Sleep with Me

by Joanna Briscoe

  ‘Do you remember, then?’ she said.

  I laughed into her mouth.

  She laughed too. She hushed me with her lips. The image chased me as we moved. Two girls, making love. She made love to me. She soothed me. My baby swam inside me as I moved. She remapped every inch of me, my nerves rippling under her, crying out and protesting, climbing higher, sweat breaking out on my forehead. Richard had once licked every inch of my skin, but she drew upon me as a man never had.

  I smelled it now: the sap-rich countryside in a Bloomsbury square and the scent of Sylvie Lavigne, and Clemenceau and the chestnuts by the Loire, and as the grass scents twined with her hair, I wanted to lie here rising and rising without stopping.

  ‘I love you,’ I said at last.

  ‘I love you, always,’ she said.

  I kissed her cheekbone, and it was wet. I echoed her with a sob. We were half-crying as we talked. The night was so dark, the sounds of my wedding larger and sharper in my ears, her arms circling me, holding my neck to her.

  I remembered a broad river, the terrible panic seeping into pleasure. Her body was hot on top of mine. We were tangled and open, our flesh a mess of heat and liquid. If my baby died, I would die as well, because I could never survive it. I would die in orgasm. She moved her hands down, across my body, my abdomen a curve in the moonlight.

  ‘This will be the very end, won’t it?’ she said. She looked directly into my eyes from above me. A spasm caught heat and rose.

  ‘No,’ I said. A sound came from my mouth, from outside of me. I heard Richard’s voice. I was high on a cliff ledge in the darkest blue night. I couldn’t breathe. Heat gathered inside me, then it spread, and raced. I lay in silence as the glory paused, spilled, widened, and saturated my bloodstream. ‘No,’ I said.

  Eighteen

  Richard

  MacDara. The snivelling paunchy cunt. MacDara bothered me almost more than anyone. More than my wife or my mistress or my failing fortnight-long marriage. I squandered valuable hours at work frantically calculating the sex that he and Sylvie Lavigne were or were not having, and then spent considerably more time weighing up the intensity and potential humiliation levels of their disgusting conspiracy. I flailed through old undeleted emails searching for clues to Sylvie’s identity, embedded like a worm in his illiterate messages, but MW had always seemed to me someone else entirely: married, glamorous and above all, normal.

  I missed him. I hated him more than anyone in the world.

  My first instinct on the Monday after my wedding was to storm over to his office in a fury, shake him up a bit, and squeeze out every last drop of information about Sylvie Lavigne. When? I wondered. How? I could recall them together only once since that first night, at dinner in my flat with the shouting Fearons. She had been invisible; she’d drifted along the edges, shunning alcohol or conversation. And then, with a jolt, as though nailing the criminal, I recalled MacDara taking some lengthy work call in my office.

  Had she been with him? Had she? Had she sneaked her way into his life that night?

  I went to the roof at work the following morning and gazed over to the east towards the tower blocks where MacDara spent his waking hours, and every instinct in me wanted to jump into a taxi, to crash in there and wring the truth from him until he begged me for mercy. But I knew better. I could not risk further damage to my marriage. The cretin was clearly ignorant of his mistress’s other activities: my outburst of violence towards him was attributed, hilariously, to an over-developed sense of protectiveness towards an innocent and little-known family friend whose honour I had defended with my fists. Thus his hammy, indignant pleas, his justifications and sudden snide bouts of conjecture were all met by a disciplined silence as I ignored his emails and told him in simple terms to fuck off whenever he rang.

  ‘Let’s go now on honeymoon,’ I said to Lelia after a few days of marriage that were so tense I could only disperse the silence with proclamations.

  ‘How?’ she said simply, and I considered our work commitments and reflected miserably upon the stupid mistake I’d made in agreeing to postpone our honeymoon until her university summer holiday to protect her maternity leave. I should have swept her away right then and left the mess of our lives behind. And yet perhaps, in our secret minds, neither of us had wanted to go after all.

  ‘Please,’ she said. ‘Talk to me.’

