Authors: Anna Stothard
“Things are going to fall apart,” said another.
Three weeks after Lily’s wake I did a handstand for David, showing him how straight I could get my back and how I could walk on my hands across his living room. I was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, my bare toes stretching up against gravity and the tendons in my feet arching forwards. An hour later we were fucking, but I don’t remember it clearly. I remember the childishness of doing the handstands in front of him – how the blood rushed to my head and my spine tingled as it stretched upwards. I remember that it was evening, and that he said I should have been a gymnast. I said gym class was for pansies, it was all about football, but then there’s a big blank space, an explosion of noise and eradicated synapses in which we must have kissed and touched properly for the first time.
The absence of any lasting recollection of these moments makes me think of my mind as a city, and that first evening with him as one of those bulldozed Los Angeles buildings. There is the outline of a memory in the rubble, but it’s sunken and tumbled. Amongst the burnt-out foliage and gang graffiti of it I have no idea how we got to the point of me itching black cotton knickers off my ankles, like a cricket playing music, and realizing with horror that I was still wearing blue cotton socks. There is no lasting memory of how we got from the over-lit living room to the darkened bedroom. I couldn’t tell you what he looked like naked that night, or what I felt like naked in front of him. I couldn’t tell you who did what to whom or the patterns of our bodies on the bedsheets. I couldn’t tell you if it was scary kissing someone whose body was so oddly large compared to mine. I couldn’t tell you how that worked, logistically. I couldn’t tell you what I was thinking about, what it smelt like, or what noises happened to be going on in his building at the time. I couldn’t tell you if we were silent or loud.
The next thing I remember was sitting on the edge of his bed and knowing, without looking, that he was watching me while I put Lily’s tan-coloured lace bra back on and tugged a white T-shirt over my head. I sucked my tummy in slightly because he was watching, and when I lifted up my arms to pull the T-shirt on, I smelt him on my skin. Together, we had an entirely different smell than apart. It was deodorant and wet flesh, dampness and unwashed sheets, dried saliva and jogging in the dark. I smiled happily to myself at the thought of the last hour, knowing David was watching me smile.
Daphne was always telling me “not to be so angry”. Daphne moved in with Dad when I was eleven. For some reason she thought I was going to be something she could play with, but I wouldn’t be a doll or a daughter or even a friend to her. A few months after she moved in, I was already ignoring her existence, and she was already talking about me in the third person. “Why does she have to dress like that?” Daphne would say, with me standing right there in front of her. “Why doesn’t she help more at the café? Why can’t she smile sometimes, huh? Why is she always so bloody angry?”
The only thing that Daphne and I had in common after she moved in was an addiction to sleep that I copied off her. She had always been a compulsive sleeper, I think, but for me the dependency only came the year after Grandma and Grandpa died. Daphne moved into our flat the same week Grandma moved to the hospice. For those few months while Grandma was still alive, two important people in my life were desperate to be unconscious. Grandma would talk at great length in her nonsense-poetry language about how she couldn’t understand her surroundings any more. She wanted desperately to die, squirming darkly to herself in a hospice room that smelt of damp flesh and antiseptic soap. She wanted to be “out there”. She wanted to be “no”. She wanted to be “dust” and to be “gone now please”. Meanwhile there was Daphne, who would come upstairs after her waitressing shifts, pop a Valium or two and not wake up until twenty minutes before her next shift.
Daphne and Dad’s bedroom developed a thick, acidic smell. At breakfast time most mornings before I fell in love with sleep, I’d stand at their bedroom door and inhale the edges of that tangible sleep bubble. Every step into that scented blister sent adrenalin into my brain: I was scared that at any moment she might wake up. She’d be all tangled with limbs akimbo and cocooned in limp sheets, a look of concentration on her face as if she was counting out change in the café. Without even touching her, she’d radiate this thick heat that made me feel pleasantly claustrophobic. There was one time when I wanted to ask her something, but couldn’t bring myself to wake her up. It was around 5:00 p.m. and she was napping, an activity that ate up most of the afternoon. Her waitressing shifts at the café seemed to diminish rather than increase after she started sleeping in Dad’s bed every night. I snuck bravely through the creaky door, which used to be Grandma and Grandpa’s creaky door, then tiptoed through the bubble of sleep smell and extended my fingers over her body. Where should I touch her? My fingers hovered, doubtful, towards her pale shoulder, when suddenly she flinched and grabbed my wrist. She held it tight, without seeming to recognize or even see me. She looked me in the eye as if I was an unpleasant creature from her unconscious, and I froze, appalled. The moment hung there in the air for enough time for me to notice some mascara residue lodged in the crow’s feet around her eyes, then her painted fingers peeled away from my skin and she started to snore again, while I backed out of the room into the corridor.
