The House of Sleep (36 page)

‘“Did he ever cause you physical pain?” I asked her.

‘“No,” Sarah answered, “he never really hurt me.”

‘“But you thought that he
might
hurt you?”

‘“It could have been at the back of my mind.”

‘“And did he know that? Was that in fact the whole point of the game?”

‘“Yes, I suppose it could have been.”

‘“For him? Or for both of you?”

‘Sarah was unable – or unwilling – to answer my last question, but this was of little consequence, because I now had all the facts at my disposal, and was satisfied that the cause and extent of her problems were perfectly clear to me. And while it would have been highly irresponsible of me to share any of my insights with the patient herself, I shall conclude this paper with a sketch of the most salient points, for the benefit of my listeners.

‘The “eye” is not only the instrument through which we view the world; it is also the “I”, the innermost self, that stands at its centre. By eroticizing Sarah’s eyes, by linking them inseparably in her psyche with the expectation of sexual pleasure, Gregory had given her an appetite for violation, for the penetration of her “I”, the rape of her most intimate self, that neither he nor any other man or woman had ever been able to satisfy…’

‘Oh,
please
,’ said Dr Herriot.

‘Let him finish,’ said Dr Myers wearily. ‘We might as well get to the bitter end.’

‘Sarah did not know this, of course,’ Russell Watts continued. ‘And on one level, she was afraid of masculine desire; afraid, in fact, of the phallus itself and its awesome, delirious power. This is why she slept so badly at night, in bed with her husband: from the fear that, like Gregory, he would wait until she was powerless with sleep, and then seek to penetrate her “I”. But was there not another level on which this was the very thing she most wanted? Why else would she regularly fall asleep during the daytime, in the company of strangers? For no other reason than to put herself at their mercy, to prostrate herself before them in the attitude of sleep; to invite them, man and woman alike, to play their own game of “I spy with my little eye”.

‘Yes, I am afraid there was something of the whore about Sarah.’

‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Dr Herriot. ‘I don’t need to listen to any more of this rubbish.’

But Russell Watts was too caught up in his rhetoric to take heed of any more interruptions. He had not even noticed, for instance, that Dr Dudden was now sitting forward on the bed, his teeth clenched, his whitened knuckles clutching the water glass so tightly that it threatened to shatter at any moment.

‘Clearly,’ he continued, his voice rising in volume and the rhythm of his speech breaking into something like a crazed gallop, ‘there had only ever been one man who, in her fantasies
at least, might have satisfied her craving for violation: Robert – the absent one, the missing, the mysterious Other who had so completely vanished from her life. No wonder she had been horrified, after surprising him in the bath that afternoon, to think that he had castrated himself, casting aside the phallus, his gender’s magnificent, philoprogenitive signifier. For it was Robert she had really desired in all his thrilling, masculine glory: why else should she dignify him with the name of “Sandman” – that legendary figure whom children allow every night to
enter their eyes
and leave behind traces of his invading presence?

‘And I could be certain of this for one very simple reason: because
Sarah had told me herself.
For remember – language is a cruel and faithless mistress; it is a sly cardsharp, who deals us a pack full of jokers; it is a distant flute on a misty night, teasing us with half-forgotten melodies; it is the light on the inside of the fridge, which never goes off when we are looking; it is a fork in the road; it is a knife in the water.

‘What had Sarah said to me, after all, when I asked her exactly how she had assaulted her faithless husband? “
I kneed him in the balls
,” she had said. Was she really talking about her domestic argument at the time? Of course not: if so, she could just as easily have said, “I kicked him in the crotch.” No, what she was doing, at that moment, was
articulating her desire for the phallus.
When she used the word “kneed”, she did not mean “I attacked him with my knee”, but “I
need
, I
crave
, I
desire.
” And when she talked of “the balls”, she did not mean the testicles, she was not referring to her husband’s bruised and mangled organs of generation, she meant
the balls of her eyes
, her own eyeballs, those twin desiring globes which had become, in her strange, private, opto-erotic sexual universe, nothing less than two vaginas which some freak of nature had placed on either side of her nose.