  But I dreaded her confronting me, just as I cringed at our terrible new inability to communicate. We had barely spoken since our marriage, we who could never stop talking even at the expense of sex and sleep. Only the subject of MacDara came up with horrible regularity, as though he had somehow become the bogus focus for all our unspoken griefs, my flimsily embellished explanations failing to calm her distress. She slept badly; she rarely referred to her pregnancy; she no longer irritatingly grabbed my hand to feel baby kicks that never materialised, a rapt and patient expression on her face that I was supposed to echo.

  ‘Are you still – are you having your ante-natal checkups?’ I wanted to ask her, but I feared that the question itself would be an inexplicable source of fury, and I failed to find a way to ask it.

  This, then, I realised, was what crap marriages were composed of. All those snapping couples who seemed to hate each other; pensioners silently reading over hotel meals; couples seething with a decade of resentments, their squabbling pale-faced kids in tow. Our oldest arguments – formed, I now realised, in the first year of our relationship – were endlessly recycled, sprouting new and nasty tentacles that barely disguised their repetitive nature. An imagined tone of voice could set off a well-rehearsed chain of accusations and counter-accusations that culminated in a round of defence and tears. And yet the shouting and the silence and the tension served merely as a barrier, and in the thick of explosive arguments, we swerved away from the very questions that might reveal the truth, and we crept around each other and buried ourselves in work before tailing, late and exhausted, into bed.

  One morning I looked at her face, now faintly freckly with July sun, the skin beneath her eyes tired and strained, and she looked older, and reduced in ways I couldn’t describe, as though with my infidelity I’d damaged her at some essential level. A pang for her welled up inside me.

  ‘Sorry,’ I murmured into her sleeping neck. ‘Sorry.’

  Sylvie Lavigne herself was nowhere to be seen. I had looked forward, upon waking the morning after my wedding, to scorning the treacherous little cat; I had wanted to wield the easy power of banishing her from my pages, ignoring her entreaties, punishing her as she deserved. But I should have known better by now: elusive as she always was, she had disappeared. The idea that she might be shacked up with MacDara somewhere (trips to his furry loft; subtle assignations in City bars) made me fantasise about crashing my fist into his face again, but harder this time, so that his shattered jaw produced a comedy trowel of a chin resembling Desperate Dan’s that would induce pity and mirth. It felt as though I was developing a stomach ulcer.

  Where are you? Dearest love, I miss you.

  She haunted me even as I tried to exorcise her. I loathed her now, as though allergic to her, and yet she stayed lodged in my mind, sending tendrils of lust and old unsullied affection through my memory when I was caught unawares. I found notes that had been planted by her at unknown times under piles of books at work, or in my drawer, and once even in the flat. I switched on my computer to her fragments of novel. I received a letter at work and foolishly opened it. She’s fucking with my mind, MacDara had once said to me, weeks ago, months ago, when he was still my friend, and MW was some amorphous tart, and all was right with the world.

  There is uproar in our house. The Hindoo enchants me, but she must be kept from my Emilia. She cries for her dead Papa when she thinks no one sees her. The infant whips his arms about his crib if I so much as hollow my hand upon his chin. Once I pulled his head-flannel hard upon him, and he hissed at me like a wild goose and mewled for Mama, who is his Mama. The nurse came clattering along.


  One afternoon, I thought I could drop him from the maid’s room in the sky to the barrow below and there he would die, as though the catsmeat man had pocketed him. But what if I failed? We had a few weeks, perhaps, before the infant could betray us by turning to us with his saucer-pool eyes and hinting to the world what we had tried to do. The mother and I no longer contemplated each other when I returned late from the day nursery, and God looked upon me and upon my sinful passions with sorrow. I had made myself so small, I was invisible at last.

  As Mama smoothed the baby’s quilling and gave her body to him, Emilia and I practised on each other, our fingers crooking and finding, a black roaring gathering inside my head.

  I delected her emails, barely read, just as I made myself throw away the letters she sent me. I found a love note planted on my desk that moved me, and yet I screwed it up and threw it in the bin before I walked home from work. And much as I hated her, and MacDara, and Charlie and all of them, the odd phrase caught me unawares, slicing across the rhythm of my breathing or rocketing through my blood, yet Lelia was the one I loved. The idea of losing her during that terrible fortnight filled me with desperation to cling to the flawed yet glorious thing I’d once had. I wanted her more than anything else. I knew it one day very clearly. I understood it, finally.

