About the Author
Louise Mumford was born and lives in South Wales. From a young age she loved books and dancing, but hated having to go to sleep, convinced that she might miss out on something interesting happening in the world whilst she dozed – much to her mother’s frustration! Insomnia has been a part of her life ever since.
She studied English Literature at university and graduated with first class honours. As a teacher she tried to pass on her love of reading to her students (and discovered that the secret to successful teaching is … stickers! She is aware that that is, essentially, bribery.)
In the summer of 2019 Louise experienced a once-in-a-lifetime moment: she was discovered as a new writer by her publisher at the Primadonna Festival. Everything has been a bit of a whirlwind since then.
Louise lives in Cardiff with her husband and spends her time trying to get down on paper all the marvellous and frightening things that happen in her head.
Praise for Sleepless
‘An unputdownable thriller … Had me on the edge of my seat!’
‘Twisty and tantalizing’
‘A multi-layered story that packs a punch … Hooks you in from the opening chapter’
‘A truly skilful novel’
‘Moved along rapidly keeping me sucked in until the end and even then I wanted more’
‘If you like John Marrs, you’ll love this’
‘I was hooked from page one’
Sleepless
LOUISE MUMFORD
HQ
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd.
1 London Bridge Street
London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2020
Copyright © Louise Mumford
Louise Mumford asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
E-book Edition © December 2020 ISBN: 9780008412234
Version: 2020-10-27
Table of Contents
Cover
About the Author
Praise for Sleepless
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Chapter 50
Chapter 51
Chapter 52
Chapter 53
Chapter 54
Chapter 55
Chapter 56
Chapter 57
Chapter 58
Chapter 59
Chapter 60
Chapter 61
Chapter 62
Chapter 63
Chapter 64
Chapter 65
Chapter 66
Acknowledgements
Dear Reader …
Keep Reading …
About the Publisher
For Jason: this book would never have happened without you.
And for my mother and those nights playing hangman in the living room with a child who wouldn’t sleep.
Chapter 1
There was already a gridlock of cars stretching away behind the accident. Her accident. Thea felt a weird ownership over it, like a cat licking at her poor dead kitten.
Her fault – no doubt.
It had to be. In total, she’d probably only slept for four hours … that week.
Behind her was the three-vehicle sandwich in which her car was the crushed metal filling. She staggered back and tried to close the mangled door.
Someone pulled at her elbow: a man, dragging her back from the road where she stood gazing into the traffic. He was uninjured but shouting something, and Thea couldn’t focus, her mind slipping off him in the same way his glasses slid down his sweaty nose.
The actual moment of impact had been strangely soothing. Thea couldn’t remember any sound really, so there had just been this lovely, pillowy-white cushioning as the airbag deployed and then – whoosh! – like a fairground ride, she was spun around.
She hadn’t done it on purpose. She’d thought about things like that quite a few times, in those dead, red-eye hours of the night when she felt like the only person left on earth who was still awake. Ironically, as her car smashed into the one in front, she had actually been congratulating herself that she’d got through the day, that she could do this living thing, even without any sleep, with just a cold sponge for a brain and sandpaper balls for eyes.
She could do it.
But clearly, she couldn’t.
How many years of sleeplessness? Too many. Too many achingly long nights that then smudged themselves into joyless, grey, listless days before lights out and another eight hours of frantic panicking. Too many nights etched into the bloodshot spiderwebs in the whites of her eyes.
There was a woman with the man now and Thea looked for blood on her, expecting broken limbs and jagged wounds, but there was nothing, not even a torn blouse. Both of them worked their mouths madly, like gulping fish, expectantly looking at her and then the cars and then back to her again. She should respond, she thought, but she didn’t know what to say. The words were there, but they were busy dancing in her brain, enjoying themselves – shaken loose by the impact and free to partner up however they chose.
Her car was concertinaed. It was a shock, how impressively the whole thing could crumple, yet keep her whole as a seed inside its tattered fruit.
But, if she was fruit, then she was the rotten kind, she realized with a gulp that turned into a choking gasp. She could have hurt that man and woman staring at her now. She could have killed them. Up until that point, the only damage her insomnia had done had been to herself – her social life, her concentration, mood, skin, memory and general joy in living. It had never affected someone else, never nearly crushed them in a smoking metal box.
