Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Sylvie,’ I said, exhaling heavily. My heart raced. ‘This is much too early. The baby might – it’s early. Please. Don’t you understand? I want Richard. Please.’

  ‘Do you?’ she said slowly. Her features were motionless. ‘Really?’ She seemed to gaze at a fitting in the corner of the room. ‘But if we do this, if we do this together, darling – we’re so strong, we can do this, both of us, we can get you through this – then we’ve done, well, almost the opposite, haven’t we?’ Her voice was light, threaded with something like amusement.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I snapped. I breathed slowly and deeply, revelling in the calm between contractions. I felt in control of my body, as though the pain would never come back. How was it possible for such pain to return? I wanted Richard. I wanted my baby to be safe. I tried to quell my panic. I reached out my arm and touched her. ‘Help me,’ I said. ‘Do everything properly. You’ll help me, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course. That’s what I’m here for. I’m helping you. Whatever else I’ve done – and I think you’ll hate me one day–’

  ‘Why?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, you will. People – everything seems to go wrong.’

  ‘Why?’

  She pulled me closer to her so my head was resting on her neck, supported by her as I clung to her. ‘My baby,’ I whispered. ‘I’m scared. My baby.’

  ‘Whatever else I’ve done, believe me, I loved you,’ she said, her voice now hot in my ear. ‘I wanted you to share it with me.’

  ‘Share what?’ I said, confused.

  ‘I thought, you know, somehow, one day, you’d tell me I was silly and make it all right.’

  ‘What happened to that baby?’ I said, at last, panic making my voice shrill and thin.

  ‘Do you remember what she said? Do you?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘My dear mother said it. Look after Agnes for the evening. Look after her, Mazarine and Lelia. Do you remember? I’m sure you do. We fed her her bottle together, we tucked her in, we agreed to check on her. And who – what – who wanted to go skipping over the fields, back over the fields to the grown-up room above the garage? Who? Innocent little Lelia. Tupping through the night.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ I moaned.

  ‘Who agreed that we’d be much better off fucking each other stupid than keeping an eye on a snuffly boring little kid? Let’s fuck off back to the great big bed and know heaven. Never mind the baby alone in the house and the lush out for the night.’

  ‘So–’ I said. I started to pant. I howled, long and low.

  ‘We were meant to look after her together.’

  I breathed out through my nose in reply. I gulped air, constricted. My head seemed lodged beneath her arm.

  ‘You didn’t say goodbye to me,’ I said eventually, my voice emerging as a low-pitched groan.

  ‘They’d already got me. They’d already decided on my future. No one would speak to me or tell me what was happening. Adults loomed above me like giants: they were so tall, so elongated and no one speaking to me. I never really saw my mother again.’ She shook her head. ‘Twice. I saw her twice again, much later, I mean.’

  ‘Where did you go?’ I said.

  ‘I was sent straight back to Paris, to the woman I stayed with. Then school. And then on to another school, and …’

  ‘Then?’

  ‘We lived separately. School. School for ever. Relatives.’

  I pulled in my breath.

  ‘Canada. Back to Europe.’

  I breathed out slowly.

  ‘And then I was on my own.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ I hissed, though I knew. My mouth barely moved. My eternal fear loomed before me, poised to catch me. Her fingertips held my arm. She stroked me. I shook her off aggressively.

  ‘Don’t you know?’

  ‘Not really,’ I said. Tears were soaking my face. They comforted me for seconds, like hot rain. The skin was sore at the corners of my eyes.

  ‘She – you know. She – the baby died in the night.’ I could smell Sylvie’s skin. She was trembling. ‘My sister,’ she said.

  ‘Was it what – was it what–’ I felt the juices of nausea fill my mouth.

  ‘She stopped breathing.’ Her mouth hesitated by my ear.

  ‘Did she?’ I said. I felt her head against me.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Because of – why?’

  ‘No one knows. They’d call it–’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Cot death now.’

  I burped back nausea. I lifted my head above her skin scent, her skin warmth, reaching for air.

  ‘I’m going to throw up,’ I said, and I vomited on to my hand and into the water.

