Sleep and His Brother

by Peter Dickinson

  Pibble grinned to himself at the idea of how wickedly Rue must have enjoyed bashing those nails through the coarse timber and into the beautiful wood of the door behind the notice. Rue was the most violent antiaesthete he had ever met, clever and voluble, happiest in extreme positions. The garish corridor below, scientifically useful and aesthetically awful, was a perfect Rue production, a physical equivalent of his pub argument that Oscar Wilde should not have been jailed for his morals, but should have been shot for his philosophy.

  For a moment, gazing blankly out of the window, Pibble could see the ugly interior of the Black Boot, hear the jostle at the bar, smell the steam from the vast shepherd’s pie behind the snack bar. He’d found the place a couple of years ago, when the pub he’d used before became involved in a brewers “rationalization” and started to dispense a bitter he despised. He’d had a job then, so had gone there only on a few evenings or sometimes on weekends, and had merely noticed the thin-faced, green-eyed young man who was occasionally present; but his being sacked had changed that, bringing him there at weekday lunchtimes to prevent Mary’s hydra-headed guilt feelings from forcing her to cook him yet another square meal. All of a sudden he and Rue Kelly were cronies.

  Not friends. That implied a wider knowledge. Not acquaintances, an altogether weaker relationship. Cronies. Pibble, in his new, disoriented life, was uncomfortably aware of how intense his reliance on Rue Kelly had become. Before, work and the abrasion of colleagues had kept him tuned, sharp, alive; now the rust and dust of retirement were settling on him. His garden kept his muscles in trim and he’d always been lucky with his digestion, but he needed the two-man debating club in the Black Boot much as a prisoner doing solitary needs his daily trudge round the yard.

  Wondering, not for the first time, what the other member of the club got out of his company, he turned back to the ward in time to see Kelly straighten and stand humming. The sleeper’s eyelid fell like treacle. Kelly ticked the chart on the wall, checked a tube which ran into the child’s nostril, and spun round grinning.

  “Pint of blood, mister?” he said.

  “There jokes the eternal student,” said Pibble.

  “Who’s died, Rue?” said the girl.

  “No one.”

  “Angela was crying.”

  “Was she? I told her Mickey Nicholas had six days.”

  “You can’t be sure.”

  “Yes I can. Another brick is added to the house of knowledge. Rue Kelly sees the future! Let him foretell your fate!”

  He clapped the ophthalmoscope to his eye, squinted at them across the room, and began singsong chant.

  “I see through the clouds. I see the mists part. I see you, my pretty one. There is a man with you. I cannot see his face. But I can see what he is doing. He is cutting you up and putting you in a trunk. Now he is taking the trunk to the left luggage office. Aha! Now I see his face. He is old, he is ugly, he has just been fired from the police force—”

  “Oh, shut up, Rue,” said the girl. “Can you really? That’s marvellous.”

  “What are you trying to do?” said Pibble.

  “Find out what makes them stop ticking.”

  “When will this one wake up?”

  “Never.”

  Pibble felt a chill, like the touch of the children, run through his veins; he must have paled.

  “Nasty thought, isn’t it?” said Kelly cheerfully. “And now I’ll answer your next question, seeing that you aren’t going to ask it as it’s not in very good taste. We don’t let ’em die, straight away, as soon as they fall into their everlasting doze, because it’s not ethical. I belong to a very ethical profession, mister, and it just so happens that this hands me a unique collection of research material. They beat rats and rabbits into a cocked hat. They’ve got no feelings, no future, no individuality, so I can use ’em as I think fit—with the utmost respect, of course, the utmost respect.”

  The last phrases were spoken in parody of some medical spokesman mouthing his obscene euphemisms.

  “As a matter of fact,” said Pibble, “I was going to ask if you knew what they were dreaming about.”

  Kelly snorted with amusement, then stilled. His eyes flickered and remained angry, though he laughed again.

  “Ram’s been getting at you,” he said. “You mustn’t believe any of that cock.”

  “Oh, Rue,” said the girl. “You know there’s something in it. All the staff think so.”

