‘Oh, he’s not sleeping well,’ I said. ‘Could stand to be woken.’
And I tapped Daniel on the shoulder and tugged him towards Tom’s room. Something fun about the idea of sneaking in there together. And Tom talking in his sleep. What secrets he might spill, and Daniel to work them out with later.
Formal Settings
I remember Tom coming up to my flat just the once, early on. Sure he came loads of times but the only instant I can remember is in the light of everything after it. Late night, following drinks after his work. Him sullen and large on the bar’s low stool, hunched shoulders. Not responding to probes about what his job entailed. ‘Everyone’s a wanker there,’ he said, staring off at the wall of gins, ‘shallow bastards looking to get ahead. No need to ruin a good night,’ he said. I hopped up for beer, a juniper IPA for him, some local porter for myself. I felt like he’d respect that. Beer but fancy. The right level of risk, something to talk about or reject. I suspected Tom cared deeply about the taxonomy of crafted objects, consumable or otherwise, or would, if pressed in just the right way to explain his feelings on the subject.
He took a sip. Fuck that perfect pre-Raphaelite mouth, that caught the eye from the other side of any room like the sight of a bruise on an eyesocket. I wonder if that tender side to his features made him this solid and blank as defence. I wondered about his childhood. Around us the wide space of the pub buzzed thickly, Friday bodies shifted uncomplaining to make room, to move forward and closer to one another and cried with laughter and the barstaff poured shots in lighting rich with shadows so that the drink gleamed as it fell.
‘I love this,’ I said, meaninglessly, and knocked back as much of my beer as I could without drawing attention. We hadn’t had sex yet. No, I know, almost on the first night, after the club. But we were having it that night and the knowledge of that hung awkwardly between us. We drank our drinks and went back too early to mine, with the light still up. The excuse was to show him something on Netflix. Two of us walking against a stream of folk going out. I wanted to be past this, at the point where holding his hand would be as natural as breathing, before the point handholding gets dropped. As it was we walked close, by necessity. The air between us was blue and sharp and the hairs on my arm were up.
‘You’re so close to the park,’ he said, and I wanted to die, on his behalf I wanted to shove us both into neural oblivion, I wanted to skip all steps to the aftermath, in bed, sweaty and fulfilled preferably. There was my doorway, like a bad joke. I stood next to him hunting for my keys, trying not to make the bad joke. Up the three flights. I’d never noticed before how cathedral-like the staircase was, how like a cathedral or an ancient nunnery in some old film, all shadows and echoes and tight steps. I see shadows everywhere, you’ll say. Like granting the thing that was watching us a space to watch us from.
‘Fancy a drink?’ I said, hustling far away from him in the kitchenette that connected to the living room, which had fairy lights and pink candles belonging to Vee, and photos he could look at while I cracked a beer. It’s always this way. I sighed, regretting, wanting. The blank of him and the bulk of him. Then he looked at me. And he had that hallowed desire there, that’s not pretence, that’s not pushing itself. That’s almost a tremulous thing. The warm domestic air of the room did nothing to diminish it. I touched the counter with my fingers, picked an earring out, and another.
‘Nah,’ he said. ‘Come here.’ So I did.
Tell me, is it ever how it is in the films, when they slam in through the door and spill their passion everywhere bright and assured? But this was close. We stood together. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I want to kiss you, is that all right?’ and I responded by kissing, and the human-electrical storm that had been gathering and setting my teeth on edge just cracked open the sky.
What was he like, in bed? Like any man who cares what his partner wants to feel. Generous. Quick to respond. Quiet, which I wished he wasn’t – so much. He slept and I joined him, knackered both. My flatmates came back in the small hours. Tom was still there, asleep. I touched him with my foot, and he woke. His face close again in the dark. Better that way, when I couldn’t see it all.
‘You hungry?’ I said.
‘Fucking starving,’ he answered.
Hours later, I stood in the kitchen, drowning in apprehension, throwing out wax cheese wrappers and an emptied biscuit box. My fucking heart was going to get broken. It signalled very clearly and from a long way off. But, I told myself, better just relax into it, for now.
