The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  Sarah had called on Veronica again the next day. They went for a meal together, and then went to see a late film in town, and Sarah missed the last bus home: she woke up, the next morning, in a sleeping-bag on the floor of Veronica’s room on campus. The morning after that, she woke up in her bed.

  It was a click that woke her: somebody switching on a portable cassette player. She snoozed through the first few minutes of the tape, then surfaced and began to take note of her surroundings during a Billie Holiday song:

  I’ve got those Monday blues

  Straight through Sunday blues

  ‘Well – have you?’ Veronica asked, sitting on the edge of the bed.

  ‘Have I what?’

  ‘Got those Monday blues.’

  ‘Is it Monday?’ Sarah sat up anxiously and looked at the bedside clock. It was ten-fifteen. ‘Oh, fuck – I had a nine-thirty lecture.’

  ‘You’ve got sleep in your eyes.’ Veronica tried to touch it with her forefinger, but Sarah flinched and sank back under the duvet. ‘I bet you’d like some coffee.’

  ‘Mm, I would, quite.’

  ‘So would I,’ said Veronica, ‘but unfortunately we drank it all yesterday.’ She stood up and stretched, her body strong and wiry beneath a T-shirt so long that it reached below her knee. ‘I think we should have something in Jonah’s, anyway. Coffee, breakfast, the full works. What do you say?’

  Breakfast was not served after ten-thirty, so they dressed quickly, arrived just in time and were rewarded with bacon, mushrooms and large portions of solidifying scrambled egg. Veronica dispatched her portion hungrily, then started dipping her fork into the rubbery hillock of egg which Sarah – sitting stiffly opposite her, and looking somehow distracted – had left untouched. Neither of them spoke much: at least, not until they were joined for a few minutes by a History student called Lynne, and even then it was Veronica who did all the talking. Sarah sat playing with her sachet of sugar, tipping all the sugar to the bottom half and then folding it in two, then inverting it and repeating the process, until the sachet itself came apart and sugar spilled out all over the remains of her breakfast.

  ‘I could see that was going to happen,’ said Veronica. Lynne had left by now.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Sarah laughed. ‘It’s a bad habit of mine.’ She ran a hand through her hair, taking hold of a clump and tugging at it lightly. Another habit: a gesture Robert had already been captivated by. And now Veronica, too, noticed it for the first time.

  ‘What d’you want to do today?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Sarah. Her voice was toneless. ‘I’m feeling a little bit strange, to be honest.’

  ‘I’d noticed.’

  ‘It’s just that… what it is…’ Sarah looked across at the table next to them. Although the restaurant was almost empty, three young male students had chosen to seat themselves there, and were starting up a fitful and desultory conversation. ‘This is really embarrassing, but… you know what I was telling you yesterday, about my dreams?’ (Could she really have told Veronica this already, after knowing her only a couple of days?) ‘About how vivid they are, sometimes?’

  Veronica nodded.

  ‘Well, I had one about you last night.’

  ‘About me?’

  ‘About us.’ She glanced across at the three students. They were munching Kit-Kats wordlessly. ‘We were…’

  ‘Yes?’ said Veronica.

  ‘… in bed together.’

  Veronica shrugged. ‘Sounds fairly harmless. Is that the only reason you’re looking so tortured?’

  ‘You know how it is,’ said Sarah, ‘after you’ve dreamed about someone. The next day, you don’t see them the same way.’

  ‘That’s true,’ said Veronica. ‘Especially if it’s an erotic dream, I find.’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ said Sarah, almost in a whisper.

  ‘What do you mean, “exactly”?’

  ‘I mean… “exactly”.’

  ‘This was an erotic dream: is that what you’re telling me?’

  Sarah nodded; and then she said (her voice lower than a whisper now): ‘I wish those creeps would go away.’

  ‘What makes you think it was a dream?’ asked Veronica.

  ‘I’m sure they’re listening.’

  ‘Well, you’re obviously not.’

  Sarah looked at her, her eyes widening. Veronica’s question had finally broken in upon her, and its implications became suddenly, shockingly clear even as she heard it repeated.

