Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Catrin, can we talk?’ I said.

  ‘Not now,’ she said coldly.

  I hesitated, humiliated.

  I glanced at Lelia, talking animatedly to a friend of hers, and a fresh surge of panic hit me at the prospect of her loss.

  ‘Please,’ I said to Catrin.

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ said Catrin, and walked away. I strode after her.

  ‘Look,’ I said, coughing as she started to walk upstairs.

  ‘Yes?’ She turned to me from the top step with an expression I had never previously seen.

  I walked up the remaining stairs two at a time. The rage of the Celt was terrifying.

  ‘Look,’ I said in a hiss, turning round to ascertain that we were alone on the landing. ‘I’m sorry. ‘I’m really, truly sorry.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be saying sorry to me,’ she said, her voice rising.

  ‘I know, I know,’ I said, half-whispering, half-hissing as I tried to hush her with conciliatory tones. ‘Listen, Catrin, I – I fucked up. I won’t do it again, ever. You know that.’

  ‘Won’t you?’

  ‘Never. Let’s just talk. Please – please don’t–’

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she said, the disgust palpable in her voice.

  ‘But–’

  ‘I tried to tell her. She didn’t return my calls. Now she’s pregnant. I’m not going to upset her.’ She turned her back and walked into a bedroom.

  ‘Catrin!’ I called, the relief of salvation fanning through me and nudging the panic into a subsidiary position, but she shut her door. Confronted by its panelled white silence, I simply didn’t dare to knock. Appreciation – affection – flooded through me.

  I found a loo and stood there, breathing deeply as I let out a long piss stream. My abdomen, or my stomach – indiscriminate entrails, ulcerous and churning – felt ragged. I stood very still, slowly processing the news that Catrin was not going to reveal my crime to Lelia. Thank you, Catrin, thank you, Catrin. I muttered like an idiot. I leaned my head against the wall, a framed painting rocking alarmingly as I caught it with my ear, and felt I could shout with relief and misplaced gratitude. I bashed the black-and-white tiles of the wall a little, hoping I might accidentally crack an expensive surface, and enjoyed the feeling of pain. I could start again. One day, when our child was born, I would somehow admit to Lelia that I had snogged a woman, and clean the slate and live happily. In the meantime, I would try hard, so very hard, not to see Sylvie. I would attempt to keep away from her in the most mechanical and methodical fashion, transferring her work enquiries to my assistant and religiously refraining from contact. Chance encounters would be met with civility and brevity. I let myself picture Sylvie, mourning for one more moment before beginning my harsh training in self-discipline: I murmured her name into MacDara’s tiles, feeling my breath mist their surface and briefly return its warmth to my face as I stood there for rich, elastic seconds, the thudding of music somewhere below me buzzing at my feet.

  I heard her voice.

  It wound through my memory as I rested my head against the wall, the noises of the party muffling speech until one voice would emerge above others with individual clarity; and although it took a few seconds for me to understand that Sylvie’s voice was real and not the fantasy I supposed, the realisation hit me with a jolt.

  I jerked my head from the wall. My heart was racing. What on earth was she doing here? I would have to lock myself in the loo until I could ascertain her whereabouts and then avoid her. I waited, the vaguely nauseating sensation of too much alcohol already rolling inside me as I hid myself from Sylvie and Catrin. I tried to think about other things. Our baby. I couldn’t. It was a pug-faced alien in pickling fluid, or it was a nothingness. I waited. I wanted, more than anything, to pull back the lock and breathe in the scent of Sylvie Lavigne. My skin was clammy as an addict’s as I made myself wait, the time measured out by the beat of my pulse. I waited. I could no longer hear her voice, all sound now merging on the floor below. Slowly, I pulled back the bolt.

  She was leaning elegantly against a chair on the other side of the landing, and she smiled at me.

  ‘I thought I might find you here,’ she said.

  ‘What are you doing?’ I said abruptly.

  ‘Waiting for the bathroom.’

  ‘Why? Why are you here?’ I said, our voices meeting with hushed clarity on the landing.

