The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  He was not using a safety razor, and now a sudden shaft of pain from somewhere in the region of his calf made him flinch. He had nicked himself quite badly: a trickle of blood flowed into the bath-water. Shaving his legs wasn’t the relaxing, pleasantly mindless business he had assumed it would be, then: a modicum of concentration was required. Even so, there was something deeply satisfying about it, some fundamental quality of Tightness. He had never seen the point of hairy legs. He had always asked his previous girlfriends for their opinions on this subject, and had been astonished to find that they considered them attractive. Just as well, really: but he couldn’t help regarding it as an inexplicable lapse of taste.

  He had nearly finished, now: just the ankles to do, and they would be a stretch. He would give himself a little rest first. He lay back in the grey water, now thick with dark hair, and stared for a while unfocusingly at the cracked and begrimed wall tiles. They reminded him of the showers at school, and that was another nasty memory: communal showers, all that teasing, and furtive comparison…

  Robert had been in the bath for more than an hour: enough time for Sarah to have left the library, caught a bus from campus and arrived back at Ashdown, anxious to wash her hair. There was no lock on the bathroom door. The trick was to put the towel-rail up against it, but Robert, being a new resident, had not discovered this yet. That was how she came to burst in upon him unexpectedly, without even knocking.

  It all happened in a rush. Sarah screamed in shock and mortification but Robert screamed in agony, for he was in the middle of shaving his left ankle, with his leg raised high in the air. When the door crashed open his hand had slipped and the twin blades of his razor gouged deeply into the leg, twice, at right angles, leaving a double scar that would stay with him for the rest of his life, like French quotation marks. And this time the blood came in more than a trickle: it jetted out and flooded the bath-water, turning it strawberry-pink in what seemed to be no time at all. Sarah stared at him, appalled, transfixed, and for a moment he thought that she was even going to rush to his help; but he managed to forestall this by shouting: ‘It’s all right! It’s all right! I was shaving, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m sorry, I – I’ll come back when you’ve finished.’

  She made for the doorway but paused when she got there. She was shielding her eyes and looking away. ‘Are you O K ? I mean, do you need any help? There’s a First Aid box in the cabinet.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll be fine. Just – just leave me to it, will you?’

  She stepped out of the room, but paused again in the corridor. ‘I thought you would have gone home,’ she said, quickly, enigmatically, and then disappeared.

  Robert did not waste any time pondering the meaning of this remark. He climbed out of the bath and staunched the flow of blood from his ankle with toilet paper, then bandaged it tightly. He was dripping wet and very cold. He dried himself with his small, threadbare towel, and limped back to his bedroom.

  Sarah came to find him a few minutes later, just as he had finished dressing. She had washed her hair and combed it out, but not dried it, and it looked darker than he remembered from the night before, mousey even. For some reason he was touched by this: or perhaps he was already approaching that vulnerable condition of the heart where even the smallest and most mundane details take on a luminous, transfiguring quality. Whatever the cause, he felt his chest tighten as she sat down on the bed opposite his desk, and found himself, for a moment, completely incapable of speech. Even breathing was difficult at first.

  ‘Is it still hurting?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh… just a bit. It’ll be fine.’ He hoped she wasn’t going to ask him why he had been shaving his legs in the first place.

  ‘I didn’t mean to… well, I’m sorry if I disturbed you. People usually put the towel-rail up against the door, you see.’

  ‘Oh. Right. Well, that’s what I’ll do, then: next time.’

  Sarah nodded. This was not proceeding at all as she had hoped. She wondered how they were possibly going to reestablish the easy, trusting atmosphere of last night’s conversation.

  ‘Anyway,’ she said, ‘I just came to see that you were OK, really. You know, you looked pretty… upset last night, and I wanted to know that you were coping.’

  ‘Coping?’

  ‘Well, yes: it must be very hard for you.’

  He summoned the courage to look at her now, pricked by curiosity at the note of genuine, tremulous concern in her voice. What was going on here, exactly? Did she really think he was the kind of man to be laid flat out with grief for days over the death of a cat? Did he appear that pathetic? Unable to tell, from her question, whether she was patronizing him or simply making fun, he said guardedly:

  ‘Oh, you know, it’s not such a big deal, really. I’ll get over it.’

  How very male, Sarah thought, to be putting on this bluff display of resilience. Did men really believe that they weren’t allowed to show their feelings, even when discussing the death of someone close to them – almost as close, in this case, as it was possible to be? She saw how tense and anxious he was in her presence, how uncomfortable at the thought of having this husk of insensibility peeled back, revealing the softer, truer nature underneath. But she knew that it was in both their interests to persist.

  ‘When I said that I thought you’d gone away,’ she went on, ‘I meant that, you know, the funeral must be soon.’

  ‘Funeral?’ said Robert.

  ‘For – I’m sorry, I’ve forgotten her name…’

  ‘For Muriel, you mean?’

  ‘Yes. For Muriel.’

  He shrugged, laughing uneasily. ‘Oh, I don’t think we’ll be making that much of a fuss over it,’ he said. ‘That would be a bit over the top, don’t you think?’

  Taken aback for a moment, she mumbled: ‘Well, whatever you all think is… appropriate.’

  ‘I mean, when this has happened before,’ said Robert, ‘we haven’t bothered with a funeral or anything.’

  ‘This has happened before?’ she asked, horrified.

  ‘Twice, yes.’

  ‘Oh God, Robert, I just… don’t know what to say. That’s awful. To think that lives can be so… blighted, and yet –you carry on, somehow.’

  ‘Well, I must say, Muriel’s is the hardest to take.’ He sat forward, nearer to her, and rubbed his hands, warming them at the flame of her sympathy. ‘I was closest to her, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes, I can imagine.’

  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 h
im 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.’