Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  Richard turned off Guilford Street and crossed the road. He looked handsome in his winter coat with his big dark green scarf.

  ‘He’s coming,’ I said, my voice betraying my feeling of urgency.

  ‘Is he?’ she said.

  I watched him walk towards the flat, the way his feet swung, the way he hurried against the cold. I knew his emotions. I loved his flawed, lovely soul, just as a part of me literally hated him for being so distant from me and my pregnancy. I thought of his shoulders, of that beautiful area of flat musculature between the pubic bones and the hips, of the fact that, should he want to, with his strength and weight he could pin me down or flip me over in sex. I had never really wanted to kiss a woman. But she was so unlike me: smaller, slighter, and discreet and restrained. She felt like a different creature altogether. I wanted her to want me, to choose me above other people, and then I would know what to do.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, looking out of the window. ‘There he is now.’ I moved away into the centre of the room. She joined me.

  ‘It’s time for me to go home,’ she said.

  Without thinking, I pulled her head towards me so that it rested on my shoulder, my hand lingering just below the crown of her hair. I was shocked at what I’d done. She felt delicate in my arms. Is this the way men feel upon holding her? I wondered. We stood there, moments ticking past.

  I listened for the street door. I felt her breathe on my shoulder. Her own sweet smell drifted beneath the layers of cigarette smoke that came from elsewhere: a pub, or perhaps a party from the night before. I had to say something.

  ‘He’ll be up in a moment,’ I said.

  We heard the flat door open. We looked at each other. Our gazes met with terrifying directness. He banged about a little downstairs.

  ‘Lelia!’ he called. I opened my mouth to answer. She moved her head away from my shoulder. I was silent.

  She reached up and put her fingertips on my cheek, just above my jaw. She’s going to kiss me now, I thought. That is what is going to happen. I saw it clearly before it happened. I froze in the panic of the moment.

  She didn’t.

  The feeling of her fingers remained on my skin.

  I heard the loo door open and bang shut.

  ‘Goodbye,’ she said rapidly.

  ‘But–’ I said. ‘No.’

  She looked at me questioningly, her dark eyebrows curving. She smiled. ‘Next time,’ she said. ‘There’ll be more time.’

  She slipped down the stairs. I followed her unsteadily, banging into paintwork as I went. She opened the front door while the lavatory was flushing, and slipped out.

  I ran into the main room and threw a ciabatta into the oven, which was still hot, and sat trembling upon a pile of cushions, and blindly tugged my hair up into a pencil, and when Richard appeared at the doorway, I looked up from my work and smiled at him.

  Later, later that June, I felt a strong and unwise desire to invite her to my wedding. I had dreamed for weeks of the possibility of her being there, but my excuses were all too baffling. It was only the blood that made me certain.

  She arrived there late, half-hiding in the growing darkness in a layered lilac dress that was less formal than her usual style but still bore that characteristic restraint. I embraced her when I saw her in the shadows on the gravel path. Her mouth was more visible; her eyebrows were dark and defined against her pale face in the dusk.

  ‘I want to congratulate you,’ she murmured.

  ‘Oh, thank you,’ I said, embarrassed and moved. I saw myself pressing my hands together. ‘Thank you. It’s – nice of you. Not nice. I sound like a – it sounds stupid. Did I do the right thing?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  There was silence. I stared at her. Why did I do this? I thought.

  She gazed back at me.

  ‘I’m bleeding,’ I whispered.

  ‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Lelia.’ She put her arm round me. She drew me to her as I had known she would, pulling my hair from my cheek and kissing my ear. ‘Sit down,’ she said, and she led me to a park bench on the side of the path where the lime shadows thickened. ‘What have you done about it? We should phone the hospital.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Is there more?’

  ‘I don’t think so. I keep looking.’

  ‘Is this – is this how it was last time?’

  ‘Yes, but it was much earlier. There was – well, more pain.’

  ‘And you’re not in pain? Sweet love.’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t want to go to hospital. I want to be here with –’ I looked at her – ‘my friends. Richard. You.’

