The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Right.’ He scrolled up and down the screen a few times, trying to find his place. ‘Now where was I…’

  ‘The inference was plain,’ prompted Professor Cole, evenly.

  ‘Yes, of course. All right, then – to resume:

  ‘Sarah found it very hard to talk about the evening when this joke was told, and was evasive when I encouraged her to ask herself why. Eventually, however, certain interesting facts emerged. There had been two people present at the party, one of them a woman with whom she had recently enjoyed a sexual relationship, the other a man who, not content with being one of her closest friends, also fervently wanted to be her lover. This man’s name was Robert, and he had disappeared somewhat mysteriously and abruptly from her life shortly after the evening in question.

  ‘Now that I knew that Sarah had had sexual relations with both men and women, it was clear that we were making progress; and as she told me the details of her friendship with Robert, many things began to fall into place. She explained, for instance, that they had shared a communal bathroom as students, and once, not long after their first meeting, she had entered it to find not only that he was lying in the bath, but that he had a razor in his hand and the bath-water was full of blood.

  ‘“What did you feel when you saw him like that?” I asked.

  ‘“I was very disturbed.”

  ‘“Because you thought he was trying to kill himself?”

  ‘“No,” Sarah answered. “That’s not what I thought.”

  ‘In fact – although she was never able to recognize this – it was clear to me that she suspected Robert of having guessed the secret of her sexuality, whereupon he was – or so she supposed – attempting to castrate himself in order to appeal to the homosexual aspect of her nature.

  ‘At this stage in the analysis, Sarah’s marriage came to a crisis. She had established beyond doubt that her husband Anthony was betraying her. What had particularly enraged her was the revelation that he had met this other woman, not through some chance, unplanned encounter, but by placing an advertisement in the “lonely hearts” column of the magazine Private Eye – a well-known method of arranging adulterous liaisons among the London middle classes. Sarah and her husband had quarrelled violently, and she had, in fact, assaulted him, following which he had packed his bags and left their marital home.

  ‘“How exactly did you assault him?” I asked.

  ‘“I kneed him in the balls,” she said.

  ‘I asked her to repeat this and she said once again, with great emphasis and satisfaction: “I kneed him in the balls.”

  ‘I suggest that you all remember these words and ponder them carefully, for they contain, in microcosm, the whole key to Sarah’s neurosis.

  ‘Meanwhile, further details of her friendship with Robert were being disclosed during every session. She talked repeatedly, for example, of an afternoon she had spent with him on a beach, in the company of a young girl who had been placed in their care for the day. On this occasion Robert, it seems, had constructed an elaborate sandcastle with the child’s help, and she had started referring to him as “the Sandman” – an appellation which seemed to have lodged itself very firmly in Sarah’s mind.

  ‘It was this last detail which made me decide that it was time to confront Sarah with her obsession: an obsession which was now absolutely clear to me – as it will be to my distinguished audience – but of which she herself remained in complete ignorance. Sarah was, of course, obsessed with her eyes: obsessed with their vulnerability, fearful of their being harmed or violated. Was this not at the root of her fraught and ambivalent feelings towards frogs? Did it not explain her unusual choice of words when talking about her schoolchildren: “I wanted to protect my pupils”? Was this not the reason why she had felt so cruelly betrayed by her husband’s means of committing adultery – the placing of an advertisement in a magazine called Private Eye? I put these questions to her, and asked her, as a matter of urgency, if she could recall any early traumatic experience which had involved her eyes, particularly in an erotic or sexual context. Under my careful probing, it was not long before the truth came out.

  ‘During her time at university, Sarah told me, she had been deeply involved with a medical student called Gregory. He was her first… – I’m sorry, Dr Dudden, are you feeling all right?’

  The others all turned to look at their colleague, who suddenly seemed to be choking on his glass of water. Dr Herriot patted him on the back, while Dr Myers took some tissue paper and tried to soak up some of the spilled liquid from the counterpane.

  ‘Yes, yes, I’m fine,’ he was saying, red-faced and gasping for breath. ‘Just a little water went down the wrong way, that’s all.’

