The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ∗

  As Terry strode purposefully along the cliffs in the direction of Ashdown, Sarah was making slower, more meditative progress through the park on her way home from school. It was the day after her encounter with Ruby, and she was still preoccupied with the memories it had stirred.

  Summer was yet to assert itself, this last week in June. A few isolated, freakishly sunny days had been enough to persuade most Londoners that a heatwave had arrived, so that singlets, shorts and T-shirts were much in evidence today, even though the sky was cloudy and a skittish northerly breeze threatened to scatter thin raindrops. Sarah was beginning to shiver, even in her work clothes; and her first thought, when she saw Alison Hill sitting alone on a bench, was that she looked not just bored and lonely, but cold.

  It was sports day at school, so there were no lessons that afternoon. Sarah had watched the first few events and then decided that her presence was no longer required; and those pupils who were not taking part had been given the option either of staying to watch or going home for the rest of the day. It was a slightly alarming surprise to discover that Alison had done neither.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, standing over the small, frail figure on the bench. ‘What are you doing here, all by yourself?’

  ‘Just sitting,’ said Alison placidly.

  ‘Well – do you mind if I sit with you for a minute?’

  Alison – not having much choice – shook her head.

  ‘Not watching the sports, then?’ said Sarah, as she settled beside her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Bit boring, you think?’

  ‘Mm.’

  ‘So…’ Sarah wondered how best to approach this. ‘Do you live near here, then? We must be nearly neighbours.’

  ‘Quite near here,’ said Alison. She pointed towards one of the park gates. ‘We live over there. Not on the main road, but quite close by.’

  ‘The Seven Sisters Road, you mean?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s not far from my house,’ said Sarah. Technically a lie, but justified in the circumstances, she thought. ‘Would you like to walk home together? Only, it’s not always a good place to be by yourself, this park.’

  ‘I can’t go home, yet,’ said Alison. ‘Mum’ll be at work.’

  ‘Don’t you have a key or something?’

  Alison shook her head. ‘I thought I did, but I can’t find it. It’s supposed to be in my satchel. I think I might have left it at home.’

  ‘But – what time will your mother be back?’

  ‘Seven o’clock, she said.’

  This was not for another four hours. Having established, quickly, that there were no neighbours or relatives for Alison to call upon, Sarah came to an inevitable if reluctant decision. Abandoning her half-formed plans for a shower, a nap, a few chapters of her Lorrie Moore novel followed by a serious assault on the assessment forms, she said to Alison: ‘Well, how would you like to come home with me for the afternoon? You could come back and have some tea and watch some telly.’

  Not seeming too excited by this offer, Alison bowed her head and nodded. ‘OK.’

  ‘Come on then.’

  They got up and walked towards the park gates in silence. Sarah was wondering why Alison had not made any reference to her father, and tried to recall the few details of her family background she had picked up from a dimly remembered conversation in the staff room a few months ago. In fact there was no father, she was fairly certain. There had been some speculation – inconclusive, as far as she could remember – over whether there had ever been a father on the scene, or whether he had left only recently. At which point, the oddness of Alison’s poem came back to her, and a suspicion began to form.

  ‘That was a lovely poem you read out in class the other day,’ Sarah said. ‘What gave you the idea? Have you got your own telescope? Do you like looking at stars?’

  Alison shook her head shyly. ‘No, I just… started to write it, and the words came out…’

  ‘It was very sad,’ said Sarah. ‘I felt sorry for the two stars by themselves, after the big one had died. Did you mean to write such a sad poem?’

  ‘Well…’ Alison began, but went no further.

  Sarah realized that this line of enquiry was not going to lead anywhere, and realized too that she could not cope with the idea of Alison being in her house all afternoon, perched on the edge of the sofa, subdued and fearful, nibbling biscuits or sitting glassy-eyed with boredom in front of children’s T V. And so, as an interim measure, they detoured via the nearest McDonald’s, where Sarah had coffee – or something like it – and Alison had Fillet-o-Fish and a chocolate shake. It seemed to cheer her up slightly, although she became no more talkative; after fifteen minutes their conversation dried up altogether.