  ‘Ren and Vicky brought me.’ She smiled again. She looked slightly more polished, in the way that women sometimes do.

  ‘You’re always everywhere,’ I said wonderingly. ‘Or nowhere at all.’

  ‘I wanted to see you. MacDara and Catrin don’t even know I’m here yet.’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Someone else let us in. I was hoping it might be you at the door – I wanted to see your face!’

  ‘Sylvie, you’ve got to go, before Catrin sees you–’

  ‘Come here,’ she said. She held out her hand.

  I didn’t take it. Without saying anything, she turned and began to walk up the next flight of stairs, and I followed her. I simply followed her, barely questioning the impulse. She guided me, a slender wraith always ahead of me as I travelled in slow motion, the boom of my own blood filling my head. Away from the party, the house smelled different, as other people’s houses always do: adult, with alien cooking and cleaning products. Somewhere, far away, a lavatory flushed. We passed a richly curtained window. My mind tick-ticked with a mechanism divorced from thought. I caught the faintest tinge of her skin scent, and like a hound, I followed her silent walk. My legs were shaking. Her skirt was brown, and possibly slightly tighter than anything I had seen her in, her small rump visible as she lifted her leg on each stair. I wanted to enter her from below, to taste the divine leverage it would give me. Her shoes were pointed, with straps, like a girl’s, but they bore a small, narrow heel. The simple fact of the heels got to me, primitive that I was. I walked higher and higher, away from Lelia. What if she looked for me? Sense tugged at me and then disappeared. My mind seemed filled with a thick substance that allowed no reasoning. Sylvie climbed up to the top of the house, never looking behind to see that I was following – knowing, knowing that I would follow as if tied to a wire – and there behind a bathroom was a smaller flight of stairs, rising at an angle.

  ‘Look, I found this,’ she said.

  We moved silently, her head dipping, my head crouching, as we climbed the ladder-like stairs towards the ceiling.

  ‘How?’ I said.

  ‘I explored, by myself,’ she said.

  To the left of the top step was a small dark section of loft – dusty splintered joists, single pane of window framing trees and chimney stacks – containing the water tank. A few bolts, now rusting, had been screwed into the rendering on one side. A furred loop of string and a calendar hung there.

  The images floated before slotting together in the gloom.

  1994, I read. The window was bathed bright orange by a street lamp directly below. In that silent dusty warmth, she turned to me.

  ‘Now,’ she said. ‘We’re alone.’

  The catch in her voice resonated in the air, its after-effects buzzing against my skin like little drills. I could just make out the outline of her thigh, hinted at through the cloth of her skirt.

  An ambulance streamed past outside.

  At that moment I thought of Lelia, honeyed and vibrant on a sofa several floors below, waiting for me to return. She would be wondering where I had gone to, or she would have given up, cold-faced and resolved, and started talking to someone else. A visual memory of the intense pooling quality of her brown eyes with their intimate knowledge of my ways and thought processes snagged at me. I thought of her voice, her habits, her body, all our history together, and I felt sickened at myself. She was a live thing with a living baby inside her, in contrast to the ghost before me.

  I had to say something. I felt like a clumsy giant in that little room, stuck for words, a
bout to make myself leave.

  She lolled against the water tank, seemingly amused at something.

  ‘Do you remember us on a park bench in the snow?’ she said simply.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, and nodded, and the lower half of me automatically melted.

  ‘Sullied snow,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ I said again like an imbecile.

  ‘Why don’t you sit there?’

  She turned to a shelf that ran below the window. For lack of a decision, to remove my giant’s head from the splintered rafters, I lowered myself on to a layer of snagged fluff and leaned against the pane. Objects radiated strangely in the orange light.

  ‘Come here,’ I said instinctively as I detected her scent and its effect spread through my body, soothing and electrifying. My voice caught. I coughed. The water in the tank swirled and gurgled above me.

  ‘I will,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Oh really?’ I said. ‘But we’re going to have to end this, aren’t we?’

  ‘We will,’ she said. ‘Not yet.’

