The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘What sort of variations?’

  ‘First of all, Stage Four sleep predominates. Then, as the night goes on, the REM periods get longer and longer. This makes some researchers think that Stage Four is what the brain really needs to refresh itself, and the dreams generated during REM sleep – especially early in the morning – are just something devised by the brain to keep itself amused while the body carries on resting.’

  ‘But so far I’ve got no further than Stage Two – is that right?’

  ‘Remarkably, yes.’

  ‘And when can I expect to start dreaming again?’

  ‘When you enter REM sleep, probably: if that ever happens.’ Allowing Terry a moment or two to absorb this information, Dr Dudden went on: ‘I made one other assumption about you, Mr Worth – a very naive one – before you arrived. I assumed that, like my other patients, you were coming here in the hope that I would cure you of your insomnia: prescribe sedatives, cyclopirolones, something like that. I hadn’t realized –’ and now he looked at him differently: testingly ‘– that you and I felt the same way about sleep. That we were… allies, if you like.’

  Terry squirmed a little. ‘I’m not sure that I follow.’

  ‘Let me put it this way,’ said Dr Dudden, rubbing his eyes in an absent-minded way. ‘Do you think you would have achieved nearly so much, in your career as a journalist, if you’d been sleeping eight hours a night for the last twelve years?’

  ‘No, I don’t suppose I would. As a freelance, it gives me a big advantage – I can be twice as productive as everyone else.’

  ‘Exactly. Exactly! Whereas here, Mr Worth, here, you must be going out of your mind with boredom, tied down to the bed all night with those electrodes.’

  ‘It’s a bit dull, yes.’

  ‘So what do you think about? How do you keep yourself amused?’

  ‘The worst thing is not having a television in the room. If I had a television, it wouldn’t be a problem. I listen to my Walkman, I write things on my laptop. Sometimes I read.’

  ‘What do you read?’

  ‘Reference books, if I can find them. I like books of lists. Books that give you little bits of information.’

  ‘You don’t read novels, or biographies?’

  ‘No. I don’t like continuous narratives, I can’t concentrate on them.’

  ‘But you like films?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘On the subject of which…’ Dr Dudden reached up and fetched a box-file from the shelf behind him. ‘I was very struck, the other day, by your failure to recognize Lorna, our technician, after being introduced to her twice. I’ve devised a little experiment, with the help of my colleagues in the University Film Department. Do you mind if we try it?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Dr Dudden opened the file and took out a sheaf of photographs.

  ‘I want to see how many of these you can identify,’ he said, and held up the first. ‘Any ideas?’

  Terry stared at the picture and frowned. There was something distantly recognizable about the face, and a name hovered just out of his mind’s reach; but both finally eluded him.

  ‘No. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s Dr Goldsmith, our neurologist. How about this?’

  The second photograph presented no problems.

  ‘Steve Buscemi. He was Mr Pink in Reservoir Dogs, and he plays one of the kidnappers in Fargo.’

  ‘Very good. What about this one?’

  Terry failed to identify the next picture, which was a photograph of Lorna.

  ‘And this?’

  ‘Ray Liotta, from Unlawful Entry and Something Wild.’

  ‘Just a couple more. Who’s this, would you say?’

  Terry could see which way the exercise was heading now, and made a concentrated effort with the next picture. The face was certainly familiar, this time; he felt for some reason that it ought to be embedded in his consciousness more deeply than the other two. But still he had to admit defeat.

  ‘It was Dr Madison. One more, to finish off with. I’m told that you might find this one rather more difficult.’

  Terry did not find it difficult at all. ‘Shelley Hack,’ he said. ‘She was one of Charlie’s Angels, for a while, and she played Jerry Langford’s assistant in The King of Comedy.’