  ‘Shall I carry on?’

  ‘Well, frankly,’ said Dr Dudden, now regaining his power of speech, ‘I’m beginning to find all this a little fanciful. Isn’t it time we heard from someone whose methods are rather more rigorous, rather more, erm… scientific?’

  ‘I’ve nearly finished. Just a few more pages to go.’

  ‘I think we should hear it out to the end,’ said Dr Herriot. ‘I’m quite hooked, I must say.’

  Professor Cole and Dr Myers agreed with her, and Russell Watts continued with his reading.

  ‘He was her first serious boyfriend, and I asked her if the early stages of the relationship had been happy.

  ‘“Yes,” Sarah answered. “He took me out to dinner, and he took me to concerts. I used to enjoy being taken out by him.”

  ‘There were, however, some aspects of Gregory’s behaviour which began to alarm her. He liked to watch over her while she was sleeping, for instance, and was especially fascinated by the activity he claimed to be able to discern behind her eyelids during Rapid Eye Movement sleep. Sometimes she would awake suddenly to find him shining a light into her eyes, or even touching her eyelids and applying pressure to them. Her sleep patterns, never very regular at the best of times, became highly disturbed from this point onwards.

  ‘It was to Gregory that Sarah had lost her virginity, and sex now began to play an increasingly important part in their relationship. He was, she told me, an energetic but also clumsy and unsatisfactory lover –’

  This time a whole jet of water shot out of Dr Dudden’s mouth and landed on Professor Cole’s trousers. The Professor sprang to his feet with a cry of annoyance, and began wiping himself down with a pocket handkerchief.

  ‘For God’s sake, man, what on earth’s the matter with you?’ he shouted. ‘Can’t you just drink the stuff, like everybody else?’

  Dr Dudden jumped to his assistance, and started using his own handkerchief to dab at the Professor’s trousers. ‘Look, I’m terribly sorry,’ he said, his voice shaky with mortification. ‘This is inexcusably careless of me. It’s just that the – I don’t know how much longer I can tolerate the… the rank amateurism of this man’s approach…’

  ‘Just hear him out, will you?’ Professor Cole barked. ‘That’s what we’re here for. There’ll be plenty of time for argument when it’s over. Now just sit down and give the man a fair hearing.’

  Dr Dudden meekly resumed his position on the bed; and as soon as calm, of a sort, had been restored, Russell Watts read out the concluding part of his paper.

  ‘He was, she told me, an energetic but also clumsy and unsatisfactory lover. Furthermore, he soon began to incorporate his fascination with Sarah’s eyes into their performance of the sexual act itself. Central to their lovemaking was something they had come to refer to as “the game”, in which he would touch both of her eyes with his outstretched fingers, applying more and more pressure as he approached his climax, this process being invariably accompanied by his ritual repetition of the phrase, “I spy with my little eye”. (The word “spy”, as I hardly need to point out to you at this stage, being almost synonymous with “private eye”.)

  ‘“Did he ever cause you physical pain?” I asked her.

  ‘“No,” Sarah answered, “he never really hurt me.”

>   ‘“But you thought that he might hurt you?”

  ‘“It could have been at the back of my mind.”

  ‘“And did he know that? Was that in fact the whole point of the game?”

  ‘“Yes, I suppose it could have been.”

  ‘“For him? Or for both of you?”

  ‘Sarah was unable – or unwilling – to answer my last question, but this was of little consequence, because I now had all the facts at my disposal, and was satisfied that the cause and extent of her problems were perfectly clear to me. And while it would have been highly irresponsible of me to share any of my insights with the patient herself, I shall conclude this paper with a sketch of the most salient points, for the benefit of my listeners.

  ‘The “eye” is not only the instrument through which we view the world; it is also the “I”, the innermost self, that stands at its centre. By eroticizing Sarah’s eyes, by linking them inseparably in her psyche with the expectation of sexual pleasure, Gregory had given her an appetite for violation, for the penetration of her “I”, the rape of her most intimate self, that neither he nor any other man or woman had ever been able to satisfy…’

  ‘Oh, please,’ said Dr Herriot.

