Some Will Not Sleep: Selected Horrors

by Adam Nevill

  In the dark, I sat my drained and tired body down upon the end of my bed. It had gone eight.

  I thought of what he had said to me in such an offhand manner in the car, and of how it had numbed me to the core. I had been poor company thereafter. In the passenger seat, Toby had read my shock and merely adopted a smirk that had lasted for the remainder of the day. I had been too proud to lose my temper, too upset to speak. I had been betrayed, and betrayal is a powerful emotion that shuts down most of the mind, besides its ability to sustain the misery of betrayal, at least until rage takes over. And this was no lovers’ tiff, because we were not lovers. But we had shared a bond that only lovers share. Or rather I realised, with a cold trickle of terror and shame in equal amounts, that what we had shared for twenty-three years was the devotion of a dog to its master; a master who considered his own needs as superior to those of the dog, and was soon to abandon the trusting hound too.

  In that dim and fusty room in a boarding house on the shore of a relentless tide, I could not bring myself to list all of the things that I had sacrificed and missed in life, due to my misguided attachment to this man, this friend. But the listing of my grievances would come in time. There was always time for the listing of grievances in the long dark days that filled my existence.

  Toby would soon return to a comfortable world full of potential and opportunity and promise that I had known nothing of in the last two decades. A world that he had deliberately kept hidden from me, and had retreated to during his enigmatic disappearances over the years.

  This was to be our last journey together too: without a trace of remorse, he had told me as much, in the car, on the French side of the channel. After the trip’s conclusion in two days, I would be left with so many silent hours of contemplation on wasted time and youth. And the memory of him and his deception, which would become viler in my mind, would always be there to accompany me as I sank back into a directionless, debilitating and miserable poverty. He did not state this, but we both knew it to be true.

  What did any of these uncanny experiences of ours now mean? Our explorations in the abandoned and derelict corners of Great Britain, a country that now hurtled backwards to the social inequality of Queen Victoria’s reign, had come to nothing. And so quick was Britain’s regression through history that everyone had been taken by surprise. It was possible that the society would go even further back to feudalism, and then reach the new Dark Ages with a population to match. The situation was even worse in France; the French were now but a fraction of the population within their own countryside, and only the dead of ages remained en masse.

  Toby and I had thought ourselves unique and above the disintegrating world. But what music, or poetry, or writing, or films, or art, had our collaborations in the esoteric achieved? What had our explorations of psychic geography in a dying world ever produced? Those creative ventures we had planned, and incessantly talked about, through long hours in the squats and grim flats that we had shared together, smoked in together, and in which we had withdrawn from the fallen world together, had degenerated into recreational drug use and a perpetual staring into space. We had become degenerate and hopeless, like most of what remained of the world.

  I thought of those inexplicable stone figures in this town with their faces turned away. Without Toby, my fate would become theirs: cold as stone, an installation planted in isolation, paralysed with despair, waiting for the darkness to finally take everything away.

  But if I protested too much about his abandonment of me, Toby would only shrug and smirk and merely tell me that I was being ‘dramatic’. And then he would be gone into the light of comfort, into a grazing of pale female flesh, into vast warm rooms, and into so much money that his wealth will only cause him anxiety at the prospect of it being shared. And I will be left behind, in a place like this: a dead corner. My existence beyond whatever tiny grim space I occupy will amount to nothing more than him saying, ‘I knew a chap once . . .’ That will be my epitaph, an anecdote briefly spoken and then sinking in the fragrant air of some noisy party in Paris, or South Kensington, or Edinburgh, where the privileged congratulate themselves on still being privileged despite all that has happened in the world.

  Better for me, and for all those he and his kind have exploited, if I had smothered him right then in that guest house, with one of the musty pillows, as he lay snoring like some sated king upon the faded candlewick bedspread. Over his thin pointy face I should have pressed down hard until his vigour was stoppered.