Oddly enough David did nearly the same thing to me once. David mostly had insomnia, but when he did sleep he fell into a coma-like trance and was nearly impossible to wake up. No amount of music or coffee-making or telephones ringing worked. There was one time when his mobile phone kept ringing and he wasn’t waking up, so I stepped hesitantly into his bedroom and stretched out my hand to shake him. He looked sweet, asleep. Then suddenly his big hands grabbed and held my wrist hard enough to leave a clumsy bracelet of heart-shaped bruises that he claimed he didn’t remember creating. He looked me bang in the eye, and then let go of my hand. I’d been leaning away from him, scared, so when he let go of me I stumbled backwards onto his carpet. He nonchalantly turned away from me and started to snore.
“She’s copying you!” I remember Dad shouting at Daphne six months after I started my obsessive sleeping, when he finally realized that I’d been missing school several times a week and not seeing my friends. “You’re a role model now, babe, you can’t just be a lazy slag.”
“I’m not a slag,” said Daphne, missing the point. She wasn’t very bright.
“The doctor says she’s not got Mono and she’s not got narcolepsy. She’s not addicted to sleepers, either,” said Dad pointedly to Daphne. “All I can think is she’s copying you.”
“I’m not her mother. I never signed on to be a fucking mother.”
“I’m not asking you to be a mother! I’m asking you to be conscious. Occasionally.”
After Dad started to take an interest in my sleeping, it became even more obsessive. If he made me go to school, I would fall asleep at my desk or in the playground. Teachers would find me asleep in the stationery cupboard, sweating like I was having a seizure. I’d fall asleep behind the games shed, or in the cafeteria, or curled up in the girls’ locker rooms. My favourite feeling was the sinking sensation between being awake and asleep, when I could only half-control my thoughts and they half-controlled me. Eventually Dad took me to a big white hospital in the suburbs, where I tried to tell a moustached Asian doctor about my interest in half-thoughts. I tried to explain to him that colours were stronger in my unconscious. The doctor made notes while I told him that within twenty minutes of closing my eyes each evening after school, deities would fall in love with me over candle-lit séances in the jungle. On other nights I invented perfect languages, full of perfect onomatopoeic words, which united continents of warring tribes in a mythical version of Africa. I explained how I often murdered evangelical dictators and escaped capture by climbing into train carriages full of corpses, or became the zoo keeper at a miniature zoo full of calf-high giraffes and ankle-high gazelles in my dreams.
“Do you ever think about falling asleep for ever?” asked the Doctor. The Doctor’s office was full of mahogany furniture and waxy pot plants that made sinister shadows on the walls. There were bookshelves in all the corners and books on shelves above the desk –
John Locke and the Paradox of Forgetting
,
Freud’s Unconscious
, that sort of stuff.
“Like, dying?” I said, looking at a poster of a sleeping baby behind the doctor’s head. Half the baby’s head was open to reveal his brain, and there were anatomical descriptions of each sleep-related section of the brain.
“Do you think that death is like being asleep for a long time?” he said.
“No,” I said, narrowing my eyes, “I don’t think about dying very much.”
“Do you miss your Grandma and Grandpa?” he said.
“Yes,” I said, “But I don’t believe in Heaven.”
“So where are your Grandma and Grandpa now?” he said.
“They’re in a box under Dad’s bed,” I said, “Cos they were cremated.”
“Do you miss your mother?”
“No,” I said.
“You never wish you had a mother?”
“No,” I said crossing my arms.
“Does it make you feel bad that she left you?”
I shrugged, nonplussed.
“Does it make you feel unlovable?”
“What?” I said. “What do you mean?”
“Does it scare you when people leave?”
“What’s that got to do with liking to sleep?” I said, and promptly lost interest in the whole conversation. He was a weedy man with thick glasses. I imagined the doctor as a child while he tried to tell me that it’s important to keep a hold on reality, however banal it seems.
“Reality is very important,” he said. I imagined the doctor being bullied at school, being put into rubbish bins and spat on. He told me that I was obviously very creative and that I had a high IQ, but mustn’t let myself slip away from the tangible world and the people around me. I imagined the doctor falling asleep in bed with his boyfriend or wife, snoring just slightly.
The doctor made me stay overnight in that hospital, with electrodes attached to my wrists. The hospital room was the colour of pale eggshells, and there was a white porcelain lamp with a pink floral shade next to the bed along with a plastic mug of water and a box of tissues. There was a window that looked out onto another part of the hospital. I could see a middle-aged man asleep in bed and a nurse tucking the covers in around him. In another window there was a nurses’ station with a skinny lady filing her nails while watching a tiny television. In my bedroom there was a video recorder attached to the ceiling, which could see every bit of the room apart from a little triangle of space directly behind it.