  She knelt beside me. Her face, her limbs, her hands were cast into glowing brown silhouette, as though she moved through sepia. We sipped hot, brushing kisses, like tiny spasms. I mustn’t, I thought. Her head slanted, her hair falling to one side, making her look more womanly, and I kissed her neck, and her skin smell slalomed straight through my body. Her lips parted as I kissed her, then she pushed me back against the glass.

  ‘No,’ I said with momentary resistance, but bathed in her smell with her fingers grazing the skin of my neck, I couldn’t maintain my resolve. I could no more stop than I could make myself fall from the window behind me. Final flares of panic erupted in my mind.

  She pushed my shoulder back lightly with her fingertip.

  ‘I’ve waited all day for you,’ she said quietly. Her voice lapped over me, as though it bathed me in a chemical to which I was addicted.

  ‘But I haven’t seen you since … when? Two Mondays ago,’ I said.

  ‘We can’t always see each other,’ she said.

  Her mouth was in front of my eyes, perfectly sculpted in the light.

  ‘I knew I’d have to wait until tonight,’ she said. She undid two buttons of my shirt, and stroked my clavicle with the back of her nails. I reached out and touched her cheek, but she caught my hand and pressed it down on to my own thigh. ‘Remember, you mustn’t move. You did last time, and I stopped. I’ll do that again.’

  I half-laughed in protest.

  ‘You must be perfectly still,’ she murmured. ‘Richard. You must lie there against the glass.’

  Tremendous excitement instantly rose inside me. She moved closer. She did nothing more. She knelt above me, looking down as solemnly as a studious girl concentrating on her work, her dark questioning eyebrows slanted, and her warm breath, scented with her, travelled to my stomach, making the hairs ripple as the muscles of my abdomen tensed. My every exhalation carried a barely audible moan.

  She sat back neatly on her calves, her skirt resting on the floor, the outline of her surprising heels visible, and very slowly, with delicate fingers, she began to undress me. Instinctively, I reached out and caught her waist. She stopped. She waited. I pulled my hand back, and she began again, circling, breathing over my nipples.

  I remembered that I was wearing a greying vest, and cringed. She pulled the top of it with her fingertip. It simply radiated dull amber light.

  ‘Imagine if I were a cat stroking you, rubbing you, licking you,’ she said, her voice a cobweb in the darkness. The shadows under her eyes that I always found worryingly appealing were subsumed by darker shadings as she dipped her head.

  ‘Listen, you,’ I said, rising from the shelf. I bent over her and put my hands around her waist to lift her. ‘I want you there. I–’

  She slapped me. My cheek rang with a wasp sting of pain. I gasped. No one had ever done that to me before. I stared at her.

  ‘You can’t do that,’ I said.

  ‘You’re lying under water,’ she said, and she ran her fingertips over my stomach. ‘Lie down. You’re in green water. Fronds passing and tangling.’ Her fingers travelled up to my chest and under my armpits, whispering down the sides of my body as my cheek still rang. ‘Here are fish, leaping. Porcelain bubbly fishes, around your legs and kissing your neck.’

  ‘Sylvie,’ I said. I moaned.

  She pulled my sleeves from my arms with small deft fingers. She held the shirt, breathed it in, then threw it into a corner. She pulled off the shameful vest.

  ‘Lie back. As you lie there – don’t move. As you lie there, the currents of the water bubble and twist. All the waterweed, rushes, bend and stroke you. Richard. Glassy twists rippling over your skin.’

  She inserted her fingers under the top of my trousers. I tensed my stomach muscles. She bent and kissed the skin. I stroked her hair. I moaned. I could not be silent.

  ‘And the bubbles blow and bubble, tiny bubbles blurting from under rocks to cling to your skin,’ she said, the components of her voice echoing in my ears so that I barely made sense of the words themselves. She pressed her fingers further down. I gasped. I thrust my hips forward, desperate for any touch, even the tightness of seams against me. She suspended her movements.

  ‘Little bitch,’ I muttered. She smiled.

