by Nicky Wells
I tossed and turned, unable to determine my motives, unable to disentangle selfish from practical reasons, unsure whether I needed to, unwilling to dig too deep and overanalyze.
Consequently, when Dan suggested the following week after a particularly harrowing day for everyone concerned that Emily, Josh, and I “might as well stay over for the night,” I simply shrugged and went with the flow.
Dan produced a couple of airbeds and made the kids a lovely indoor camping den in the guestroom they had progressively been taking over. I installed myself in the guest room in which I always stayed. It was odd, being in Dan’s house after the kids’ bedtime with Dan absent—off to the studio—and nothing much for me to do, but it was good, too. I watched a movie on the telly and curled up in bed with a book afterwards. I fell asleep strangely content with the light still on and didn’t wake until I heard Dan returning home at about three a.m.
For a second, I debated getting up to say hello, but instead, I switched off my light and curled up under the duvet, hoping for a swift return to sleep. Yet my ears strained to hear the sounds of Dan coming upstairs, walking down the landing to his bedroom, except none were forthcoming. Surely, surely, he had to go to bed some time!
Twenty minutes later, I couldn’t bear the uncertainty any longer. Fully awake now myself, I grabbed a dressing gown and padded downstairs. Lights were blazing everywhere, and I clicked them off, one by one, once I had ascertained Dan was, in fact, not present in the kitchen, or the dining room, or even the lounge. Leaving the hall light on, I ventured down to the studio, hoping against hope that Dan wouldn’t still be working, unsure what I would say or do if he was.
My heart beat in my throat when I saw Dan passed out in his chair. His head was lolling over the backrest and his hands hung loosely on either side of the armrests, with his legs stretched out and spread wide. It looked like he had simply fallen over backwards, unable to stand any longer. My tummy constricted with worry when I noticed once again those dark purple smudges that had disconcerted me so at my own house a few weeks ago.
Unlike then, however, leaving Dan in that chair was not an option. He would wake up with a crick in his neck, full of aches and pains, and I doubted that whatever sleep he was getting would prove restful. Very gently, I bent over my sleeping friend and planted a kiss on his cheek. I wrapped his right arm around my shoulders and, bending awkwardly, managed to duck my head through his armpit so I could try to pull him upright. His body was heavy but limp, and I couldn’t move him an inch.
I disengaged myself and took an uncertain step backward. I had to get this man to bed, but how? Eventually, I resorted to pulling at his arms and shaking his shoulders, and after a small eternity, the action yielded a result. Dan’s eyes opened and he looked around, bleary and unfocused.
“Whass gonon?”
“It’s time for sleep,” I announced, pulling at Dan’s arms again to get him to stand up. “Come on, buck up, we need to get you into bed.” I tugged some more, and he half-rose with the force of the pull.
“Tired,” Dan protested. “Lemme siddown.” With that, he let himself droop backwards again. Back to square one.
I wavered for a moment while I gathered my wits. The indistinct slur of Dan’s speech disturbed me. I had seen Dan drunk many times, even passed out on the odd occasion, but never had he sounded so…drugged. Yet a surreptitious sniff of his breath suggested a complete absence of alcohol. Unbelievably, he was sober even though he looked wasted. I didn’t know what to make of that and determined to mull this over some other time. For now, he needed to get to bed.
“You need to go to bed,” I reiterated with determination, pulling him forward again and taking another step. Reluctantly, he fell in beside me, and I grabbed hold of his arm around my shoulders. “That’s good,” I encouraged. “Keep going.”
It took me a good few minutes to maneuver Dan up the stairs and into his bedroom. He was dopey and sleepy and not very cooperative at all, but eventually we got there. I flicked on the beside lamp, threw back the duvet and let Dan sit on the side of his bed. While I bent down to take off his shoes, his upper body melted onto the bed, arms curled up under his face. There was no way I would manage to disrobe and get him dressed in more suitable sleepwear. Thus I simply lifted his legs onto the bed and tried to roll him into a comfortable position.
