The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  The man came round the corner, saw her and took a step back.

  ‘I’m sorry. I thought you knew I was here.’

  She said: ‘No, I didn’t.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  He had a kind face: that was the first thing that she noticed. And the second thing she noticed was that he appeared to have been crying – quite recently, in fact. He sat down at the kitchen table to drink his coffee, and she sat down opposite him to drink her soup, and as she was pulling up a chair she glanced across at him and could have sworn that she saw a tear inching down his cheek.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked. They didn’t get many first-years at Ashdown, but she wondered if he had just arrived at the university, and was already starting to feel homesick.

  It turned out that this was not the case. He was in his third year, studying modern languages, and had moved into Ashdown only yesterday. What had distressed him was a phone call from his mother, who had rung from home a few hours ago to tell him that Muriel, the family cat, had been killed that same morning – run over by a milk float at the bottom of the front drive. He was clearly ashamed to be showing so much emotion about this, but Sarah liked him for it. To save him further embarrassment, all the same, she changed the subject as quickly as possible, and told him that he was not the only one to have had an upsetting day.

  ‘Why, what happened to you?’ he asked.

  It did not occur to Sarah until later that it was surprising to have found herself talking so frankly to such a new acquaintance, someone whose name she had not even, at this stage, troubled to find out. None the less, she told him all about her bizarre encounter on the street with a complete stranger who had glared at her and called her a bitch for no apparent reason. The new resident listened attentively as he sipped his coffee: striking, Sarah thought, just the right balance between concern (for he seemed to understand how traumatic the incident must have been for her) and a more lighthearted note of reassurance (for he encouraged her, at the same time, to laugh it off as the outburst of some pitiable eccentric). She told him about the conversation she had overheard at the Café Valladon, how it had turned to the subject of misogyny, and how she had felt compelled to join in.

  ‘It’s a very live subject at the moment,’ he agreed. ‘There’s a big anti-feminist backlash going on here.’ He told her how the university’s new Women’s Studies Department had been vandalized recently: someone had broken in and spray-painted the words ‘Death to the Sisters’ in foot-high letters all over the walls.

  Sarah was enjoying talking to this man very much, but had started to feel tired. Sometimes she was subject to a sort of tiredness which was extreme, by most people’s standards, and once or twice had even found herself falling asleep in the middle of conversations. She didn’t want anything like that to happen here: she was too anxious to leave a good impression.

  ‘I think I’d better get back to bed,’ she said, getting up and rinsing her soup-mug under the cold tap. ‘It’s nice to have met you, though. I’m glad you’re moving in. I think we’re going to be friends.’

  ‘I hope so.’

  ‘My name’s Sarah, by the way.’

  ‘I’m Robert.’

  They smiled at each other. Sarah ran a hand through her hair, taking hold of a clump and tugging at it lightly. Robert noticed this gesture, and remembered it.

  She went up to her room and slept for an hour or two, until Gregory woke her by coming in and turning on the overhead light. Blinking, she looked at the alarm clock. It was earlier than she had thought: only ten-fifteen.

  ‘Home already?’ she said.

  He had his back towards her, putting something away in a drawer, and grunted: ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I thought since this was the last night you were all going to be together, you’d stay out late. Make an occasion of it.’

  It was the beginning of the autumn term, and Gregory had come down from his parents’ house in Dundee merely to collect some belongings, to see some old friends, and to spend a few final days with Sarah. They had both finished their undergraduate degree courses in July. Later that week he was due to start at medical school in London, where he would specialize in psychiatry. She was staying on at the university for another year, to train as a primary school teacher.

  ‘Busy day tomorrow,’ he said, sitting at the end of the bed, tugging off a shoe. ‘Got to make an early start.’ His eyes flicked towards her for the first time. ‘You look done in.’

  Sarah told him the story of the man who had abused her in the street, to which his initial response was: ‘But that doesn’t make sense. Why would anyone do that?’

  ‘I suppose I was a woman,’ said Sarah, ‘and that was enough.’

