I sigh and sign off. I get obscene amounts of sleep, but hardly ever in my own bed.
‘Hope the new bookings aren’t too much,’ O says, making me jump.
‘I thought you were down for the count.’
‘Only napping. Turned in a draft of the Damselfly report today. Bit of a press to get it done.’
‘Ooh, excellent! Nice one.’
O makes an obscene amount of money doing something incomprehensible with IT. I gather that she’s some sort of security consultant, but she’s cagey about it and I’m sure I wouldn’t understand anyway. Given that she owns the entire building and rents out the flats below, she has no real need to work; according to Muz, her motivations are all internal. ‘She’s packing so much brainpower that she has to keep her mind active or she’d go mad,’ he said the day I met him, as he helped me carry my stuff up three flights of stairs. Muz is in his early fifties but hard as a rock physically, and even that first time I met him, being around him made me feel safe. When we paused on a landing for me to catch my breath, he added, ‘Keeping busy takes her mind off being sick. A word to the wise, love: she hates talking about it.’
Muz also told me that O uses cutting-edge biofeedback systems to fight the cancer that has spread to her bones, in addition to the more usual immunotherapies. That’s why now, when O stretches and yawns and says, ‘I have outdone myself. Sorry about the mess,’ I wave my hand theatrically and say, ‘Oh, pfft. I’ll have the butler tell the housekeeper to tell the maid to polish all the door handles tout de suite.’
Then she says, ‘Antonio called.’
I try to keep my tone casual. ‘Yeah, he left me a message.’
‘He said he was calling to book an appointment. He wanted to Spacetime you but I played guard dog.’
‘You disapprove. I get it.’
I’m sure she’s right, though. Antonio unexpectedly popping up in my augmented reality would probably have proven a little too . . . augmented for my own good right now.
‘I don’t know this person, Charlie. I only know what you tell me.’
‘Oh, you mean his schlong.’
‘I wasn’t necessarily referring to anatomical details.’
‘Details? A tool like that is not a mere detail, trust me. It’s too big for condoms.’
‘Indeed.’ She is so dry.
‘I bought some XXXL ones online, I think they were made for porn stars. But Antonio broke two of those just trying to put them on, and when we finally managed to fit one he said it acted like a cock ring at the base and he’d never be able to get his erection down. Then he complained about loss of sensation and said, I am physical, everything I do has to be the best or it’s not worth doing! He was such a diva about it.’
‘At which point you walked away, obviously.’
I make a face at her. ‘You know I didn’t. I was an idiot. I got the implant, gained the better part of a stone and started crying over dog-food adverts. Then he dumped me for not being the same fun person I was when we met. All because he’s so “physical”.’
I realise that I’m becoming sexually aroused just thinking about him. O clears her throat.
‘And . . . ?’ Clearly she’s waiting for me to recall the moral of the story.
‘Oh. And I learned an important lesson about my boundaries and how not to be a doormat.’
‘Good. That is all, then.’
O throws off the afghan and begins the slow process of getting into her wheelchair. I check my messages, trying to be discreet and not watch as she positions her legs and rearranges her robe. She’s been working too hard, that’s for sure. But if I say anything—
‘Don’t say anything, darling,’ she gasps as she begins to wheel herself to her room.
‘Not. Saying. Anything. Up to you if you want to blow yourself out. Your funeral, et cetera’
‘Start writing my eulogy now so I can check your syntax before I pop off.’
I wait until her light’s out, then open the windows to let in fresh air, plump the sofa pillows, put the room more or less to rights before I go, at last, to my own bed in the little second bedroom. My old schoolmates have proper jobs in sensible towns that aren’t London. They are getting engaged and going to Cambodia on holiday, and I live with an old lady whose other best friends are pigeons. Most of my current friends are anxious people I met on the Internet because my ASMR helps them go to sleep. And nowadays you may as well call me a sex worker for all I try and pretend otherwise.
It’s time I got real.
Hi Antonio, I message. Happy to see Melodie. When is she free?
