by Jonathan Coe
‘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.
‘Now.’ Dr Dudden gathered the sheets of his typescript together and stacked them into a neat pile, then picked up a file with Terry’s name on it. ‘On arrival yesterday you received a complete medical examination from Dr Goldsmith. No irregularities were found: in fact he seems to have concluded that you are in excellent shape.’
‘Good.’
‘I notice one or two striking features of his report, however. For instance, you claim an average coffee consumption of between thirty to forty cups per day.’
‘That’s right.’
‘Have you drunk any coffee since arriving here?’
‘No. There doesn’t seem to be any on the premises.’
‘We only allow our patients to drink coffee as part of a controlled experiment, to see how it affects their sleep patterns. You went looking for some, then?’
‘Yes.’
‘And how do you feel, not having drunk any in the last… nineteen hours?’
‘Uncomfortable.’
‘Thirty to forty cups a day seems rather excessive to me. Why do you drink so much?’
‘It helps me to stay awake.’
‘I see. That,’ said Dr Dudden, ‘is a singular remark. Most insomniacs in my experience are looking for ways to help them to sleep, not to stay awake. I see from this report that you’ve been taking no medication for your complaint.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘And that you have never, in fact, sought out a medical opinion at all.’
‘No.’
‘Most people find insomnia a depressing and in some cases devastating condition. That hasn’t been your experience?’
‘I often find that I get tired and sleepy during the day. That’s why I drink coffee. But it’s not a major problem.’
‘Has it occurred to you that you may not really be insomniac?’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘One of the most important and fundamental distinctions to be made at this stage in a diagnosis,’ said Dr Dudden, ‘is between psychophysiological and subjective insomnia.’
‘Subjective?’
‘Yes.’
‘You mean… I might be imagining it. Or putting it on. Malingering.’
‘That, with all due respect, is an unhelpful word. To imagine that you are going without sleep can be just as distressing as really going without it. And it’s by no means uncommon. A great many of my patients come here, spend the night in the lab and claim not to have slept a wink. I’m then able to confound them by presenting them with scientific evidence that they have slept soundly – sometimes for up to six or seven hours.’
‘That must give you great satisfaction,’ said Terry.
‘It always gives me satisfaction to help people,’ Dr Dudden answered, drily, as he reached for the telephone. He dialled an extension number. ‘Lorna? Could you bring me last night’s EEG on Mr Worth, please?’ He replaced the receiver abruptly and said to Terry: ‘You are under the impression, I take it, that you didn’t sleep at all last night. When my assistant supplies us with this data, we should be able to establish the facts of the case. Meanwhile…’ He reached for Terry’s report again. ‘I wonder if you can clarify another point for me. From what you said to Dr Goldsmith yesterday, there seems to have been an extraordinary change in your sleeping habits some… twelve years ago.’
‘In nineteen eighty-four, yes.’
‘Prior to which, you claim to have frequently slept for up to fourteen hours a day.’
‘Yes.’
‘This was when you were a student.’
‘Yes.’
‘A student… at this university, I notice.’
‘That’s right. Like yourself.’
Something awoke, briefly, in Dr Dudden’s eyes: a sudden wariness, which made it clear that he didn’t like his patients to spring surprises on him.
‘I suppose that’s something your researchers dug up,’ he said.
‘No,’ said Terry. ‘Dr Madison told me, last night.’
‘I see. You’ve become acquainted with my colleague, then?’
‘Superficially.’ Terry and Dr Dudden looked at each other, and tried to read each other’s smiles. ‘I lived in this very house, as a matter of fact. For a few months.’
‘So did I,’ said Dr Dudden. ‘I lived here for two years.’
‘That’s quite a coincidence. But we never overlapped.’
‘I think not. Otherwise…’
‘Otherwise I’m sure we would have remembered each other.’
‘Precisely.’
‘I did,’ said Terry, ‘have a friend called Sarah. Sarah Tudor. And she once went out with someone called Gregory. Gregory: that is your first name, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, it is.’
‘Yes. Dr Madison told me, you see, last…’
‘… last night. Of course. While you were getting superficially acquainted.’
‘Yes.’
‘Now, just let me think…’ Dr Dudden sat back in his chair, and rolled his eyes towards the ceiling, rather obviously feigning an attempt at recollection. ‘There was a girl here called Sarah, now that you mention it. I suppose we did see each other from time to time. It was hardly what you’d call… goin
g out.’
‘Dr Madison thinks she may have been narcoleptic.’
‘Dr Madison knew her as well?’ Now the wariness was turning into something like panic.
