Kind of Cruel

by Sophie Hannah

  ‘Ah, but what about your guilty memories, the ones that make you squirm with shame whenever you think about them?’ She sounds jarringly upbeat, given the subject matter. Did Ginny persuade her that suffering is fun?

  ‘Still no repression,’ I say. ‘All my guilty memories clock in and out, every day. There’s no subterfuge involved. I wish there were. Anywhere here’s fine. That’s my house – the one lit up like a pumpkin at Halloween.’ Nonie’s scared of the dark, and claims the house is too. She sleeps with her desk lamp on and can’t walk past an unlit room without ‘turning its light on to cheer it up’.

  I wonder if Dinah will still be up. Neither of the girls has a set bedtime. Nonie always asks to go up to bed between seven thirty and eight; with Dinah, some nights it’s eight, some nights she’s still holding court at ten.

  ‘So,’ Sergeant Zailer says as she pulls over. ‘What have you got to feel guilty about?’

  Of course. Silly of me to think we’ve been talking for talking’s sake. To Sergeant Zailer, I’m an object she’s been charged with interrogating, nothing more.

  I get to tell everything and ask nothing.

  ‘I don’t feel guilty about anything,’ I say as I get out of the car. ‘Everything bad that’s ever happened to me is someone else’s fault.’

  Luke’s standing in the hall when I walk in; he must have heard the car pull up. He chuckles at the sight of me as I take off my coat and hang it on a peg. I’ve been questioned in connection with a murder, and he’s laughing. Can anything make this man anxious? ‘You look like someone in need of a glass of wine,’ he tells me.

  ‘A glass?’ He might as well have said ‘thimble’. ‘Fill the biggest saucepan we’ve got with Sauvignon Blanc and give me a straw.’ I remove a second layer of clothing: my jumper. One of the things I love about our house is that it’s always warm, despite looking as if it wouldn’t be. I like the cosiness almost as much as the defiance of expectation.

  ‘That bad?’ Luke asks.

  ‘Worse. I’m going to faint if I don’t eat something.’

  ‘There’s loads of chilli left. I’ll heat some up for you.’ He heads for the kitchen and starts moving around energetically. I follow him, hoping to be able to make it as far as the nearest chair, so that I can slump at the kitchen table. ‘Girls in bed?’

  ‘Yup. Dinah fell asleep on the sofa at half six. I had to carry her upstairs.’

  I raise my eyebrows in disbelief, which takes more effort than it should. The heat from the hot-plate, which Luke tends to leave on in winter to create an Aga-like effect, is making me feel drowsy, too heavy to move even the lightest parts of my body.

  ‘She had a stressful day. I’m under orders to tell you all about it.’ He hands me an extra-large pottery mug full of cold white wine: a compromise.

  ‘What happened?’ I ask, not because I’m keen to immerse myself in the details of Dinah’s latest spat with Mrs Truscott, but because there are only two other things Luke and I are likely to talk about tonight, and I can’t face either of them: my abduction by the police, and the letter from Social Services that’s lying on the table in front of me, poking out of what’s left of its envelope. It isn’t there by accident. This is Luke’s way of saying we need to talk about our least favourite subject. I wasn’t here when he opened the letter, but I can see him in my mind, ripping into the envelope, fearless.

  If I were the brave one and he the coward, would I force him to confront it? Read the letter aloud to him if he wouldn’t read it himself?

  ‘Did you know Dinah’s been writing a play?’ he asks, stirring the chilli.

  ‘No.’ Knowing things is too tiring. The thought is so out of character for me, it shocks me. I need food. ‘That’ll be hot enough if it’s been on the hot-plate since teatime,’ I tell Luke. ‘And even if it isn’t, I want it now.’

  ‘Hector and His Ten Sisters. It’s about an eight-year-old boy whose mother forces him to wear pink. She’s so exhausted from looking after her eleven children that she can’t face buying different clothes for each one, or different outfits for schooldays and weekends – too much effort. So she decides they all have to wear the same clothes every day, like a uniform, and since ten of her eleven kids are pink-obsessed girls, the mother figures it’d make sense for that to be the colour of the uniform.’ Luke’s standing with his back to me, but I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘Hector has no choice but to go along with it, and pretty soon none of his mates’ll talk to him or play football with him—’

  ‘What’s this got to do with Mrs Truscott?’ I cut him off. Another time, I’d love to hear all about Hector and his sisters. Just not now.