  She pulled me to her so that my cheek was resting on her shoulder. She played with the hair at the back of my neck. ‘Darling Lelia,’ she said, her voice close and warm in my ear. ‘You’ll be all right. It doesn’t seem to be getting worse. I’ll look after you.’

  ‘Oh – God. I knew that you would.’

  ‘If you’re not all right, we’ll go to the hospital together.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. I breathed slowly. I sat against her. We looked at the orange sky above the leaves of the limes, and I kissed her palm before I left her, and she hovered in the shadows as a slim lilac figure at the edge of my vision while I talked to my other guests.

  Later, I found her again. I saw her near the old hawthorn where the jasmine fell in a black-green surge over the fence. It seemed that Richard hadn’t, so far, noticed her in her quietness, or she had been keeping in the shadows. He was talking to MacDara by the marquee, his tie already loose, and he ran his hand through his hair, which flopped a little on his forehead. A feeling of disbelief came to me as I watched him and realised that he was my husband. Whatever I did, he was officially married to me. I felt panic creeping up on me at that moment – what had I signed away? How was I trapped by the law? – followed by a pang of guilt that he didn’t deserve. Our guests ran around, shouting, behaving like children. I smiled slightly at the sight of them. So many daisies sprinkled over the lawns, their little white heads now closing. The deep red Alice roses were blood-black in the darkness.

  ‘Now,’ said Sylvie. ‘Now … what? Because after this…’

  She took me by the hand.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I want to say now. Say it. I love you,’ she said.

  ‘Oh!’ I said. ‘You know, I’d–’

  ‘Shh,’ she said, and placed her mouth against mine to quieten me. Her lips left a pattern of pressure whose imprint I tasted afterwards.

  There was a bang by the marquee. Silence. Laughter. The band began a new tune.

  ‘I’ve found a little house for us. This is our first home – our last home,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, Sylvie,’ I said. I swallowed a kind of sob. Although I had always guessed that there were other people in her life beyond Charlie, just as I was aware that she had guessed that I knew, at that moment, I only wanted to stay with her; I wanted to guard her, to protect her, primarily, from me. Why did we end up marrying men? In another life, or another mindset, I could have eloped with her; I could have married my slender, subtle best friend, and we could have lived in a little house somewhere and talked all night, all nights.

  She took my arm. She guided me away from the marquee and through the gnat-hung shade of an overhanging beech where the ground was soft with dampness and longer grass.

  ‘Look, it’s a shed!’ she murmured. ‘It’s a gardener’s shed for us.’

  ‘A shed?’ I said dumbly. I let her lead me through the night and away from my own party. I was driven by the childish thrill of conspiracy, of inappropriate behaviour instigated by another.

  ‘Let’s go in there first, or other people will discover it,’ she said. ‘It’s open, you see. I just gave it a little push, and it’s unlocked, specially for us. I made a place for you to lie on and look beautiful.’

  We lowered ourselves and sat very close, our temples together as we talked. I felt I could decipher the thump of her blood
, the minute crunching of flesh and vein as we pressed a headache into each other’s brow and traced each other’s thoughts.

  I had never in my life known a friendship like this one. Not Sophie-Hélène before Mazarine. Not my primary school love Cally, nor my old conscience Enzo, nor Suzannah, the great friend and confidante of the last decade and a half. We had a romance, an entanglement of the mind, of books, of shops, of perpetual conversation. We phoned each other when Richard and Charlie were asleep and discussed Fontane or Sarraute or Flaubert in our nighties and laughed over inconsequential matters and talked ceaselessly about the baby.

  She hadn’t kissed me in the bedroom at Mecklenburgh Square, nor in the days that followed. I was largely keeping to office hours that term, with more moral tutoring obligations and an education sub-committee that demanded my time. As I sat at work, thinking about her as I guided some intense undergraduate through a tutorial or tackled files of mind-numbing admin, I noticed that there were bubbles of disappointment trapped in the relief. She contacted me subtly: she left snatches of music on my voicemail, notes in my pigeon-hole, texts and work emails, their unspoken aim to communicate with me while bypassing Richard, the subterfuge at first disquieting. Each morning I woke to invent new plots as I lay recovering on my bed after the initial bout of vomiting.