  ‘Roses float,’ she said.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You see, little rosebuds beneath water, they spurt bubbles, up, and up.’ Her fingertips pattered up my thighs and her hand rested on the button of my trousers. She undid it. My muscles tightened, every hormone and sinew instructing me to jolt up to my feet and take her.‘Lie,’ she said, and brushed her nails over my crotch. I pressed my back against the window and listened to her voice, my breath hoarse and shallow. ‘Roses fattening in the water.’ I felt myself swelling, rising, frantic. She undid my fly. Silently, she pulled the trousers off, hooking my pants down in one movement. I sat on the ledge, my cock pressing against my stomach, and she embraced me fully clothed, pressing her skirt against me, enveloping me with her voice, her hair, her breath. She murmured into my ears; we kissed, we bit, we moved frantically about each other’s faces, and my hands reached down and touched her breasts.

  She sat back down on the floor.

  ‘For God’s sake!’ I said. ‘I have to–’

  She raised one eyebrow.

  ‘Sleep with you.’

  ‘Sleep with me?’ she said calmly. ‘We don’t sleep with each other. You sleep with someone else. You want to fuck me?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  She shook her head minutely.

  ‘For God’s sake,’ I said loudly, sinking on to the floor beside her.

  On top, she was all demure, a ruffled blouse thing covering her breasts and her small waist. One of her legs was propped up, her skirt falling down and revealing a part of her thigh in the blurred orange light. She was wearing stockings secured with a simple, lacy band. Casually, she wore stockings below her dull girl clothes, like a disturbing adolescent from a Balthus painting. I looked down again. I caught the faintest scent of something familiar, yet different, warm and mushroom and private. In the brown-furred darkness, I saw then, at the top of her thighs, a black shadow like a pool of blood. I caught my breath. I stared. I gazed, absorbing every detail that emerged as my eyes searched in the fragmented light. I moved nearer her and held her. I kissed her thigh. I dipped my head towards that delectable scent, up, up to its slick sweet origin, to where she was opening to me.

  She pulled her leg away.

  ‘Only if you sit,’ she said in her calm tones.

  Like an animal, rearing and foolish, I did as I was told. She knelt in front of me, and my hand reached under her skirt, feeling the rough edge of the surprising stockings, meeting an airy warm space before the even more surprising lack of underwear, and my finger found her and moved, slid back and forth across the metallic slick of liquid, her every sec
ret curve and pocket of warmth a revelation. I bathed my fingers in her, rubbed, slipped, teased.

  ‘I need to fuck you,’ I said in jerks.

  ‘No,’ she said.

  She raised herself above me, and she rubbed herself against my fingers, up and down, clasping my shoulders with a hard grip.

  She rose and fell, emitting sounds that aroused me still further. Her movements were fluid, her small hips circling, her hair and thighs so wet that I opened out my hand against her, cupping, sliding, inserting my middle finger inside her as I moved.

  She threw herself against my shoulders and pressed herself into my body, my dick against her stomach, rising, rising, tightening as her movements made me gasp.

  I grabbed her hips and pulled her harder towards me.

  ‘Have to fuck,’ I said, and pulled her into my lap.

  ‘No,’ she said, her breath faster.

  ‘What the fuck?’

  ‘Not until…’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘You’re an attached man,’ she said.

  ‘You are–’

  ‘It’s not the same.’

  ‘You won’t?’

  ‘Not until–’

  ‘Fuck,’ I said. ‘Hampstead Heath.’

  She was silent.

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Oh, please. Come on, darling.’ She shook her head, biting into my neck as thinner juices fell on to my hand. The sea-life indentations were warm inside her.

  I had to have her. For a fraction of a moment I imagined raping her. I pictured myself pushing her to the floor and pumping into her, spending my terrible, welling explosion of desire. I shocked the image away from me. She pressed herself harder against me. I felt the spasm of orgasm taking root in my groin.

  ‘Run away with me,’ I blurted out. ‘Run – away with me.’

  She gripped my shoulders with urgent pressure.

  ‘A weekend. Wherever. For ever.’

  I felt the shudder go through her, long and deep and propelling her far away from me to some distant place where her mouth was parted and her eyes were dark and the voice she cried in was barely her own. I followed her moments later, and in that moment of exquisite pleasure, I knew what I was capable of doing for her.