The House of Sleep

by Jonathan Coe

  He was trying to get used to this café, though. He was trying to get used to its formica tables and plastic bottles encrusted with ketchup and HP sauce. He was trying to forgive it for the fact that it was not the Café Valladon.

  The market always seemed to be busy on Wednesday afternoons. Robert sat at a window table and watched the crowds passing by, their patient, wind-chapped faces and ruddy hands. He wanted to take comfort from all this bustling humanity but instead it swamped him, making him feel smaller, even less noticeable, even more lost.

  As he looked through the café window, he thought about what the psychiatrist had said to him.

  Robert had been referred for psychiatric treatment more than seven years before Sarah would begin her own course of analysis with Russell Watts, and had been lucky enough to find a more helpful practitioner. Dr Fowler was approachable and sympathetic, a good listener but also generous with his advice and encouragement. They had met in his consultation room each Wednesday for the last month, ever since Robert was sent there as a matter of urgency following his third and most desperate call to the Samaritans. And now, while he was not exactly making a recovery, at least the feelings of hopelessness and self-hatred were beginning to come into focus: he was starting to understand them, and could almost bring himself to imagine, at the end of this particular tunnel, the glimmering possibility that they might prove containable.

  Dr Fowler knew that Robert had been rejected by a woman, and he now wanted to examine why she had made him think of himself this way: why he had started to regard himself as fundamentally impossible to love. He wanted Robert to try to isolate this one specific aspect of himself: What was it about him that she had never loved – and which he, as a consequence, had started to hate?

  This afternoon, the answer had become clear. He hated his gender: his body.

  That was the only thing that Sarah had never loved about him.

  ‘You hate yourself for being a man?’ said Dr Fowler.

  ‘Yes. I think I always have, in fact. All my life.’

  ‘Have you ever had fantasies of being a woman? Of living as a woman?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. At last – not until now.’

  That evening, it suddenly seemed the obvious solution. A breathtakingly easy solution. Drunk with excitement (and drunk on the two bottles of dry white wine that had recently become his nightly tipple) he wrote to Sarah for the first time. He wrote to her about his childhood dream, and how he had finally come to understand what it was telling him. He told her that he was certain they would meet again. He told her that he loved her more than ever.

  At their next meeting, however, Dr Fowler explained that Robert’s solution wasn’t quite as easy as he appeared to imagine. It wasn’t possible just to go off and have surgery at the drop of a hat, he pointed out. For one thing, unless he had the funds to do it privately, there was a waiting list of at least two years. And for another, he would have to prove – to Dr Fowler’s complete satisfaction – that it was what he really wanted.

  Robert now began to apply himself to this task with some energy.

  ∗

  The clothes he began to wear were androgynous, rather than specifically female.

  He wore a modest amount of makeup, and kept his hair short, but had it permed and highlighted. People began to tell him that he looked like Annie Lennox.

  The hormones he was prescribed were supposed to boost his hips and his bust, but mainly he just seemed to put on weight. Whenever he went out, he wore a padded bra.

  Regular electrolysis helped to keep facial hair at bay.

  He began to pick up technical translation work for local companies, anxious to meet the new challenges posed by the European Community. Later, feeling more confident in his female guise, he started to give private lessons in French and German. He lived carefully, and supported himself.

  Judi was his first great success. As soon as he decided to start living as a woman, he moved to another part of town, where it transpired that Judi – a dental hygienist – was his new neighbour across the landing. She never once guessed that he was a man. They became close friends, and although he rarely invited her into his flat, they would often go out together, drinking or clubbing. Judi described these occasions as her ‘girls’ night out’, and when she got herself a boyfriend and started seeing much less of Robert, he found that he missed her company very badly.

  To Judi, to his landlord, and to his students, Robert was now known as Cleo Madison. ‘Madison’ was an easy choice, for it had been his mother’s maiden name; and as for ‘Cleo’, how could he have used anything else? This, after all, was the name that Sarah had dreamed for him.