  ‘Excellent, Mr Worth. Excellent. I’m relieved, to tell you the truth. It had occurred to me that you might be suffering from serious memory loss: but the problem is clearly localized. Twelve years!’ He put the photographs back in their file, and looked at Terry with a noticeable gleam in his eye: triumphant, proprietorial. ‘Twelve years, with only selective damage to your powers of recall. I hope you realize how special this makes you. I hope you realize how important you are.’

  ‘I’m not sure that I do.’

  Dr Dudden continued to shake his head in wonder. For a nasty moment, Terry thought that he was going to reach across the desk and embrace him.

  ‘I’m going to learn so much from you, Mr Worth. So very, very much.’ Smartly, now, he rose to his feet. ‘Come with me, in the meantime. There’s something I’d like to show you; something that I know will interest you.’

  Terry had no idea where Dr Dudden was leading him as they left the office and crossed the stone-flagged entrance hall. To his surprise, the doctor opened a door beneath the main staircase, and they descended into the basement, which Terry remembered as damp, neglected and unsavoury, and rarely visited by the students. Now, however, its whitewashed walls and strip lighting made it seem bright and clean, even antiseptic, and it was loud with the rumble of washing-machines and driers.

  ‘We decided to put the laundry room down here,’ Dr Dudden explained. ‘Even in a temple of science, you see, the practicalities must be attended to. However, this is not what I wanted to show you.’

  He ushered Terry down towards the very end of the corridor, where their path was uncompromisingly barred by a heavy metal door, bearing the legend: ‘RESTRICTED AREA. STRICTLY AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY TO PROCEED BEYOND THIS POINT’. It was secured by an electronic combination lock. Dr Dudden entered six digits on to the keypad, then paused.

  ‘Now: you wouldn’t describe yourself as a sentimental man, would you?’ he asked Terry. ‘Or squeamish, in any way?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  Dr Dudden smiled. ‘I thought not,’ he said; then pressed the two remaining numbers, waited for the responding click, and pushed the door open.

  9

  The beach was little used, and could only be reached by a steep, narrow path cut roughly into the sheerness of the cliff.

  From the beach you could see Ashdown, perched on its clifftop, grey and formless in the sunlight.

  From the windows of Ashdown you could make out figures on the beach; but it would be hard to identify them.

  Robert walked down the path first, carrying the Sainsbury’s bag full of food, drink, books and magazines. Sarah came last, carrying a spade in one hand and, slung over her shoulder, a rucksack containing towels and swimming costumes. Ruby was in the middle: she carried a bucket.

  The task of escorting a child along this route made Robert realize that it was more dangerous and uneven than he had remembered. Every so often he turned and took Ruby’s hand, helping her to negotiate some sudden declivity, some breach in the pathway where the dry, sandy soil had crumbled away. At one point she lost her footing, slipped, and might almost have fallen over the edge had he not stayed her in time; and although Ruby herself seemed not in the least put out by the accident, it made Robert wonder again whether they hadn’t exceeded their authority by bringing her to the beach; if they hadn’t taken on more than they could really manage. It was an entirely new experience for him, to have accepted responsibility (even a shared and temporary responsibility) for the welfare of this small and vulnerable human being. Consciousness of her absolute, unthinking trust in him coursed through his body like electricity; shocking and wonderful.

  Equally wonderful was the circumstance, quite unexpected,
which had brought this miraculous day into being: Veronica’s absence. It was half-term at the local schools, and for most of the week she and Sarah had been doing some voluntary childminding for the caretakers at Ashdown, Mr and Mrs Sharp. They needed someone to look after their eight-year-old daughter Ruby, since Mrs Sharp had recently taken on an afternoon cleaning job in the neighbouring village. The two students would take Ruby up to the room they now shared together, and while one of them worked at the old pine desk, crouched over a mound of file paper or a broken-backed library book, the other would help the child with a jigsaw, or read aloud to her, or squat cross-legged on the floor with her over a game of Snap or Pelmanism, or sit with her in the bay window overlooking the ocean, playing noughts and crosses on the steamed-up glass.