Dad was livid with me when the Doctor told him that I hadn’t slept for a minute all night. I’d spent the entire evening drawing pictures of dolphins on the wall behind the camera, out of view, or making rude faces at the camera.
“Do you know how much that night cost me?” Dad shouted at me when we got on the train the next morning. I shook my head. “Now they want you to come in for weekly therapy sessions. They think you’re crazy, but I won’t have it. We’d all like to spend our lives falling asleep and swimming with dolphins, but we have to work. You’re just an attention-seeking little girl who doesn’t know how to behave. That’s all. Do you know that? You only think about yourself. You’re just like your fucking mother,” he said. “And you’re going to snap the fuck out of it,” he said as the train moved off.
I didn’t say anything in retaliation, and I stared out of the window at suburban rooftops, torn in places by crumbling walls and graffiti – “bite”, “slum”, “ideal”, said the walls in kaleidoscopic bubble-writing. The sky slipped by above the chimneys and our train fed itself into the city. “Abluvion”, I thought, imagining Grandpa’s dictionary again. As the train slipped underground and became the Tube I begrudgingly decided to stop sleeping all the time, mostly because going to see the boring doctor once a week was a grim prospect. Although legitimately tired, I stayed awake through the entire train journey and watched a B-horror flick called
Curse of the Puppet Master
with Dad until midnight that evening, long after Daphne had popped Valiums and passed out on Dad’s lap. For the next few years I sometimes woke up in places other than I fell asleep, or dreamed things that I thought were true when they weren’t, but I never spoke about these sleep demons to him again.
On the whole I slept unexpectedly deeply in David’s bed, falling into a well of nervous unconsciousness while he was sleeping next to me, but also while he padded around the flat reading magazines and fixing his cameras. He told me that I whimpered in my sleep, which embarrassed me, but I wouldn’t tell him about the dreams of fainting and falling, or of the bleeding sunsets and the mouthful of goo being disgorged from the lips of a newborn baby. I also wouldn’t tell him about a new recurring dream, a horrible Enkidu-Gilgamesh-and-Lily-inspired nightmare that started in the idyllic few weeks after David and I started sharing the same bed. The dreamscape was a desert village of concrete houses with barren cactus gardens. I’d be playing with the desert geckos and chameleons a little way from the town, letting their little webbed toes crawl all over my body and face while I lie on the floor. Then with a rush and an intake of breath, a sudden panic comes over me as I remembered: we are meant to be moving house that day! I immediately start to run towards my house, bare feet panting over hot sand and brambles, geckos tumbling backwards off my skin, but when I get to our kitchen it’s empty. I run out front just in time to catch sight of David and Lily driving away in David’s new black SUV. Sometimes they kiss before driving away, but they never look back. The worst part of the dream was how as time passed and nobody came back for me, my flesh began to crawl with metallic-coloured scales. They came painfully out of my skin like teeth from raw gums. My spine grew lengthways, and I screamed when it broke out of my lower back, becoming a tail. My tongue grew while my legs shrunk, and when a new family came to live in the desert bungalow, nobody took any notice of the gecko in the garden.
I’d wake with a sudden gulp of air, pleased to see David. Sometimes he’d stroke my hair and I’d pull away from him, not wanting to be patronized. Sometimes we’d make love after my nightmares, and I’d feel even more like a strange animal. Occasionally he even held me in place on the bed or the floor. If he held me too tightly I’d buck against him, my hips squirming on impulse and the palms of my hands pressing neatly into the groves of his shoulders. He’d pin me down hard, like we were fighting or play-wrestling. I’d push him away when he came close, and he’d drag me back in, then he’d push away and I’d pull in, yet we hardly moved at all. I loved him. My skin would itch for him to hurt me, but I didn’t ask him to. I knew I was with him, kissing him, touching him, but sometimes I wanted more proof of our connection and my physical existence. I was more existent when he touched me. I wanted pain, though. I wanted the proof, the pain, the sure rush of being connected to another human being. All I could do was buck under him and fight, though, and could never quite articulate my interest in feeling pain.
The closest I ever got, somewhat comically, was once asking him:
“Have you ever killed a chicken?”
I wasn’t bringing up the subject of pain, only I’d seen a documentary about the sex lives of animals. When a female otter is in heat, for example, the male glides towards her under the stream water, and they copulate while swimming slowly forwards together in the river.
“Can’t say I have,” said David, lighting a cigarette and lounging. He tipped ash into a silver tray.
“You press their backs so they think they’re going to have sex,” I said, “And then you snap their necks.”
“I’d never hurt you,” he said.
I laughed at his earnestness, and kissed his shoulder.