  ‘We’d better go now,’ Sarah said, looking at her watch. ‘But first of all, I want you to have one last look for this key. Are you sure it isn’t in your satchel?’

  As Alison opened the bag and rummaged through it with a resigned, dutiful air, Sarah saw something that instantly chilled her.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asked gently, craning forward.

  Alison’s eyes were wide and guilty, eloquently pleading with Sarah not to take the matter any further. But she was not to be deterred. She pulled aside the exercise books and the scrunched-up grey sweater, peered into the satchel and found, to her dismay, that her passing glimpse had not been deceptive: there was a dead animal lying at the bottom. For a ghastly moment she thought that it was a rat; but it turned out to be a small, tawny field mouse. Alison had also found a scrap of green velvet from somewhere, and had partly wrapped the animal up in it. It did not seem to have been dead for long: probably less than a day.

  ‘Alison,’ said Sarah, looking gravely into her eyes, ‘you must never, ever keep dead things in your bag like that. They carry all sorts of diseases. You could make yourself very ill indeed. Do you keep food in this bag?’

  ‘Sometimes,’ said Alison. ‘When Mum makes me sandwiches.’

  ‘Well, when you get home, you’re going to have to ask her to disinfect it. In fact, we’ll disinfect it together, when we get back to my house. And what we’re going to do now, we’re not going to take him out here, in the restaurant, because that might cause trouble; but we’re going to go out into the street, and then I’m going to wrap him in tissue paper and throw him in the nearest rubbish bin.’

  ‘But he’s not rubbish,’ Alison protested, tearful now.

  ‘Where did you find him?’

  ‘At school. By the football pitch.’

  ‘And what were you going to do with him?’

  ‘Take him home, and bury him.’

  Suddenly, from across the years, a rogue memory emerged and pierced Sarah’s consciousness, eliciting (most inappropriately at this point) a private smile. She remembered the absurd conversation she had had with Robert, that day – only their second conversation, really – when he had been talking about his dead cat, and she thought he had been talking about his sister, and she had been horrified to learn that his father planned to take her out into the back garden and bury her in a bin liner. All at once the misunderstanding seemed so delicious that she wanted to giggle; she even wondered if it was worth sharing with Alison, to see if it would defuse the tension; but one look at her unspoilt, unquestioning face, the lower lip beginning to tremble, the eyes swollen from the tears that had flowed (Sarah was beginning to suspect) during many recent nights, was enough to stifle that idea. Instead, she merely stood up and led Alison towards the door, thinking to herself, almost with panic now: This child is haunted by death. Obsessed with it.

  Three more hours to go until seven o’clock. The mouse safely disposed of, Sarah began to look around for other excuses to delay their return to her noiseless, unwelcoming house: and after a few minutes’ walking, a kind of salvation presented itself in the form of a multiplex cinema. Sarah took Alison into the foyer and they stood looking at the posters and starting times.

 
‘Do you go to the cinema much?’ Sarah asked.

  ‘Not really. In the holidays sometimes. At home we rent videos.’

  Most of the films were completely unsuitable, and in any case carried ‘15’ or ‘18’ certificates. There was one, however, which looked more promising: a comedy called Chalk and Cheese 4. The poster didn’t inspire much confidence, showing as it did two uniformed policemen pointing gigantic guns in each other’s faces, beneath the tagline, ‘THEY’RE BACK – THEY’RE ON THE CASE-AND THEY’RE CRANKIER THAN EVER!’ But this was the film, Sarah now realized, that Terry had been eulogizing at such length in the paper last week. ‘Fun for all the family’: hadn’t that been his conclusion? Well, for the rest of this afternoon she and Alison were a family, of sorts, and they were certainly both in need of a little fun. Sarah bought two tickets and they went inside.

