Emily Barr - The Sleeper

When we had children we were going to extend, to make more bedrooms and a playroom and a tree house and all sorts of other things. Sam used to fantasise about sticky fingerprints on the windows; but the windows have remained pristine.

‘This is glorious.’ Iris is looking at the view.

‘You never really get used to it, because it’s different every day.’

‘I bet. If I lived here I’d just stare out of the window all the time.’

‘That’s pretty much what I do.’

She laughs, but I am serious. I have nothing else to do. I haven’t even been able to find an admin job. Every time I apply for anything, they come back with the same word: ‘overqualified’. Yet there is nothing for which my qualifications would be any use. Every job in my field, in property development and architecture, is already taken. I have flirted with the idea of Asda, but Sam has stopped me.

‘How’s the proofreading going?’ I am pleased that I remember that. Iris and I met on the ferry to St Mawes one afternoon. We got talking in an idle way, and discovered that both of us were going over there on a whim, just for the boat trip. When we got there we walked around in the harsh wind, and her hair blew all over her face and even mine started to escape from its grips and pins. Then we went and sat in a dark little pub up a side road and drank bottled lager. It was random, and transgressive, and I liked it.

‘Oh, fine,’ she says. ‘I like working from home. Being able to set my own hours, take control of my work life.’ Her face creases right up when she laughs, and this makes me think of a baby laughing. ‘That sounds like I’m operating sex lines, doesn’t it? Or posing on the end of a webcam. I specialise in legal books. Rock and roll. But it’s going fine, thanks. I should keep a diary. It would be the world’s most boring document. Every day just precisely the same.’

‘I used to keep a diary,’ I tell her. ‘Back when my life was interesting. You can’t reread a diary, though, can you? Not without cringing mightily. But your work must be satisfying, in a way?’

‘Yeah. Some days. You have to get in the right frame of mind. I have the radio on all the time, BBC 6, so there’s music going constantly, but also – and this is a key thing for me – my boyfriend’s around too. Laurie. He works from home as well, so there’s just enough company. We both like the music. It’s a cosy little world. You could say boring, but it suits me.’

I hand her a glass of Prosecco. ‘Cheers,’ I say.

‘Cheers,’ she responds.

I sip the drink, and in that instant I know that I could become dependent on alcohol too easily. It would be so logical, to slip into a habit of drinking every afternoon.

‘So it’s just the two of you?’ I say. ‘Like us. Sam and me.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘You get pulled into your own little world, don’t you?’

‘Do you find it gets stifling?’

‘I think I’m a hermit at heart, and Laurie is more so. Me and him and the cats. It’s not for everyone, but it works for us. If I’d been born in a different era, I’d have been great as a nun in a closed order, or a wild woman living in a cave on a mountainside.’

‘You live in your cave in Budock.’

‘I do.’

‘But not on your own.’

‘No.’

‘How many cats?’

‘Just two.’ She looks at me. ‘Did you think I was going to say eighteen?’

‘I wondered.’

‘Happily things haven’t got to that point. Desdemona and Ophelia. Our tragic heroines. They like a bit of drama. That’s enough for me.’

Sam clumps into the room.

‘Afternoon, ladies!’ His plain white T-shirt is sticking sweatily to him. Only Sam would wear a plain white T-shirt. It worked on John Travolta back in the day, but on my husband it signals a lack of imagination.

‘Sam.’ I stand up and put a hand on his arm. I often, I realise with a flash of insight, put a hand on his arm. It is a way of showing willing, as far as contact is concerned, while keeping it as minimal as possible. ‘Sam, this is Iris. Iris, my husband, Sam.’

He reaches out to shake her hand, but she stands up and kisses him on the cheek.

‘You two met on the boat,’ he tells her. ‘Lara said. You’re hitting the stuff with the bubbles, I see!’

Iris is making a polite reply of some sort when I hear my mobile ringing. Its old-fashioned ringtone cuts through the air, and I run towards it. My phone rarely rings.

I look at the name on the screen. Then I snatch it up and run outside on to the balcony. My heart is pumping.

‘Leon.’ I close the door firmly behind me. The air is cold but crisp. ‘How are you?’

‘Lara,’ says my godfather, the man who knows me properly. ‘Skip the small talk. Are you sure this is what you want?’

He has got it. I know it from his tone.

‘Yes. Please, Leon. I have to. I can’t carry on like this.’

I stare at Sam, watch him take a nervous sip from my glass, cut himself an enormous slice of cake. He sits down and visibly racks his brains for questions to ask the strange woman at his dining table. I wish he wouldn’t resent her presence quite so obviously.

‘Then I’ve got something for you.’

‘Tell me,’ I say.

As I stare out at a purplish cloud advancing visibly up the estuary, he starts to speak, and a future begins to unfurl.

chapter two

I practise saying it, locked in the bathroom.

‘I’ve got a job,’ I tell my reflection. I like the feel of it in my mouth. I can barely conceive of the potential it holds. I hate the way Sam is going to react.

I need to tell him now. He knows I’m jumpy about something. He knew from the moment I finished speaking to Leon, went back to the table and drained my Prosecco in one gulp.

‘What’s up, Lara?’ he keeps asking, and I say ‘nothing’, with one of my big shiny smiles.

‘I’ve got a job.’ I say it again, to my reflection. She looks sombre as she says the words, but her eyes are alight with the whole new world that is revealing itself before her. I make her practise saying it properly. Having a job is a good thing. I force myself to add the salient part: ‘I’ve got a job, and it’s in London.’

‘Lara?’

I flush the loo, as cover, and pin up a couple of stray strands of hair. Iris has gone home. She went suddenly, when I whispered to her that I had to tell Sam something. She probably thinks I’m pregnant: I will fix that later.

‘Coming!’ I call.

I have a job, and it’s in London. The reality of that is astonishing.

I am a Londoner and I am craving it. I was born there, and I grew up there. Sam and I met there, and we lived there for three years, before deciding in a sudden flurry that the reason I was not getting pregnant was because we were spending hours every day on the Tube. It was, we reasoned, the environment, rather than us. It was all the other people, pushing and shoving and hurrying us along. It was the lipstick and the shopping and the pollution, the buses that chugged past our Battersea bedroom with all the people on the top deck at eye level looking in, the dashes into Sainsbury’s Local to grab dinner on the way home, the fact that walking round the park was nice, but it was no substitute for getting out of town.

And there was, of course, the old cliché: as Londoners, we rarely went to the theatre, the galleries, the museums.

Now that we live in Cornwall, a trip to the capital would be a treat: we haven’t been for a year and a half. It is intoxicating, full of possibilities. There are so many possibilities there for me, now. I am consumed with them.

The move was, naturally, his idea. One Sunday morning, he came downstairs, wearing pyjama bottoms and one of his many white T-shirts, and found me poring over a piece of work.