  Instead of murder most just, I abandoned the unlit room; leaving the curtains open to the darkness, to the immensity that made an even greater mockery of my foolish trust and pathetic hopes. I went down and through the silent house and into a cold night roaring with ocean.

  I imagined that some place, somewhere inside this dim town, must still serve food. Maybe hot food would have made me feel better too. But I would bring nothing back for Toby; I would sate my own hunger. For was I just to wait for him to awaken from his drugged stupor, and then find him nourishment, as I had always done? And as he would expect me to do, and at my own expense? He was entitled to what I could do for him; that was the essence of our relationship. And what one group of people can do for another has been revealed as the foundation of civilisation, now that all illusions of fairness have been doused, and now that nearly everything is in ruins. Perhaps greed is the very root of our species.

  I walked down Quai du Canada and avoided looking at the great imploring sea, so idiotic in its surging. I did not want to be pulled into those black, churning waters. To my left, the long line of empty hotels and bars had unlit windows. Many were uncovered from the inside, with blankets nailed to sash frames, or old newspapers taped to the glass.

  Before I turned inland, I saw another stone figure at a window. That one had withdrawn itself further inside the room. But in the ambient glow of one of the last working streetlamps, the figure still showed the black ocean its stone head, covered with a cowl and clutching white fingers.

  I walked along Rue du Mézeray and Route de Ryes. Here too everything was closed, shuttered, derelict. But in the weak light of the lamps, from the occasional lit window above street level, I caught glimpses of other stone statues in the distant gloom of the empty gift shops, or crouching in despair behind the dirty glass of bankrupt estate agents, clothes shops and cafés. Each of the figures made me start, and I made sure not to stare for too long, in case my appalled scrutiny would draw me inside an empty shop front, to stand in horror in the darkness, in the dust with them, amongst the litter of flyers advertising pizza restaurants long gone.

  I walked along the wider thoroughfare of Rue Marie-Rose Thonnard and saw not a soul. The restaurants were shuttered against indifference, one sustained long enough to fade their hoardings and signage; the coaches had long departed and left no trace; the shuffling tourists were less than a memory of a distant era when holidays were taken by any but the few. The darkness had come in from the sea and refilled the places in which human antics had once occurred.

  On both sides of the Channel, what remained of us now drew together in greying cities to clutch at the charity that was thrown from the back of lorries. Or we stood in long lines, day after day, hunched toward the distant promise of something of colour. France was also being closed down, village by town, as if the villages and towns were little lights on some great grid that winked out on the Grande Retraite towards Paris, and had left the rest of this land in darkness. On the grid, the coastline was almost entirely black now, as if the sea was coming over the rim; thick and salty and toxic.

  But in the abandoned places, other regions were either opening or had always been open but obscured by irrelevance. Without clutter and noise and traffic and so much electricity, strange flowers were now opening to the moon, and curious doors and windows were being left carelessly agape and uncovered. There was no life to be had in such spaces now being revealed; just the silent staring of what had invested itself, and will continue to do so until a
n unrecorded end of everything living. But that had done nothing to dim Toby’s fascination with such things in such places. Until now, because here he was saying goodbye to it all; bidding farewell to the places where those left alive were outnumbered by the dead.

  Back to the sea. Toward the seaward side of Arromanches, I found an open restaurant. And I studied its yellowing menu intently through the brown glass while my stomach gaped and burned. The broad windows were tinted to protect diners from the heat; many years ago someone had thought it a good idea. In the 70s perhaps. This town seemed to have known nothing of the brief peaks of prosperity that had come and gone since the decline. Like every other place here, the people left when the tourists left, or when the factories closed, or if the fields became overgrown, and the jobs vanished.