  ‘Are you sure he was talking to you?’

  ‘There was nobody else around.’ Gregory was preoccupied with a knotted shoelace, so she prompted: ‘It was quite upsetting.’

  ‘Well, you don’t want to let these things get to you.’ The shoelace untied, he felt for her ankle and squeezed it through the bedclothes. ‘I thought we’d gone beyond this. You’re a big girl now.’ He frowned at her. ‘Did it really happen?’

  ‘I think so.’

  ‘Hmm… but you’re not sure. Perhaps I should write it down anyway.’

  Gregory sat at the dressing-table and took an exercise book out of the top drawer. He scribbled a few words, then sat back and thumbed through the pages. His face, reflected in the mirror, betrayed a pleased smile.

  ‘You know, I was so lucky to meet you,’ he said. ‘Look at all the material it’s given me. I mean, I know that’s not the only reason, but… think of the lead it’s going to give me over all the other guys.’

  ‘Isn’t it a bit early to be thinking in those terms?’ said Sarah.

  ‘Nonsense. If you really want to get to the top, you can never get started too soon.’

  ‘It’s not a race, though, is it?’

  ‘There are winners and losers in the human race, just like any other,’ said Gregory. He had put the exercise book away and was taking off his shirt. ‘How many times have I told you that?’

  Rather to her own surprise, Sarah took this question seriously. ‘My guess would be between about fifteen and twenty.’

  ‘There you are, then,’ said Gregory, apparently quite satisfied with this statistic. ‘It applies to everything, as well – even accommodation. I mean, you’d scarcely credit it, but Frank’s going up to London in a week’s time, and he hasn’t even found himself somewhere to live yet.’ He laughed incredulously. ‘How do you account for that kind of behaviour?’

  ‘Well,’ said Sarah, ‘perhaps he just isn’t lucky enough to have a father who’s in a position to buy him a flat in Victoria.’

  ‘It’s Pimlico. Not Victoria.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’

  ‘About twenty thousand pounds, for one thing. We chose that location very carefully. Convenient for the hospital. Excellent neighbourhood.’ Appearing to sense an unvoiced contempt on Sarah’s part, he added: ‘For God’s sake, I would have thought you’d appreciate it as much as anybody. You’re going to be staying there every weekend, aren’t you?’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘Well I assume so.’

  ‘You know I’m going to have to prepare lessons and things. I’m doing lots of teaching practice this term. I might be busy.’

  ‘I can’t see that preparing a few lessons is going to take up much of your time.’

  ‘Some people don’t have to work hard. I do. I’m a plodder.’

  Gregory sat down on the bed beside her. ‘You know, you have a serious self-esteem problem,’ he said. ‘Has it never occurred to you that it’s largely because of your low self-esteem that you never achieve anything?’

  Sarah took a moment to digest this, but couldn’t find it in herself to get angry. Instead her mind went back to the scene in the kitchen. ‘I met one of the new people today,’ she said. ‘His name was Robert. He seemed really nice. Have you
met him yet?’

  ‘No.’ Gregory had undressed to his underpants by now, and he slid a hand absently down the front of Sarah’s nightdress, resting it on her breast.

  ‘You haven’t spoken to him or anything?’

  He sighed. ‘Sarah, I’m leaving tomorrow. I’m going to live in London. Why would I waste my time getting to know people I’m never going to see again?’

  He removed his underpants, climbed on top of her, and then pulled down her nightdress so that her breasts were fully exposed. He took hold of her nipples and began to tweak them simultaneously. Sarah examined his expression as he did this, trying to remember where she had seen something like it before: his brow was furrowed with both impatience and concentration, much as it had been the other evening while she had watched him twiddling the contrast and vertical-hold knobs on the television downstairs, trying to get a good picture for News at Ten. That, she recalled, had taken him about two minutes, but less than half that time was up before he took her tiny wrists in his hands, pinned her arms to the pillow behind her head, and entered her swiftly. She was dry and tight, and found the sensation uncomfortable.

