Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  Oxford Street was woven with the breath of evening shoppers in the dark blue air. I put my hand lightly on Lelia’s back, guiding her through the crowds as though protecting a glass vessel that contained a child. She looked elegant and somehow interestingly dressed. The store was strip-lit with a flat glare: it felt as though we were in a warehouse, or a shop from another era: Marks & Spencer in the late fifties. By the time we had taken several escalators to reach the baby department, we were in a different land: glaucous and queasy, an echoing hall of devices and disturbing ointments that made me feel as though I had been herded into a dairy farm. Even Lelia seemed temporarily taken aback. I wondered whether she was remembering her miscarriages. I put my hand on her arm.

  I looked around with something approaching revulsion. Breast pumps and other inexplicable gadgets that looked vaguely designed for physical torture sat on shelves below an array of objects with straps and checked torsos, hanging butcherishly from hooks. After the cold of the street, the heat in there was overwhelming, our coats already like felty encumbrances.

  ‘Oh!’ said Lelia. ‘Look at all this stuff.’

  ‘But this is a place of horror,’ I burst out.

  ‘But – oh, Richard. For God’s sake! That’s worthy of MacDara. If you don’t like it, go and sit in the cafe, you great wimp.’

  ‘Sorry’ I said. ‘Well, look at it though.’

  ‘Should I buy things yet?’ said Lelia.

  ‘Er,’ I said, surfacing. ‘Yes.’

  I thought about my mother. When Rachel and I were five and four, she had given birth to a baby followed by two others in quick succession. I had vague and unpleasant memories of nappies and shit in buckets of disinfectant, of boring sibling supervisory tasks, and ceaseless baby screeching. Somehow she had coped, despite my father’s lengthy absences in his studio or in the outhouse where he made the complex wooden boxes which later became his passion but rarely sold.

  By the time Clodagh, the youngest, was a toddler, we could drag one another as a warring gang through our unstructured days, free-range but maternally adored. We were packed into a series of old cars, wedged on laps and stuffed into the luggage space with neighbours’ children, and driven to a haphazard collection of outlying schools where Rachel and I, self-motivated as we were, and then encouraged by our reasonably erudite father, took to our books, while the others drank snakebites and learned new guitar chords. Rachel and I left home the moment we finished school, our mud-splattered souls aching for urban excitements and broader horizons. Both enchanted and dispirited by the life I found in London, I felt happy to have escaped the rabble, though I stayed in constant contact with my mother. Babies had never since impinged on my consciousness: even recently, even now, with a broody girlfriend and a lackadaisical approach towards contraception. Fool that I was.

  I looked around the department. Women with fascinatingly vast bumps sailed past me with the oblivion and authority of sea-going ships. Others carried their babies on their stomachs in those same cloth torsos. The infants, fairly uniform, pudgy-cheeked creatures with a scrawl of geriatric hair, were mostly asleep. A few squalled unpleasantly. I watched a mother looking down at her offspring with an expression of glazed pride. She appeared stupefied, and somehow she was repugnant in her own subjective world, so stunned and focused, it was as though I had caught her masturbating. I realised suddenly that every single mother here considered their own child was the best. As simple as that. The very best. On whatever warped and hormonal scale they measured the brats’ unguessable qualifications, they were all under the blissful illusion that their little sack of breathing life was superior.

  Prams, apparently called ‘buggies’, sat in a bewildering array. I simply could not imagine how I would summon even a show of the required interest. The concept made me feel weary. Lelia was kneeling down and fingering some clothes with pastel edging, hesitating. I grabbed the packet from her and tossed it into her basket.

  ‘Get them,’ I said.

  I saw the back of a head – dark brown hair cut to the shoulders, a slight back, a familiar posture – and I had the strange sensation that I was in a dream, or that danger was imminent. It can’t be her, it can’t be that woman again, I thought, but I knew that it was. She was there with another woman. I said nothing. I was embarrassed that I had been in contact with her after teasing Lelia about her square friends; I was even more embarrassed that I had somehow commissioned a review from her. I looked away. I felt nervous in the face of my odd, unnecessary subterfuge. I began to think about how I could tell Lelia right now that I had seen her and commissioned her.