  ‘What makes you think it was a dream?’

  Sarah’s next words were faint: ‘I know it was.’ Then fainter still: ‘I’m sure it was.’

  Veronica smiled and shook her head. She said: ‘I think I’m going to fall in love with you, Sarah.’

  6

  At two o’clock that afternoon, Terry went into Dr Dudden’s empty office and – quite without his permission, or indeed knowledge – efficiently disconnected the telephone. He plugged his PowerBook into the phone socket and pressed the send button, thereby sitting in motion a rapid but complex chain of events. Converted from binary data into analog signals, his film review was propelled down the telephone lines by electric current and just a few seconds later arrived in the Arts and Features Department of the newspaper, where a fax machine reconverted it into digital information and fed it to a thermal print head for reconstruction on paper. Passed in this form to the Arts Editor, it was briefly scrutinized, chuckled over and approved for publication, so that the following morning it could be glanced at by perhaps one in twenty of the newspaper’s 400,000 readers: one of them, on this occasion, being Sarah, who fell asleep while attempting to read Terry’s review in her staff room during morning break.

  When the sleepiness started she could feel it, but not fight against it.

  The words zoomed in and out of focus before her eyes.

  She willed herself to concentrate, but it was no good. Her eyelids were getting heavy: heavier…

  Catherine woke her, ten minutes later, by shaking her shoulder gently and saying: ‘Sarah, wake up. Break’s almost over.’

  ‘Was I asleep? Oh, hell.’ Sarah sat up in her chair and blinked around the room. Her colleagues were all beginning to leave: even the bell had not roused her this time. Just as he was going through the door, she called after Norman (a tall, rather anxious-looking student teacher in his early twenties): ‘I’ll be along in a little while, OK?’

  ‘Yes, that’s fine.’

  ‘Twenty minutes or so.’

  He must find me very peculiar, she thought, opening her bottle of mazindol and popping a couple of pills in her mouth.

  Too polite or too scared to say anything, though.

  When the room was empty, she refilled her coffee cup and gradually, effortfully, managed to remember what she had been reading in the newspaper. It was a film review by Terry. Strange to think that she still received these weekly updates on his critical opinions, even though she had not actually seen him for more than ten years. From her passing acquaintance with his journalism she could draw a surprisingly complete picture: she was familiar with his tastes in music and films, she knew that he still lived in London, she could imagine what his social life was like, she could even hazard a reasonable guess at his income (three times more than hers? Four?). And yet to him, she must have become completely invisible. Did he ever think about her? she wondered. Ever remember the time they had shared a flat together, after graduating; ever ask himself what had become of her?

  Not that it really mattered. Not that it made any difference.

  She looked at the review again and couldn’t remember how much of it she had read. Skimming through it now, she found it more comprehensible than most of Terry’s outpourings. The general tenor, at least, appeared to be enthusiastic. ‘Fun for all the family’ was his (hardly very groundbreaking) conclusion, and on reading this phrase Sarah indulged herself in a bitter little smile. Well, she thought, that was just fine, for people with families. What about the rest of
us?

  This was an area into which her thoughts seemed to be leading her more and more often, these days, and she resolved to escape it immediately. Throwing the newspaper aside, she reached for a tall, unstable pile of folders and took out a handful of Key Stage 2 assessment forms – one of the many new administrative by-products of the National Curriculum – and these distracted her, after a fashion, until it was time to go and check on Norman and the progress of his English class.

  She did so with certain feelings of foreboding, for Norman aroused in her a complicated mixture of amusement and sympathy. In his favour, he was enthusiastic and good-natured, and seemed to take a genuine interest in the children (which did not translate itself, unfortunately, into anything resembling a rapport). But he was dangerously naive, and for someone so young his teaching methods seemed curiously old-fashioned. Sarah knew, all the same, that this was an easy criticism to make: the classroom atmosphere had changed so much during her eleven years in the profession that she shuddered to think how she would have fared if she was starting out now. She admired anyone who was prepared to try it, really.