  ‘Let him finish,’ said Dr Myers wearily. ‘We might as well get to the bitter end.’

  ‘Sarah did not know this, of course,’ Russell Watts continued. ‘And on one level, she was afraid of masculine desire; afraid, in fact, of the phallus itself and its awesome, delirious power. This is why she slept so badly at night, in bed with her husband: from the fear that, like Gregory, he would wait until she was powerless with sleep, and then seek to penetrate her “I”. But was there not another level on which this was the very thing she most wanted? Why else would she regularly fall asleep during the daytime, in the company of strangers? For no other reason than to put herself at their mercy, to prostrate herself before them in the attitude of sleep; to invite them, man and woman alike, to play their own game of “I spy with my little eye”.

  ‘Yes, I am afraid there was something of the whore about Sarah.’

  ‘I’ve had enough of this,’ said Dr Herriot. ‘I don’t need to listen to any more of this rubbish.’

  But Russell Watts was too caught up in his rhetoric to take heed of any more interruptions. He had not even noticed, for instance, that Dr Dudden was now sitting forward on the bed, his teeth clenched, his whitened knuckles clutching the water glass so tightly that it threatened to shatter at any moment.

  ‘Clearly,’ he continued, his voice rising in volume and the rhythm of his speech breaking into something like a crazed gallop, ‘there had only ever been one man who, in her fantasies at least, might have satisfied her craving for violation: Robert – the absent one, the missing, the mysterious Other who had so completely vanished from her life. No wonder she had been horrified, after surprising him in the bath that afternoon, to think that he had castrated himself, casting aside the phallus, his gender’s magnificent, philoprogenitive signifier. For it was Robert she had really desired in all his thrilling, masculine glory: why else should she dignify him with the name of “Sandman” – that legendary figure whom children allow every night to enter their eyes and leave behind traces of his invading presence?

  ‘And I could be certain of this for one very simple reason: because Sarah had told me herself. For remember – language is a cruel and faithless mistress; it is a sly cardsharp, who deals us a pack full of jokers; it is a distant flute on a misty night, teasing us with half-forgotten melodies; it is the light on the inside of the fridge, which never goes off when we are looking; it is a fork in the road; it is a knife in the water.

  ‘What had Sarah said to me, after all, when I asked her exactly how she had assaulted her faithless husband? “I kneed him in the balls,” she had said. Was she really talking about her domestic argument at the time? Of course not: if so, she could just as easily have said, “I kicked him in the crotch.” No, what she was doing, at that moment, was articulating her desire for the phallus. When she used the word “kneed”, she did not mean “I attacked him with my knee”, but “I need, I crave, I desire.” And when she talked of “the balls”, she did not mean the testicles, she was not referring to her husband’s bruised and mangled organs of generation, she meant the balls of her eyes, her own eyeballs, those twin desiring globes which had become, in her strange, private, opto-erotic sexual universe, nothing less than two vaginas which some freak of nature had placed on either side of her nose.

  ‘Yes, it was Sarah’s misfortune – Sarah’s tragedy, you might say – to have begun her sexual life under the perverse tutelage of a man who had not only made a fetish of her eyes, but had proved himself unable to satisfy the raging desires he had thereby aroused in her. Like all women, Sarah felt a longing for sexual pleasure which was also a longing for death: hence her fantasies of assassination, of things being “taken out”. At the beginning of her relationship with Gregory, she used to enjoy being “taken out” by him; but as that relationship acquired a sexual dimension, it seems that he no longer “took her out”, no longer assassinated her; his penis, apparently, was anything but lethal. And so the root of her problems lay in the unsatisfactory nature of that first sexual relationship – in Gregory’s impotence, his phallic debility, the redundancy of his pistol, his failure to shoot anything but blanks, his crushing inability, in short, to bring her to orgasm or anywhere near it –’

  Russell Watts broke off abruptly as Dr Dudden sprang to his feet with a final cry of contempt and made for the door. When he turned to address his four colleagues, they were shocked to see that his face was puce with rage, the veins on his neck and forehead standing out like knotted string.