‘No, of course not. It’s just that I mentioned to her, last night, how this girl called Sarah used to have very vivid –’
They were interrupted by a knock on the door, and the arrival of Lorna, with her piles of computer paper. Dr Dudden seemed glad of the diversion.
‘Ah, wonderful, wonderful. That’s what I like to see. Quiet efficiency. Everything running like clockwork. What a treasure you are, Lorna. Have you met Lorna, Mr Worth? Have you been introduced to our chief technician and polysomnographer?’
‘No, I haven’t.’ Terry rose to his feet and shook her hand. ‘Nice to meet you.’
Lorna stared at him in bewilderment. ‘But you spoke to me just a few minutes ago. About the video machine.’ Seeing that recognition was still slow to dawn, she added: ‘I put you to bed last night. I wired you up.’
Terry laughed. ‘Yes. Of course.’
Breaking the difficult silence, Dr Dudden took the paper out of Lorna’s arms and invited her to leave. When she had gone, he asked Terry whether he was usually so bad at remembering new faces.
‘I don’t know. I’ve never really thought about it.’
‘You mean you’ve never really noticed it before?’
‘I suppose I don’t tend to meet that many new people.’
‘I would have thought that in your line of work you were meeting new people all the time.’
‘Well, yes, I suppose I am: but then I hardly ever see them again. So the problem doesn’t arise.’
‘But there is a problem?’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ It was the first time Dr Dudden had seen Terry looking rattled. ‘I’m very tired, you know. I haven’t had any coffee for nineteen hours. It’s no wonder I don’t recognize everybody.’
‘You’d rather have coffee than sleep?’
‘I’ve told you already: I don’t sleep. I never sleep. I haven’t slept for years.’
‘Well, let’s see about that.’ Dr Dudden looked at the note Lorna had left on top of the paper, summarizing her findings, then flicked brusquely but attentively through the sheets themselves. They were covered with jagged lines in different coloured inks, and judging from his occasional grunts, he seemed to be finding them quite surprising. ‘There’s a long interval here with no recordings at all,’ he said at one point.
‘Yes. I was getting bored, so I took the equipment off and left the room.’
‘Not unassisted, I hope,’ said Dr Dudden, but fortunately did not wait for the answer. ‘Well–’ as he laid down the paper, and scribbled a quick memo to himself ‘–it would seem, last night at least, that your subjective perception was correct. You didn’t sleep at all. No sleep-onset REM, as we might have expected. Not even Stage One. Not even drowsiness, for that matter. Which, given the experience you’ve recently been through at the cinema, is quite remarkable, I must say.’
‘I told you,’ said Terry. ‘I don’t sleep.’
‘Everybody sleeps, Mr Worth. I hope you’re not going to try to persuade me, now or at any other time, that you have had no sleep at all for the last twelve years.’
‘I’ve had very little,’ said Terry. ‘Although, as you say, perhaps I’ve been imagining it. Or dreaming it, or something. Do people dream that they’ve had no sleep?’
‘Certainly. That happens all the time. However, it seems to be unlikely, in your case. Let’s just check off some of the things you discussed with Dr Goldsmith. Are you an alcoholic?’
‘Not to my knowledge.’
‘Your daily alcohol intake is certainly excessive, according to these figures. But I dare say that’s not the underlying cause of your difficulties. The caffeine addiction we’ve already mentioned… No allergies, I see… You don’t suffer any discomfort in your legs at night? Any urge to keep moving them?’
‘No.’
‘And you don’t snore?’
‘How would I know?’
‘Your sleeping partner might complain.’
‘I don’t have a sleeping partner.’
‘Mm. And what about depression? You wouldn’t describe yourself as depressed?’
‘Not really. I think that if I was ever depressed, it was before this started: back when I was a student, and all I wanted to do was sleep.’
‘Do you have any theories about why you wanted to sleep so much?’
‘I suppose I was happier when I was asleep than when I was awake. I used to have very nice dreams.’
‘Ah.’ Dr Dudden wrote this down. ‘That’s very interesting. What were these dreams about?’
‘I don’t know. I could never remember them.’
‘Then how did you know they were nice?’
‘It was just… a sense I had. When I woke up.’
‘Mm. And then this stopped, did it? In nineteen eighty-four?’
‘Yes.’
‘Perhaps you could tell me something about that period in your life.’
‘Well…’ Terry shifted in his seat, as if he found this subject uncomfortable. At the same time, a tiny, nostalgic smirk appeared around his lips. ‘When I left university – a few weeks after I left – I got this job, and quite soon afterwards, I precipitated this – well, crisis is the word, I suppose.’