  “Darlint,” said Kelly, “if you’d be listening to me ould friend Father O’Freud, there’s some knowledge of wish fulfilment you’d be having.”

  “Begorra,” said the girl.

  “Begorra indade!” cried Kelly, doing a short wild jig in the aisle between the silent beds. “The raisin, I mean reason, why my admirable colleagues think the kids are telepathic is that without some asset like that they’d be spending their lives trying to cultivate an allotment of moving vegetables. They want the little bastards to be extraordinary, and therefore worthwhile.”

  “But then we’d all choose different extraordinary things about them,” said the girl.

  “Would you hell? You’ve got one ready-made myth, so any further superstitions accrete to that. Belief in the unreasonable is always collective—look at medical history.”

  “When I arrived,” said Pibble, “two of the children opened the door. Before they saw me one of them said, ‘Copper come. Lost his hat.’”

  “You never wear a hat,” said Kelly.

  “I was thinking about the psychological effects of being sacked—or I just had been.”

  “Very sophisticated metaphors you think in, by cathypnic standards.”

  “It’s very close, isn’t it?” said the girl.

  “What is?”

  “The copper and the hat.”

  Kelly snorted again.

  “My cousin from County Clare,” he said, “dealt himself all thirteen spades once. They threw him in the Liffey for cheating, but we in the family knew he hadn’t the wits.”

  Pibble laughed and Kelly joined him, but the girl remained serious.

  “Doctor Silver did bring two of the dormice in here,” she said. “He wanted to find out if they were all dreaming one communal dream.”

  “What happened?” said Pibble.

  “The kids said ‘Lovely’ and tried to go to sleep too. I hustled them out.”

  “How beautiful is sleep,” said the girl. “Sleep and his brother death.”

  Kelly snarled at her like a wildcat.

  “Haven’t I told you that if you quoted once more from bloody English literature I’d never buy you another drink?”

  Her hand flew to her mouth and the peachy softness of her face began to crumple as she bit at her knuckles.

  “What really happened,” said Kelly, “was that Ram Silver queered my pitch with Posey Dixon-Jones. You met her, Jimmy?”

  “This is what the children call ‘upstairs,’ is it?” said Pibble. “I imagine she doesn’t like the waking ones to know that it’s here.”

  “They all know,” insisted the girl, risking a glance at Kelly to see how he took this continued defiance.

  “Course they do,” said Kelly. “It’s a big house, but not that big. They’re stupid, but not that stupid. Anyway Posey’s mad. What did you make of her, Jimmy?”

  “She seemed tough but sensible. I suppose she might have sudden emotional patches—like air pockets. You’re flying along and without warning the bottom falls out of the sky.”

  He explained about the meeting with Mr. Costain.

  “Psychotic,” said Kelly. “Her own drives make the rules, and the hell with the rest of us. Of course she’s never thought that she has any drives—that type never does. There’s a reason for everything. I hope the bloody little pansy doesn’t drive her too far. She might do anything, absolutely anything. She wouldn’t
worry about the consequences. She’d blow the whole place up, with us in it, rather than let him move one brick without her permission. Love has passed her by, poor old bitch, and—”

  “May I enter your territory, dear colleague?” boomed Dr. Silver from the door.

  Kelly smiled, sharp but charming.

  “One for your notebooks, Ram,” he said. “I’ve been praying all morning you’d come, and you came. Telekinesis or telepathy? I’ve got something to show you.”

  “You have? In fact I was looking for the good Mr. Pibble. Mr. T. has expressed a wish to see him.”

  “Oho!” said Kelly. “Be a pal, Jimmy, and ask him when I’m going to get my scintillation counter.”

  “Do no such thing,” said Dr. Silver. “Mr. T. needs very precise handling.”

  “Only Ram knows how to pray to the rain god,” said Kelly.

  “Perfectly expressed,” said Dr. Silver, beaming. “Show me this something, Rue. Your somethings are becoming most interesting.”

  Like coequal hierarchs of a schismatic church, the two doctors paced down the aisle and turned up a side chapel between two beds; here they bowed their heads over a graph.