  I came out of Safeway’s, and I saw a woman and a child at the bottom of the steps. As I left the shopping centre, the woman fell over on the pavement, catching her foot and sprawling on the ground, and in her humiliation, in the mess of exposed thigh and hurt ankle before an audience of strangers, I felt such an embarrassed lurch of pity for her, the urgency of the situation stripping my mind of all but empathy and horror as it revealed in one flashing fragment the priorities of my life. I ran towards her. The child clung to her on the ground and put its face against her waist, offering flailing child comfort even as it opened its mouth in a silent scream, and I was shocked at that moment into knowledge of what it was that mattered.

  Lelia. I wanted her, and our life together. I wanted to protect her and that unimaginable child inside her. In that oblique epiphany, I made a simple promise in my head, more binding than any marriage certificate.

  I walked home. I didn’t truly want that child. I didn’t not want it either. What I desired was her. I wanted her, and with her came our child, and like all slack and useless dads I would make an effort and grow to love it.

  I looked up at the front window of our flat, and I knew as my gaze met the darkness that if only I could win her back through the toxic silence that had engulfed us, then everything was perfectly simple at last. I wanted to commit myself for always to the lovely person I’d married. The revelation, the relief of it, was almost overwhelming. It hurt my throat. I glanced at the dark room again, warding off a trickle of fear, and I rushed up the steps thinking, thank God, thank God, thank you, God, for warning me. My heart hammering into my neck, I double-stepped to the top. Whatever happened now, I would never betray her or the baby. There was silence. She should be there, she should certainly be there.

  ‘Lelia!’ I shouted.

  I called out again, and ran in and saw that things were neat and altered.

  Nineteen

  Richard

  I put my head in my hands. I dragged my fingers across my scalp, trying to gouge out silken dandruff as proof of my living body there under my fingernails when I felt like death.

  When? I thought. How? When had she found out? When? When? Who? Or had she guessed, with her terrifying female intuition, just as she had known about MacDara? Or had she simply despaired over living with a distracted and monosyllabic madman? A burp of nausea lodged in my throat. The note she had left on the kitchen table said that she was staying at her mother’s. That was all. There was a kiss scrawled at the end. In my moment of shock, the kiss was a perverse token of comfort and true hope. I kicked the table leg, purposely hurting myself as the table leapt and whined across the floor. Had Sylvie herself somehow confessed to her, Sylvie who was nowhere and yet obliquely everywhere?

  How to kill a baby? I didn’t know. I hefted its plump weight and dropped it from high. I could not do it. I thumped it, pounded it like the nursemaid did when it coughed and retched on its milk. I pounded it harder. It drew in its breath in a silent spasm before it stormed the air with its screams.

  I rolled him once, roly-poly, roly-poly, from the top of the stairs to the rug below the night nursery. He tumbled quite softly on his puffs of flesh, but at the bottom he knocked his block-head on the wainscot and bawled and spewed as though a monster possessed him. I pitied it then.

  I became patient.

  The Hindoo girl who was visiting my Emilia came daily to our house. There she glided, like a figurine the heathens idolised, scattering her hooks. Her charms lay in her loose curls, which she spread like rings. Her eyes too inspired idolatry – big brown stones found in the desert, and set at a tilt. Even my mother smiled on her. She rubbed ointments all day into her skin in her bath tub, keeping close to where she could hear Emilia playing, and sobbing silently for her departed father. I wanted to be with Emilia and the Hindoo when they went home together at night, and wrap myself in their scents until I embraced the warmth of the Hindoo’s skin. Everything the Hindoo had, I wanted to take: her charm, her laughing beauty, the harsh orphan­hood that shaded my own secret abandonment. I wanted her home in that glittering city of which I had read. I wanted the Hindoo’s life.

  As I skimmed the latest instalment on my computer, the suspicion that had been bothering me burst into certainty.

  That creepy little vixen was writing about Lelia, whom she barely knew. The woman who had infiltrated my life was now infantilising my wife in her demented tatters of fiction in order to intrigue or punish me in some obscure way.