  ‘I – what else?’ I said.

  ‘Well…’ said Lelia. ‘We shouldn’t get too much.’

  ‘Why not?’ I said vaguely, staring in shock at a box of objects called nipple guards, and some vast vats of nappy cream. Were these things really necessary, or there to fool defenceless mothers into spending money? I felt queasy again.

  ‘Superstition. I must just look at the buggies,’ said Lelia.

  ‘You go and look,’ I said. ‘I’ll just look at these – um, baby baths. We need one probably, don’t we?’

  ‘I think you can just bath them in the washing-up bowl. But I don’t really know. Maybe you should check out the muslins. See you in a minute.’

  ‘What’s a muslin?’ I murmured.

  I wandered, dazed, around the corner. I considered having a quick read of the newspaper, but I feared she might catch me and be cross; or, worse still in the case of Lelia, hurt. I couldn’t stand the idea of her irritating wounded expression.

  Sylvie stood with her back to me for a few more seconds talking to her friend, then the friend walked away and she turned around.

  ‘Are you following me?’ I said.

  There was silence.

  ‘I was going to ask the same of you,’ she said calmly.

  I paused, indignant and then amazed. But she was right. I could equally have been following her.

  ‘We both live in Bloomsbury,’ I said, shrugging.

  ‘This isn’t Bloomsbury. But I’m glad to see you.’

  I noticed her mouth. Her top lip seemed to move delicately, curving as she spoke, as though its movements were independently choreographed. She was wearing a ridiculously English tweed coat, severe and old-fashioned, but I could see the French in her clearly for the first time. Her eyes were quite ordinary. Her mouth, uncoloured though it was, was noticeable. Her features seemed to have rearranged themselves so that she was not simply plain, but a mixture of things.

  ‘Your review was brilliant,’ I said for something to say, though the choice of adjective was stronger than I had intended.

  ‘“Brilliant”?’ she said. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘It was good.’

  ‘I just read as much as I could,’ she said, speaking clearly in that husky little voice, like sun and fog together. ‘All night. I kept finding more references that seemed relevant. It occurred to me, somehow, that you might be up too.’ She flicked back a strand of her hair. ‘By the time it was dawn, and those strange seagulls were wheeling about – why are they so far from the sea? – I’d finished. It felt as though I’d been sailing through the night. I was worried that it was thin.’

  ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘Better than the stuff of half my crass hacks, or the crusty old experts I call in. It needs a bit of fiddling with, that’s all.’

  She smiled.

  There was silence.

  I tried to prevent myself from filling it. I almost heard what I was about to say before I said it, and tried to stop myself: ‘You can do something else for me if you’d like–’ I said into the silence. I halted abruptly.

  ‘Something else?’ she said, her lips parting. Her grave, pale face remained quite still, as though she were a sculpture. Then she smiled, her full top lip curving.

  ‘Why are you here?’ I said abruptly to change the subject, her intensity bothering me.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, and gazed into the distance. ‘I have
to buy a baby present for someone. Where’s your–’

  ‘Lelia.’

  ‘That’s her name. Of course. It’s a beautiful name.’

  ‘She was named after someone,’ I said, halting myself. ‘I–’

  ‘What?’ she said simultaneously.

  ‘Oh, I–’

  ‘Never mind,’ she said.

  ‘The Duchess of Westminster,’ I said. I stopped. I glanced up to where Lelia had turned the corner to look at prams. The origin of her name, and the parental aspirations it revealed, were a source of unreasonable embarrassment to her. My throat felt hot: I had betrayed her.

  Sylvie glanced to one side.

  ‘I’m going to go now,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ I said. ‘Where?’ I suddenly wanted to look at her unadorned face, to hear what she would say next in her cloudy voice.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There’s someone I need to meet. But you can always find me.’ She turned. ‘Bye,’ she said in a murmur, and as she left, Lelia arrived. Lelia could have seen the back of her head if she had looked towards her, but she was smiling straight at me, holding something in a packet.