  He never knew where it had come from; from what period in her early life or what little-visited corner of her unconscious she had retrieved it, so that it might play a new and transfiguring role in her dreams. Nor did he know exactly what he had said to her, more than a year ago, during that long, rapt, confessional encounter on the terrace at Ashdown, that had inspired Sarah to dream anything so unaccountable as the existence of a twin sister who had been separated from him shortly after birth. He had talked about the feeling – yes, he could remember this, at least – that he had a female counterpart, that the world contained some feminine soulmate with whom he longed to be united. He had actually been talking about potential girlfriends, potential life-partners (and thinking secretly about Sarah, even then), but might this have been the remark that prompted her fatal dream? He would probably never know. All he knew was that he had taken an irreversible step, a life-transforming step, when Terry and Lynne had told him about this dream, and instead of denying it, instead of joining them in their easy mockery of Sarah and her comical fantasies, he had come to her defence. He had invented Cleo, in order to protect Sarah from their laughter. But then, Sarah had invented her too. The fiction had been conceived by them both, it was their child, and all year they had raised it and nurtured it together, feeding it with anecdotes, watching it grow strong and healthy on the diet of their conversations. And now, Robert was ready to go one step further.

  He would become Cleo. He would become Sarah’s hallucination. He would, in the purest possible sense, make her dreams come true. Wasn’t that the most that any lover could offer?

  ∗

  Summer, 1986

  Dr Fowler said: ‘Let me repeat that if you do this, you do it by your own decision, at your own risk, and on your own responsibility in relation to the civil authority – by which I mean the police. Do you understand?’

  ‘Yes, I understand.’

  ‘All right. Now I want you to listen carefully, because what I will say now has medical and legal significance. Two further things. Whatever is done to you, you won’t be a woman legally. You can’t change your birth certificate, because that is a definition of sex attributed at birth, however much it may contradict what you think of yourself now. Secondly, it is a criminal offence for you to attempt to marry another biological male.’

  ‘Yes, I know that.’

  ‘Good. Well, in that case – and if you’re quite happy in your mind about this, if you’re quite decided – I’ll now refer you to my surgeon.’

  Robert smiled: a huge, relieved smile. He couldn’t help himself.

  ‘You don’t have the resources to pay for this privately, do you?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘Then I’m afraid you’re going to have to wait for a little while.’

  ‘That’s all right,’ said Robert, his blood pounding as he fingered the ladder in his tights. ‘That doesn’t matter at all.’

  ∗

  Autumn, 1988

  It wasn’t long before he was on friendly terms with the nurses: since choosing to become female, he found that his social skills had improved considerably. There was one that he liked in particular, called Rachel. She was the one who came to say goodbye to him on the night before his surgery.

  ‘Big day tomorrow, then,’ she chirped, sitting at the foot of his bed. It was the end of h
er shift, and she was wearing a raincoat over her uniform. Outside it was teeming down. ‘How are you feeling?’

  Without answering, Robert reached across to his bedside table for a book. As it happened, he was feeling terrified.

  ‘Have you ever read this?’ he asked.

  Rachel looked at the title: it was Gravity and Grace, by Simone Weil. She shook her head.

  ‘It’s one of those books,’ said Robert, ‘where, no matter what situation you’re in, you just have to open it at random and read a page or two, and you find… well, listen to this: this is the bit I read this morning.

  ‘“To accept a void in ourselves is supernatural. Where is the energy to be found for an act which has nothing to counterbalance it? The energy has to come from elsewhere. Yet first there must be–”’ he looked up at Rachel ‘“– a tearing out, something desperate has to take place, the void must be created.”’ Robert closed the book. ‘What do you think of that?’

  She was struggling. ‘I don’t know. I don’t know what it means.’

  ‘Sometimes,’ he said, ‘I didn’t think I’d be able to make it through the last few years. But there’s something else I read in here this morning: “A time has to be gone through, without any reward, natural or supernatural.”’