  Yesterday’s lesson, of which she had attended only the last ten minutes, had been largely shambolic. In accordance with a government ruling that pupils should be made to familiarize themselves with ‘classic poetry’, Norman had attempted to steer the class through John Donne’s ‘Go, and catch a falling star’, which Sarah had thought far too ambitious for a group of nine- and ten-year-olds. Their initial response of stunned boredom had transformed itself, by the time she arrived, into a chaos of facetiousness and hilarity. The chief troublemaker, as usual, was a boy called Andy Ellis, who when asked to respond to the line ‘Teach me to hear the mermaids singing’ said that it reminded him of the name of a film which he and a friend had recently rented from the video library because they’d heard it was about lesbians. Ignoring Norman’s attempts to change the subject, he went on to explain that this had been a deeply disappointing experience, owing to the film’s paucity of what he disarmingly referred to as ‘girl-on-girl action’. This had led to an animated discussion among the male members of the class, not about Donne’s use of marine imagery, but about whether it was possible to get a glimpse of Sharon Stone’s pubic hair on the video of Basic Instinct by skilful use of the freeze frame. At the end of the lesson, very unwisely in Sarah’s view, Norman had asked everyone to write their own poems about stars and to bring them into class the next day.

  The lesson was already in some disarray when she arrived, although things calmed down a little when she appeared and made her way to a vacant desk in the back row. Sarah got the sense, however, that each successive poem was meeting with greater waves of derision, and one girl – Melanie Harris – was clearly struggling to fight back tears. Following Sarah’s arrival, a couple of unexceptional efforts were read against a steady but containable backdrop of murmurs and giggles; and then it was Andy Ellis’s turn.

  It was the very first line of Andy’s poem – Listen up now, you dirty motherfucker – which, for Sarah at least, set off the initial alarm bells. If it had been up to her, she probably would have intervened at that point, but Norman was locked into a horrified silence and allowed the whole performance to proceed uninterrupted.

  Listen up now, you dirty motherfucker

  If you messin with my bitch I’m gonna git you sucker

  Gonna go down on the street, gonna get me a hit

  Then I come round to your house and I beat you to shit

  You gonna see stars, motherfucker, see stars

  You gonna see stars, motherfucker, see stars

  Gonna kill the little bitch if I find you in my bed

  Gonna take out my Uzi, pump her pussy full of lead

  Then you’re the next one, you know the score

  Ain’t no one allowed to go fuckin with my whore

  You see stars, motherfucker, see stars

  You see stars, motherfucker, see stars.

  While about half the class looked on open-mouthed with either awe or amazement, Andy was rewarded with a noisy ovation from most of the boys and even one or two of the girls. Sarah could not help being professionally interested, in spite of her mounting unease, to see that responses to the poem seemed to divide up along gender rather than racial lines. Andy himself was from a (rather well-off) white family, which made his attempt at gangsta rap quite creditable, she thought; and she also liked the characteristically inventive way he had managed to incorporate the star motif. She wouldn’t have said any of this, of course: a simple request to see him afterwards and a hasty transition to the next reader would have been her way of handling the situation. Norman, on the other hand, seemed determined – once he had recovered his powers of speech – to wade on into ever deeper waters.

  ‘That was very interesting, Andy,’ he said, when the hubbub had partly died down, ‘but I wonder if you yourself have really understood what you’ve written.’

  ‘Of course I understand it.’

  ‘Yes, we understand it, sir,’ said another boy.

  ‘We understand every word, sir,’ said another.

  (Sarah resisted the temptation to cover her face in her hands. She knew that they never called the teachers ‘sir’ unless the mood was particularly evil.)

  ‘Are there any words you don’t understand, sir?’

  ‘Don’t you know what a pussy is, sir?’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t. He hasn’t even seen Basic Instinct.’

  ‘That’s enough!’ Norman shouted, above the laughter. ‘This “poem” of yours, Andy, is nothing but a farrago of obscenities.’