  In the process, however, Veronica was neglecting her duties as stage manager on that term’s production of Arturo Ui, and today she decided that she could not absent herself any longer. It was a Thursday in May, and the weather had just turned: suddenly it was warm, as warm as it was ever likely to get during the summer, without a breath of wind and with a cloudless sky as blue as the deep blue at the base of a flame. (Late in the afternoon, breaking a long silence, Sarah would look up and quote six words from the novel she was reading – ‘as still, as carved, as death’ – and for many years afterwards Robert would remember these words, which never failed, for him, to reawaken the exact substance and texture of that day.) Through the window of his own room, Robert had been staring thoughtlessly into this blueness for some time when he heard Sarah’s knock at the door (he always knew when it was Sarah’s knock), and she had appeared in his doorway with Ruby clutching on to her hand. She wanted to know whether he could keep an eye on her for a while: just for an hour, while she finished writing up some notes. But this one hour was all it had taken for Robert and Ruby to hatch their scheme of walking down to the beach, so that they were able to present Sarah with a fait accompli, right down to the preparation of the sandwiches which they undertook together in the kitchen while she sat unwittingly upstairs, putting the finishing touches to her work. Sarah had refused the suggestion at first; then softened towards it; and finally embraced it wholeheartedly. Mrs Sharp had left her with the keys to her cottage, one of a puzzling, isolated row of terraces about half a mile down the road from Ashdown, and it was from there that they fetched Ruby’s bucket, spade and swimsuit before heading off to the clifftop and their hazardous descent. By the time they reached the bottom it was two-thirty and, as they might have expected on a weekday afternoon, out of season, the beach was quite deserted.

  The first thing they did was to undress.

  Ruby, as it turned out, was the least inhibited of the three. She stood placid and uncomplaining as Sarah unbuttoned her dress and helped her briskly into her little blue-and-white bathing suit. Sarah’s own bathing suit was a navy-blue one-piece, cut low at the back to reveal (as Robert had always groaningly imagined to himself) perfect shoulder-blades and a musky, even, overall tan. She was wearing a long, pale and gauzy summer skirt, and this she did not take off. Robert’s swimming trunks were old and slightly too small: he had removed his trousers but not his T-shirt, and soon realized that this was a mistake, because even the sight of these unveiled portions of Sarah’s body was enough to provoke an immediate and maddening erection, which he was obliged to conceal by rolling awkwardly to one side and draping an absurd towel over his upper thighs. Prompting Sarah to enquire, laughingly:

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, fine.’

  ‘You don’t look very comfortable, that’s all.’

  Sarah took Ruby’s hand and began to lead her down towards the sea. As soon as they were at a safe distance, Robert removed the towel and glared with unmitigated hatred at the lump in his swimming trunks, until it went away. How he loathed and despised this preposterous organ, with its infinitely predictable patterns of behaviour, its changeless, robotic responses to an over-familiar range of visual stimuli. Sarah must have noticed: there could be no doubt about it. His scalp tingled and the blood rushed to his face.

  The tide was far out this afternoon. The voices of Ruby and Sarah could barely be heard, like distant music. There was no breeze to waft them towards him.

  Robert looked at the books Sarah had brought to the beach with her. There was a novel by Rosamond Lehmann, whose name he had recently learned to recognize (Veronica being a fan, even to the extent of collecting her books in first editions); and there was a strange-looking volume which seemed to consist mainly of short paragraphs divided up into sections under headings like ‘Detachment’, ‘The Self’ and ‘To Accept the Void’. He read a few lines and found himself confronted by a dense, abstract, difficult language in which there appeared to be couched a series of spiritual and theological epigrams. He looked at the title-page. The book was Gravity and Grace by Simone Weil, and beneath the title these words had been written in blue ink:

  ‘For Sarah. Sorry to have bombarded you with all the obvious icons. Here’s a less obvious one. All my love – Ronnie.’