  ‘I thought perhaps you and I,’ she said, reaching for my flannel and calmly wiping my mouth, ‘when we became friends again, lovers – you’d take your share. I thought, one day, we’d live together, be together, and we’d share that; you’d make it all all right. We’d make it all all right. And then you were pregnant. Somehow this would make it all right. We’d make it right.’

  ‘Nothing can make it all right,’ I said, gazing at my own vomit as it spread and floated on the surface of the water.

  ‘Oh, my Jesus.’

  ‘But it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Wasn’t it?’ said Sylvie abruptly.

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘It was equally yours.‘

  ‘Yes, yes, but it wasn’t anyone’s. It happened.’

  I remembered it. ‘Look after her,’ said the mother. The milk was in the fridge. The baby was snuffly and crotchety. ‘Yes,’ we said, but the baby started to sleep more calmly, and any minute, Sophie-Hélène might come in and join us. We were soundless with suppressed desire. I wanted that girl with the face of a knowing child to take me and fuck my father away. I wanted it more than anything. The baby blinked up at me through her bars, and I felt a kick of anxiety. I leaned over her cot, willing her to be all right if we left her for a little while. Anything I did at that time, I did out of primitive fear, my brain cells clenched with terror, riddled with superstition as I tested out my psychic powers to prove once and for all that I didn’t have them.

  We slipped away through the fields behind the houses until we reached the gate at the back of Sophie-Hélène’s garden and let ourselves into my bedroom. ‘We have to check on her,’ I kept saying, in guilt and perverse excitement, but we never did, and as Mazarine took me to higher levels of pleasure, a tiny strand of my mind was exhilarated by her hatred of that poor scrap of a sister; I almost wanted to bully her myself, or leave her to her own devices and please Mazarine.

  I lived with the guilt of that all my life: I had thought ill of a baby while neglecting her. But life wasn’t like that, I thought: a child’s fear manifest. I made myself picture her, always, as a plump, healthy girl with looping plaits and red tights toddling around the fields of Clemenceau and growing, growing up and away from my fears.

  ‘Oh, let’s make it right, darling,’ said Sylvie. ‘We can do this. Let’s bring her here together. If we go to the hospital, they’ll ask, who’s the father? We can do this on our own.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ I said. I seemed to cling to her sister in my mind, saving her as the dark stain of a lifetime’s further penance filtered into my brain. I felt like dying. The belt squeezed me. I shouted out in pain for my baby’s safety. The belt pulled tighter, fanning outwards and downwards, dragging nausea and compressing me until it seemed to torture me with its hot liquid grip.

  I had no concept of such pain. I don’t want to die, I thought, I don’t want my baby to die. The idea of losing her was beyond anything I could contemplate. Now the other baby had gone. My father had gone. All I wanted was my own baby. That was all in the world that I wanted. I was in love with the baby who moved around inside me; I wouldn’t let her suffer. She was trying to come out now.

  ‘Get me to the hospital. Ring a taxi,’ I said.

  Sylvie smiled at me. She shook her
head. She glanced at her watch.

  ‘Get me a fucking taxi,’ I shouted at her.

  ‘You don’t need–’

  ‘No. Get me Richard.’

  ‘But why, sweetheart? I don’t understand why you–’

  ‘He’s the father,’ I shouted.

  I walked around the flat, water dripping down my back and legs. I leaned over the bedstead. I seemed to breathe in a choking ball of air. My hips began to sway.

  ‘But–’ said Sylvie hopelessly. She tailed off. ‘This is our home.’

  ‘Sylvie,’ I said, shaking my head as my contraction began to subside.

  ‘I think of this as our marriage home. We left, we eloped–’

  ‘Sylvie, sweetheart.’ My voice came out cracked and dry. ‘I can’t think. I don’t know what – I want him.’

  ‘But I thought – we don’t need him.’

  ‘I do. I need him right now.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said. Her mouth was stiff.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, turning to her, and on her face I glimpsed the expression she’d worn when her sister was born, long ago: an older person’s grief etched in her eyes and the grooves of her forehead. I began to cry for her little sister. I cried for my baby.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sylvie, her mouth still open, and then I cried for her.

  ‘Phone Richard,’ I said again.

  ‘On your number?’ said Sylvie in a monotone. ‘I can’t phone him at home, can I?’