There was pain now. Her nose, a tender, pulsating blob, her knees suddenly shakier than they had been, blood on her collarbone where her seatbelt had taken a bite.
Abruptly, she sank to the cold ground at the roadside. Soon there would be flaring emergency lights and sirens; there would be gentle fingers prodding at her and questions asked and, dimly, she realized she would have to get herself together for all of that. More people gathered, but from her viewpoint sat on the ground, they were just feet, their voices so far above her they may as well have been stars.
There would be so much to do after something like this, Thea thought: the forms and phone calls, appointments and claims. The effort. She didn’t have it in her. She felt so light there was nothing left of her and dealing with all of this needed solidity; it needed heft, a person who felt like they left a footprint when they walked. If someone blew on her she would simply dissipate, like dust on the wind.
Idly, she watched liquid seep from under her car and with the same blankness with which she’d thought of everything else, she wondered if the liquid was flammable, or if it was merely water.
She should have cared, one way or the other.
At that moment her hand buzzed. She blinked. Maybe it was an injury of some kind, she thought slowly. She would probably need to get it checked out, once she got up from this really rather comfortable bit of damp ground. It buzzed again and this time her eyes managed to get the message over to her brain that she was still clutching her phone. Looking down at it, a notification flashed up, some advert from one of her apps, something she’d probably seen a thousand times before. At first, she thought it was the universe’s idea of a cruel joke. But then, as she sat there amongst the twisted metal and shattered glass, she came to think of it more as salvation:
Morpheus. Dream your way to a better you – one sleep at a time.
Chapter 2
Thea stared at the frog.
She had successfully risen from the dead for yet another day.
It was one week after the car crash. Thea had removed all clocks from her bedroom to prevent feeling anxious at night about the hours passing. However, this now meant she spent the time feeling anxious about not knowing how many hours were passing, which she wasn’t sure was an improvement. Last night she had certainly spent many hours in bed, a lot of them with her eyes shut kidding herself she was dozing. The sky had been a watery blue when she finally did drop off.
Waking to the alarm was like dragging herself out of a deep grave.
She did the usual estimation again: an hour or so of sleep, tops. That was pretty much classed as sleep deprivation, wasn’t it? Some dictatorships used that as torture. By rights, after years of sleeping like this, she shouldn’t have been walking, talking, working … driving. She should have been huddled in a corner, hollow-eyed and drooling.
Mornings were finely tuned. As adrenaline kicked at brain cells that only wanted sleep, she had discovered that mornings were not a time for decision-making. She washed, dressed in the clothes laid out ready the night before, grabbed her pre-prepared breakfast and lunch and got out of the door, her head beginning to pound.
She was a bruise and the rest of the world was a poking finger.
The frog looked at her.
Instead of work, this morning Thea found herself at the Car Recovery Centre, picking her way through the graveyard of other people’s vehicles with an overly cheerful assistant. She clutched a cardboard box to her chest. It was filled with the belongings that had been rescued from her car. The bright green frog sprawled on top, a present from her mother when she had bought her first car. He had a red kerchief around his neck and a button in his middle that, when pressed, played a selection of children’s songs. His green was clean, his kerchief still tied neatly, his button still working. It was as if the crash had never happened. She, on the other hand, felt as if her own stuffing was showing.
‘We clear out the cars ourselves, but just wanna check that there’s nothing we missed.’ The man edged his stomach past the hulk of an estate car.
‘Umm … I’m okay. You seem to have it all here. I don’t need to see the—’
‘There you go.’ He pointed.
The thing in front of her still had some of the essential features of a car, but they were in all the wrong places: wheels squashed too close together, windscreen crumpled, half the bonnet missing. Suddenly, the car park around her shifted and fell away and she was back in the driver’s seat, the airbags a cushion around her, smoke in her hair.
She took a deep breath.
Someone else could have ended up as twisted and shattered as the lump of metal and glass in front of her.
And then, within twenty minutes, she really was back in the driver’s seat. A different car provided by her insurance, the inside smelling of polish and air freshener.
All she had to do was turn the ignition key.
A woman with a clipboard stood expectantly by the car, waiting for her to drive away, smile frozen.
It was now 10 a.m. and the world had come into pulsing, throbbing focus. Thea popped a paracetamol for her eternal headache, stared at the dashboard and blinked a few times, hoping that would make her eyelids lighter.