  ‘I just–’ I said. I stopped, struggling for the phrases with which to express my explanation; but I hesitated for too long, and the moment passed, and then I didn’t tell her because she would tease me, or be mildly amazed or annoyed.

  Lelia’s face was still pale, like pale gold, pale straw. She held her stomach. A flicker of anxiety crossed her face.‘We’re going to have a baby!’ she said.

  The quickening, it is called. The movement happens when the infant is half-grown, a flawlessly formed miniature turning in its watery sac. Yet I imagined the offspring of my mother not as the perfect wax-plump doll of a boy it would be, but as a hen. A monstrosity preserved in brine: a waterlogged clump of spines and scratchings, its feathers yolk swollen, its beak a nib of orange. A hen of a child. Would the creature live to its full maturity?

  Eight

  Lelia

  By seven weeks, this little life with folded limb buds has a heart hardly bigger than a poppy seed and a tongue of its own. There in its liquid world, it can open its mouth. That fact alone filled me with a rush of love. I pictured the foetus shaped like a baby dinosaur with a hinged square head, the mouth serrated with tiny triangular teeth as it opened and closed. I went into the miniature boxroom at the back of the flat where the baby would sleep if it survived. But it would. Some instinct in me, or a desperate optimism, knew that it would.

  ‘Someone was hanging round for you,’ came a voice from below as I rested against the window.

  There on the pavement stood Lucy, the daughter of the people next door. Richard claimed that Lucy was alarming, clever and sly, referred to her as a meddlesome little tart, called her Lucille to her face and Lucifer to me. She saw me at the window, and waved. Though it was cold, she wore a skimpy top over jeans with clumpy boots. She motioned to me to open the window, and her top rose, revealing inches of bare stomach.

  ‘When? Who?’ I said.

  She shrugged. ‘Some little creep waiting around to see you,’ she said, her lip curling up. ‘Don’t know her.’ She shrugged, beginning to rock on her feet impatiently.

  ‘What did she look like?’ I asked. Cold air streamed into my face.

  ‘Like nothing,’ said Lucy, turning away and beginning to walk. ‘Crap clothes. She had a parcel for you or something.’

  ‘Did she leave it?’ I called.

  ‘Dunno,’ said Lucy’s disappearing back.

  I knew. Of course I knew. Sylvie had come to give me something for the baby.

  I had signed a library form granting her access to Senate House the day before, a simple task. I found the phone and rang the number she had given me.

  ‘I’ve signed for your ticket. You can pick it up from the library reception,’ I said.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said, elation merging with the faint huskiness of her voice in a warm, dense rush of air in my ear.

  ‘Your fantasy is a carrel,’ I teased her. Bright white clouds blew over Mecklenburgh Square from the north.

  ‘My fantasy granted,’ she said.

  This, I thought, running my finger along the window’s base, is where my baby will be safe – in a wooden cabin with her parents reading and cooking and working, keeping out strangers. I thought of my baby, from the beginning, as a girl.

  ‘I got you something for the baby,’ she said.

  ‘That’s so nice of you,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

  The clouds blew, fierce and white, tearing into strands. A draught seeped in through the old frames.

  ‘It’s very exciting.’

  ‘Yes.’ I said, exhilaration soaring inside me. ‘Richard’s not excited, though.’ I paused. As I spoke, I realised that it was true. I hesitated again. The truth hurt me, my heart suddenly a sinking, sore thing.

  ‘But I am,’ she said. ‘He’s a man. How could he understand? You need looking after now–’

  There was a noise in the background. ‘Oh,’ she said. ‘There.’

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, nothing,’ she said. She hesitated.

  The sound of objects being placed on a hard surface continued and then stopped.

  ‘Is someone there?’

  ‘It’s just Charlie,’ she said.

  ‘Who’s Charlie?’

  ‘Oh, my – room-mate.’

  ‘Right!’ I said. I was surprised. I felt unreasonably affronted whenever anyone blew apart my impression of them. Everything about her had suggested a private existence. I had assumed for her, without conscious thought, a life of books and self-sufficient solitude. But here was the previously unmentioned Charlie who shared the practicalities of her daily existence. A sense of relief was tinged with disappointment as I abandoned my vague sense of responsibility for her: for her library ticket, for her social life, for her sensitive disposition.