‘Yes, it was Sarah’s misfortune – Sarah’s tragedy, you might say – to have begun her sexual life under the perverse tutelage of a man who had not only made a fetish of her eyes, but had
proved himself unable to satisfy the raging desires he had thereby aroused in her. Like all women, Sarah felt a longing for sexual pleasure which was also a longing for death: hence her fantasies of assassination, of things being “taken out”. At the beginning of her relationship with Gregory, she used to enjoy being “taken out” by him; but as that relationship acquired a sexual dimension, it seems that he no longer “took her out”, no longer assassinated her; his penis, apparently, was anything but lethal. And so the root of her problems lay in the unsatisfactory nature of that first sexual relationship – in Gregory’s impotence, his phallic debility, the redundancy of his pistol, his failure to shoot anything but blanks, his crushing inability, in short, to bring her to orgasm or anywhere near it –’

Russell Watts broke off abruptly as Dr Dudden sprang to his feet with a final cry of contempt and made for the door. When he turned to address his four colleagues, they were shocked to see that his face was puce with rage, the veins on his neck and forehead standing out like knotted string.

‘I know what this is about,’ he said, pointing a quivering finger at each of them in turn. ‘I know what this is about, you bastards! You cooked this up together, you sad, pathetic, jealous… mediocrities! And I know why, as well. Because you know what I’m trying to achieve. You know what I’m on the
brink
of achieving. And you think you can stop me, don’t you? You think you can undermine me. Humiliate me. Well, you can’t! No matter how hard you try. No matter how devious you are. Because I know one thing for a fact – a solid, incontrovertible
fact
: that the name of Gregory Dudden will be remembered long after
your
names have been forgotten. Do you hear that? All of you? Completely–’ (and here he opened the door) ‘– utterly –’ (and now he stepped outside, gathering breath for the delivery of his last word) ‘–
FORGOTTEN!
’

After he had slammed the door behind him and stormed off down the corridor, the others sat for a few seconds in
silent bafflement. Dr Herriot was the first to speak. Comprehension had begun to light up her face, bringing a slow smile in its wake.

‘
Gregory
Dudden, did he say?’ She turned to Professor Cole. ‘Did he say his name was Gregory?’

But the other three had yet to catch up. Dr Myers merely shook his head sadly, and said: ‘I think the sooner I start that investigation, the better.’

∗

Darkness over Ashdown, where Ruby Sharp lies in Bedroom Three. Her head festooned with electrodes, she rolls and squirms in the bed, restless. Every so often a few words gurgle, brokenly, from her mouth. Above the bed a microphone is listening, and in the adjacent observation room, magnetic tape glides between two spools. Soon the words will swell into a quiet, uneven, murmurous stream. For a few minutes, Ruby will disclose her secrets to the microphone and the tape-recorder. In the morning Lorna will transcribe them, and Dr Madison will read them. But Ruby will have left the clinic by then, without explaining, without saying goodbye.

Darkness in Bedroom Nine, where Terry now lies, smiling a blissful smile. Behind his closed eyelids, his eyes are rolling busily: he is deep into Rapid Eye Movement sleep, and an exquisite dream is playing itself out in his brain. This dream is both sensuous and cerebral; it transports him glidingly, effortlessly to heights of physical pleasure and intellectual enlightenment such as he could never imagine in his waking life. Nothing that happens to him during the daylight hours will ever match the pleasure, the intensity, the joy of this dream. In the morning, he will have forgotten it almost entirely.

Darkness, too, in Day Room Nine – Terry’s day room – where Cleo Madison sits at the desk, looking out over the water, as she has done every night for the last week, ever since the discovery of that curious, unexplained writing behind the wardrobe. She has been disturbed by her conversations with Terry today. The lie she told about her brother Philip was
foolish and trivial, a botched improvisation, born of confusion and haste. The lies she told about Robert, though, were far more considered; and yet she already regrets these, just as deeply. In short, she cannot decide what to do about Terry. She cannot decide whether to tell him the truth.