  ‘Please, sir,’ said someone, putting up his hand, ‘I don’t know what a farrago is.’

  Norman ignored him. ‘It’s just a lot of filthy nonsense, isn’t it, without rhyme or reason.’

  ‘It does rhyme, actually,’ said Andy. ‘And it’s got a story, just like the poem you made us read yesterday.’

  ‘A story, eh? Well I didn’t notice any story.’

  ‘Well, sir’, said the boy sitting next to Andy. ‘This black man is very angry with his friend, so he’s going to kill him.’

  ‘Yes, sir. And his woman.’

  ‘Because she’s been a bitchin’ whore, sir.’

  ‘Shut up! The lot of you.’ He homed in on Andy. ‘Is this your own work?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Nonsense. How could you have possibly made up something like that?’

  ‘Well, I listen to a lot of rap music, and that sort of gave me the idea. People like Onyx, and M. C. Ren, and The Notorious B.I.G. Miss Tudor says it’s very good for us to open ourselves up to influences from other cultures and traditions.’

  Norman glanced at Sarah with a look that was half accusation, half desperate appeal. She smiled back sweetly.

  ‘Anyway,’ Andy continued, ‘yesterday you told us that Pulp and Oasis wrote poetry.’

  ‘Well, yes, but–’

  ‘So what’s the difference here, sir? It isn’t because Onyx are black, is it?’

  ‘You’re not a racist, are you, sir?’

  God, these boys are good, Sarah thought. For a moment she was almost proud of them.

  ‘Right. That’s it.’ Norman’s lips were quivering, and his face had turned chalk-white. ‘Andy, see me afterwards. You’re in deep trouble, now. You don’t know how deep. Now the rest of you, just shut the f –… Just shut up’ – as the class erupted into laughter again – ‘just shut up and listen to the next poem. I don’t want to hear another word out of you lot until the bell goes. Is that understood?’

  The restoration of order was only superficial, and Sarah was doubly apprehensive when he chose Alison Hill as the next reader. She was by some way the youngest member of class, and was withdrawn and quiet at the best of times. Now, after Andy’s brazen theatrics, her voice sounded weaker and more timidly monotonous than ever.

  ‘My poem is called “Holes in the Sky”,’ she declaimed at great speed. ‘When stars the they turn into black holes. An astrol
oger was looking at three stars in the sky. Through his telescope. There was a little star and two big ones. One of the big stars died and turned into a black hole. The other two stars were very lonely. There were no other stars for millions and millions of miles. Just black air and empty sky. I feel sorry for those two lonely stars, said the astrologer. But he was too far away to do anything about it. So they just stayed there in the sky, looking sad, and although they twinkled sometimes, all the darkness and emptiness made them very scared.’

  A semi-respectful silence ensued. One of the boys clapped sarcastically.

  ‘That was very good, Alison,’ said Norman. ‘Really very good. I did however notice one tiny mistake. Did anyone else spot it?’ There were no takers. ‘Well, you said that the man looking through his telescope was an astrologer, when I think you meant that he was an astronomer.’

  ‘What’s the difference?’ someone asked.

  ‘Well, it’s a very important difference.’ Norman wrote the two words on the blackboard, and turned back towards the class looking pleased with himself. ‘You see, there are only two letters changed between the words, and yet they mean completely different things. An astronomer is a serious scientist, who spends his time looking through telescopes and other scientific instruments to find things out about the stars, and an astrologer is a frivolous and superstitious person who only pretends to study the stars, and makes up horoscopes and other bits of nonsense.’

  Sarah could sense another imminent change of mood. Alison seemed to be paying little attention to any of this: the expression on her face was listless, distracted, and for a passing moment Sarah felt that she could see within it the faded reflection of some other face, some nameless face from the past. (Perhaps it was the way that she held her mouth slightly askew, and chewed carelessly on her lower lip.) Meanwhile, the rest of the class were recovering their appetite for mischief.

  ‘Are you saying that horoscopes aren’t serious, sir?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘But they’re in the newspapers.’

  ‘You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the newspapers.’