  Athanasius Thanatos! said part of Pibble’s mind. Crippen!

  The rest of his mind told it, prissily but vainly, to shut up. A man is only a man, it said, even if his name sends shivers down the spines of gossip columnists. Think, it said, of that hotel at—where was it? Mary would remember—not that the Pibbles could afford to stay there, but they’d seen the thing, seen how its drab slab diminished the Aegean sky and its reflection polluted the blue bay. And now the man was manoeuvring to build something just as ugly, but five times bigger, on the South Bank.

  Athanasius Thanatos! Him!

  And what about the Thanatos Disposable Hotel, only a few weeks back so loudly deplored in every responsible paper? A pure despoiler’s idea, a quick, cheap prefab shipped in to wherever he could find sun and a beach and cheap local booze, just to catch the ever-quickening eddies of the tourist mania. He’d boasted to Time magazine that any government who asked for a tourist resort one autumn could see it pullulating the next spring. And when the tourist tide receded, all the rooms and equipment could be shipped elsewhere, leaving only the scar tissue of dead cement where the hotel had stood, pocked with a few drain holes. He had publicly rejoiced in the fact that few of the ardent preservationists were likely to be citizens of the countries that actually needed the currency.

  And Pibble’s long apathy was stirred at the prospect of meeting the man. To allay his shame he glanced at Doll and saw that she was at the teetering point of recovering her composure, and wouldn’t welcome chitchat now. So he looked back to the doctors. Both of them were playacting—that is to say, Pibble was aware that their poses would have been different if there’d been no one to watch them. It probably meant nothing; Silver, however impressive, was something of a poseur; and Pibble had seen Rue use almost the same expanded gestures in the Black Boot, during the long campaign to persuade Oenone behind the bar that he really was a spy, just as Pibble really was a policeman. Oenone was never quite convinced, never quite disbelieving, and both Rue and Pibble got steady pleasure out of her wavering faith. Now Rue was teasing Dr. Silver in much the same way. An olive finger shot out and pointed at the chart. Rue gesticulated blandly.

  And all around the motionless sleepers dreamed their way down the long slope to the dark. It was an easy ride for them, freewheeling; not the tumble over the cliff, not a slither down agonizing scree; down they glided, dreaming as they went. What dream? Lovely, the waking children had said—but they said that about everything, not counting Marilyn Goddard, whose step­father had done the Paperham jobs. Odd that Silver should extend his multiple­ persona to using thieves’ cant about so sick and sensational­ a horror. Pibble shivered. Retirement was softening him, or the atmosphere of the room was unmanning—twenty-something ex-dormice, not long ago capable of summoning up in strangers a freshet of unwonted affection, now lying inert, fed through tubes, evacuating into diapers. Mrs. Dixon-Jones would never bring her ledger up here to harry them about the movement of their bowels. The room was more dismaying than a mortuary, because it was not formaldehyde but some still functioning processes of life that prevented the young flesh from rotting away to reveal the not yet fully hardened bone. How old? Fourteen, fifteen? And already they had retired—or been sacked, if you were a theist. He shivered again.

  “Are you all right?” whispered the girl.

  Pibble jerked his head toward the door and followed her quietly out.

  “It’s horrid until you get used to it,” she said. “Then you find it sort of restful. Rue put that notice up to stop us from coming and hanging about between the beds.”

  “How long has he been here?”

  “Not long. About three years.”

  “And Doctor Silver’s been here four months, and so’s the money.”

  “That’s right.”

  “So Rue stuck it out for. . . It must have seemed quite long to him. I mean, it’s not the sort of setup you expect to appeal to anyone with Rue’s brains and drive.”

  “There aren’t a lot of jobs where you can do fundamental research absolutely on your own. Rue says ‘colleague’ is a dirty word.”

  “He seems to get along all right with Doctor Silver.”

  “He was bloody to him at first. Have you been to Whipsnade?”

  “No. . .”

