Sleepless

by Louise Mumford

  Not hollowed out anymore.

  The rope tightened and Thea yanked the handle back, her eyes on Rory, both of them praying to a god in which they did not believe that the engine would splutter and start.

  It coughed.

  And again.

  And then it chugged into life. They sat there for a second, staring at it, and then they both did something they hadn’t done for what seemed like a lifetime – they smiled. But Thea realized that what she really wanted to do was scream, loud and long, until she was doubled over with no breath left, so hoarse it hurt.

  They carefully edged the boat out into the sea, Thea keeping her eyes on a mainland she knew would soon start to appear out of the haze.

  ‘What am I going to do?’ she said lightly, not looking back at the island as they came out of the shadow of its cliffs.

  She smiled again.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, paused and her smile widened. ‘Yet.’

  Behind them, the island paled into the background, a dissolving watercolour. But Thea didn’t look behind her, she gazed straight ahead, watching the white ripples of water being pushed from the boat’s prow.

  She kept her eyes on the mainland.

  Chapter 65

  The map took up one entire wall. It was a map of the world, coloured black and outlined in white; on it, little red dots shone like hellish stars.

  The barefoot man, dressed in unbleached cream cotton, didn’t have to have the map beamed on the wall, it was not as if he needed it.

  He liked it.

  A warm breeze billowed out the white voile that hung over the terrace doors.

  The terrace led to the pool where, that morning, he had already swum his allotted lengths and, next to it, he had eaten his carefully compiled breakfast, swallowing the accompanying tablets.

  He was waging a war, one that had been ongoing for years. It was a war against his body, which wanted to degrade, decay, defragment like a badly maintained computer hub. He would not let it. He had the money for nootropic supplements, exercise, nutrition, meditation and education to stop the rot. But that was the thing, as the years had gone by, he realized he didn’t want to merely stop the rot anymore … he wanted to transform it.

  Aspire had been born.

  ‘Sir?’

  He had been about to begin his first micro-nap. The staff knew that. He would not get irritated by this interruption, however, as irritation led to a spike in cortisol, which was napalm for the nervous system.

  He nodded.

  ‘Sir?’ The man was poorly dressed for the heat, dark blooms of sweat flowering the armpits of his shirt with its too-tight, buttoned-up collar. ‘I have had an update from St Dunstan’s.’

  The barefoot man found the little red dot on the map. The island. It was one of his favourite trials. He’d met Moses once, many years ago, when he’d just been starting out with his shiny new sleep idea. An over-caffeinated man with bloodshot eyes and poor skin but he’d had an idea for sleep technology that made the barefoot man’s heart beat faster, cortisol be damned. It started with fixing sleep issues, but the end result? Well, the end result was altogether something more interesting.

  It was a technology that, eventually, became part of his arsenal.

  Increasingly, as Aspire grew to take in other technology, gene therapy and medication, the barefoot man had found himself waging war not just against the body, but also against the old world, the old way of doing things, the old order. Disappointingly he discovered that governments were hardly worthy adversaries because they couldn’t keep up with the pace of this change and didn’t understand its scope. Even when they did, legislation then worked so slowly they were destined to lose the battle before they’d even realized they were in it.

  There were plenty of others who understood the potential.

  Sweat Stain edged into the room. ‘St Dunstan’s has been compromised, sir.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘The problems with the trial proved insurmountable. The full evacuation policy has been activated.’

  Full evacuation policy. He knew what that meant, and he sighed. Regrettable.

  As if on cue, one of the red lights on his map began to blink.

  The jarring dissonance of that blinking light against all the other steady, unwavering ones was perturbing. He didn’t like it.

  Sweat Stain was nearly at his elbow. Too close. The barefoot man could smell his cologne, just about, under the stench of meaty perspiration. Perfumes were beautifully scented poisons. He reminded himself to issue a memo about them.

  ‘Ms Maxwell? Mr Ing?’

  ‘I regret to inform you of their passing, sir.’

  It was inconvenient to lose Delores and Moses. The woman had been clever, in her own way, and Moses, well he was a legend. But, as they said, legends … never died. Moses would have to continue, in one shape or another.

  It was messier than he would have liked. But that was beta-testing for you. Unpredictable. Thankfully, it was frighteningly easy for people to be wiped away – if you chose the right people in the first place.

  But still … messy.

  And exactly what Morpheus could be used for in the future: one carefully constructed dream, one perfectly balanced REM sleep, and those people would simply forget what had happened on that island. Their brains would be reprogrammed. So much cleaner.

  He clasped his hands and tapped the two index fingers together. Sweat Stain cleared his throat nervously.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Well …’ The man swallowed loudly. ‘We’ve just had a report of a boat, coming from one of the coves and heading to the mainland. It has two people in it. As yet unidentified.’

  The barefoot man clenched and unclenched one fist, watching the tendons in his wrist flex and disappear.

  One day those tendons might be reinforced with a biologically compatible substance that hadn’t been invented yet, something that would keep his skeleton strong while his organs were replaced one by one. Then, eventually they would find a way to open up the parts of the brain currently unmapped, stimulate those dormant neurons into activity as yet unimagined.