The Person Asleep Is With Many Others
The body sleeping didn’t stir when we first tiptoed in but did a little when we began rummaging. It was true I had seen the book in there earlier. Tom had been reading it before bed. Not the first time. I’d seen Tom with it several times over the course of the weeks he’d been living there. I hadn’t asked about it and it only held slight professional interest in that it was handwritten and a little old, but Tom was so engrossed I didn’t want to pry. Anyway, nineteenth century, outwith my remit. I’d thought at first he owned it, only he’d usually put it back outside on the kitchen table or the living room. It appeared to move without much human intervention between the two places and nowhere, sometimes gone for days, sometimes popping up on the counter or on the stand by the door where the keys and post hung out. That Tom read at all surprised me. I’d decided it was some book the house kept in common. And so it was, kind of, though Badr didn’t bother with it.
There in the dim room Daniel put his hands on the top of the chest of drawers and I opened Tom’s bag.
‘Will he mind?’ Daniel whispered. He stood there, looking at Tom. I looked at them both and tried not to allow myself much room for speculation. As you can imagine, I speculate wildly. It’s almost something I can taste. I didn’t answer Daniel because I didn’t know. I found the book with my fingers. Rough cloth. I took it gently out the bag.
‘We’ve disturbed him,’ said Daniel.
‘Anyway, it’s your book, right? Don’t worry about it.’
Tom was moving about on the bed. A stripe of light over him. His sleeping face frowning, and then, a slow inward breath switching, to hhhhhahhhhhhhuuh, the eeriest noise. Daniel and I straightened and stood watching, frozen, unsure of our mission then, the easy centre suddenly dropped. We waited. I passed Daniel the book and at this, Tom shifted violently, throwing one shoulder, hands in the sheets.
‘No!’ he cried out. ‘Give it here!’ but he was still asleep. He made the noise again, then rose into a seated position, stiff upright and opened his eyes, which were blankly blue and staring. He made fists with the duvet, and his face contorted with anguish – I don’t like to use such words, but that was all I could call it.
‘The knife,’ he said, in a strange strangulated voice, ‘get it in her!’
Then he dropped his head and breathed out in a long shuddering sigh and fell back down onto the pillow. Curled himself up, fists to head and legs up to his chin. His breathing was coming in feverish judders. Little whispers emitted between gritted teeth could have been speech or release. As I was making to leave, the pressure in the room seemed to drop. That’s how I’d describe it. I felt my throat tighten, and I swear I saw bright blotches gathering, the kind you see when you get lightheaded. Slowly and slightly at first, window panes began rattling. The bed Tom was lying on began rattling too. It rattled up and down, against the wall, scraping, in a way that it would do if someone was shaking it, or fucking in it to a really weird pattern of motion. Tom, to my eyes, did not appear to move. He was solid as a stone in his curled position. I got closer. His eyes were open, and unmoving, his mouth a little open, his bottom teeth showing. Daniel came up too, reached out a hand as if to pull the blanket back or up, and the rattling intensified. He whipped his hand away as if burned.
‘What the fuck . . . ?’ he whispered.
The rattling went fainter. It stopped. Tom lay there in his strange sleep, twisting himself. A small still gleeful voice in my head said, ‘Oho, look a
t this now.’
Folie à Deux a Real Risk
Daniel and I sat in the kitchen, the book on the table in front of us. A neat, slightly scuffed rectangle bound in reddish cloth. It looked reassuringly placeable by age and classification. On the first page was the name of the writer and his place of address, in big swirling inky loops. Ostentatious, I thought.
‘Could it have been some kind of fit?’ Daniel said.
‘He was just dreaming. The rattling, though . . .’
‘If you’re sure,’ he said. ‘Dreams are strange things, you know. I’m sure he didn’t mean anything by what he said.’
‘Maybe the “her” wasn’t me,’ I said, ‘when we sleep we go to be with the mass of human subconsciousness. It could be anyone at all he wants to stab, living, dead, made up.’
