that I would be able to detect them. I passed a woman herding her animals, the cows patterned plates of late afternoon sun. The vegetation frothed across the river, and in a slant of light I came upon Mazarine, crying in the long grass and nettle. He – she – wore a skirt instead of the usual unisex long shorts and aertex shirt. She looked vulnerable, like an almost pretty girl with her large hazel eyes and pale fine skin.

  She was crying; she was snotty and blotched in the leaves. She was as humiliated as she would have been had I stumbled upon her naked there. She was weeping, and I knew that it was about her mother and the baby. I watched her and she turned from me, and I thought about the grief that parents bring – not loving you, or leaving you by dying; and I cried too and tried to hide the tears flattening over my face.

  After a long silence she said, ‘I’ll show you other things.’ She wouldn’t look at me. She led me along the old canal, and we scrambled up a bank and along an avenue of planes that widened into a ring of horse chestnuts.

  ‘I’ll show you more,’ she said; she would say nothing else, and we clambered over small bridges on to the old ecluse, and there was the Loire in all its thundering width, vaster and more sinewy than anything I had seen. The houses, shutters, locks were stunted before it. ‘Like the Mekong,’ she said. ‘The Plain of the Birds.’

  She gazed. ‘Look at the river like a sea where it divides,’ she said. ‘It’s a world out there.’ I felt flags rise, fluttering. I felt sails, a gala, a wind that could lift me up. ‘There’s an island,’ she said. ‘You could live there almost. We could live there.’ She said nothing more. She turned and we left.

  It was as though, that afternoon for the first time, we loved each other. We walked back; we stumbled; she led me. How could that slight, straight body, the smooth little mound, the small hands, give another girl such pleasure? How how how when she wasn’t a boy? My curiosity made me light-headed. She began to speak to me again. We spoke in English. Of course, I realised, it was inevitable that she spoke nearly faultless English. She spoke to me calmly, her tone almost monotonous, about everything she did with Sophie-Hélène; she half-glanced at me; she held my arm so lightly, her hand sometimes catching my waist, and I had the strangest sensation that in her mind – in my mind, which was her mind too – she was talking about us, about our own bodies astonishingly, improbably intertwined.

  I felt then as though she would lead me by the hand and I would walk and we would disappear together, runaway children never found, living in the grasses. We made each other little promises in hints and shy ellipses. I chattered brightly, self-consciously, trying to fill in her silences and please her clever mind, because when the roofs of Clemenceau came into view, she would belong to Sophie-Hélène. We created new delays and grassy loops. We talked on our knees, lowering ourselves so slowly that we disappeared into the grass together. The weed petals and green blades arched above us, rustling and concealing us. We emerged much later, in the early evening.

  She whispered into my ear. She knew, now, despair, she said. We spoke, frowning, heads huddled and almost pressed together as we walked, about the baby. I sometimes tried to remember that conversation afterwards. I couldn’t, though; I couldn’t exactly.

  When I saw Mazarine again, I had the sensation of waking in confusion from a dream. Newly pregnant, I felt the ghost of her arrive. I saw, sitting there, someone I’d thought for years would turn up in my life again, and I knew then that my image of her had become skewed, and I realised how wrong, how unreliable memory is. I had half-looked for her all my life, the taste of frustrated childhood desire and shame and anxiety having never left me as I imagined for a moment that I recognised her in certain girls, in particular women on the streets over the years. There was always the flare of recognition that must then subside as a stranger passed by.

  I even, just once, tried sleeping with another woman. I had split up with my older man; I was feeling hurt, and carefree and single, and I was introduced to a woman at a party. Something about her restrained manner had reminded me of Mazarine, and with terrible curiosity, in a fit of nerves, I had gone back with her. I’d wanted to re-create something in my mind, but it wasn’t right. Nothing caught fire; it disturbed me, and I left with ashamed apologies in the night.

  Mazarine was at the other end of MacDara’s table, and apparently her name was Sylvie. I felt immense excitement and anxiety, as though I might be sick. Yet this woman wouldn’t talk to me; I suspected a desire for self-reinvention; I tried to catch her eye,
but she was a shadowy figure in a corner who barely looked up. She knew, she told me later, that she would find me again through Ren.

  The second time I saw her, I was less certain; I thought it was possible I had made a mistake.

  ‘Mazarine?’ I said, half-muttering her name. She looked at me blankly, unsettling me, since I’d only seen her a few times in my life after all; I would have recognised Sophie-Hélène more easily.

  ‘Mazarine,’ I said again later, testing her, though I was equally afraid of the past, but she simply ignored me in her cool, controlled way, as though I’d never spoken, and after a while, I understood what it was she wanted. Whoever she was, she wanted us to know each other afresh, to discover each other as women. It was like a delightful exercise in adulthood.

  ‘I really wanted to know you again,’ said Sylvie eventually, after so many weeks of wilful silence in which she only hinted, just slightly, at the presence of the past. ‘I wanted you to know me, not that terrible child.’

  ‘You weren’t a terrible child. Is that why your name’s different?’ I said.

  She said nothing. ‘My mother gave me my name,’ she said at last.

  I had only five days left in France by the time Mazarine talked to me and touched me. I had never known such pleasure in my life; I wouldn’t know it again for years. My morals became muddied: we slipped out when Sophie–Hélène was helping her mother with the toddlers, and I, already so absorbed by the idea of boys, could somehow seamlessly accept the fact that my lover was a girl, the surreal revelation of her gender only piquing my extreme excitement. She made love to me; she dived far into my mind; she showed me tricks that Sophie-Hélène had already sketched for me, controlling my breathing and my consciousness and my pain levels, and I entered that black world almost innocently, only shocked at myself years later.