The House of Sleep (8 page)

He allowed himself a nostalgic smile. ‘Every evening, you know, she used to come into my room, and she’d curl up on the bed next to me. I’d stroke her little head and… just talk to her. Talk to her for hours sometimes.’

‘That’s so sweet.’

‘In a way –’ he laughed now ‘– in a silly way, she knew me even better than my parents did. Certainly my father.’

‘They weren’t so fond of her, as you were?’

‘Well,
he
never took to Muriel, there’s no denying it.’ He sighed. ‘They rubbed each other up the wrong way. You know, silly little habits of hers used to annoy him.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Well, he didn’t like the way she used to pee on the sitting-room carpet, for instance.’

Sarah took this information in slowly. A new picture was beginning to emerge: a child, dysfunctional in some way, and a family who had perhaps never learned to cope with her;
perhaps never even learned to regard her as fully human. The situation was more painful, more tragic than she had first imagined. And now the real meaning of Robert’s earlier, puzzling remarks began to suggest itself.

‘Look, Robert,’ she said carefully. ‘What you said before, about a funeral being over the top – I do think it’s very important, you know, that your family… marks this death in some way.’

‘Well, I did talk with Dad last night on the phone, about –’ he grimaced ‘– disposing of her. I wanted to know if some sort of cremation was possible.’

‘And?’

‘He just laughed. Told me I was being pathetic. He said he was just going to dig a hole at the bottom of the garden and put her in a bin-liner. Like he did with the others.’

Sarah looked at Robert earnestly for a long time, and then said, with great care and emphasis: ‘But you think that’s wrong, don’t you? You
know
that it’s wrong.’

Robert nodded. ‘Yes. Yes, I do.’

‘Good.’ Sarah rose from the bed, now, and stood by the door. ‘OK, Robert, I’m finding this conversation… a little hard to cope with, and I’m going to go downstairs for a while. But I want you to think about what I said, and remember that, you know, however bad things have been, in your family, you can always talk to me about it. I’m always here.’

Just as she was leaving, they looked directly into each other’s eyes for the first time; and something happened then, some connection was made, just for a moment, before Sarah turned away and left the room, relieved to have gained the sanctuary of the corridor and to be heading safely out towards the clifftops and the autumn breeze. As he listened to her receding footsteps, Robert began to breathe again in long, uneven breaths.

He did not see her again for several days after that; or at least, while he may have glimpsed her from his window, on
her way to or from the house, or been offered a fugitive vision of her disappearing into her bedroom or passing through the L-shaped kitchen, he never had the opportunity of speaking to her, and became convinced that she was purposely avoiding him. One evening towards the end of the week, he challenged her about this, and she admitted that she was shocked by his behaviour – by his failure, specifically, to return home in the aftermath of his sister’s death. Once this mistake had been brought to light, of course, it was easily dealt with. Robert burst into laughter as soon as he realized what had happened, but she was too embarrassed to see the funny side, and was disturbed, besides, by this further evidence of the perfidy of her dreams. She apologized rather coldly, and made no effort to prolong the conversation.

That night, however, long after most of the other students had gone to bed, Robert looked out of his window and saw Sarah standing alone on the moonlit terrace. She was looking out into the darkness and leaning against the balustrade, upon which she had balanced what appeared to be a tumblerful of white wine. He went downstairs to join her, gaining access to the terrace through the French windows in the television room, where the rusty hinges gave out a grating squeal. She turned when she heard him approach, and smiled an encouraging smile.