‘Houses have funny settling floors. When we stood on it together, that probably explains the rattling.’
I nodded, like I believed him.
‘Have you read any of this?’ he said then, and he reached over and tapped the book with two fingers. A strange motion, I thought. Like knocking on wood.
We made coffee, heavily sugared. I wasn’t going to sleep again. I could have – I’m not so easily shaken. But I am easily intrigued by psychodrama and Daniel is easily led into telling stories, and even before he began on the story of this particular book, well, I think a part of me was lit up wanting this to be the moment when I saw a possession come on before me.
‘This diary isn’t mine, by the way,’ he began, still whispering as if Tom might hear us from the next room. I settled in. Let me say again I am not that fanciful. I knew logically it was Tom just having a nightmare that was shaking the bed and us probably making it worse by blundering about; his some human fear, present even in sleep, of moving predation in the dark. But I also felt excited by that girlish wish for this, this overwhelm by malign forces stealing into a body that couldn’t really take its strength. It didn’t really matter if this was caused by fictional sources of torment, by dreams only. The overspill, oh that was it. I was ready.
‘Where does it come from?’ I said.
There’s a kind of intimacy in sharing a foolish idea, in the middle of the night with both of you in your pyjamas, fretting up a storm of possibility.
‘My friend Mark. It was his – I stole it. I’ve been reading it, and, you know, it’s fascinating. James Lennoxlove, intermittent stories of his life and his days, from about age nineteen up until thirty or so, I think. I thought Tom was reading it casually. I noticed it had been moved about. But I think now something about it may have unsettled him, I mean in a profound, lasting way.’
‘It’s a young man’s diary, right?’ I said, nodding at it. ‘Anything in it beyond the usual sordid stuff?’
‘Yes, actually. As a younger man, James Lennoxlove was witness to a murder, one night before a party at a neighbour’s house. It’s not much, just a few pages of description, then he drops the subject. The next entry is over a year later, and he doesn’t reference what he saw at all. I haven’t closely read the whole thing, so my thinking is he must reference it later, and in more detail.’
‘A murder?’
‘Yes, of a maid by a groom. In the stable.’
‘With the candlestick?’
‘No,’ he said, laughing, ‘with a knife, as you’ve already guessed.’ I picked at the book and opened it to a page and read,
I am so much happier than I could have imagined with this new person in my life. We have gone to track the deer in the Bitterrave forest of an idle afternoon though not to hunt them but to sketch, because art is this person’s great love. Not me, but that I can accept, because—
‘Person,’ I said, ‘here, about going sketching deer. He seems to go a long way to avoid saying the gender.’
‘I noticed that, too,’ said Daniel.
‘It could be nothing. I mean, what Tom was doing. Disrupted sleep.’
‘You’d noticed he’s been stressed lately though.’
‘Could be work. Could be any number of things,’ I said, my mind glowing so brightly I imagined Daniel could see right into my head, see the red and orange lava slopping about in there.
‘Spooked. No, you’re right,’ Daniel said. He sipped on his coffee for a moment. We both sat not saying. It hung around us. You want to grasp and to know the thing, get it named. To have it and to that way disarm. As if a named bomb won’t go off in your hand. But even speaking of the thing obliquely, as we were doing, is itself sometimes impossibly hard.
‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do,’ Daniel said.
‘Keep an eye on him,’ I said, ‘make sure he gets enough sleep. Rests and relaxes enough.’
I looked at the window. There we sat in the reflection, in the glass all hollow. Stillness. Daniel, in his reflection, took off his glasses and put them on the table. He looked very different, less pinched. But then much the same, unmovingly agitated, like a pool of water into which some current is pouring, churning. But likely this was my projection onto him, and he was still to his depths, calm in a way I would never be. I felt the cold and damp of the old room then, even with a jumper. I wished we had a fire, something to gather ourselves around.
‘I didn’t realise you wore glasses,’ I said.