  Once the film had started, it only took a few minutes for her to realize that she had made a terrible mistake. It was offensive on so many different levels that she would have hesitated to take anyone to see it, let alone a sensitive and immature nine-year-old. It wasn’t so much the humour, although Alison sat unmoved and apparently baffled through those scenes which were intended to be funny (a sequence, for example, where the two policemen were assigned the task of escorting the President’s wife to a speaking engagement, but found, after consuming a heavy meal of baked beans at police headquarters, that they kept breaking wind in the confines of her limousine); nor was it the film’s awesome brutalization of women, one of its recurring motifs (there was a sub-plot involving a wrongfully arrested shopkeeper, whose shy, respectable wife was made to perform a striptease for the two policemen in order to secure her husband’s release from the cells; naturally she found herself aroused by the experience and later took up stripping as a career). What really alarmed Sarah, what made her hotly ashamed to have brought Alison into the cinema that afternoon, was the film’s love affair with death: the way it revelled in death as sideshow, carnival, joke-fodder and comic panacea. Characters would be killed off, blown away, taken out, blasted open with shotguns, all for the sake of a plot twist or even a wisecrack. Casual genocide was committed on passers-by with the random explosion of cars and buildings. The film’s one sympathetic black character, a lovable Uncle Tom who served as sidekick to the eponymous heroes, was cheerfully assassinated to supply a few seconds’ worth of pathos. This film, which never aspired to anything other than insolent hilarity, was permeated with death; saturated and clotted with it.

  To make matters worse, it was not long before the coffee Sarah had drunk at McDonald’s began pressurizing her bladder.

  ‘I’ll be right back,’ she whispered to Alison, with a squeeze of her arm; and then, as she splashed cold water on to her face in the ladies’ toilet she decided that, come what may, they might as well walk out of the film now. There was no point in prolonging the ordeal.

  Sarah dried her face with paper towels and returned to her seat. But Alison had gone.

  ∗

  ‘Punctuality, Mr Worth,’ said Dr Dudden, looking approvingly at his watch as Terry sat down opposite him. ‘Punctuality is the key to organization. Organization is the key to success. I’m pleased to see that you’re with me on this one.’

  He turned off his portable cassette player (upon which some characterless, even-handed piece of harpsichord music had been playing) and added – presumably to himself – ‘That man ignores the metronome markings. Simply ignores them.’ Having got that off his chest, he settled himself at the desk and beamed at his patient, who smiled back wanly. In point of fact, Terry was not feeling at all well. His walk along the cliffs, far from refreshing him, had proved physically exhausting: he had not realized that he was so thoroughly out of condition. The one-and-a-half cups of coffee he had drunk that morning were continuing to take powerful effect, and his brain was spinning with an energy that was disconcertingly at odds with the weariness in his limbs: in particular, he could not stop worrying about the precious photograph which might or might not be hidden away somewhere in his London flat. And finally, to make matters worse, two alarming thoughts regarding Dr Dudden had started to take root in his mind. One was that, judging from the heaviness of the bags under his eyes, the doctor did not seem to be getting nearly enough sleep. And the other was even more worrying: because after that compliment about punctuality, delivered in tones far more affable and welcoming than usual, Terry had a terrible suspicion that Dr Dudden was beginning to like him.

  This suspicion was promptly confirmed by his next speech.

  ‘You’ve been here for slightly more than a week, now, Mr Worth, and this seems to me an appropriate time to undertake a small review of our modus operandi.

  ‘I say this because, before you arrived, I assumed that the primary benefit of your visit – for me as a researcher – would lie in the opportunity to assess how your dream content was affected by the experience of seeing so many films in such a short space of time. However, since you haven’t been dreaming at all, this has obviously not been feasible.’

  ‘I may not have been dreaming,’ said Terry, ‘but I have been feeling different. More rested.’

  ‘That doesn’t surprise me. You are beginning to sleep more. Last night, for instance, you spent eighteen minutes in Stage Two.’

  Terry nodded, not really understanding.

  ‘Is it a pleasant sensation, would you say – this sense of feeling rested?’

  ‘Well – yes,’ said Terry, rather surprised.