  “You go in winter. Choose a dismal day and walk up the path from the main gate. There’s a pine wood on your right, tall red trunks, quite empty. It looks as though the animals in it must have been taken away for the winter, so you walk on. Then something snags at the corner of your attention, like a bramble catching your skirt, and you look again and it’s eyes. Green eyes. Hundreds of them between the trunks. And then you see the notice which says the wood is called Wolf Wood.”

  “I see what you mean about the eyes. But the wolves have colleagues, don’t they?”

  “Rue is a lone wolf. Lone, alone. Wolf, like a wolf in Wolf Wood.”

  “Um. How fundamental is fundamental research?”

  “I don’t know. Hasn’t he told you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s just he hates talking to laymen about what he does. But he admires you an awful lot. He brought me to that pub specially to meet you, you know.”

  “I’m glad I didn’t at the time.”

  “I think what he’s doing must be pretty important. I mean you’re right—he wouldn’t have stuck it here if it wasn’t. And before Ram came, when he thought he was going to have to associate a professor at Saint Ursula’s with his work, he …”

  They had begun to whisper outside the door like schoolgirls agreeing on a lie before facing a teacher with their unfinished project. When the ornate leaf swung open they jerked into aloofness—if Rue didn’t like talking about his research, still less would he fancy his girl and his bar crony guessing about it out of earshot. But now he was smiling as he followed Dr. Silver out into the passage, the cheerful smile of the angler home with a full creel. He flung a long arm round Doll’s shoulder.

  “It’s forgivin’ ye I am, darlint,” he said.

  “Begorra,” she answered dully.

  “Begorra indade!” he cried. “And me being the doctor, it’s a cure I have found for your craving to be quoting always. When you go this night to your lone and narrow bed, take with ye a book­een of the poets that are bad, and never snuff your candle till you have in your heart a hundred lines of balderdash, such as you’d be shamed to let fly from your darling lips.”

  “Great!” cried Dr. Silver. “The Abbey Theatre! I have bestrode those boards.”

  “Bestridden,” corrected Kelly in a sour tone. Even in the Black Boot he didn’t like other people elaborating on his jokes. Dr. Silver seemed to feel the rebuke, enough to lose his fizz and turn to his
secretary.

  “Now, Doll,” he said. “Let’s have that tape transcribed before Mr. T.’s car comes for Mr. Pibble.”

  “Christ, Jimmy,” said Kelly. “What have you done to earn yourself the red carpet treatment?”

  “Mr. Pibble represents a breakthrough in biological knowledge unparalleled in this century. Mr. T. is decidedly impressed.”

  Pibble was surprised to hear how much more respectable his adventure had become, statistically speaking, since the magic phone call. Kelly stopped watching the plump rump of his girl as she walked away.

  “All I ask,” he said, “is don’t persuade the old monkey he’s immortal until I’ve got my scintillation counter and had time to do a couple of biopsies. See you in the pub, mister.”

  He still sounded as sour as raw rhubarb. Pibble watched with regret as Kelly spun away and shut himself back into his kingdom. It had been a disappointing meeting, curiously strained, but that often happens when two people who know each other well but only in a leisure context meet in what is for one of them a work context. In fact, for a moment when Rue had come out of the ward, he had suddenly reverted to the easygoing Black Boot Kelly, teasing his girl about Eng. lit. And then Dr. Silver had spoiled it, and both doctors had overreacted in a curious way. Never mind. It was unlikely to have any bearing on the Problems of Posey.

  “That’s a very sound young man,” said Silver in his statesman’s voice. “Very brilliant and very sound. We are lucky to have him. Now let us walk in the garden and I will try to give you an inkling of what Mr. T. is like and why he is important to us. If we go down the back stairs we may get out unseen and be able to converse in peace. The car will not be here for forty minutes.”

  He opened a door in the big convex around which the stairs curved, and Pibble found they were on another landing, with a wooden spiral staircase leading down. For the first time he really felt the true nature of the house, the aspirations and assumptions of the people who built it. The change from carved and inlaid panels to cheap stain, from exotic timber to plain deal, was startling. He could sense the ghosts of stunted tweenies who had lugged, up this cruel curve, the coals for the gentlemen’s bedrooms.