  Better human beings.

  Smarter people who learned quicker and made better choices. The kind of people who would not choose to get in a silly boat and sail away. This was the ultimate purpose of the glowing map, wasn’t it?

  The barefoot man hadn’t realized how useful sleep could be, before he discovered Moses. The world was obsessed with it, or rather the lack of it, but previously he’d thought of it as wasted time: necessary, but a waste all the same. Thanks to Moses though, sleep now held all sorts of possibilities that could be utilized by all sorts of people with different agendas.

  Well … they’d think they had different agendas. He smiled. Soon though, they would discover they all had the same agenda: his.

  The flashing light that represented St Dunstan’s on the map blinked out.

  That was an improvement. Now there was no irregularity to needle him as he stared at the map, all the lights glowing unwaveringly. It was like one of those magic-eye pictures, if he stared at it long enough something else would form in his vision – he could see the future in it, a future in which he was the centre and pivot.

  The barefoot man tapped his fingers together a few more times. Curiosity was a sign of an active mind and he had to admit, he was curious. A boat. Delores had had a hand in that, no doubt. He had never trusted the woman. It might amuse him to find out what had happened.

  The lights on his map shone unwaveringly, each of them representing a trial in some forgotten part of a country somewhere. Not just sleep, of course – that was merely one part of his arsenal in the war he was waging.

  Birdsong piped up suddenly. His micro-nap was over. He wondered whether one of his telomeres was fraying slightly because of the missed rest and imagined it, the broken fronds swaying like coral under the sea. A full day and a fixed regime stretched out before him. He would be late for his LED light bathing.

&n
bsp; Sentimentality. It would be his downfall. He got up and Sweat Stain backed away before him as if he was a god.

  Not yet.

  ‘Intercept the boat at the mainland. Discreetly.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Chapter 66

  It had to be a hallucination.

  Thea blinked. She’d already had this one before: a boat, some owls scrabbling amongst golf balls and her mother at the prow.

  She blinked again.

  ‘Who’s that?’ Rory shielded his eyes with one hand.

  Thea turned to him. ‘You can see it too?’ And then she grabbed his arm, her blanket slipping from her shoulders. ‘You can see it too!’

  ‘Umm … yes? And there is a woman waving at us?’

  Thea clambered across the boat, the waves lurching as much as her heart because, without a doubt, there standing at the prow of the orange and navy lifeboat, vagina-printed scarf blowing back in the wind, waving her arms as if she was helping land a plane was …

  … her mother.

  No owls, no golf balls, no mushrooms, no hallucination. Real and in the flesh.

  ‘Thea!’ she heard her mother yell.

  When she had been little, like all small children, she had believed that her mother could fix anything, could make anything better, that she could cry out for her and there she’d appear, ready to reprimand, repair, or rescue. It seemed, even at twenty-seven years of age, that trust held true.

  Burning tree, ghost balloons, lab rat in a maze.

  A daughter enveloped in a hug by her mother.

  Hands had helped her into the boat and now arms held her, her face pressed close to a scarf that smelled of patchouli and herb-infused tea. All those times on the island when she’d thought that this was it, this was the moment that her life ended, on a coastal path, in a lighthouse, or a white corridor, each time she had imagined these arms around her, this smell. Part of her still thought it couldn’t be true, that the force of her imagination had conjured up this boat and all the people on it.

  ‘Dear girl, dear, dear, girl,’ she heard her mother whisper over and over again, felt her arms tighten. Thea wasn’t sure if she said anything in return apart from meaningless sounds, the words in her brain hopelessly mangled.

  Though it felt to Thea that they had only been hugging for seconds, Vivian eventually pulled away to get a good look at her, lips twitching, a glint in her bloodshot eyes.

  ‘I told you it was a cult, didn’t I?’

  Thea gave a hoarse laugh and glanced around the boat, not a small inflatable thing, but big with glistening orange paint, safety rails, walkways, and people. Quite a few people, faces that she didn’t know. Behind her Rory was being helped aboard. She knew that the people were made of flesh and muscle and blood, that the boat was fibreglass and plastic and rubber but to her it all felt paper thin. She could poke her finger through it all and watch it tear.

  ‘How?’ she managed before her legs wobbled and Vivian helped her into the cabin where she could sit out of the wind. She worried she would sink straight through the hard seat, puddle through its cracks and pool on the floor into a shapeless blob, but with Rory sat on one side and Vivian on the other, they kept her up and kept her whole.

  She scanned the sea around them and shifted in her seat. ‘Wait. I don’t think it’s safe. I think … there are probably people coming for us—’

  And then a familiar voice interrupted her: ‘This is the coastguard, girlie. Official now, see?’

  And if she was just getting used to the idea that all the rest of it was real, then this part at least had to be a hallucination, Thea thought, as the man walked towards her. This man should have been in a pub armoured with abandoned hanging basket hooks, making tuna and dandruff sandwiches.

  ‘But—?’

  ‘Thea, this is Alastair,’ Vivian said. ‘He’s been a great help.’

  ‘Nice to see you again, Thea.’ He held out his hand and she took it, her own dwarfed in his rough fingers. ‘Said I was a lifeboat man, didn’t I?’ He chuckled.