  ‘Yes. Yes. Phone him. Tell him to come here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvie.

  She pulled her mobile out of her pocket.

  ‘It’s Sylvie,’ I heard her saying, and then she walked into the bathroom. I heard her voice through the wall. I rocked on my hands and knees; I arched my back, sobbing; I climbed clumsily off the bed.

  ‘Richard!’ I shouted. I stumbled over there. I banged on the door.

  ‘He’s coming,’ said Sylvie, and put the phone back in her pocket.

  ‘I wanted to speak to him,’ I said, crying. ‘Is he coming?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Sylvie dully.

  ‘I’m truly–’ I said, shaking my head.

  ‘You’re leaving me again,’ said Sylvie, her mouth still a terrible small opening.

  ‘I never left you.’

  ‘I thought you wanted me.’

  I sat on the edge of the bed, panting. ‘I need him,’ I moaned. ‘I can’t think. Get me an ambulance.’

  ‘I–’

  ‘Quickly I want an epidural now. I want Richard.’

  ‘Darling.’

  ‘Fuck!’ I shouted. My womb was tearing out of me. ‘This is – agony.’

  ‘Let’s get to the hospital now and be together,’ said Sylvie.

  I shook my head with a violent movement. ‘This isn’t right, is it?’ I turned to her, begging her. ‘What are you doing? Get me there. Or I’ll walk. I’ll–’

  ‘God.’ She shook her head.

  ‘I’m scared,’ I shouted.

  ‘I wanted this, I wanted us. Our own family.’

  ‘It’s mine. My baby.’

  She turned from me.‘You’re actually leaving me, aren’t you?’

  ‘I don’t know what I’m doing!’ I shouted. ‘This baby–’ The contraction tore through me, building up, rising and knocking into me before I could catch a breath. There seemed to be no spaces between the pain.

  ‘Breathe. Slowly. Like this.’

  I opened my mouth. ‘Shut up,’ I shouted. ‘Get me – get me there.’

  She turned from me again. I saw her neck sag, as though her spine was failing to support her.

  ‘Where are you going?’ I said, my question rising into an involuntary scream.

  ‘Downstairs.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Just wait a few minutes,’ said Sylvie.

  ‘Oh God, Sylvie, don’t leave me.’

  ‘I have to.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Just wait a few minutes,’ said Sylvie, half-turning to me. ‘Just keep breathing.’

  ‘No! Sylvie!’ I bellowed, reaching out for her, but the waves of pain were riding into one another, lapping and overlapping, and falling against me. I crouched on the floor, tensing and moaning from outside myself like an animal, and I heard her shut the door.

  Twenty-One

  Richard

  The phone rang in the night, and I stumbled about in a shin-crashing state of bewilderment before grabbing it from the bathroom sink.

  ‘It’s Sylvie.’

  I could hear her breath through my own hammering pulse, as though she was pressing the receiver close to her ear as she asked me to meet her. There was a hallucinatory quality to her unexplained request on a phone in an unknown hour of the morning, like a dream that swung between a nightmare and merciful intervention. She was a tenuous link to Lelia, and I would leap at anything that might alter the insistent, remorseless flavour of my existence alone in the flat.

  ‘Do you know how Lelia is?’ I barked to no effect, as she told me where to meet her in her measured tones, like the manipulative little monster she was. I 1471’d her afterwards, but she had called on her mobile.

  I looked down at myself. I was unshaven, old-T-shirted, waxy-eared. What if that vixen, whose seemingly vague acquaintance with Lelia had merited an invitation to our wedding, could lead me to my wife? I ran into the shower and shaved, nicking myself. There were no clean underpants. I had very little clean washing. I found I was trembling as I dressed. I went out to the car, filled with manic purpose, lovingly grateful when the engine started, and I swung out of the square and headed towards Waterloo Bridge. I crossed the river, lit white and blue, suddenly irrationally hopeful and excited and in love with Lelia and our baby and my own trusty old car as I let myself be comforted like a poor fool with the temporary fantasies that the Thames and Sylvie had stirred in me. The offices on Stamford Street where I’d once visited various girls on magazines rose above me, surrounded by a tangle of unfamiliar new developments, and I dumped the car on a double yellow and stood for a moment, breathing deeply. I wanted a cigarette, though I had abandoned smoking years before. I bent over a little, an idea that I was having a heart attack flickering through my mind. I gulped the river-damp air. Sylvie had asked me to meet her outside the Tate Modern, but I was twenty-five minutes early, so I wandered down to the river to sit on a bench, and gazed at the water and thought of Lelia.