Without really knowing why, I patted his trouser and shirt pockets, finding and retrieving his wallet, mobile phone and keys, all of which I placed on the bedside table. But there was nothing else. I didn’t quite know what I expected; pill packets, maybe, or something to explain his weird, flaked out state, but there was nothing. I shrugged and covered him with his duvet. Maybe he was just that tired.
For a minute, I allowed myself to watch my sleeping rock star and I smiled to myself. He was as gorgeous as he had ever been. If, that was, one were romantically attracted to him, which, of course, I was not. But still… I couldn’t resist a little stroke of his face, now relaxed in deep sleep. He didn’t stir and, quite unexpectedly, I found myself kneeling beside the bed and covering his cheeks, his nose, his eyes, his mouth with gentle kisses. Ah, but that felt nice. Without knowing what I was doing or why, I lay down beside him, curling my body around his and cradling him in my arms. Just for a second, I told myself. Just for a second it would be okay to pretend to be a woman in a relationship with this man, instead of being a widow still paralyzed by grief.
I breathed deeply and savored the moment. This is probably wrong, I mused, but nobody need know about it and…and…well, I suppose it’s okay to—
Dan stirred and interrupted my train of thought. I quickly let go of my hold on him and withdrew a little, allowing him to roll onto his other side. Now we were facing each other and I held my breath as I waited to see if I had inadvertently woken him, whether my undue presence in his bed would be discovered. Dan flung out his arm in sleeping repose, and his hand landed on my shoulder. I lay perfectly still, not knowing what to do next, half-hoping he might pull me into an embrace, but he shifted and his hand slid off me.
As gently as I could, I slid across the bed so I could get out on the other side. I covered Dan once again with his duvet before turning off the bedside lamp. Shutting the door firmly behind me, I stumbled back to my own bedroom. Four a.m. Great. Another broken night to add to my never-ending catalog of sleep deprivation. And a whole host of disturbing, conflicting emotions to file under the category, “For Later Analysis.”
My first, entirely predictable, reaction when my alarm clock went off was, you’ve got to be joking. But my mind was fast to recall the events of the night, and I silenced the alarm quickly in hopes to let a sleeping Dan lie, as it were. I got dressed and snuck into the children’s room before they had a chance to make an almighty racket.
“Morning, my lovelies,” I whispered into the gloom. “Come on, sweeties, time to get up. But you’ve got to be really quiet!”
My darling offspring rose quietly and without protest. I gathered their clothes, and we all tiptoed downstairs and into the kitchen. Shutting the door softly behind me, I sat the kids on top of the work-surface in the middle island to get them dressed.
“Why are we doing this?” a sleepy Josh demanded to know.
“Dan isn’t well,” I explained. “I think we should let him get some more sleep, so we need to be very quiet.”
“Shh,” Emily supplied with her index finger over her closed mouth.
“That’s right, shh,” I confirmed. Right on cue, I heard the front door open. Jenny was early today! I rushed out to intercept her before she could wake the dead with her loud and cheery customary greeting, and pulled her into the kitchen to join the rest of us.
“Dad not very well,” Emily informed the housekeeper, who threw me a questioning look with raised eyebrows. Whether she was perturbed at the fatherly reference or the potential illness of her employer, I wasn’t sure, but I focused on the latter.
“Dan had a very late night last night, and he didn’t look very w
ell,” I offered, hoping I sounded sufficiently concerned yet nonchalant. “I thought it would do him good to sleep in.”
Jenny nodded. “I’m sure it would. I’ve never known Mr. Hunter to get up so early as what he’s been doing these past few months. He used to sleep until at least midday. I’m thinking the man must be missing out on a lot of sleep.”
I swallowed hard. Dan’s lack of sleep was probably in large part due to us. He had been working with me in the morning for weeks, ever since Josh started school. Perhaps something needed to change.
The children remained admirably quiet while Jenny and I whipped up a lightning-fast breakfast. We brushed teeth and hair in the downstairs bathroom, and I bundled the kids into my car for the school run. By the time I delivered Emily at playschool, there was no time to nip back to check on Dan. If I was to make my training session with Richard, I had to drive to the studio straightaway. I was only two minutes late by the time I drew up in one of the parking spaces reserved for staff.