They began talking on the terrace, and continued in the kitchen, and it was after four o’clock in the morning when they finally said goodnight and went upstairs to their separate rooms. It was probably, at that point, the longest conversation Robert had ever had in his life. The melancholy silence which had always enveloped him at home – his mother timid and deferential, his father morosely taciturn – had never prepared him for this kind of fluid, impulsive exchanging of confidences. By the time they had finished, he felt drunk with talk; high on confession. They had discussed everything, it seemed, and had held nothing back from each other. It had begun with the collapse of Sarah’s relationship with Gregory, and after that
they had ranged freely over romance, friendship, families and gender, the shared intimacies and the self-revelations coming ever thicker and faster as the subjects themselves grew larger and more complex, until Robert realized that he had trusted Sarah with secrets about himself, about his parents, about his home life, that he had never thought

Stage One

4

thought there was something strange about the rooms at the Dudden Clinic, and now realized what it was: that although they contained wardrobes, and washbasins, and dressers, and desks, and easy-chairs, and all the other appurtenances of residential accommodation, they contained no beds. Of course, this made perfect sense. Punctually at 10.30 p.m., washed and wearing their night-clothes, the thirteen patients would make their way from the day rooms and settle down to sleep under laboratory conditions in the thirteen small, simple bedchambers – each flanked by an adjacent observation room – which took up much of the ground floor. There was no need for beds anywhere else. But it still seemed odd that there should be no bed against the far wall of this room, which he now found that he remembered well as the room Robert had occupied in his last year at the university, and which seemed in every other way to be unchanged. Even the furniture was the same; and it was all in exactly the same position.

It surprised Terry that he should remember Robert’s room better than he could remember his face. He tried to recall the last time he had seen him, and had a sudden, badly focused flashback to a grey Saturday morning, during their last summer, with Robert sitting near the edge of the cliff and talking to Sarah, both looking tired and haggard. That was twelve years ago. After that he had disappeared: done a comprehensive and unequivocal vanishing trick which now, in retrospect, struck Terry as being rather impressive. He had thought little of it at the time, being heavily preoccupied that summer with
the launch of his own glorious career. Sarah, he seemed to remember, had made sporadic efforts to track him down. Unsuccessfully, though.

Terry sat at the desk overlooking the sea and flipped open his PowerBook. He didn’t know what he was going to write, but the machine’s compact solidity, its laminated textures and neat, sexy contours never ceased to arouse and console him. He fetched the power cord from his suitcase and looked around for somewhere to plug it in. The only suitable mains outlet turned out to be just behind the wardrobe; but while there was enough space between the socket and the back of the wardrobe to accommodate a regular three-pin plug, Terry’s chunky A C adaptor was not going to fit. The wardrobe would have to be moved. It was made of teak, and very heavy. Terry put his whole weight against one side and shoved it about six inches along the wall, so that the mains socket was now fully exposed; and then he noticed something else. Something had been written on the wall, but the wardrobe had been hiding it. There was some writing, about three feet above the skirting board, and a smudge of some unidentifiable brown substance. There were two words.

‘Charming,’ said Terry to himself, aloud, and resolved to report it to Dr Dudden. It might earn him some credit.

He booted up and skimmed through the files, his finger sweaty and jittery on the trackball. There were more than a thousand documents, in more than thirty folders, but nothing seemed to inspire him on this occasion. Next, he took a slim personal organizer from his jacket pocket, switched it on and began searching through the diary section. He hadn’t looked at this since the beginning of the Cinethon, and this time something immediately caught his attention. He reached again into the pocket of his jacket, which was slung over the armchair, fetched out a mobile phone and punched a couple of keys to call up a number from memory. The ringing tone was answered almost immediately.

‘Hello, Stuart? It’s Terry.

‘Not too bad. No ill-effects so far.

‘Listen – why haven’t you asked me to write about the new Kingsley film? It’s out on Friday.

‘Armstrong? What are you, out of your mind? He knows nothing about him. Nothing. He knows nothing about anything.

‘Of course I’m not on bloody holiday. I’m sitting down here in Arsehole-on-Sea with nothing to do all day, bored witless. I could be writing your whole fucking paper for you.

‘Who’s releasing it? Fox? Well, they could send me down a tape, couldn’t they?

‘Of course I could. When would you need it for?

‘That’s no problem.

‘No, I’ll phone them myself. I’ll do it now.

‘He’s had enough breaks. He doesn’t need any more breaks. More fucking talent is what he needs, not breaks.

‘No,
I’ll
phone them. I’ll get it all sorted. No problem. Tomorrow afternoon.

‘No, there’s no need for that.