After that, my self-pity is such that I want to say I cry myself to sleep, but thanks to the narcolepsy I actually just pass out without even trying.
ASMR
‘I can’t believe you’re standing me up,’ Shandy moans into my Spacetime. ‘I could have gone to board-game night with work people, but I chose you because you’re so squidgy and cuddly and I miss having you in our cupboard under the stairs. Now I’m going to be stuck scraping mould off cheese and listening to room-mate grievances. Hey, where you at? Looks posh.’
‘The new Hilton,’ I subvocalize because I’m in a lift with well-dressed people. ‘Antonio’s girlfriend has invited me to her suite there. How actually bad do I look, Shandy?’
I expand the Spacetime field of view so she can see me fully. I’m wearing a manky old Spoon Bandit shirt from their first festival, shorts over dark tights, and trainers. I have proper shoes in my backpack but couldn’t find anywhere around London Bridge to put them on without getting knocked down by the grey and black tide of business suits just let out of work. I have a green rag wrapped around my head, which makes people think I’m on chemo and causes weirdness but hides the fact that only random chunks of my hair are left after the trial.
While Shandy stares at me, I can see her curled up in a beanbag in her room. She has perfect skin and an eye-catching figure, and her hair sticks out in all directions aggressively. When she takes in my look, a big white smile zaps across her face like a lightning bolt. She covers her mouth with both hands, laughing so hard that her feet paddle up and down like she’s dancing flamenco.
‘Bugger,’ I say under my breath. ‘I had it all sorted. I was planning to wear my special going-out jacket.’
‘The one with the mustard stain?’
‘The grey one, you know, that makes me look more young professional and less underemployed house cleaner. I had my whole outfit laid out on my bed, but then O somehow sprained her wrist trying to open the pigeon cage and I had to take her to A and E.’
Shandy stops laughing.
‘Oh, that sucks. Is she OK?’
‘I guess, I don’t really know with her condition being what it is. I would still be there waiting if she hadn’t told me to push off and do some paying work. So then I had to hustle from the Tube station, and you know how BigSky are running a promotion for Spacetime Gold and you can’t walk two metres without tripping over an AR-bot trying to wheedle you into an upgrade.’
The lift lets me off at the 23rd floor and I stand in the hallway uncertainly.
‘On behalf of my employer, I am so sorry,’ Shandy says. ‘But I thought you said O gave you some blockware for free.’
‘She did. You know how she hates BigSky.’
‘This is why I never come to your house.’
‘I tried the blockers but they just make the narcolepsy worse.’
‘But everybody uses blockware! I work for BigSky and I use blockware to block our own stuff. Otherwise you just get overstimulated and start to hallucinate. Couple of days ago I thought I was talking to a 3D ad, but it turns out I just had feedback on one of my design apps and I told a perfectly innocent crash-test dummy to fuck off.’
‘You have crash-test dummies in virtual-furniture design?’
‘I got assigned to an AR human-flight project. People go up in the Cairngorms and fly in those suit thingies, but with AR they can be on other planets. Did you at least take the earrin
g out?’
‘After being waylaid a few times by AR, I took the earring out. Then I just ran through the rain, which I thought was making me wet until a Green Bus drove through a puddle and I got fully soaked. I’m so tempted to blow off this appointment and come to yours.’
Shandy and friends have a new room-mate-under-the-stairs, a New Zealander. Shandy’s been trying and failing to get into his pants for a while, so he must be terribly hot and standoffish. It would be so entertaining to be there and not here.
‘Don’t even think of changing your mind, Horse. You need the funds. And Antonio called you. Hold your head up high, go in there and show them both what you’re made of.’
‘But I’m made of wet spaghetti.’
‘Cut the shit and get in there. I expect a full report.’
She snaps her fingers and disappears.
* * *
Melodie lets me in so quickly that she must have been standing right inside the door waiting for me. That’s her name. Melodie Tan. The harpist.
‘I know, it makes me sound like such a joke!’ She’s Canadian, with a strong accent. ‘My friends call me Mel. You should, too.’