She has not yet noticed the photograph Terry has placed on the bookshelf behind her; the photograph for which he scoured an Italian film archive; the photograph he travelled all the way to London to retrieve; the only surviving fragment of Salvatore Ortese’s lost film, which was once his great obsession. A single black and white photograph, showing a road, a dusty, arid landscape, and a woman, a woman in nurse’s uniform, pointing off into the distance as she stands in front of a sign which consists of one word, written in a foreign language. Perhaps when Cleo does notice it, it will help her to make up her mind.

17

Late autumn, 1984

Everything about this city was different. That had been the idea, of course, but it was also what he found so disheartening, so hard to fight against. The people were different; the jokes, the humour, the accents; the buses were a different colour; the beer tasted different; the skies were different – bigger and greyer, somehow; the houses were packed together more tightly than he would ever have thought possible; the days seemed to be shorter here, and the nights longer; the names of some of the biggest shops were new and strange to him; the cinemas showed unfamiliar local advertisements and the evening newspaper seemed to be written in some inscrutable code; even the tea was different, and the cakes they served with it in the market café.

He was trying to get used to this café, though. He was trying to get used to its formica tables and plastic bottles encrusted with ketchup and HP sauce. He was trying to forgive it for the fact that it was not the Café Valladon.

The market always seemed to be busy on Wednesday afternoons. Robert sat at a window table and watched the crowds passing by, their patient, wind-chapped faces and ruddy hands. He wanted to take comfort from all this bustling humanity but instead it swamped him, making him feel smaller, even less noticeable, even more lost.

As he looked through the café window, he thought about what the psychiatrist had said to him.

Robert had been referred for psychiatric treatment more than seven years before Sarah would begin her own course of
analysis with Russell Watts, and had been lucky enough to find a more helpful practitioner. Dr Fowler was approachable and sympathetic, a good listener but also generous with his advice and encouragement. They had met in his consultation room each Wednesday for the last month, ever since Robert was sent there as a matter of urgency following his third and most desperate call to the Samaritans. And now, while he was not exactly making a recovery, at least the feelings of hopelessness and self-hatred were beginning to come into focus: he was starting to understand them, and could almost bring himself to imagine, at the end of this particular tunnel, the glimmering possibility that they might prove containable.

Dr Fowler knew that Robert had been rejected by a woman, and he now wanted to examine why she had made him think of himself this way: why he had started to regard himself as fundamentally impossible to love. He wanted Robert to try to isolate this one specific aspect of himself: What was it about him that she had never loved – and which he, as a consequence, had started to hate?

This afternoon, the answer had become clear. He hated his gender: his body.

That was the only thing that Sarah had never loved about him.

‘You hate yourself for being a man?’ said Dr Fowler.

‘Yes. I think I always have, in fact. All my life.’

‘Have you ever had fantasies of being a woman? Of living as a woman?’

‘No, I haven’t. At last – not until now.’

That evening, it suddenly seemed the obvious solution. A breathtakingly easy solution. Drunk with excitement (and drunk on the two bottles of dry white wine that had recently become his nightly tipple) he wrote to Sarah for the first time. He wrote to her about his childhood dream, and how he had finally come to understand what it was telling him. He told her that he was certain they would meet again. He told her that he loved her more than ever.

At their next meeting, however, Dr Fowler explained that Robert’s solution wasn’t quite as easy as he appeared to imagine. It wasn’t possible just to go off and have surgery at the drop of a hat, he pointed out. For one thing, unless he had the funds to do it privately, there was a waiting list of at least two years. And for another, he would have to prove – to Dr Fowler’s complete satisfaction – that it was what he really wanted.

Robert now began to apply himself to this task with some energy.

∗

The clothes he began to wear were androgynous, rather than specifically female.

He wore a modest amount of makeup, and kept his hair short, but had it permed and highlighted. People began to tell him that he looked like Annie Lennox.

The hormones he was prescribed were supposed to boost his hips and his bust, but mainly he just seemed to put on weight. Whenever he went out, he wore a padded bra.