  I checked the prices rather than the items on the restaurant menu. Vanity induced me to casually withdraw the coins from my pocket and count them; I knew exactly how much money I was carrying. Along with the crisp brown sheet of a treasured ten-euro note that I could not bear to part with was the last of my benefits in coinage: three euros and thirty-four cents. I’d had thirty two cents, but I had found two greening one-cent coins close to the cemetery and had polished them into a serviceable lustre while Toby stared at the sky, from amongst the weeds and tombstones. My half of the guest house bill, five euros, was buried at the bottom of my rucksack. That five was gone, dead to me, and was to become the property of the yellowy woman soon enough.

  There was to be no rib-eye steak or bourguignon for me that night. It would have to be soup of the day and a cup of coffee. When I returned to Wolverhampton, whatever remained of my money would then have to be meted out for two weeks until my next benefit payment. The length of time was staggering, and recalling it made me lightheaded. I even leaned against the glass of the restaurant for a moment to regain my balance. Inside the restaurant, I noticed a woolly head, hunched over a table, feeding.

  The restaurant was warm. The walls were brown and tatty and peeling. The furniture municipal. The carpet hard under my feet. I could see no staff behind the counter with the curved glass sneeze screens and little golden lamps shielding empty hot plates. Despite the scores of tables, there was only one diner: what appeared to be an old man in a bad wig and a maternity dress, gobbling at soup. I kept my eyes away from him. Beside his table was a wheelchair and a plastic supermarket bag full of children’s books.

  I walked along the broad counter, peeking over and muttering ‘Hello’ towards the dim suggestion of a kitchen beyond a fire door. No one came out.

  I sat at a table by a window; there was nothing to be seen through it besides some smudges of building exteriors and the odd globe of a street lamp. I could still hear the sea. For all I knew it was as black as oil now, and welling up the glass outside the restaurant.

  A meagre old woman with a man’s haircut eventually shuffled out of the dim kitchen and approached without looking at me once. She dropped a menu encased in a heavy binding on the table before me, and then retreated back behind the counter where she busied herself with things out of my sight. I felt awkward and under-dressed. I had not washed in three, no four . . . no, at least five days. I was pungent and rubbery beneath my waterproof and knitwear. Stupidly, I envied the disabled man his ghastly floral maternity dress; at least he was clean. What had possessed me to think that I could come inside here and eat?

  I raised the leatherette menu, which was the size of a stamp album and tasselled. I affected a poise and nonchalance that filled me with a hot self-loathing. As if I, a scruffy man with soiled canvas shoes on his feet, ate in French restaurants as a matter of course. I was ridiculous.

  I added the price of soup to the price of coffee and then counted my own money again, inside my head, to make sure that I had enough.

  The waitress came back; she knew I was English. Who else would visit here now that the Americans stayed within their own borders, with their own dead? She barked more than she spoke. ‘No steak. No stew. Just lemon sole, potato gratin.’

  ‘Soup?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Soup. And to drink, I’ll have . . . a cup of coffee. White. Sugar.’

  She snatched the menu off me.

  ‘Bread with the soup?’ I asked, and tried to keep the desperation out of my voice.

  ‘Extra.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Furty cents.’

  ‘Great. Thank you.’

  She was already walking away from the table as I thanked her. I fretted that she had not taken my order for bread. I felt that I would die without bread. I had only eaten two sandwiches at eleven, and had been saving the crisps and chocolate that Toby had eaten for later.

  But I think the soup was the best thing that I had ever eaten, and there was plenty of it. I soaked it into the two slices of white bread and then crammed them into my mouth. When I had finished eating, I sat back and sipped my coffee. Feeling magnanimous, expansive, a man of the world, I pondered a tip.

  And left the restaurant without leaving one; the meal consumed most of my change, and I had deducted points because of the abrupt service. Thoughts of money had also spoiled the second half of the coffee, which I had swallowed without any memory of doing so. I had left my room in Wolverhampton the previous morning with forty euros to my name, but the ferry, petrol, guest house, the soup and the lunch that had I paid for, had left me with only ten euros to live on for a fortnight. A miserable prospect, but I had done so before, many times over the years, having eschewed a material lifestyle, as had Toby – ‘because what is the point now?’ – or so he’d always claimed.

