Ian McEwan - In Between the Sheets

He turned the light on and went into the bathroom. His cock was small in his hands, nut brown and wrinkled by the cold, or perhaps the fear. He felt sorry for it. As he pissed his stream split in two. He pulled his foreskin a little and the streams converged. He felt sorry for himself. He stepped back into the hallway, and as he closed the bathroom door behind him and cut off the rumble of the cistern he heard that sound again, the sound he had listened to in his sleep. A sound so forgotten, so utterly familiar that only now as he advanced very cautiously along the hallway did he know it to be the background for all other sounds, the frame of all anxieties. The sound of his wife in, or approaching, orgasm. He stopped several yards short of the girls’ bedroom. It was a low moan through the medium of a harsh, barking cough, it rose imperceptibly in pitch through fractions of a tone, then fell away at the end, down but not very far, still higher than the starting point. He did not dare go nearer the door. He strained to listen. The end came and he heard the bed creak a little, and footsteps across the floor. He saw the door handle turn. Like a dreamer he asked no questions, he forgot his nakedness, he had no expectations.

Miranda screwed up her eyes in the brightness. Her yellow hair was loose. Her white cotton nightdress reached her ankles and its folds concealed the lines of her body. She could be any age. She hugged her arms around her body. Her father stood in front of her, very still, very massive, one foot in front of the other as though frozen mid-step, arms limp by his side, his naked black hairs, his wrinkled, nut-brown naked self. She could be a child or a woman, she could be any age. She took a little step forward.

“Daddy,” she moaned, “I can’t get to sleep.” She took his hand and he led her into the bedroom. Charmian lay curled up on the far side of the bed, her back to them. Was she awake, was she innocent? Stephen held back the bedclothes and Miranda climbed between the sheets. He tucked her in and sat on the edge of the bed. She arranged her hair.

“Sometimes I get frightened when I wake up in the middle of the night,” she told him.

“So do I,” he said, and bent over and kissed her lightly on the lips.

“But there’s nothing to be frightened of really, is there?”

“No,” he said, “Nothing.” She settled herself deeper into the deep red sheets and gazed into his face.

“Tell me something though, tell me something to make me go to sleep.”

He looked across at Charmian.

“Tomorrow you can look in the cupboard in the hall. There’s a whole bag of presents in there.”

“For Charmian too?”

“Yes.” He studied her face by the light from the hall. He was beginning to feel the cold. “I bought them for your birthday,” he added. But she was asleep and almost smiling, and in the pallor of her upturned throat he thought he saw from one bright morning in his childhood a field of dazzling white snow which he, a small boy of eight, had not dared scar with footprints.

Now Leech pushes his legs out straight till they tremble with the effort, locks his fingers behind his head, cracks them at the joints, chuckles his deliberate, dirty chuckle at what he pretends to see in the middle distance and bats me gently behind the head with his elbow. Looks like it’s over, what would you say?

Is it true? I lie in the dark. It is true, I think the old to and fro rocked her to sleep. The ancient to and fro had no end and the suspension came unnoticed like sleep itself. Rise and fall, rise and fall, rise and fall, between the fall and rise the perilous silent gap, the decision she makes to go on.

The sky a blank yellow-white, the canal odor reduced by distance to the smell of sweet ripe cherries, the melancholy of airliners turning in the stack and here in the office others cut up the day’s papers, this is their work. Paste columns to index cards.

If I lie in the dark I can see in the dark pale skin on the fragile ridge of cheekbone, it carves a dogleg shape in the dark. The deep-set eyes are open and invisible. Through almost parted lips a point of light glints on saliva and tooth, the thick belt of hair blacker than the surrounding night. Sometimes I look at her and wonder who will die first, who will die first, you or me? The colossal weight of stillness, how many more hours?

Leech. I see Leech in this same corridor in frequent consultation with the Director. I see them, together they pace the long doorless corridor. The Director walks erect, his hands, deep in his pockets, jingle with gewgaws and Leech stoops subordinately, head twisted towards his superior’s neck, his hands clasped behind his back, the fingers of one hand rolled around the wrist of the other to check scrupulously his own pulse. I see what the Director sees, our images combine—Leech and this man; twist the bright metal ring and they spring apart, one standing, one sitting, both posing.

Saliva glints on a point of tooth. Listen to her breathing, rhythmic soaring and plunging, deep sleep air, not her own. One animal need tracks another through the night, black-furred sleep smothered pleasure from a low branch, the old tree creaks, gone, memory, listen to her… house smells sweet. The ancient, soft to and fro rocked her to sleep. Do you remember the small wood, the gnarled and stunted trees, the leafless branches and twigs fused to one canopy, what we found there? What we saw? Ah… the tiny, patient heroism of being awake, the Arctic hole bigger than the surrounding ice widens, too large to assume a shape, inclusive of the optical limits of sight. I lie in the dark and look in, I lie in it and gaze out, and from another room one of her children cries out in her sleep, A bear!

First here comes Leech, no first here am I towards the end of one morning, reclining, sipping, private, and Leech comes by, salutes me, claps me on the back a cordial, vicious blow between the shoulder blades below the neck. He stands at the tea urn, legs apart like a public urinator, the brown liquid dribbling into his cup and he saying do I remember (this) or (that) conversation. No, no. He approaches with his cup. No, no, I tell him, I remember nothing, I tell him as he settles on the long settee, as close to me as he can without actually… becoming me. Ah, the bitter tang of a stranger’s skin wrapped about to conceal the remoter fecal core. His right leg touches my left.

In the cold hour before dawn her children will climb into the bed, first one and then the other, sometimes one without the other, they drop between the spicy adult warmth, attach themselves to her sides like the starfish (remember the starfish clinging to its rock) and make faint liquid noises with their tongues. Outside in the street urgent footsteps approach and recede down the hill. I lie on the edge of the litter, Robinson Crusoe making his plans for stockades of finely sharpened stakes, guns that will fire themselves at the faintest tremor of an alien step, hopes his goats and dogs will procreate, will not find another such nest of tolerant creatures. When one of her daughters comes too early, in the dead of night she wakes and carries her back, returns and sleeps, her knees drawn up to her belly. Her house smells sweetly of sleeping children.

In the slow motion of one who feels the need to be watched, Leech unclips a pen from his breast pocket, examines it, replaces it, grips my extended arm as I reach for my book which slid to the floor at the moment of Leech’s blow. A significant space by the door indicates the Director, the possibility of his arrival.

The colossal weight… do you remember, sleeper, the small wood of gnarled stunted trees, the leafless branches and twigs fused to one canopy, a dark roof leaking light onto the pungent soil? We tiptoed on the absorbent vegetable silence, it made us whisper, drew our sibilants through hidden roots beneath our feet, a very old and private wood. Ahead of us brightness, the canopy had collapsed as though a heavy weight once crashed down from the sky. The bright semicircle, the trees’ branches and twigs drooping to the ground in a brilliant cascade, and there lodged halfway up the torrent, picked white by the sun and stark against the dull gray wood were bones, white bones of a creature resting there, a flat, socketed skull, a long curving spine diminishing to the delicate point, and at its sides the meticulous heap of other bones, slender with bunch-fisted ends.