Emily Barr - The Sleeper

Then I laugh. I was woken by two junk emails, one from Pizza Express and the other from the dotcomgiftshop, from whom I bought a little light once and who now email me more regularly than any actual human being. There is, however, also a text from Guy, from what I realise was only an hour ago, when I was comatose. I have hardly been asleep for any time: it is only half past midnight.

Lovely Wilberforce , he has written. I’m going to be worrying about you all night, but I know Ellen’s right and I must leave you to sleep. If you wake and want to see me it’s F21. I love you. Truly. We will make this happen. xxx

I stand up, wobbly but surprisingly well recovered, and try to unlock my door, realising as I do so that it was not locked in the first place, because I had not been capable of doing it.

I stumble along happily, and his words run through my head again and again. He loves me. He has never said that before, and I have carefully not said it to him either. We will make it happen. He loves me. We will make it happen.

I walk down the narrow corridor, enclosed in my familiar world, with its institutional train smell, its reassuring constant movement. In the space between carriages, I pass a man in pyjama bottoms and flip-flops heading towards the loo. He gives me a ‘we’re in this together’ smile, and I return it. I knock on Guy’s door, and when he doesn’t reply, I try the handle and push it open.

The scream rises in my throat. I grab the door frame to keep myself upright while I stare at the scene in front of me, a scene that makes no sense at all.

The train grinds to a halt, and everything is still.

part two

Iris

chapter thirteen

It was one of the sobbing mornings. They were happening more and more frequently, and I hated them. I was furious with myself for behaving so illogically. This kind of thing was not meant to happen.

I woke, in absolute darkness, crying, hiccuping, and feeling hopeless. For a second I thought Laurie was not beside me, that he had slipped away in the night, but then I saw that he was there, sleeping peacefully on his side, his mouth slightly open. I had not even disturbed him.

The only thing I could do was to get out. I took my bike and rode away into the blackness.

It was better at once. There was something invigorating about being out on a dry winter morning with my bike lights on (I put two on the front and two on the back as a nod to safety), my long hair squashed on top by my helmet, my furry coat covered by a huge reflective jacket. As soon as my feet crunched across the frozen grass, something lightened inside me. I was just a tiny part of a huge universe, and nothing really mattered. Every single thing was temporary, and one day all of us would be gone without trace. It was an intensely soothing thought.

I retrieved my bike from the place I left it when I remembered, hidden in the hedge. I appreciated the fact that the little noises of cycling – the heaves and squeaks of a bike setting off, the crunch of a stony lane under tyres – were the loudest thing in this tiny corner of the cosmos.

I knew it was past six o’clock, but it felt more like two in the morning. There were owls screeching as I set off down the lane, and invisible night creatures fled into undergrowth at my approach. I could hear the occasional distant car, and I liked the feeling of solidarity, and particularly the certain knowledge that whoever was in that car would never think to wonder if there was a woman on a bicycle somewhere nearby, listening.

I knew, as I cycled towards the main road, that one day I was going to have to stop running away. Things were not right between me and Laurie and I knew that, if I were braver, I would have been addressing that fact. One day he would leave. He would have to. It would be better if I were to take control and make it happen, rather than continuing to limp on like this.

Sometimes I came close to losing my poise completely. I could feel myself edging closer to yelling at him, swearing, demanding that he get out of my bed and my head. When he went away just before Christmas, relief had ambushed me. I had functioned fine. I even had a friend over to the house, like a normal person, and even though I had panicked when she insisted on coming to my house rather than meeting in town or at the beach, it had ended up being the most satisfying interaction with someone from the real world that I’d had for years.

That was what I would do, I decided as the light from the street lamps on the main road started to illuminate my surroundings. There was the church, the trees, the houses set back from the road. I would go and call in on her. That would calm me down. It would give me enough of a blast of reality to keep me functioning for a while.

I had spent the previous evening sitting by the wood burner, painting my toenails carefully lilac, and trying to pluck up the courage to ask him to go away again, to travel, to do something without me. I was his whole world, and he was mine, and that, I was finally suspecting, was not healthy. Other people did not live like this. We kept people away by being rude to them. It was not the way I was brought up, but it was quite enjoyable.

‘I’m not going to leave you,’ he kept protesting. ‘Not ever again,’ and I was so infuriated, and so annoyed with myself for being a tiny bit grateful for his insistence, that I’d burst into tears and stormed off to bed.

We lived on the outskirts of a village which itself was on the outskirts of Falmouth, which was, I suppose, a town on the outskirts of Great Britain. The two of us had hidden here for years, shutting out everyone, and it had suited us both, for a while. We lived with the cats, Ophelia and Desdemona, and I worked at home, proofreading impenetrable legal books that arrived by special delivery every few weeks. Our life was small, but then one week I bought a lottery ticket with the Saturday paper on a whim, and now everything was surreally different.

I had not told Laurie that I had won the lottery. My plans were not going to include him.

I pulled on to the main road, which was pleasingly empty of cars. I would, I thought, go into Falmouth and wander around for a while, have breakfast in a café now that I could do such a thing without counting the pennies, and then I would go to visit Lara. I liked the idea of our setting up a little routine of going to one another’s houses, with neither Laurie nor her grumpy husband involved.

I did not know Lara well, at all. She lived in London for most of the week, making lovely old buildings into horrible identikit ‘luxury apartments’, and her husband, on the two occasions I had met him, had made no secret of the fact that he wished I had not been there. I had done my best to radiate his hostility right back at him. Nonetheless, getting to know Lara felt like a first tentative step back into the world. She was, unwittingly, my test friend. I made an effort, with her, not to shut her out, not to be brusque or sharp. It was hard at first, but I liked it after a while.

She had spoken enthusiastically about her commute on the night train, when I saw her on Christmas Eve. She loved that train. She would be getting off it that morning, transferring in the grey half-light to the Falmouth service. I would show up and see what happened. If they told me to go away, I would. If she was busy, I would cycle home. It was just an idea.

I chained my bike to a traffic sign outside Trago’s as it started to get light. The street lights were still on as the sky turned pink, and I was warm on the inside from my bike ride, and cold on my cheeks. It would be a while until I was able to get breakfast, I thought, so I would find the coast path and stroll for a bit instead.

I walked for an hour along the clifftops, until the path descended to the beach at Maenporth. That stretch of coast path was crunchy, with glassed-over puddles and solid peaks and troughs of frozen mud. The sea was as perfectly still as a pond, and the bare branches of the trees around me did not move at all. I passed one runner, a skinny man with the muscular leanness and hollow cheeks of one who exercises too much, and one dog walker, a woman in her forties with wild insomniac eyes.