Here’s the problematic thing about Mel. She’s really sweet. I mean that. She’s got lovely warm skin, she’s got hair like those shampoo adverts where the model’s tresses fall like a satin sheet and absolutely no flyaways. And instead of resenting her for what looks to me like an unfair excess of overall gorgeousness, I find myself liking her and wanting her to like me. Oh, and get this: she plays the harp. It couldn’t be the bassoon, could it?
She offers me a seat on the couch of her suite. She pours me a glass of wine, but I notice she’s drinking sparkling water herself. On the other side of the floor-to-ceiling window, Central London spreads out looking dignified and romantic – Nice trick, London, I think to myself. I can still smell bus fumes on my clothes.
Melodie confides that the room is paid for by a Russian patron who insists on putting her up in the best suite in the hotel; she looks embarrassed. I of all people don’t judge. I get out my AR stylus to take notes in an effort to appear professional. It is held together with sticky tape like Harry Potter’s glasses, but never mind.
‘So . . . Mel . . . tell me what’s going on. Antonio hasn’t explained anything properly.’
‘I like your voice,’ she says. ‘It’s lovely. Have you ever thought about going on the radio?’
That catches me off guard.
‘My mate Shandy says I sound like I just smoked a cigar and killed some big game.’
‘Yes! Exactly. It’s wonderful. I have this squeaky little-girl voice and nobody takes me seriously.’
She isn’t at all what I expected. I feel an urge to reassure her, so I reach out and put my hand on hers, which is trembling.
‘I’m here to take you completely seriously,’ I tell her. ‘Everything you say I keep in strict confidence. Just go ahead, whenever you’re ready.’
I remove my hand and she takes a shaky breath.
‘OK.’ She lets the breath out. She laughs nervously. Then she stands up and starts pacing back and forth, talking very very fast.
‘See, I’m the kind of person who attracts stalkers and creepers and stuff like that. It’s been happening all my life. You know, I get a lot of flowers and anonymous gifts, I get weird stuff online. Sometimes people wait around to try to catch me when I leave the theatre. I had to take out a restraining order once on a guy in Rome. They’re men, usually, but one time I had a death threat from a female musician who was jealous of me. She said I slept my way into my job even though I only got into the orchestra on a blind audition – I know for a fact the director would have preferred a guy from Malaysia, but never mind. She didn’t do anything in the end. At least not to me; I heard she had some other trouble with the law. I think she married a furrier. Anyway –’ about here, she pauses for breath and then hurtles on ‘– what’s been happening lately is that I seem to have a creeper in my dreams. And I know it isn’t a real person, not really. I’ve even read that every character in your dreams is actually an aspect of you, which I find a little disturbing, but I digress. The point is, he’s there almost every night. He hasn’t tried to . . . do anything bad to me. Yet. But . . . well, OK, I’m looking at your face and you probably think I’m crazy already. Should we forget it?’
All of this comes out so fast that I find myself blinking and going, ‘Uh . . .’ into her sudden, loaded silence. I can’t keep up.
‘No! We shouldn’t forget it!’ I say as quickly as I can. ‘That’s fine. I’m just taking in the information.’
‘Because, I mean, I know I sound loony—’
‘You don’t. Not at all. Is it OK if I ask you some questions?’
‘Sure. Hit me.’
‘Tell me what you can remember about the dreams.’
She sits back down and from her supple leather satchel she draws out an exquisite leather-bound journal. She starts flipping through the smooth, creamy pages. The sound is pure ASMR and it triggers me. My scalp begins to tingle and my eyes go half-lidded before I remember that I’m supposed to be calming her down, not the other way round. I step on my own foot, hard, to jolt myself awake.