  ‘Look, Gregory,’ she said, ‘I’m not really in the mood. In fact, I’m not in the mood at all.’

  ‘It’s all right, I won’t be long.’

  ‘No.’ She took a firm hold of his hips and stilled their rocking motion. ‘I don’t want to do this.’

  ‘But we’ve had the foreplay and everything.’ His eyes were wounded, incredulous.

  ‘Get out,’ said Sarah.

  ‘What – of you, the bed, or the room?’ His confusion seemed genuine.

  ‘Of me, initially.’

  He stared at her for a second or two, then tutted to himself and withdrew gracelessly, saying: ‘You can be so inconsiderate sometimes.’ But he remained on top of her, and she knew what was coming next. ‘Close your eyes a minute.’

  She stared back at him, defiant but powerless.

  ‘I spy? With my little eye?’

  ‘Gregory, no. Not now.’

  ‘Go on. I know you like it really.’

  ‘I do not like it really. I’ve never liked it. How many times do I have to tell you that I’ve never liked it?’

  ‘It’s just a game, Sarah. It’s about trust. You do trust me, don’t you?’

  ‘Let go,’ she said. Both her hands were enclosed in one of his, and were still pinned to the pillow. His other hand was now hovering above her face, the first and second fingers extended, getting closer to her eyes.

  ‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Show that you trust me. Close your eyes.’

  The tips of his fingers were now so near that she had no option: she closed her eyes as a reflex action, and then screwed them tight. Soon she felt the pressure of his two fingers against her shielded eyeballs – gentle at first – and she stiffened, a familiar terror stirring inside her. She had developed a method of dealing with this sensation, which involved emptying her mind of all ideas relating to the present moment. Time, for Sarah, was halted as Gregory crouched over her, and if her thoughts turned towards anything at all, it was towards what seemed (for now) the distant past: the very beginnings of their relationship, when she had so enjoyed his company, before they had become locked into this pattern of self-perpetuating quarrels and weird bedroom rituals.

  How had they managed to get from there to here?

  She had a vivid recollection, still, of the first time she had met him, during the interval of a concert, at the Arts Centre bar. She had not intended to go to this concert, but ticket sales had been extremely low, and the box office staff were reduced to the expedient of handing out free tickets to passers-by shortly before it started, in order to make up the numbers and spare the visiting performer from embarrassment. The programme consisted of J. S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue, a work of which she had no previous knowledge, performed on the harpsichord in its entirety. The only other person in Sarah’s row was a tall, gangly student, his dark hair cut into a severe short-back-and-sides, sitting bolt upright in his chair, wearing a tweed jacket, an old school tie and a yellow waistcoat with a fob watch, who listened to the music with rigid concentration and once or twice sighed loudly or clicked his tongue in exasperation for no apparent reason. Since he seemed to be taking no notice of Sarah, it was a great surprise when he came to sit at her table during the interval, and an even greater surprise when, after a strained silence of perhaps two or three minutes, he suddenly addressed her in a clipped Scottish accent with the words: ‘Preposterous tempi in the eleventh contrapunctus, didn’t you think?’

  They were the most peculiar, least comprehensible words that had ever been spoken to her: but they did lead to a conversation, of sorts, and that in turn led to a relationship, of sorts. In all her five terms at the university Sarah had never had a boyfriend, and her social life, such as it was, tended to consist of the occasional rowdy evening out with large groups of friends who had never (she felt) invited her wholeheartedly into their circle. To be asked out to dinner by Gregory, to accompany him to the cinema or theatre, was for a while a new and blissful experience. Most often they went to concerts, and if she noticed that Gregory’s tastes in music showed a marked tendency towards pieces that were dry, academic and emotionless, she did not allow it to bother her. Not, at any rate, until she discovered that these same qualities characterized his lovemaking.