Coattails flying, I let myself be buzzed in through reception and raced down the stairs. “Sorry, sorry, sorry,” I gabbled before Richard had time to admonish me. “I drove myself this morning and I got a bit lost.”
For the briefest moment, Richard’s eyes focused on the empty space behind me where normally Dan Hunter would be bustling in. He looked at me quizzically. “No Dan today?”
I shook my head. “He got home so late last night and looked so terrible, I put him to bed and let him sleep this morning.”
Richard raised his eyebrows and tilted his head, and I half-expected some kind of question or comment. However, “Slight change of plan,” was all he offered by way of response as he searched for something in a drawer. “Okay. Let’s talk mixing 101.”
I took off my coat and sat down on the assistant’s chair next to him. “Mixing 101,” I repeated.
“Right,” Richard confirmed. “So you know all about set-up. But no matter what you do, there will always be problems with reproducing the sound you captured, especially the bass.”
The problem, or so I learned, was that the “room mode”—the way in which sound waves break in the mixing room itself—could give an engineer a totally misleading impression of the quality of the mix.
“It’s important to find the sweet spot in the mixing room,” Richard went on. “Although that can be a challenge. I know of one studio where that position is exactly sixty-seven centimeters diagonally into the mixing room from the right back corner. That’s kind of awkward.”
“So the sweet spot could be almost anywhere in any given room?”
“That’s right. And now I’ll teach you to find it.”
He produced a flash drive. “This is my reference mix.”
“A reference mix?”
“A reference mix. It’s one I made myself a long time ago. I’ll play it to you on the studio speakers that give me the deepest bass response, and you’ll walk around until you find this room’s sweet spot.”
“And when I’ve found it? What do I do with it?”
“When you’ve found it, that’s the place you will need to be when you assess and mix bass frequencies in this studio.”
I rose to my feet. “But, what if, as you say, it’s nowhere near the mixing desk? How do we do that?”
Richard pointed a finger at me like an imaginary gun. “That’s why we have several people in the mixing room. Or remote controls.” He chuckled. It was the first time he had laughed properly during my training, and I took that as a good sign. I had to be making progress. Dan would be so proud!
“All right, take it away,” the sound engineer encouraged me and hit play.
It took me only a few minutes to find the mixing room’s sweet spot. I had to close my eyes to listen and fumbled my way around awkwardly, but I got there in the end. Miraculously, the spot was right where it needed to be, namely where Richard kept his chair.
“You found it,” he praised when I sat down. “And you didn’t cheat, either.”
“Cheat?” My pride ebbed, and I frowned. “How would I’ve cheated?”
“X marks the spot,” Richard grinned wickedly and pointed to the floor. Sure enough, there was an ‘x’ marked in duct tape on the floor under his chair. I had noticed it before, of course, but never considered its relevance. Richard punched me lightly on the shoulder.
“Don’t worry. Nobody gets it, not even the people who should. I marked the spot as a courtesy to other engineers working here occasionally, but most people don’t notice. You did good.”
I did good. My ears glowed with pride, and I couldn’t wait to tell Dan.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Unbelievably, Dan was still in bed when I arrived at his house with a buoyant Emily for our customary lunch. I was pretty exuberant until I heard from Jenny that Dan had still not shown his face. All that joy was replaced with acute worry when she filled me in on her employer’s continued sleepiness.
“Are you absolutely sure he hasn’t crept past you and is ensconced in his studio?” I asked, trying to shush Emily so that I could actually hear Jenny’s response.
“Quite sure. Since midmorning I’ve been getting on with me chores. I’ve put away pots and pans, I’ve dusted and hoovered the whole house, and I even put on the radio a bit louder than what I’d normally do. I’ve tried everything but knocking on his door.” She blushed. “That’s not really my place.”
I considered that a debatable position—suppose he had been taken seriously ill and needed help—but I could also see where she was coming from.