  Luke bangs down a bowl of chilli in front of me and hands me a fork. I lean away from the rising steam and manage not to ask if there’s enough for me to have seconds, and thirds. He would tell me to eat my firsts first and see how I feel after that. Sometimes he reminds me that I live in a developed country, about fifty footsteps away from a Chinese takeaway, an Indian restaurant, a Co-op and a Farmers’ Outlet shop; I’m unlikely to fall victim to a food shortage.

  ‘Dinah showed the play to Miss Emerson, who said it was the best thing any child of any age at the school had written, ever.’

  I can’t help smiling at this. Dinah has a tendency to magnify any compliment she receives. Luke’s ex-squaddie workmate Zac once told her her hair looked nice, and she thought nothing of amending that to, ‘He’s travelled all over the world and never seen anyone with hair as beautiful as mine, not in any country.’

  ‘Miss Emerson suggested putting on the play at school. She asked Dinah’s permission to show it to Mrs Truscott . . .’

  ‘Oh, God,’ I mutter, my mouth full. This is my favourite kind of meal: full of eye-wateringly strong red chillis that Luke will have added only once he and the girls were sure they’d had enough. I’m a masochist. I love food that makes me cry and sweat.

  ‘Mrs Truscott said she didn’t think it was suitable. Why?’ He refills my wine mug. ‘Because there’s no reason why boys shouldn’t wear pink, and we mustn’t reinforce gender stereotypes or give the impression that having sisters is a terrible thing.’

  I groan. Is it selfish to wish that nothing problematic, nothing requiring any thought or action on my part, would ever happen at school? When I meet Dinah and Nonie off the bus and ask them how their day was, the answer I’m desperate to hear is, ‘Great fun and highly educative, though at the same time absolutely unremarkable and therefore in no need of further discussion.’

  ‘When did all this happen? Why didn’t Dinah say anything?’

  ‘She wanted to deal with it on her own, and she did. Admirably or deviously or both, depending on your point of view. She agreed with Mrs Truscott that there was nothing wrong with boys wearing pink, and said that was exactly the point her play was trying to make: that if Hector’s friends hadn’t teased him, he wouldn’t have had to take drastic action and there’d have been no tragic end for the ten sisters. They mock Hector mercilessly for wearing pink clothes and get horribly punished. Mrs Truscott fell for it, said Dinah’s play could be part of the Christmas show, as long as she didn’t allow it to interfere with her schoolwork or anyone else’s. Dinah set up auditions, even formed a casting committee so that all decisions could be shown to be fair. I think that might have been Nonie’s idea. Nonie was on the committee, anyway. Miss Emerson helped out with the admin, scripts went home with individual lines highlighted . . .’

  ‘I can’t believe Dinah didn’t tell us.’

  ‘She didn’t want to invite us to her drama premiere until she knew it wasn’t going to fall through.’ Luke pours himself a glass of wine and brings it over to the table. I see from his face that he’s angry. ‘Which it did, pretty much straight away. One kid’s mum rang up and said her daughter had come home sobbing because she hadn’t got one of the “sister” parts and her two best friends had; another kid’s dad stormed into Mrs Truscott’s office complaining about the disgusting script his son had brought hom
e, full of cruelty and torture and likely to provoke a pandemic of sister-hatred.’

  ‘Torture? Teasing someone for wearing pink? It’s hardly The Killer Inside Me.’

  ‘You didn’t let me get to the end of story,’ Luke says. ‘People get rolled in mud, pushed into fishponds against their will . . .’

  ‘That ought to happen more often in real life.’

  ‘One girl was so upset not to be given even a minor part that her mother threatened to take her out of the school and home-educate her. You can guess the upshot: Mrs Truscott told Dinah the play was causing too much trouble, and suddenly it was all off. Dinah was upset and she overreacted. She accused Mrs Truscott of being a coward with no principles.’