  ‘I’m going to train the pigeon on my window-sill,’ she said. ‘It’s going to become a racing carrier pigeon, bringing notes to you across Bloomsbury every day.’

  We carried the baby with us. It was both of us who nurtured that girl: my womb enclosing her, Sylvie’s mind and imagination protecting my womb, so that even in a park in winter, in Russell Square in the big glass cafe when the surprising snow fell, I was warm and I was cared for. We traced the growth of my baby: she had a book, she said; she knew the average rate of a baby’s development, and each week, each Friday, she showed me. She bought me rulers in newsagents and wrapped a ribbon around the relevant centimetre mark, or bought me a book or a card or a flower the very same length; she knew when organs grew and the fingernails developed and the baby could see light. I took her to my twenty-week scan: I didn’t even tell Richard about it.

  ‘Her eyelids formed this week,’ she said. ‘Imagine that.’

  The revelation of Sylvie was something I kept secret: my friends would not understand. I barely understood it myself.

  Drunken female undergraduates now routinely kissed each other for effect, I realised, but in our time as students we had never even considered such behaviour. If I asked her, tried to press her with coded Sapphic enquiries while blushing as furiously as a teenager, she would simply say, shrugging delicately, was anything so straightforward? Could human desire be categorised? She spoke lightly and casually, as though she was a senior lecturer considering the hypothetical, and kept her own cool distance. Into that detachment leapt my excitement.

  Tell me, I wanted to say, to beg. Tell me everything. But not everything.

  The world was different. Trees smelled of sperm; pavements smelled of dog excrement; a passing mention of Asian food made me retch. Coffee tasted of burnt oil. I gagged; I threw up on to the pavement, against trees, in rubbish bins, but every session of sickness was proof of the miracle that the baby was held tight by my hormones; it was an expiation for the past miscarriages, for my father’s death, and for other problems I may have caused. Except that it would never be.

  Pigmentation scattered itself over my skin, like the archipelago stains in Mazarine’s bath. My nipples widened; my stomach plumped; my mind pitched. I bought new clothes, avoiding maternity shops until the very last minute, and plundering my old favourites with fresh levels of passion. Sylvie’s presence was everywhere. I could sense her aftereffects in the flat, I could almost smell her scent there, anxious in case Richard detected that same subtle alteration of the air. I looked out for him nervously on the streets of Bloomsbury, and there were times when we missed his return home by moments.

  One evening when he’d gone out with MacDara and stayed later and later, Sylvie had remained with me, and then caught sight of him on the square as she left. He hadn’t spotted her, she said, but she’d had to hide. She slipped into the shadows by the gate to the gardens, shivering, the snow hanging on the trees above her, and watched him enter our flat with a feeling of sadness. And once, when Catrin seemed to want to talk to me at MacDara’s party, I had the distinct impression that she had guessed what was happening.

  ‘Do you feel guilty?’ Sylvie asked me, teasing me with laughter, gazing intently into my eyes and holding my temples between her hands.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Not very.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘I don’t know why.’

  ‘I do,’ she said, and indeed, in the face of Richard’s abandonment of me and my baby, I barely felt guilt – I who was so guilt-ridden I couldn’t look at my father’s picture without the old hot panic beginning to form. I watched the development of my own duplicity with wonder as I kept him at bay with the odd guileless comment about the mouse girl, Sylvie herself so coolly, patchily amoral that I was easily, even happily, infected.

  When she and I kissed for the first time, we kissed urgently. A storm was brewing, roughing the trees in Mecklenburgh Square, the leaves that mounted the fence streaming and vibrating. The sky was so grey, it was going to tear with rain. Our hair blew horizontally in spitty gusts and we had to hurry home, we had to part, but there was so much left to say, and suddenly we were gasping in the airless wind and kissing, words and coldness and the warmth of our mouths mixing as we leaned towards each other to shout goodbye against the gathering gale. The surprise of the contrast – the electric jolt of her mouth in the running air, the human intimacy – was a shock that had the power to excite me whenever I summoned it.