  Sarah lost her virginity to Gregory, about six weeks after he had started taking her out. It was a difficult and painful experience, much as she had been expecting; what she had not been expecting, however, was that all their subsequent encounters would be equally lacking in pleasure. Gregory made love with the same cool, intelligent efficiency he found so admirable in the most rigorous of Bach’s keyboard exercises. Tenderness, flexibility, expressiveness and variations in tempo were not among the items in his repertoire. The best that Sarah could expect – the best she had to look forward to, after several months of these couplings – was the moment of post-coital fatigue, when Gregory, his performance executed and his energies spent, would sometimes speak to her in a cajoling, intimate way she found untypical and delightful. It was on one such occasion that he had asked her an unexpected question.

  They were lying in bed together, deep in the middle of a still, airless night, hotly entwined, her head on his shoulder. And Gregory had asked her, seemingly from nowhere, what she thought was the most beautiful part of his body. Sarah had looked up at him in surprise, and told him that she wasn’t sure, she would have to think about it, and then he, much to her relief (because she couldn’t, to be honest, think of any part of his body that was especially beautiful), had said, ‘Shall I tell you what is the most beautiful part of your body?’ and she had said, ‘Yes, tell me,’ but for a little while he had made her guess, and they ran, giggling, through the obvious possibilities, but it was none of those, and finally she gave up, and then Gregory had smiled at her and said, quietly, ‘Your eyelids.’ She hadn’t believed him at first, but he had said, ‘That’s because you’ve never seen your own eyelids; and never will see them, unless I take a photograph’ (but he never did take a photograph), and so she asked him, ‘Well, when have you become so intimately acquainted with my eyelids?’ and he answered, ‘While you were asleep. I like watching you when you’re asleep.’ And this was the first intimation she had had, the first hint, of his liking for standing over people in their beds, looking down on them as they slept, something she had regarded as interesting at first, the sign of an enquiring intelligence, until she began to wonder, in the end, whether there wasn’t something sinister about it, fetishistic almost, this desire to look down on people as they lay helpless, unconscious, while he, the watching subject, retained full control over his waking mind.

  It was harder to get to sleep after that, knowing that at any point in the night he might climb out of bed and stand over her, watching her sleeping face by moonlight. (And that was before she had further aroused his interest by telling him about her dreams, her dreams so real th
at she could sometimes not distinguish them from the events of her waking life.) But she got used to the idea, as she supposed one gets used to most ideas, and her awareness of Gregory’s watchful presence did not unduly disturb her sleeping patterns for several more months (or was it weeks?) until she awoke screaming, in the early hours of one December morning, from one of her recurring nightmares about frogs. This one concerned a man-sized frog which had been squatting by the side of the campus ring road as she tried to hurry by: it had croaked horribly at her and then fastened on to her eyelids with the twin ends of its forked tongue, one on each eye. Sarah had struggled to wake from the nightmare but then began to cry out in even greater panic as she realized that, even though the dream was over, the sensation of pressure against her eyelids wasn’t going away: there really was someone, or something, fastening on to them. She tried to open her eyes but found that she couldn’t. Something was obstructing the movement of her eyelids. Then the obstruction was removed swiftly and she opened her eyes to find Gregory sitting close beside her, his face bent intently towards hers, his hand – with first and second fingers outstretched – suspended in the air only an inch or two from her eyes.

  ‘What the hell were you doing?’ she asked, about ten minutes later, when she was fully awake, her breathing and heart rate had returned to normal, and she was convinced, finally, that there were no giant frogs in the room with them. ‘What were you doing back then?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Gregory. ‘I was just watching you.’

  ‘You were touching me,’ said Sarah.

  ‘I didn’t mean to wake you.’

  ‘Well then, you shouldn’t have put your bloody fingers in my eyes.’

  After a pause Gregory murmured, ‘I’m sorry,’ very softly – meltingly – and squeezed her hand. Then he leaned forward and kissed her. ‘I didn’t mean to wake you,’ he repeated. ‘I had to touch them. It’s incredible…’ in the half-dark of the bedroom she could sense his smile ‘… there’s so much life going on behind your eyes when you’re asleep: I could see it. And I wanted to touch it: I could feel it, in my fingertips.’ He added: ‘I’ve done it before, you know.’