‘What sort of crisis?’
‘I closed down a magazine. Single-handedly.’
‘And how did you manage to do that?’
‘It was a film magazine, and they published this article which I was supposed to have checked. Unfortunately, I allowed certain… errors to appear in this article, and these errors turned out to be libellous. It attracted seven libel suits.’
‘Seven.’
‘Yes. I can’t remember all the people involved, but there was certainly Denis Thatcher, Norman Wisdom, Vera Lynn…’
‘I see.’
‘… Cliff Richard, Kingsley Amis, Edward Heath…’
‘The author managed to libel all of these people, in the course of one article?’
‘Yes, owing to an oversight on my part. Or rather…’ The smirk became at once wider and more private. ‘Well, it was just bad luck, I suppose. Luck, pure and simple. That was the beauty of it.’
When it became clear that he wasn’t going to elaborate on this, Dr Dudden said: ‘And you then found yourself out of a job, presumably.’
‘That was when I started working freelance. I’d been going to write a book. It was going to be about a director – quite an obscure director, someone not much written about – and about… other things, as well. Theoretical things. About loss, in a way. The idea of loss.’
‘But you never finished it?’
‘I never started it. I was having to do so much work, just to support myself… I was working till midnight, most nights, and then I was starting to find – oddly – that I wasn’t all that tired at the end of it. So instead of going to bed, I’d stay up all night. Watching videos. And that was really how it began.’
‘Would you agree, then,’ said Dr Dudden, ‘that you were using these videos as a substitute for the dreams which had once –’
As he spoke, a small alarm clock on his desk began to bleep. He put down his pencil and closed Terry’s file with a brief sigh of frustration.
‘That’s it, I’m afraid,’ he said.
‘What?’
‘Time’s up. It’s eleven forty-two, and I have another appointment to keep at a quarter to twelve.’
‘But that was just getting interesting.’
‘We run a tight ship here, Mr Worth. If you had not been twenty-three minutes late, we could have made a good deal more progress. Now it will have to wait until tomorrow.’
‘Surely we’ve got another three minutes, at least.’
‘No. During the first interview, that time is set aside for me to ask you certain practical questions. For instance…’ He paused, and a blankness crossed his face.
After sitting there for a second or two, vacant-eyed, he fumbled inside one of his desk drawers and eventually produced a sheet of paper with some typed questions on it. ‘Ah, yes. Funny how I can never seem to remember these.’ He proceeded to read out the first question. ‘“How are you settling in at the Clinic?”’
‘Very well, thank you,’ said Terry; regarding him now with some astonishment.
‘“Have the staff been courteous and helpful?”’
‘Perfectly,’ said Terry; deciding not to voice the thought that Dr Dudden himself had so far proved neither.
‘“Is your day room clean and comfortable?”’
Only now did Terry hesitate. ‘Comfortable, yes,’ he said. He allowed himself a moment to enjoy Dr Dudden’s look of incipient horror; and then he told him about the writing on the wall.
∗
‘Psst!’ said a voice.
Dr Madison paused in the corridor and looked around. It was not obvious where the noise was coming from.
‘Psst!’ it said again. A finger emerged from one of the doorways, beckoned her, then disappeared. Dr Madison followed it into Day Room Nine, where she found Dr Dudden waiting for her, his face pale with fury (not an uncommon sight), his posture betraying every sign of shamed agitation.
‘Come here,’ he hissed.
She joined him by the wardrobe.
‘Look at that,’ he said. ‘Just look at it.’
He pointed at the words ‘stupid fuck’, which had been scrawled on the wall in ink. Next to them was a large brown stain.
‘Mr Worth discovered that,’ he went on. ‘A bloody journalist discovered that, God damn it. Isn’t that typical? Isn’t that just typical of our luck?’
‘Why had no one noticed it before?’
‘It was hidden behind the wardrobe.’
‘And what was Mr Worth doing moving the wardrobe?’
Dr Dudden ignored this question. He said: ‘I realize you won’t want to hear it, doctor, but this exactly proves my point. This is precisely why we have to be careful what… sort of person we allow in here. This is the sort of thing that happens when you open your doors to riff-raff.’
‘Are you by any chance referring,’ said Dr Madison, ‘to the NHS patients?’
‘I don’t think I need to spell it out,’ said Dr Dudden. ‘That woman in your group, for instance. The Brixton woman. I don’t mean to be snobbish, but… what can you expect from someone like that? No class, no character…’