‘OK. I wrote everything I could remember in here. Let me look at my notes. So, here we go. In the dream there’s a room. It’s like a practice room, with soundproof walls and a piano and some music stands. Like the ones they had in Toronto where I trained. I’m in there tuning my harp, but the low D won’t stay in. The tuning peg is wobbly, even though in the dream I can remember having it fixed recently. I’ve got this big canvas tote bag that my mom bought me from the Smithsonian gift shop, with all my music and stuff in it, and for some odd reason I have pitch pipes – which nobody uses any more, but it’s a dream. So I go to get the pitch pipes and there’s a—’
She stops and an abstracted expression comes over her face.
‘No, it’s not like that. Well, I can’t quite remember how, but suddenly this guy is just there, he says he’s going to fix the harp but he tries to steal my bag.’
‘Your bag with your music in?’ She nods. ‘All right, go on.’
‘So, at first I let him take it because I’m so surprised, and then I think hang on, I need those scores because we’re rehearsing tomorrow – and in the dream somehow I’m still in school, and if I lose the sheet music I’ll be in trouble, and I’m getting really upset.’
‘Of course.’
‘So I run out of the room after him, but we’re not at the conservatory any more, we’re outside on this scaffold, like a . . . what do you call it? Like a gangway. Up in the sky. I look down and I can see all these canals with boats on them, and instead of roads there are these scaffolds way up high with walkways made of boards. The city below us has so many lights, and the architecture is sort of futuristic, a bit like Singapore – but it isn’t any real place that I’ve ever been, and I’ve been a lot of places. The buildings are much taller. So he’s running ahead of me with the bag, and I have to chase him. And I’m wearing heels.’
‘Oh, I hate that,’ I say. But Singapore? A city with canals . . .
‘I know, right? So I was kind of mad by then. Well, not really mad, but more panicked because I had no clue what I was going to do if I didn’t get my scores off of him. I chased him and he was just about to go into this tall building with a giant tulip out front, and I grabbed the back of his jacket and stopped him, and the bag of sheet music spilled. It went everywhere. It floated down into the canals and it blew around in the wind— Oh, I’ve got a note here – there was this hot wind, like a blow dryer, or when you walk over a subway grate in New York.’
‘Did you say a tulip concierge?’ I’m shocked that she’s been in the Dream City. I’d assumed it was my place, part of my psyche. The idea of a client going there feels out of order to me.
‘Yeah, I know, so stupid, you probably think—’
‘It’s fine, just carry on, Mel. What happened then?’
‘Wel
l, somehow in all the confusion I found I had the score I needed in my hand – it was Debussy – and the Creeper gave me a shove and I fell off the edge of the scaffold, and he shouted after me, You’re weak. What makes you think you can survive in high places?’
‘And then you kept falling?’
‘Yes, but I woke up before I hit the water.’
‘Well, obviously he’s lying to you. You’re not weak, you’ve earned your success. I hope you know that.’
‘Thanks. I have no idea what part of me could be undermining me so much. I feel ashamed that I have such bad thoughts about myself.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I tell her. ‘We all have cultural introjections. We absorb messages from our environment without even knowing it, and they get assimilated into us and cause trouble. Can you describe the guy to me? How old, what did he look like?’
‘That’s part of the problem – he was wearing a mask. It was a white plastic mask, really shiny, but it had no eyeholes and the whole surface of the face was covered with these chemical symbols. You know like in organic chemistry when they diagram molecules and they have the element and then the little lines connecting each element to the others? One line for a single bond, two lines for a double bond . . . I could draw it for you.’
‘No need,’ I say. I was rubbish at chemistry in school. The fact that Mel knows what a double bond is means that she must have studied it at some point, which makes her even more freakishly perfect, like a Miss World contestant. During her gap year she probably built an orphanage using eco-sustainable materials.
‘Just one more question. Do you dream in colour?’
‘Oh, yes, definitely.’
‘Can you recall if the Creeper was in colour? Or was he in black and white?’
I’m off-script now, but the talk of the Dream City and the mask makes me remember my own dream in the hotel laundry cart. The people sleepwalking into the river.
‘No, he was definitely in colour. He wore green trainers, I remember that clearly. I have an excellent memory.’
Sweet Dreams Page 4