‘It’s simple: if you haven’t heard from me in half an hour, then they’re sending me down a tape, and I’m doing it for you. Give it half an hour, then phone Armstrong, and tell him to fuck off.

‘Yep. Simple.

‘Ciao.’

Galvanized now, Terry snapped the mobile shut and hurried downstairs. What used to be the television room in his student days was now the patients’ common room. There was still a television in the corner – a large colour set, with the volume turned down, on which a punkish-looking man in a chef’s hat was chopping vegetables and gabbling away silently to the empty room – but this wasn’t what Terry had been hoping to find. He clicked his tongue impatiently and went looking for a member of staff.

In one of the observation rooms he found Lorna, the technician. She was sitting down, a clipboard on her lap and a
mug of tea between her hands, watching a television screen which was mounted on a shelf above the polysomnographic equipment. She noticed Terry appearing in the doorway, glanced at him, but did not otherwise allow him to deflect her attention. Together, they watched the screen in silence for a few seconds. It showed the blurry, black and white image of a woman wearing a nightgown, asleep in bed, her head festooned with electrodes. The woman remained perfectly still, as did the camera. Once or twice the screen flickered. Terry looked at Lorna, who was watching intently, then contemplated the screen again for another minute or more, while the image remained unchanged.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said at last. ‘I hate these European art movies, don’t you?’

Lorna smiled, picked up a remote control unit, and paused the tape.

‘You shouldn’t be watching this at all,’ she said. ‘What do you want?’

‘Is this the one they’re remaking in Hollywood with Ted Danson and Goldie Hawn?’

‘Dr Dudden was looking for you,’ said Lorna. ‘Just a few minutes ago.’

‘Yes, I know. I was supposed to be seeing him at eleven. Seriously, though – what were you watching that for? Can’t you tell me?’

‘Not without breaching confidentiality.’ In spite of which she pointed, after a moment’s hesitation, at a wad of computer paper on her desk, covered with pen-tracings from the polysomnograph. ‘According to that,’ she said, ‘there was a burst of activity at four thirty-seven this morning. So I thought I’d be able to see something on the tape: catch her moving her legs or something. But I can’t find anything.’

‘Why’s it in black and white? Can’t this machine play in colour?’ Terry was bending down to inspect the video recorder.

‘It can if you want it to.’

‘What about sound? Where’s the sound?’

‘There’s a volume control on the side of the monitor.’

‘So it’s just like a regular video, is it? I mean, it can play regular tapes?’

‘I dare say.’

‘And is there one of these attached to every bedroom?’

‘Yes.’

‘Would I be able to use one of them tomorrow morning?’

‘Well, we do have a vacancy in Bedroom Three at the moment, because one of the patients has cancelled. So
technically
speaking, that machine won’t be in use. But I
very
much doubt whether Dr Dudden –’

‘What time does the post get here?’ Terry asked.

‘About nine-thirty.’

‘Brilliant. That’s all I need to know.’ He switched on the mobile again and was already hitting a number on his way out. ‘Thanks,’ he said, turning in the doorway. And, with a final glance at the screen: ‘Give me a shout when the nude scene starts, will you?’

After he had phoned the relevant publicity department and persuaded them to send down a VHS copy of the film by registered post, Terry found that he was already twenty minutes late for his interview with Dr Dudden: who, upon seeing his apologetic face appear round the door, merely returned to the perusal of a typescript spread out on his desk, and murmured: ‘Come in, Mr Worth, come in.’

Once Terry had sat down, he added (still seemingly absorbed in his papers): ‘Perhaps my watch is fast, but I make the time to be eleven twenty-three.’

‘Yes, you’re right. I’m late.’

Dr Dudden looked up at last. ‘I see.’

‘I must have overslept.’

This remark met with an unwavering stare. Terry crumbled in the face of it, and started back-pedalling furiously. ‘You probably get these jokes all the time,’ he said, weakly.

‘Occasionally,’ said Dr Dudden. ‘My colleague, Dr Madison, is a great believer in humour as a therapeutic aid. Perhaps
we should organize a group discussion on this subject.’

Momentarily numbed into silence, Terry could only nod.