  I have to tread a fine line here. Luke is worried, understandably. This means I must under no circumstances blurt out, ‘Ha! Spot on!’ I have a horrible feeling my face is giving the game away.

  ‘I’m glad you’re enjoying this, because there’s more. Dinah told Mrs Truscott that a good leader needs to be strong and fair. They’d learned about it in history the day before. Strong as in not giving in to pressure from idiots. Fair as in not breaking promises you made last week. On being told she was a rubbish head and an even worse human being, Mrs Truscott apparently said very little, apart from that she was going to ring us and speak to us about what had happened.’

  ‘Which she hasn’t. Has she? Did you check the messages?’

  ‘Of course she hasn’t! She’s putting it off, terrified of being told the same or worse by you.’ Luke gives me a stern look. ‘Which wouldn’t do any good, Amber, however true it might be. There’s no need for you to do anything, all right? I’ve dealt with it.’

  I make a non-committal noise, unconvinced. Normally, things that have been dealt with by other people are precisely the ones in most urgent need of my interference.

  ‘Dinah and I made a deal,’ says Luke. ‘She’s going to apologise to Truscott first thing tomorrow. Hopefully Truscott won’t then feel the need to . . . do anything more. I think I also persuaded Dinah to ask if she can have a go at writing another play for the Christmas show, one a bit less—’

  ‘Fuck that!’ I’m full of chilli and wide awake, ready to fight all night. ‘What, a play about kittens and lambs cuddling each other, with nice little bows round their cute necks?’

  ‘You know, you said that in a really menacing way.’ Luke grins at me. ‘There’s no way I’m going to see that play. I’m scared. Those kittens and lambs, they’re evil.’

  ‘Dinah and Nonie’s days at that school are numbered.’ I’ve warned him before; he doesn’t think I mean it.

  ‘No, they’re not,’ he says, infuriatingly calm. ‘It’s a good school.’

  It’s the school Sharon chose for them. That’s not what Luke said, but it’s what I heard. ‘A good school with a spineless head,’ I say stubbornly. ‘As our leaving letter will make clear. Or maybe I’ll spray-paint it on her office door, so she can’t hide it and carry on pretending everyone loves her.’

  ‘Good plan.’ Luke nods. ‘Why don’t you really stick it to her by making a dog’s breakfast of the girls’ education? Could you speak any French or Spanish when you were eight? I couldn’t. Did you know there was a difference between simple and complex Chinese? I didn’t. Dinah and Nonie do. Nonie told me the other day that Jackson Pollock was an abstract expressionist artist, and what that meant.’

  ‘What did you tell the girls?’ I ask, reaching for the wine bottle. ‘About this afternoon, where I was.’

  ‘I said you had to go back to work for an urgent meeting. They didn’t believe me.’

  ‘I’m not surprised. As lies go, it’s a pretty boring one.’

  ‘So let’s hear the interesting truth,’ Luke says. ‘What happened?’

  I fall easily into my usual pattern of telling him almost the whole story. I even tell him that Katharine Allen was murdered on Tuesday 2 November.

  I say nothing about my driver awareness course, the one I didn’t attend, having taken place on the same day.

  Fifteen minutes later Luke goes up to bed, and I am pitched into the stretch of evening I dread most: the hour between ten thirty and eleven thirty, when I’m left alone to face yet another sleepless night. Eighteen months ago, when I first stopped sleeping, I assumed that the surges of crushing panic that accompanied my insomnia would prove to be temporary: either I would learn to sleep again, or I’d get used to not sleeping – psychologically and emotionally, it would get easier. It hasn’t, and I no longer kid myself that it will. The censorious voice in my head starts up the second Luke kisses me goodnight and leaves the room.

  This is when and how normal people go to bed. They go upstairs, without fear, and change into their pyjamas. They don’t break into a sweat, their hearts don’t beat as if they’re about to explode, they don’t suddenly find that they need to empty their bladders every ten minutes. They brush their teeth, yawn, roll into bed, maybe read a couple of pages of a book, eyelids drooping. Then they turn out the light and go to sleep. Why can’t you do that? What’s wrong with you?