  ‘I see.’ This did not seem to be the response that Dr Dudden had been anticipating, or hoping for. He leaned forward now, and spoke with some enthusiasm. ‘I don’t mind telling you, Mr Worth, that you have confounded my expectations, and turned out to be a far more extraordinary specimen than I had imagined. I’m beginning to wonder, in fact, whether your case might not be unique in the annals of sleep research. And what I would like to suggest to you – the invitation that I would like to extend to you – is that you stay at this Clinic for as long as you like. As our guest. And that these “interviews”, as I have rather formally called them, should become… well, less formal.’

  ‘Less formal?’

  ‘Friendlier. More in the nature of… chats. That way—’

  ‘That way you hope to ingratiate yourself with me, so that I decide to stay around. And then you, as a researcher, have plenty of access to me, as a specimen.’

  ‘That is a very cynical way of looking at it.’

  ‘Maybe.’ Perhaps it was simply because he felt so weak and breathless, but Terry was beginning to soften towards Dr Dudden in spite of himself. ‘These chats, then: can we envisage a two-way exchange of information here? I am supposed to be writing about this place, after all.’

  ‘By all means. By all means. I’m only too delighted to hear that you think our work might be of some interest to the wider world. And I can allow you reasonably free access to our materials – while respecting the patients’ confidentiality, of course…’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘So: is there anything you want to ask, to get the ball rolling?’

  ‘Yes, there is,’ said Terry. ‘There are lots of things.’

  ‘Ask away, then.’

  ‘Right.’ Terry sat up in his chair, trying to assume an attitude of concentration. ‘Well… you said that my case may well be unique, for instance. What exactly were you comparing it to?’

  ‘Only two comparisons come to mind, one of them professionally documented, the other one not. A seventy-year-old retired district nurse from London, known only as Miss M., spent some nights in a reputable sleep laboratory and was found to subsist on only one hour’s sleep a night. Her attitude towards people who slept longer than this was quite scathing: she thought that they were idlers and time-wasters. Perhaps she had a point.’ He tailed off for a moment, here, and then regained his thread. ‘Even more remarkable was the widely publicized case of the director of a London orphanage, who claimed in 1974 to have slept for only fifteen minutes a day
since the war. This claim was never verified, however, because he adamantly refused to visit a laboratory. The record for the longest uninterrupted period of sleeplessness is held by a Mr Randy Gardner from San Diego: in 1965, at the age of seventeen, he went without sleep for two hundred and sixty-four hours. His motor and physical functions did not appear to have been impaired at all, and at three a.m. on the last night of his attempt he played a game of basketball, which he won. But I suspect that you, Mr Worth, could break this record quite easily, if you haven’t already done so without realizing it. I know for a fact that you have been at this clinic for more than two hundred hours without progressing any further than Stage Two sleep.’

  ‘Perhaps you should explain to me how these stages work: I’m not quite clear about that.’

  ‘It’s very simple. Stage One is the transition from wakefulness to drowsiness, during which your blood pressure drops and your heart rate slows down and your muscles relax. The brain at this point is emitting alpha waves at a frequency of seven to fourteen cycles per second. This stage usually lasts for five or ten minutes at the most. Stage Two begins with the appearance of theta waves of three-and-a-half to seven-and-a-half cycles per second, along with sleep spindles and K-complexes. Early in the night this stage also lasts for just a few minutes, and then we see slow delta wave activity beginning, which marks the start of unconsciousness proper. Stage Three is an interim stage, when the delta waves still account for less than half the recording on the EEC Stage Four is when the delta waves predominate, there’s very little bodily movement and the sleeper is hard to awake. Stage Four is the deepest and most restful part of sleep: some researchers call it “core sleep”. After maybe half an hour or three-quarters of an hour of this, there will be noticeable body movements and changes of position. Stage Four has been interrupted, the sleeper returns very briefly to Stage Two or Three, and then quickly enters what we call REM sleep, or paradoxical sleep. This actually resembles wakefulness more than sleep: muscle tone disappears, but there is frantic brain activity and the eyes roll from side to side beneath the closed lids. This whole cycle, from Stage One to REM, has taken about ninety minutes and will repeat itself, with some variations, about four or five times during the night.’