Бен Ааронович - Lies Sleeping

But that might just have been my own breath.

I’m an only child so I’ve never been that comfortable sharing a room. It took me a while to get used to sharing a bed with Beverley. Mind you, Bev is a very active sleeper and, if she’s not trying to snuggle me off one side of the bed, she talks in her sleep. One night I swear she was reciting the Shipping Forecast – Sole, Fastnet, Lundy, Irish Sea. And giggling after every one. She seemed to find the prospect of Thames: gales imminent particularly funny. When I asked her about it in the morning she insisted that I’d dreamt the whole thing up.

I woke up that first morning in the oubliette feeling sticky in my clothes and decided that I was going to have to ablute and perform bodily functions whether Foxglove was watching or not. Fortunately she seemed just as keen on my cleanliness as I was, or at least that’s how interpreted her pointing emphatically at the shower before leaping up and out of our cosy little home.

And that became the pattern for the days that followed.

After my shower she dropped in with breakfast – pitta breads stuffed with cold falafel and a limp salad. More takeaway, so I was definitely within range of a Chinese and kebab place – which narrowed my location down, I calculated, to somewhere in the UK.

Or possibly the Costa del Sol, although I think I might have noticed a flight.

Foxglove bounced out of the hole with the rubbish and when she didn’t return after half an hour I sat down and picked up The Silmarillion again.

I lasted about an hour before the naming of the Valar drove me to exercise.

One advantage of training in a gym that was last updated in 1939 is that I’ve learnt to do without equipment. You can give yourself a good workout in an hour if you push it, but I broke it up into twenty minute chunks to stretch it through the day.

Once in a while I’d have a go at creating a forma , because you never know. But they all sputtered out without catching. Even lux , which I can normally reliably do while standing on my head.

Foxglove returned at lunch with bread, cheese, some loose tomatoes and a bottle of beer, and again later in the evening with half a roast chicken, chips and salad – probably from the same place the falafel had come from. She watched me eat and then left me alone until it was dark.

This time I wasn’t knackered from a long day of being kidnapped, so it was much harder to sleep. Still, in the quiet darkness I did my breathing and slowly tried to feel out the parameters of the bubble that held me. I think it rained that night because I could hear drops splattering on the skylights far above the entrance and got ‘May It Be’ by Enya stuck on an endless loop in my head. But I also sensed a ripple as Foxglove dropped through the entrance and onto the landing mat. She stared at me for a long moment and then slipped silently over to her own bed.

The next day after breakfast – this time a selection of Kellogg’s Nutri-Grain breakfast bars and a bottle of Lucozade Zero Pink Lemonade – Foxglove reappeared with a basket full of clean bedding, which she dumped in front of me. She stripped her own bed and stood around tapping her foot until I got the message and stripped mine. Then she vaulted away with the basket full of used linen. While she was gone I made both our beds, being particularly careful to do a good job on Foxglove’s. I had a thorough look round while I was doing it, but the thing about futons is that they’re a bit short of hiding places – I suspected that was the point.

Lunch that day was a steak slice, grated carrot and sultana salad in a clear plastic box, an iced bun. Somebody – I suspect Lesley – had taken care to remove any identifying bags or receipts but I know Greggs when I’m eating it. Another point on the triangulation should I ever get out – especially since the steak slice was still oven warm.

After the food delivery Foxglove cautiously approached her bed and examined my handiwork. Finding it acceptable, she turned and gave me a polite little nod and a quizzical tilt of her head.

‘It’s not like I have anything else to do with my time,’ I said, and waved the remains of my iced bun at her. ‘I like this stuff. Can we have this again for dinner?’

Foxglove stared at my iced bun for a moment, then shrugged and departed, leaving me alone with Thingol the terminally lost and the rest of the slightly dim-witted Elves of the years before the First Age.

Dinner was late and while I waited I noticed that the bubble definitely faded a bit when Foxglove wasn’t there. Half of magic is recognising the reality behind all the mental noise of everyday life. And once you’ve noticed something it’s easier to spot it again.

Allowing for confirmation bias, of course.

When it finally arrived, dinner was shish kebab in a pitta and chips and a can of Dr Pepper. So that was all the food groups covered, then. Foxglove made a point of daintily eating her meat one chunk at a time, but she seemed a bit puzzled about what to do with the salad.

That evening I did extra exercise in the hope of wearing myself out, and then I had a shower even though Foxglove was still in the oubliette. She didn’t seem to mind, but I caught her giving me a speculative look while I was drying myself off.

That night I amused myself by seeing if I could recount the whole of The Emperor’s New Groove from memory, and when I laughed out loud for the third time Foxglove slapped the side of her futon to get my attention and hissed.

‘Why do we even have that lever?’ I asked her, but then shut up because I knew from experience with Molly that that particular style of hissing was a bad sign.

So of course then I couldn’t sleep, because I worried she was going sneak over and murder me in my bed.

Another morning in the armpit of paradise, more breakfast bars and a bottle of Perrier.

‘These,’ I told Foxglove when she handed over the food, ‘are not nearly as good for you as the packaging pretends they are. And would it kill you to give me some caffeine?’

To be honest, I was shocked to find that by Day Five I was beginning to run out of Blitz spirit. It’s hard to maintain the requisite levels of Cockney cheer when sleeping on a futon and going without coffee. However, I was cheered immensely when the washing basket made a reappearance, dropping down from the entrance hole like a beacon of hope.

Before Foxglove could reappear I stripped the bedding off both our futons and dumped it in the basket. While I worked I sang a medley of late teens Grime hits with the occasional impromptu percussion accompaniment and finishing with as much of ‘Too Many Man’ as I could remember. It did kind of peter out a bit when I turned round to find Foxglove standing right behind me.

I jumped. She smiled, but the joke was on her.

She accepted the dirty laundry from me and jumped out without checking it was all there. I’ve found that if you voluntarily take on a chore somebody else doesn’t want to do, they don’t check the results too closely – in case they have to do it again themselves. Once I was sure she was safely gone I pulled the sheet I’d nicked from her bed, folded it into a rectangle and hid it inside my nice fresh duvet cover. I didn’t know how I was going to escape, but I was pretty certain that access to ye olde knotted sheet rope would be a good start.

If they had cameras then I was stuffed. But I was willing to bet they didn’t work in fairyland, either.

That afternoon, as I came to terms with the twin burdens of cold falafel for lunch and Fëanor’s staggering denseness re: Morgoth’s intentions, Foxglove dropped down with a large artist’s sketchpad and an empty Heinz beans tin full of sticks of charcoal. She sat cross-legged on her bed and began to draw.