  Robert flicked forward through the pages hastily.

  Sarah and Ruby seemed to be paddling. Sarah had hitched up her skirt and waded into the shallows. She was kicking water at Ruby, who was screaming and giggling. Then there was a bigger splash as Ruby half fell, half threw herself into the water. More giggling. Could she swim? He had never thought to ask. Sarah would have found out about that, before taking her down to the sea. He was sure they were both safe.

  Robert thought to himself: this must be what it is like, to have a family. A wife and a child. This ceaseless admixture of anxiety and trust.

  He found a section of the book called ‘Love’ and started to read it. Most of it was very obscure, but still the words seemed to carry an awkward, hypnotic conviction, and every so often he was struck by a passage of sudden lucidity:

  … The day, if it ever comes, when you are given true affection there will be no opposition between interior solitude and friendship, quite the reverse. It is even by this infallible sign that you will recognize it…

  The water must have been cold: Sarah and Ruby had already left the sea and were on their way back towards him. Ruby was running in manic zigzags, crossing and criss-crossing Sarah’s path.

  … if it ever comes…

  Robert watched as Sarah approached, and felt no stirring between his legs this time. He realized that he had never really watched her walking before. Her limbs were delicate, well formed, and there seemed to be an incredible lightness and elegance in her movements. She was ignoring Ruby’s attempts to distract her and smiling at Robert as she came nearer: a somehow serious, pensive smile. This combination of ease and melancholy, lightness and weight, pierced him deeply and he found it difficult to smile back.

  ‘Gravity and grace,’ she said, sitting down beside him.

  It was exactly what he had been thinking. Shocked to find the workings of his own mind being echoed so closely, he merely said: ‘What?’

  ‘You’re reading my book: Gravity and Grace.’

  ‘Oh. Yes. Yes, that’s right. Trying to, anyway.’

  ‘I haven’t read it yet. It was a present from Ronnie.’

  ‘Yes, I saw.’

  ‘Are you going to read it to me?’ Ruby asked, standing over them and looking askance at the cover, as if she didn’t expect much from it.

  ‘Not this one, I don’t think,’ said Sarah.

  ‘Good. I don’t want to listen to a book anyway.’

  ‘What would you like to do, darling?’

  ‘Actually I’m quite happy just–’ Robert began, and then stopped, realizing that the question had not been directed at him. Under Sarah’s amused glance, he swore at himself silently. What was he thinking of, to imagine that she might have addressed him with such a term of endearment? He was letting his fantasies run away with him. He was out of control.

  ‘I’d like to make sandcastles,’ said Ruby.

  ‘All right,’ Robert agreed, to cov
er his embarrassment, as much as anything else. ‘I’ll come and help if you like.’

  They walked down together to the point where dry sand, never reached by the incoming tide, began to shade into the damper variety more useful as a building material. Robert watched while Ruby did a bit of energetic digging, filling her bucket twice with sand and upending it to produce two little mounds, which she stood back to admire breathlessly.

  ‘There,’ she said.

  Robert nodded. ‘Very good.’ He held out his hand and took the spade off her. ‘Now we’re going to make a real castle. Come on.’

  Ruby watched while he measured an area in the sand about six feet square, and then dug it out to a depth of four or five inches. Next, he shovelled some sand back into this basin, in order to make a central island some three feet square.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘All this is going to be the moat. We’re going to fill it with water right at the end.’

  He sent Ruby off to collect as many shells as she could find, to provide decorations for the walls and ramparts. Meanwhile he piled up a new mound of sand on to the island, and began to fashion the main body of the castle from it. He decided to build six towers: four round drum towers, one at each corner, and two rectangular towers springing up from the middle of the eastern and western walls. The main gatehouse would face south, towards the sea, and would be approached by a causeway, interrupted at mid-point by an octagonal barbican. There would be two drawbridges, one protecting the barbican and one connecting to the gatehouse itself.