  Rachel thought it best to move on to safer territory. ‘They told me you had some visitors in earlier.’

  ‘One visitor,’ said Robert, replacing the book on the table. ‘Just my mother.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘She’s come to stay: you know, just while I’m in here. Booked herself a hotel in town.’

  ‘That’s nice. That’s very nice. You don’t see a lot of parents in here, for this kind of operation. They’re not very supportive, usually.’

  ‘She’s been great.’

  ‘What about your father. Is he not…?’

  ‘He died last year.’

  ‘Oh. I’m sorry.’

  ‘I hadn’t seen him for ages. There was no love lost. He didn’t know anything about… this.’ Robert lay still for a while, listening to the rain. ‘It’s odd: I always thought he hated me, in a way, but he left me quite a lot of money. Seems he’d been setting some stuff aside.’

  ‘You could do with that, I expect,’ said Rachel. ‘What are you going to spend it on?’

  ‘With any luck, I’m going back to university. I want to study psychology.’

  ‘Sounds just up your street. Then you’ll be able to help people… people like yourself. You can counsel them.’

  ‘Maybe. That’s not really the field I want to go into, though. I’m more interested in sleep.’

  ‘Sleep?’

  ‘Sleep disorders. Narcolepsy, mainly. I had a friend who was narcoleptic, once. At least – I wasn’t sure, at the time, but I’ve been reading some books since then, and it’s pretty obvious that that was her problem. It’s one of the things I’m going to talk to her about, when I next see her.’

  ‘Oh yes? And when will that be?’

  ‘Soon,’ said Robert, managing a smile now. ‘Very soon.’

  ∗

  The strip lighting, passing overhead in blinding flashes as he is wheeled towards the operating theatre.

  The confusion of doctors and nurses. The glint of electric light on the surgical instruments.

  The eyes of the anaesthetist, neutral and inexpressive as he prepares to insert the needle into Robert’s wrist.

  A sightlessness… or something worse

  The sweet vision of darkness, the loss of control, as he breathes deeply, and closes his eyes, and starts to… pray for an oblivion so deep It ends in…

  ∗

  … transformation.

  When Cleo awoke, she felt a pain in her throat, in her breasts, in her abdomen and between her legs such as she never could have imagined, or believed endurable.

  She was unable to walk for more than a week. The pain and nausea, the bleeding and the discharges would continue for several months.

  This was the worst time. She had to call upon all her reserves of patience. But she had waited for so long, there was no point in hurrying, now. She wanted to be absolutely well when she saw Sarah again. She wanted to be ready for her.

  ∗

  Spring, 1989

  Thin, ineffectual rain spattered the windscreen as Cleo drove her hired car along the once-familiar coast road. She had left the town behind and was beginning to climb towards the headland. Passing the row of cottages where Ruby Sharp used to live with her parents (and perhaps still did), she braced herself for the waves of feeling which the sight of Ashdown was bound to stir. Any second now she would be round the corner, and it would loom into view.

  And there it was: huge, grey and imposing, a solid, weather-beaten gesture of defiance directed at the ocean and whatever rigours and inclemencies it threatened to sweep inland. Seeing that distinctive stonework again, those characteristic angles, contours, curves and lineaments, Cleo braked to a sudden halt and found herself blinking back tears. Who would have thought that mere form, mere architecture, could hold such sway over her emotions? She sat for a while irresolute, her car stopped dead in the middle of the deserted road, listening to the plaintive cry of the gulls and struggling to resist the tide of nostalgia and regret that pressed itself upon her.

  She drove up to the house and parked outside the front door.

  She had chosen to come here on Good Friday, knowing that the house would be empty over the Easter weekend. The door was locked, of course, but this presented no problem, for she still had a set of keys: she had never returned them to the university authorities, and the locks, she discovered, had not been changed in the intervening five years.