  Hunched over, I plodded back towards our lodging. I kept my head down to avoid the stone figures and my instinctive gaping at the sea; the horrified astonishment that I felt it wanted from me.

  I was quickly consumed again by my petulant thoughts about paying for our lunch. It was not an unusual train of thought; spending what little I had on Toby inevitably began an interior discourse on the unfair division of our limited resources. But considering what Toby had so recently told me, about his father’s directorship of a major surviving industry, and his parents’ purchase of a large flat for their son in South Kensington in London, where he would now reside while working for his father’s cremation empire, would it have been unreasonable for me to raise the matter of half the cost of our lunch?

  This line of enquiry soon had me gasping for breath and slapping at the stone walls that I passed on my way back to the guest house. I even paused to scream, ‘Jesus Christ!’ at the black and utterly featureless sky. Cascading through my mind came specific memories, and phrases of his about our companionship. A terrific welling sensation of betrayal was the sole result of such musings.

  Toby had always pleaded poverty for the twenty-three years that I had known him. I recalled his habitual rent-free living in my dismal flats and rooms. He’d always claimed to have no home address; to have successfully crafted a possession-free existence that involved living on the sofas and the floor-space of ‘friends’, and sometimes even in a tent on beaches and in verdant parks that no one used any more. And I had admired him for this; I had even recounted his exploits to anyone who would listen in the long aid queues. What had attracted me to Toby in the first place was his calm, his confidence, his refusal to worry, his aversion to any anxiety about money. And now I knew how such an attitude was sustained.

  Back in the days when I could find work, how many jobs had I lost due to his insistence on my dropping everything and embarking on a new journey with him? Journeys that I had inevitably funded. And during that time when there was, at least, some work available to the educated but semi-skilled, how often had I called in sick when some new adventure was announced upon Toby’s return into my life? What of his curious and inexplicable golden suntans that were not bestowed by any British sun? They were a result of what he had claimed were holidays provided by affluent friends, or merely ‘friends of friends’. And he may well have been sunning himself on the decks of
‘friends’ yachts, while I had collected tickets at the dispensary, and handed boxes of powdered milk over the counter to single mothers who shouted, ‘Dat’s mine, innit,’ while pointing long fingernails at the hundreds of parcels behind me, on the shelves holding the boxes that awaited collection.

  Not once had Toby ever invited me to his parental home, which had sounded excessive during his confession in the car – the home in Suffolk, I am referring to, not the one in Spain. In fact, Toby had always dismissed his parents as tyrants, as bullies, and had claimed to have had no contact with them. For all of the years that I had known him, he had practically passed himself off as an orphan to engage my sympathy. And it was a lie; it was all lies. He was a lie. Utterly inauthentic while claiming that his life was a penniless search for the sudden emergence of the authentically weird. He was a Trustafarian and had been slumming at my considerable expense for twenty-three years.

  Lies. Liar. Lies. Liar.

  I ran down to the water and fell upon the freezing, wet sand and I clutched at it with my hands. I shuddered with a rage so powerful that I became blacker than the terrible sea.

  And he was getting married. Married: how was that even possible? There were no women in our lives.

  I walked into our room a little calmer, but still intent on confrontation. I would have something of Toby’s fortune. I had decided this while sobbing into the stones on the beach; rocks reduced to dust by so many waves for tedious millennia. It would not be inappropriate for Toby to now provide for me; to return the favour, so to speak, by paying a pension. I also felt triumphant about eating while he’d slept, but Toby merely said, ‘I’m not hungry’ when I asked him, ‘What are you going to do about food?’ So my little victory was dashed.

  I found him slouched upon his bed, smoking a joint that I had been able to smell from the ground floor of the guest house. He’d been inside my rucksack to find the little baggy, containing enough skunk for two joints, that was to have been a treat during our visit to Normandy. The baggy was now empty; he’d put all of the weed into one joint for himself. His eyes were red and heavily lidded.