  In Gordon Square, we had to jam the shed door. I could not be a pregnant bride caught lying in a corner of a shed with another woman on her wedding day. I lay in a sliver of moon, a mist of street light. The sounds of the party drifted near us like sea. The idea of death was coming to me again; I imagined standing up to discover a hot dead pool of blood seeping into the straw, and I was desperate to hold on to life. If my baby died, I wanted her to die here while her mother died, with someone else who cared about her and honoured her, unlike her father, who had never even known her shape or size, or on what day her weekly age changed.

  Sylvie fixed the door and came back to me. I held out my arms, and she lowered herself to the floor in that dull lilac petal of a dress and we embraced. We kissed – the silken softness of kissing a woman after years of stubble still shocking to me; the way it would look from the outside more shocking still – those first girlish sips of hers mixed with whispers. She would look after me, she said.

  I felt I was sealing my love for Sylvie Lavigne, as though I was making a scrolling testament to her. And then I would attempt to save my marriage, my one-day-old marriage. But the idea of losing her made me want to cry, just as the idea of losing my baby made me want to die.

  ‘You’re my best friend,’ she said as she stroked my shoulder, subtly edging beneath the neck of my dress. ‘I found you.’

  It was damp, that shed. It smelled of moist potting sand and tiny pearly mollusc shells, of sodden spiders’ web amongst the brickwork. When I exhaled, I could taste decaying fern. I could make out spades and piles of canes in the darkness. Let my baby live, I thought. Let this be a Beatrix Potter shed of tabby cats and galoshes for her to play in, not a mausoleum.

  Sylvie pulled a blanket on me, or I thought she did. It was her coat; it emitted a shadow of her own fragrance. I shivered. She cupped my face. She was above me. ‘Let me look after you,’ she said.

  I nodded.

  ‘Let’s make her live,’ she murmured into my neck.

  You can’t say that, I thought in panic. I dug my fingernails into the cloth beneath me in superstition. My baby’s life must be my own private ritual.

  She kissed me.

  We three. My daughter. Sylvie. Me. All men had gone
. We lived here, we three, preserved in time, as we never would again. Perhaps one day I would say to my daughter whimsically, ‘See that old shed (now a burger stand, now an internet cafe). Once I loved someone there.’ I would never betray the date or the circumstance: it would be part of her mother’s misty innocent past. But I would want to whisper, You were there too; I was in love at that time; it was my wedding day.

  She kissed me on the curve of my clavicle, her head quite still, only her lips lingering and mobile.

  I was so aroused, I was filled with alarm. I didn’t want to be excited.

  ‘I want my baby,’ I said. Tears ached behind my eyeballs.

  ‘So do I,’ she said. ‘Don’t bleed. Relax, my love. Lie down. Let me love you. Let me make you relax.’

  Her skin was fine and white like a spirit’s in the shadows; I touched it to reassure myself of its human warmth. The brushstrokes of her brows were like a Japanese painting in the darkness, her eyes black, her mouth containing its own separate beauty.

  She moved her tongue to where the wetness of my tears streaked my skin. ‘Shhh,’ she said, and I kissed her hair, and she moved across me, strong and certain in all her lightness, and my breath emerged shallowly, like a moth in my neck that couldn’t escape.

  Our murmurings rose through the semi-darkness, as though we imagined we were magically protected by the shadows that would drown them, yet I could picture my mother, glinty-eyed and silently aware of where I was. Sylvie and I hushed each other, turning to strangle the sounds. I resisted her; I panicked about the baby; she stroked me, and I arched towards her, wanting more, pushing her away. Where was Richard? I didn’t know. In another place, another planet, urban and social. I remembered love among girls. That shocking little cleft of a pubis. Mazarine was a girl after all.

  ‘I found you,’ she said.

  Her hair fell on mine; it lingered together, snaked across the cloth we lay on, and I kissed the cool skin beneath her neck. Her palm skimmed my foot, my leg, and she paused to contemplate me with dark eyes, her mouth still and passive in the shadows, and then slowly she moved as Mazarine had once moved.