  ‘What is this novel?’ I had finally asked her in the dark corner of a cafe. She had merely cast me a chilly glance, and then, in her habitual manner, declined to answer.

  I deleted the email, crashing down on the key, and called Lelia’s mother, the only person in London with no voicemail. The phone rang and rang until BT cut me off.

  I had never masturbated quite so frantically as I did during that time. I had never slept as much since my student days, nor allowed my hair to become so dirty, nor spent so much money on takeaways. I roamed the flat at night, a roaring insomniac, then wanked myself helplessly back to sleep, barking out my pain and sweating into sheets that I would never change until Lelia came back to me.

  I phoned Lelia at her mother’s, to continued silence. I wrote to her. I frequently turned up at the house in the early morning, rattling up there on the Northern Line before work to surprise her into an explanation, to no avail. I began to suspect that she had gone elsewhere. Lelia’s mother, the mighty Joan, steadfastly refused to give me any hint of where or how her daughter was, even though I arrived in time to catch her on her way to work. Lelia was ‘fine’, she was ‘safe’, I was informed. Lelia was married to me and carrying our child, I reminded her in turn. Despite her habitual reserve, she managed to shoot me a withering look, then old-lady walked down the street to work. I watched her back with painful and reluctant admiration, returned via the university in case Lelia was in there marking, and yet still I failed to bump into her.

  Her mobile was nearly always turned off. I texted her; I pestered her mother, called her aunt, her department, her affrontingly loyal clique of friends, and frequently turned up at the university, but term had ended and there was a sense of hopelessness to my missions, of empty halls and filed papers. I even lowered myself to contacting her yapping guard dog Enzo. I begged her mother again; I swore at her friend Suzannah; I rang her department, where a surly holiday administrator kept me skilfully at bay

  ‘I asked you to leave me alone,’ she said, the only times I ever managed to speak to her on the phone. She was polite and distant, and her voice sounded weary, a tone that filled me with panic.

  ‘Where are you?’ I shouted at her. ‘How are you? The baby?’

 
‘Bye, Richard,’ she always said, and refused to talk further. ‘Bye, darling,’ she said once, causing a hammering of my heart.

  Gradually, the flat metamorphosed into a cesspit. The table’s burden of toppling paper and silly objects, now so precious I couldn’t face looking at them, became the mere bedrock for an unstable and catastrophic collection of detritus. Dry plant leaves were sandwiched by bills and adverts which magnetically attracted dust and traces of plaster crumble and unidentifiable flakes of desiccated matter. The piles that had always littered the staircase took on a creeping life of their own, like kudzu, to ensnare me. In the dark I had to remember the hairpin manoeuvres required to negotiate the stairs: where I had to take two steps, where I had to grip the banisters as I clung to a narrow edge and then hopped over a pile of papers. Once I slid, and cursed, and banged my toe in a throb of pain, and I sat there sobbing in the hall like a maddened bullock.

  My dear mother, sensing there was something amiss before she was treated to my full and ranting confession, rang with increasing regularity. How I looked forward to her calm, concerned calls; to her practical advice, equally scorned and lapped up by me, and her refusal to countenance my panic, just as I had once leapt upon her chatty postcards during a soggy German exchange in some Godforsaken farm where I had smoked and tinkered with motorbikes all day

  A week went by without contact. I 1471-ed every time I came home; I rifled through Lelia’s desk to find phone numbers, wincing at evidence of former times when we were enchanted and excited and could do no wrong, and rang other old friends of hers, my apparently casual enquiries sounding wildly false even to my own ears, until I abandoned all pride and began barking out terse and inappropriate confessions to semi-strangers. Masochism somehow tangled pleasingly with machismo, and I was briefly soothed by the drama and ensuing sympathy. I rang other numbers: Lelia’s relations, so movingly sparse and scattered, who tended to be referred to as aunts and cousins even if distantly related, were barely in contact, and my wild bouts of research unearthed nothing. In free lunchtimes, I went straight over to the university in case she was using her office, only to have embarrassing conversations with a department secretary, and to be barred by the electronic gates in the Senate House library.