The woman waited expectantly.
All she had to do was turn the key.
Her hand hovered near the ignition, but, in her head, she could hear the grinding squeal of metal against metal and the noise was so loud it made her fingers shake.
People as twisted and shattered as that lump of metal and glass.
She fumbled for the door handle and lurched out of the car, grabbing her box of belongings.
‘Umm … Miss Mackenzie?’ She heard the woman call out after her, but the voice was an echo and Thea walked fast, away, out of the car park, not looking back.
‘I’m sorry!’ She shouted behind her. ‘Can you just—? Look, I’ll pick it up later …’
And she kept walking until the whole place was out of sight and she was out of breath, her eyes stinging with tears she hadn’t realized she’d cried. The frog stared at her as she got out her phone to call a taxi, and, once again, the notification popped up on her screen:
Morpheus. Dream your way to a better you – one sleep at a time.
Thea blamed the frog and the broken carcass of her car as the reasons why she found herself that evening in the local pub, squashed between her desk-mate, Lisa, and a man from a different department with a thin face and thinner hair.
The office where she spent her days moving numbers from one spreadsheet to another was a grey, open-plan box. It always smelled of microwave-ready meals from the encrusted kitchen in the corner, had carpet the consistency of Velcro and an air-conditioning system that had a poor grasp of the seasons. She didn’t even have a desk of her own but shared one with Lisa, a middle-aged woman who filled her workspace with so many photographs, paperweights and cute figures that they often made attempts to colonize Thea’s territory. She spent probably too much of her day pushing back googly-eyed unicorns with a pencil. One cuddly car-frog was more than enough for her.
But, this time, when Lisa had asked her to the pub for after-work drinks, Thea had said yes.
She deserved a night out. She deserved the kind of night other people had regularly. One without worrying about how late it could get and that she wouldn’t have time for her wind-down routine and it was Thursday and she had work the next morning and she couldn’t get up late but she wouldn’t get any sleep at all and that car crash would be nothing compared to the mistakes she could make if she was utterly, utterly sleepless—
‘See? Aren’t you glad you came out? You should do it more often.’ Lisa’s nails had tiny daisies painted on them.
It was Margaret’s leaving drinks. Thea hadn’t really known that Margaret had ever arrived in the first place.
‘Too good for the likes of us, eh?’ The thin man smiled.
Thea thought about trying to explain it. She didn’t feel like she was better than them at all; in fact the
y were all quite clearly better than her – better at being human and sociable and remembering each other’s birthdays and the ages of their children. Thea didn’t have the energy for any of that. She tried sleeping later at the weekends in the hope that would tide her over for the coming week, but it never did. Sleep debt, it was called, and her debt was the kind that got loan sharks circling. She would never be able to repay it.
But that was going to stop, Thea thought, taking a swig of her wine. She couldn’t let insomnia continue to ruin her days as well as her nights. A life – that’s what she was going to have. Starting now.
‘Cheers, Mark,’ she said, raising her glass with a hand that continued to shake.
‘It’s Mike.’
Luckily, her 7 p.m. boost of brief energy kicked in and she listened, laughed in the right places, bought drinks, admired photos of holidays and children and did it all despite the fact that her brain began to whirl and the noise and heat of the pub began to close in on her.
‘And so, Mark, what do you like to do in your free time?’
He had a weak chin and there was a strange smell to him, as if he’d been out in the rain and left to dry too slowly, but he seemed pleasant enough. Thea smiled.
‘It’s Mike.’
More photos, more drinks, more laughing, more brain swirling, more noise and heat. But the noise was welcome; it drowned out the sound of grinding metal that she couldn’t get out of her head. Lisa’s perfume masked the acrid smell of burnt rubber.
People as twisted and shattered as that lump of metal and glass.
‘Another, Mark?’ She forced the corners of her mouth back up into a smile and motioned with her empty wine glass.
‘Mike.’
‘Shit! Sorry! Really I’m—’
But he had already turned away to the woman on his other side. She couldn’t blame him. It seemed that she could do everything except remember this man’s name. It slipped out of her grasp every time she opened her mouth. The wine churned in her empty stomach and suddenly she wanted to leave, before Mark – Mike! – told everyone how stupid she was, before she threw up the wine, before her exhausted brain refused to tell her equally exhausted body what to do and she had to be carried out of the pub like an invalid.
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