  I remembered the first time in my life I had seen her, on a boat. I had jumped on board, and there she was, vibrant and somehow naughty, well dressed for the country, her beautiful brown eyes holding the promise of excitement. I could sense her curves through her windproof jacket. She seemed a rare being in all her liveliness, shining out among the others. I wanted to see her again, and talk to her again, and try to kiss her. I wanted to wrest her from whatever bastard she was seeing. The water had streamed against the side of the boat as it lapped beside me on the bank of the Thames now, diluted fragments of the currents that had once flowed past her.

  The tide was low. I remembered the beach beneath the walkway, where I had once sat smoking spliffs with colleagues after subbing shifts on the Express in my early days in London. Tourists and drunks and Victorian pipe-hunters had always populated it until dusk and then abandoned it as night fell on that desolate expanse, so different from the arching illuminated symphony upriver to the west.

  I climbed over the gate and made my way down the concrete steps. The smell soaked me: the automatic trigger of sea, of seagull-heavy harbours, that made me long for something past and ineffable. On that rock-strewn strip of beach, away from the warm residue of the day’s traffic, the air was more mobile and scented with the colder depths of muddy water. I took off my shoes and walked barefoot along the sand, treading carefully over pebbles and old bottles, the bridge lights shining through the night in the distance. The river lapped and rolled, and even a trace of the waterlogged air I had once known made me think that I was mad to constrain myself in a landlocked fug of carbon m
onoxide. The gritty sand compacted pleasingly painfully beneath the arches of my feet. I began to feel nervous about the junkies and stray loners who might be down there. I narrowed my eyes. It was impossible to decipher the shadows that clustered beneath the railway bridge.

  The concrete wall above me darkened with the sky. A police boat went past, beaming its searchlight and disappearing into the night. I began to feel discomfited, the unaccustomed London silence pressing in on me, only the river’s breathing and the traffic on the far bank pumping with my lungs. Something specific reminded me of Sylvie Lavigne. A clear image of her surfaced in my head. I tried to rid myself of it. I felt as though I could almost smell her, and the memory of her scent loosened my knees for a fraction of a second against my will as I slowly walked. I banished the thought.

  It was dark all around me, St Paul’s rising in its haze of light on the far bank. I had never known fear here before, but as I moved along through the ink-spill shadows cast by the walkway’s pillars, longing, longing for Lelia beside me right then, the quietness intensified and anxiety infected the rhythm of my breathing. If I were to shout out, no one would hear me on the walkway. For a moment, I had a feeling that someone was there. I made myself look over one shoulder. I could see nothing. The river lapped yards in front of me, its surface shadowed by the bridge.

  ‘Hello,’ came Sylvie’s voice beside me.

  I let out a high scream.

  Sylvie Lavigne’s hands lay lightly on my shoulders. I dragged air into my lungs. Even in my confusion, my heart clattering painfully in my ears, I could smell her scent all about her, the bewitching skin fragrance merging confusingly with the mud streaks of the river, the live meatiness of seagull. She was breathless and agitated.

  ‘Richard. Shhhh! Richard, Richard,’ she said, a smiling exhalation of air somewhere near my chin.

  I gulped, trying to calm myself. Anger at the sight of her welled up inside me.

  ‘How did you get here?’ I said, half-shouting at her.

  ‘I saw you,’ she said. ‘I came down.’

  ‘What did you want to meet me for?’ I said. I was taken aback by the reality of her physical presence. Even in the dark, she was instantly familiar, shockingly tangible after her weeks of absence. Her hair was somehow less sleek than usual. She was wearing a pale summer dress. I could just see the shape of her breasts beneath the fabric in the moon and bridge light. Her eyebrows were dark question marks. A surge of rage went through me at the memory of her treachery.