  Vaguely she remembered the dust-fogged photo on the pub wall and the collection box on the reception counter. There was something different about the man stood in front of her, however. It wasn’t the newly shaven chin and dandruff-free shoulders, though that was surprising enough; it was the way a new light shone in the granite of his face.

  ‘So you see, Alastair’s lovely friends at the lifeboat station were more than happy to help – after all, you did need rescuing from sea.’ And when Vivian next spoke her voice was steel. ‘You are safe.’

  There were other people on board the boat, three men and a woman and Thea tried to see individual faces, but they blurred together into a mix of shy smiles, waterproof clothing and worried frowns.

  ‘But what about when we get to shore?’ Thea’s jaw started to tremble, making it difficult to get the words out.

  ‘The lifeboat men called the local police. They’re waiting on the mainland.’

  ‘Official now, see?’ Alastair added.

  Thea realized that both her mother and Alastair were waiting for the whole story, but the trembling that had begun in her jaw was now spreading, outwards through her arms and chest but also inwards, making her mind buzz and judder like a badly connected television. The whole story. It was there, inside her, but there was too much of it and too little of her.

  Burning tree, ghost balloons, lab rat in a maze.

  ‘It can wait.’ Vivian tucked the blanket tighter around Thea’s shoulders. ‘Don’t worry, it can all wait.’

  Thea’s fingers were so stiff that, at first, she couldn’t do it, but on the third attempt she managed to unzip her coat pocket, taking out the memory stick and pressing it into Vivian’s hand.

  ‘That … that explains a lot … of it,’ she managed.

  Vivian held it between thumb and finger and studied it before giving a nod and popping it under her bra strap. ‘Safest place, teapot.’

  Thea cringed at the hated nickname and cringed even more when she heard her mother say, ‘And who’s this handsome young chap?’ as Rory shifted beside her and gave a deep, throaty chuckle. But then the world went fuzzy and Thea watched colours swim lazily across her vision, the voices around her blurring into nothing but a soothing lullaby.

  She felt an arm around her back and was grateful for the way it fitted perfectly behind her neck. Dragging at least some of the focus back into the world, she moved her head – which was now the size and weight of a small planet – and traced the arm back to Rory.

  Rory.

  The beard at her preliminary testing, chocolate smuggler extraordinaire, ally … friend.

  He smiled down on her. There was something different about him too, she realized, taking a while to work it out. Lines. The lines on his face – those of worry, fear, tension – were gone, smoothed away. It made him look younger.

  She gave him some of her blanket.

  This time, when he held her hand, they were no longer on their own in a dark room with Rosie’s dead body in front of them. This time the island was merely a smudge on the horizon, a memory, a nightmare. She laced her fingers in his and the warmth of his palm brought a tingling into her own. She wanted to tell him about the hollow trees she had seen that time in a documentary, how the dark spaces can be filled with a fierce burning light …

  … but thoughts were beginning to slip from her like eels.

  ‘I’ll be here,’ Vivian whispered. ‘We’ll all be here. Go to sleep.’

  She knew she could no longer keep her eyes from closing. But, with her mother on one side, and Rory on the other, she was no longer afraid. She finally let the darkness take her.

  And, that night, in a city far away, in a tiny flat in the bedroom of someone who had been awake for hours, a phone beeped. A message popped up on the screen:

  Morpheus. Dream your way to a better you – one sleep at a time.

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  Acknowledgements

  A book is very much like the performance of a play. What you hold in your hands is the well-rehearsed performance, shining under the stage lights. But behind the scenes there are many people in the shadows making sure it all happens: moving the set, finding the costumes, swiping the gin bottle out of the main actor’s hands …

  To those people.

  Thanks to Kate, my marvellous agent, who found my story in her slush pile and has championed it ever since. Her support has meant the world to me and I know she is always there: willing me on, cheering me on, and occasionally giving me a gentle shove in the right direction.

  To my HQ family. Thank you to my fairy godmother Lisa Milton, who took the time to not only read the whole of my manuscript but also help me shape it. She is truly one of the most generous and supportive women in publishing. And Abi, my editor extraordinaire, who has so carefully dug through my words to help me bring out what I actually meant to say. She is the kindest, bestest editor I could wish for. With eagle eyes.

  Thank you though to everyone at HQ who has worked on this book: copyediting, proofreading, cover design and marketing. Their expertise and professionalism is invaluable.

  Huge thanks to the Primadonna Festival. There are many literary festivals out there, but this one really is special: warm, friendly, inclusive and truly life-changing, not just for me but for others too. That sunny weekend in Suffolk in the summer of 2019 was where my adventure began.

  Thank you to Gillian who read my manuscript in its rawest state. Her lovely feedback gave me the confidence to continue working on it and her insight helped me see what the story could actually be.

  As an insomniac myself, I didn’t have to go far for most of my research for this story, but there were two books upon which I relied. Matthew Walker’s Why We Sleep and Guy Leschziner’s The Secret World of Sleep both provided inspiration, knowledge and an insight into what the brain does while we sleep. Any flights of fancy or misinterpretations are, of course, my own.