‘Yeah, only if I’m reading,’ he said. ‘I have – I have a really bad feeling,’ he said, ‘like I’m sitting in a fog. And something is coming through it, towards us. Sorry. Probably sounds—’
I had no idea what he was talking about. I sat for a moment. ‘Oh, fog. You really do have trouble seeing then. The glasses make sense now,’ I paused. ‘No, I know what you mean,’ I said. ‘It’s like there is something coming through the fog, through Tom.’
Lennoxlove
I read: I am a young man in love with someone beneath my station but also so far beyond it that such strictures cannot be placed on us, only rank disgust. My eyes glazed over. Oh a scandal of love, huh. I flipped through a few pages more. More hunting, more talk of society, a trip to the city. Vain, rich boy who goes where he wants and gossips and has the occasional epiphany about something everyone knows. Here he orders the beech wood cut down and new farmland ploughed. Here he orders a black jacket and considers his brother’s coolness towards him as evidence of their parallel and untouching lives. Here he admires a woman at a party, only to be told that she is some kind of upperclass hussy of no repute. I rub my eyes and do not care. What does Tom find to care about? I flip backwards, forwards. A scattering of words catch my eye, make me itch. Then I notice it: the dates. Under each entry James Lennoxlove writes a date (without year), but they don’t make sense. He writes about the love in June, but describes falling leaves. The party with the socially-disparaged woman appears to be for the new year, as he mentions resolutions and forward-looking games, but the party is placed before his birthday – which he previously says is in November, so must either be a year on from, or in reference to the party he ran out of, where the murder happened. Winter appears after summer, autumn is whenever, the leaves constantly drifting in the woods that are never cut down. The diary is out of order, or the order he has imposed on it is not true. In this light the gossip reads as carrying a sly red line through it, untruthfulness. I read again. There, something too polished, too playful in the way he says, in the forestry entry, ‘like all good men must I improve my lot.’ And belying this, a handwriting that just feels slightly off – slants a little too rough, or too hasty. I can’t speak on the matter, since it’s not my century, my area of study. I sat back from the book and there it sat, all edges and disquiet.
‘What did you like about this text?’ I asked Daniel.
‘Oh, I think it’s his attention to scenic detail. He makes a lot of beautiful observations about the natural world.’
‘Not much to go on for an obsession,’ I said.
‘Tom probably saw other things in it that he liked. The secret love, the sense of isolation – the, ah, historic details?’
‘See,
I don’t think that meshes with him, who he is. Unlike us, he doesn’t have an academic interest in minutia and proof.’
‘How much do you really know of him?’ Daniel asked.
‘I know that much,’ I said. ‘He’s a man who likes the real, the now. He likes beer, working out. Women. He’s not a stupid or a shallow person, but I think that he wouldn’t or shouldn’t get interested in something as mundane as this record of a life.’
‘You don’t know that,’ said Daniel, peevish.
‘But,’ I said, holding up a hand, ‘did you notice this?’ I pointed out what I had noticed.
‘It’s not right,’ I said. ‘There’s something almost forced in it.’
‘Ehh,’ he said, ‘can’t say I saw any of this. On the other hand, if Tom’s the way you think he is he wouldn’t have noticed either. Would he?’
‘And what would it mean to him if he did?’
‘Obsession?’
I ran my finger around the lower edge of the book. It was scuffed and my nail caught on something. I picked it up and examined it. You find hidden latches that open the world that way. But there was just a wrinkle in the fabric. I let the book fall to the table, sinner that I am. And clapped my hands.
Morning
Tom wouldn’t remember, of course he wouldn’t. He’d slept the whole night, felt well rested. He got up and hugged me when he came into the kitchen.
‘You’re up early, for the weekend,’ he said. Raspy, seductive voice.
‘Mm,’ I said. Daniel put on some tea and opened the back door. The air outside rushed in violet grey light and I took some slow deep breaths of the dry air and potting mulch smells and listened to the birdsong.
‘We should have a barbeque sometime, if the weather stays dry,’ I said to myself.
Tom buttered his toast and sat looking at it on his plate.
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