  Cleo wandered through those glacial rooms and mazy, echoing corridors for only a few minutes. She did not attempt to gain entry to any of the bedrooms, for it was really the L-shaped kitchen she had wanted to see again. She put the kettle on and made herself a cup of instant coffee, then stood by the table and looked around her, thinking: Yes, this is the place. This is where it must happen.

  Returning to her hotel room in town, she sat on the bed beside the telephone and opened her address book. The plan could still go wrong, she realized. If Sarah’s parents no longer lived at this address, she would have to begin searching for her. That might take weeks, or even months. But somehow, she didn’t think they would have moved. Luck, she believed, was finally on her side.

  Her call was picked up by an answering-machine, which invited people to leave messages for Michael and Jill Tudor. Cleo replaced the receiver without speaking, and thought carefully about what she was going to say. Then she redialled the number. She said that she was trying to get in touch with their daughter, Sarah. She was calling with news of Robert, an old friend of Sarah’s from her student days. There was going to be a small reunion this weekend. She apologized for the short notice, but would Sarah be able to come to Ashdown, this Sunday, at about seven in the evening?

  She was sure that the message would be passed on. She was sure that Sarah would come.

  ∗

  The next morning, Cleo walked down to the supermarket to choose the food that she would cook for Sarah; and on her way, she visited the Café Valladon. It appeared to be under new management – at any rate, Slattery’s place behind the counter had been taken by a helpful and talkative young woman – but otherwise little had changed. The interior was still gloomy, the coffee was still strong, and the walls were still covered with second-hand books. She searched in vain for a copy of The House of Sleep, however: perhaps Sarah had taken it after all. She would find that out tomorrow. In the meantime, she fetched down Terry’s copy of Great Expectations, and was pleased to see that there was a ten-pound note safely hidden away at page 220. She left the money where it was, and read the last few pages of the novel while finishing off her slice of fruit cake. Then she replaced the book on the shelf, and took her leave of the Café for the last time.

  ∗

  A cold silvery mist had veiled the afternoon, and th
e moon was not yet up to scatter it. But the stars were shining beyond the mist, and the moon was coming, and the evening was not dark.

  From her window on the first-floor landing, Cleo could see the sweep of the approaching headlights even when the car was more than a mile in the distance. She heard the crunch of its tyres against the gravel drive, and watched it draw to a halt beside her own car on the forecourt. Then a solitary figure stepped out. It was her: it was Sarah. Her hair was turning grey – she could make that much out, even in the gathering dusk – but there was little else that Cleo could notice about her in the short time it took Sarah to lock her car and walk up the steps to the open front door.

  Cleo turned, hurried along the corridor and ran down the narrow, little-used staircase that led to the kitchen’s back entrance. When she got there, Sarah was already in the hallway, calling:

  ‘Hello? Is there anybody here?’

  ‘Hello!’ Cleo called back.

  Sarah stepped into the kitchen doorway. ‘Robert? Is it really you? Are you there?’

  The kitchen seemed to be empty. The only light came from three candles, flickering warmly on the table, and a cleaner, ghostlier sheen issuing from around the corner: this was from the lamp over the oven, presumably. Lovely, aromatic cooking smells filled the room.

  ‘Robert?’ Sarah said, advancing a little further. ‘What’s going on? Where is everybody?’

  ‘Come on in,’ said Cleo. ‘There’s a drink for you on the table.’

  ‘Yes, but where are you?’

  ‘I’m round the corner here.’ She could hear Sarah’s footsteps approaching. ‘Don’t come round, please. Not for a minute.’

  The footsteps halted. ‘Don’t come round? What are you talking about?’

  ‘Please, Sarah. Please stay where you are.’

  ‘But I want to see you, for goodness’ sake. I haven’t seen you for five years.’

  ‘I’ll be out in just a second,’ said Cleo. ‘I’ve reached a slightly delicate stage here. We’re having okra dal with cardamom and coriander rice.’