“Look here, why don’t you fix Emily some lunch and I’ll go and check on Dan,” I suggested and quickly clapped my hand on my mouth. This was the first time I had ever addressed Jenny as though I had a right to boss her about, and I instantly felt bad. Jenny, however, hadn’t noticed. She sat Emily at the table and started chatting to her about what the little lady might like for lunch. I decided to let my momentary lapse pass. With a last backwards glance, I left the kitchen to find Dan.
He was, indeed, still in bed, although there was evidence he had been up during the night. His clothes lay discarded in a heap. The duvet only half-covered a bare chest, and one pajama-clad leg stuck out over the side of the bed. He looked peaceful and much better than he had at four a.m. Once again, the purplish smudges had faded and the deathly pallor of his skin had receded. He looked groggy, but not ill.
I was debating whether to leave him to it or wake him when he opened his eyes and shot me a sleepy smile.
“Well, well, well,” he purred. “There’s a sight for sore eyes.” He scooched his body into the middle of the bed and patted the mattress in front of him. “Care to sit down?”
I blushed, recalling my little transgression while he was asleep, but perched cautiously on the side of the bed. “Good afternoon, you. Are you all right?”
Dan rubbed his eyes and yawned. “Much better than I was last night, I think. Did I dream this or did you bully me up here into bed?”
“You didn’t dream it. I couldn’t let you sleep on that chair. You would have been shattered,” I explained.
Dan smiled. “Thank you,” he murmured and grasped my hand. “That was very kind.”
“Any time,” I murmured back, only slightly coy. I held my breath, waiting to hear if he was aware of how I had held him a little later, but he said nothing more and I resumed brisk business.
“I suppose now that you’re awake, it’s time to get up. It’s nearly one o’clock. And I do want to talk about you about your sleeping patterns. You—”
Dan sat bolt upright. “One o’clock?” he echoed. “In the afternoon?”
“Indeed,” I concurred. “You’ve had at least…oh, nine hours sleep. Not enough to catch up on everything you’re missing, but a start.”
“It’s one o’clock?” Dan was fixated on that point. “What happened to the session with Richard?”
I grinned. “Oh, that happened. He taught me about room mode and standing waves today. It was awesom
e.”
My gorgeous rock star lay back in his bed, totally confused. “You went? By yourself?”
I nodded.
“And you survived?”
I nodded again, suppressing a grin.
“And you enjoyed yourself?”
Another nod, accompanied by an inanely proud grin.
“Wow.” Dan ran a hand across his forehead. “You have arrived. I think Richard has a soft spot for you. And room mode, huh? Serious stuff.” He tickled my side. “You’ll know more than me soon.”
“That’s the general idea,” I chuckled. “Come on, up you get.”
Dan reluctantly hoisted himself out of bed. He stood uncertainly for a moment, swaying ever so slightly, and I rushed to his side to steady him.
“Why, hello there,” he murmured suggestively, wrapping an arm around me. “It’s nice to have a beautiful lady throw herself at me first thing.”
I swatted away his arm with a playful nudge, even though my heart beat furiously and eagerly in my chest.
“Now, now, Mr. Hunter, behave yourself,” I admonished but Dan laughed and didn’t look in the slightest put out.
“Yes, Ma’am,” he mock-saluted before making his way into the bathroom. I left him to it and went back downstairs.
When he finally joined us in the kitchen, all traces of the night before were wiped out. He was bright-eyed and sparkly and joined Emily in her lunch of scrambled egg and bacon on toast as though it was the most normal thing in the world. It probably was, to him. After all, it could have been breakfast.
Even though Dan stayed at home for the rest of the afternoon, I didn’t get a chance to talk to him about working and sleeping and looking after himself. He busied himself playing with Emily and offered to collect Josh from school.
“This proxy-parenting malarkey is completely ruining my rock-star lifestyle,” he joked, his eyes dancing.
When he and Josh returned from the school run, they brought home all the ingredients for home-made pizza and pudding. Dan made the tomato sauce and had the kids spread the pizza dough into one enormous party-pizza. The kids garnished their sections to their own taste, while Dan looked after his and mine. Needless to say, he didn’t consult me on what I wanted. I had been a double-pepperoni-with-pickled-chili girl for as long as he had known me.