  ‘I know what this is about,’ he said, pointing a quivering finger at each of them in turn. ‘I know what this is about, you bastards! You cooked this up together, you sad, pathetic, jealous… mediocrities! And I know why, as well. Because you know what I’m trying to achieve. You know what I’m on the brink of achieving. And you think you can stop me, don’t you? You think you can undermine me. Humiliate me. Well, you can’t! No matter how hard you try. No matter how devious you are. Because I know one thing for a fact – a solid, incontrovertible fact: that the name of Gregory Dudden will be remembered long after your names have been forgotten. Do you hear that? All of you? Completely–’ (and here he opened the door) ‘– utterly –’ (and now he stepped outside, gathering breath for the delivery of his last word) ‘– FORGOTTEN!’

  After he had slammed the door behind him and stormed off down the corridor, the others sat for a few seconds in silent bafflement. Dr Herriot was the first to speak. Comprehension had begun to light up her face, bringing a slow smile in its wake.

  ‘Gregory Dudden, did he say?’ She turned to Professor Cole. ‘Did he say his name was Gregory?’

  But the other three had yet to catch up. Dr Myers merely shook his head sadly, and said: ‘I think the sooner I start that investigation, the better.’

  ∗

  Darkness over Ashdown, where Ruby Sharp lies in Bedroom Three. Her head festooned with electrodes, she rolls and squirms in the bed, restless. Every so often a few words gurgle, brokenly, from her mouth. Above the bed a microphone is listening, and in the adjacent observation room, magnetic tape glides between two spools. Soon the words will swell into a quiet, uneven, murmurous stream. For a few minutes, Ruby will disclose her secrets to the microphone and the tape-recorder. In the morning Lorna will transcribe them, and Dr Madison will read them. But Ruby will have left the clinic by then, without explaining, without saying goodbye.

  Darkness in Bedroom Nine, where Terry now lies, smiling a blissful smile. Behind his closed eyelids, his eyes are rolling busily: he is deep into Rapid Eye Movement sleep, and an exquisite dream is playing itself out in his brain. This dream is both sensuous and cerebral; it transports him glidingly, effortlessly to heights of physical pleasure and intellectual enlightenment such as he could never imagine in his waking life. Nothing that happens
to him during the daylight hours will ever match the pleasure, the intensity, the joy of this dream. In the morning, he will have forgotten it almost entirely.

  Darkness, too, in Day Room Nine – Terry’s day room – where Cleo Madison sits at the desk, looking out over the water, as she has done every night for the last week, ever since the discovery of that curious, unexplained writing behind the wardrobe. She has been disturbed by her conversations with Terry today. The lie she told about her brother Philip was foolish and trivial, a botched improvisation, born of confusion and haste. The lies she told about Robert, though, were far more considered; and yet she already regrets these, just as deeply. In short, she cannot decide what to do about Terry. She cannot decide whether to tell him the truth.

  She has not yet noticed the photograph Terry has placed on the bookshelf behind her; the photograph for which he scoured an Italian film archive; the photograph he travelled all the way to London to retrieve; the only surviving fragment of Salvatore Ortese’s lost film, which was once his great obsession. A single black and white photograph, showing a road, a dusty, arid landscape, and a woman, a woman in nurse’s uniform, pointing off into the distance as she stands in front of a sign which consists of one word, written in a foreign language. Perhaps when Cleo does notice it, it will help her to make up her mind.

  17

  Late autumn, 1984

  Everything about this city was different. That had been the idea, of course, but it was also what he found so disheartening, so hard to fight against. The people were different; the jokes, the humour, the accents; the buses were a different colour; the beer tasted different; the skies were different – bigger and greyer, somehow; the houses were packed together more tightly than he would ever have thought possible; the days seemed to be shorter here, and the nights longer; the names of some of the biggest shops were new and strange to him; the cinemas showed unfamiliar local advertisements and the evening newspaper seemed to be written in some inscrutable code; even the tea was different, and the cakes they served with it in the market café.