  ‘I’ve never heard you mention anyone there,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said. ‘But, well, no. We share a flat, but we don’t see each other for days at a time.’

  I looked down at the square, the clouds spinning past me as I moved, and I held the window ledge.

  ‘But you,’ she said. ‘I really want to give you your baby’s present.’

  Your baby. My baby. The use of the possessive filled me with pleasure. It made me feel important, normal. In an astonishing move, I could bear a baby. I realised I had been feeling lonely.

  ‘Come round,’ I said, desperate for distraction, calculating the amount of time I had left before I saw my research student, and in that moment I succumbed to my obsession and mentally allowed myself a few days’ grace, despite proliferating committees and taxing doctorate supervision.

  I turned on my computer and went online. While I suspected that Richard spent whole mornings looking up obscure personal references on Google, I hardly used the net, wandering down false routes when I tried. Still remembering the flavour of my nightmare, I typed in ‘Sophie-Hélène’, the name of my French exchange partner. I couldn’t remember the family’s surname. Five hundred and forty-five references were listed. I wrote ‘France’. Up sprang details of Marie Antoinette’s fourth child and information about the Tour de France. ‘Loire,’ I wrote, only to find the genealogy of the Princes Biron and yet more cycling news. Richard, the internet time-waster, would no doubt be very happy to help.

  I tried a little further, but I was sadder now, caught by a sense of melancholy. Richard wasn’t excited, I remembered. He pretended. I wondered whether all men regressed in the end, and whether even Richard, who seemed to me to be a different creature from the man who had most hurt me, was selfish and boorish after all, and not the flawed exception I generally believed him to be.

  There was very little I couldn’t tell him. I revealed dark humiliations to him, and cried snottily, howlingly, if I felt like it, legs unshaven, reading glasses on, hair in a chopstick, because with him it made no difference. But there w
as an old source of fear that I could hardly define in my head, let alone bring to light, like madness glimpsed inside me. If I had somehow been responsible for the deaths of two foetuses and a father, what else was my subconscious mind capable of doing? Who else’s death could I cause? I feared myself. Only by digging my nails hard into my wrist could I become calm again.

  I had begun to understand why an image of France haunted me. The baby exacerbated it. It was as though there was a valve, below which lay nausea.

  My parents believed that I was a good daughter – I gobbled pony stories as a break from Latin; I realised from a precocious age that education was my ticket to somewhere more fulfilling – but my mind was wilder than they knew. I had guilt about being half-white when my father was Indian, and guilt about my secret attitude towards being seen as Indian, and guilt about all the family expectations upon me. I think my father, who had worked for years to support himself through his medical studies until he qualified in his thirties, wanted me to be a doctor. I chose to study French instead: French because, later in my life, there somehow seemed no choice. He died of a heart attack when he was forty-three and I was fourteen. The night he died, I promised myself in a pact with God that I would never let anyone down again, because I’d failed my father at his time of need.

  I went to France a mad girl. My French family were kind to me: without mentioning my grief, they gave me affection and whispered sympathy among themselves, easily understood. Sophie-Hélène, my penfriend and exchange partner, was seemingly my perfectly matched companion. An only child, she lived in an odd little cottage off the tiny main street of Clemenceau, with beamed low ceilings and an extension sprawling behind a stream that plunged through the garden, the washing dancing over the water. They put me in a double bed in the spare room slung above a garage at the back, like a room in a bed and breakfast, the wallpaper a texture never previously seen. A teenage cousin’s motorcycle was housed in the garage below.

  Sophie-Hélène and I read and whispered about books and then boys in the times of numbness between bouts of grief. The local schoolboys, zitty and surly and long-haired, equipped with cigarettes and mopeds, were indistinguishable from the farm hands and garage workers to me. I attended school with Sophie-Hélène for the final week of term. We walked together arm-in-arm like two French girls through a world of squared paper and Orangina and I felt as though I was trailing the blood of my father.