  Escalating exhaustion isn’t the worst thing about not sleeping, not by a long way. The loneliness is worse, and the distorted perception it brings with it. People often look surprised when I tell them this, shocked when I compare prolonged insomnia to solitary confinement in prison. Your mind starts to gnaw away at itself like a deranged rat, I explain helpfully. I’ve had plenty of time to work on an appropriate metaphor – I might as well use it, even if it does make whoever I’m talking to sidle away, remembering somewhere urgent they needed to be ten minutes ago.

  Don’t think about how many minutes and seconds there are between now and six thirty tomorrow morning. Don’t go and sit in front of the clock in the dining room so that you can count them off as they pass.

  I stay where I am – where Luke reluctantly left me, cross-legged on the sofa – and wrap my arms around myself for protection, but the feelings I’m hoping to ward off come anyway: piercing isolation, the usual guilt accompanied by the conviction that this anguish is my punishment, disgust at my own freakishness, terror that’s not attached to anything in particular, which makes it all the more frightening. As always, I want to beg Luke to come back downstairs. He won’t be asleep yet, won’t even be in bed. As always, I stop myself, try instead to concentrate on fighting the voice.

  What if tonight’s worse? What if I don’t get any sleep at all, not even twenty minutes here and there? What if that becomes the new pattern? What if I get so tired I can’t do my job any more? We wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage.

  I haul myself up off the sofa and walk slowly to the dining room, concentrating on my footsteps, willing each one to take longer than it possibly can. I stop on the threshold, look at the clock. Ten thirty-five. I go back to the sofa in the lounge, lie down. Close my eyes.

  I used to go to bed when Luke did, even knowing I wouldn’t sleep; that was our tactic at first. We were both sure it was the best way. Every night, we’d review our policy and agree on it all over again. It became a ritual. Luke would hand me whatever book was lying on my bedside table and say, ‘Do what you used to do. Read for a bit, then turn out the light, close your eyes, keep them closed, and see what happens. Even if you don’t sleep, you can lie still and relax, get a bit of rest. And if you do happen to fall asleep – well, you’re in the right place, aren’t you?’

  ‘Exactly,’ I’d say. My answers tended to be short. I was too afraid of what the night had in store for me by this point, with my head actually on the pillow, to hold up my end of a normal conversation. Luke once told me that I looked as if I was standing in front of a firing squad, except I was horizontal.

  The policy changed once we spotted the glaring flaw in our plan: I was incapable of lying still. My agitated shuffling and wriggling kept waking Luke up. He didn’t mind; he would happily have rolled over and tuned back into whatever dream I’d interrupted, except that, desperate for company after too many dark hours of silent,
churning misery, I would block his route back to sleep by snapping, ‘I’ve had my eyes closed for four hours, I’m not relaxed, and, as you might be able to tell, I’m still awake. What do you propose I do now?’

  Luke was too wary of upsetting me to suggest I move into another room; after six months of wrecking his nights as well as my own, I suggested it myself. The previous owners of our house had turned the attic into a long, triangular guest bedroom with an en-suite shower room at one end, so I moved up there for a while. And then, three months ago, I decided enough was enough and moved out of that room too. Time to get tough with myself, I thought: someone who doesn’t sleep doesn’t deserve a bedroom. If you want a bedroom, let’s see you earn it. Since then, I’ve camped on various sofas – in the lounge, in Luke’s home office, in the girls’ playroom. Sometimes, if Luke’s made a fire, I lie down on the rug in front of the still-glowing coals, hoping the warmth might help to loosen the knots in my mind. Now and then I used to curl up on the floor beside Dinah’s bed, but Nonie put a stop to that. I told her there was no chance of my being able to fall asleep on her floor even for ten minutes, not with the light on all night. Her response left no room for negotiation: if I couldn’t sleep next to her bed, then I mustn’t sleep next to Dinah’s either. Both or neither – anything else wouldn’t be fair.

  Once I dozed for half an hour in the bath, which I’d filled with cushions, and woke up with an agonising crick in my neck. Occasionally I go outside and try to lose consciousness in the car. I no longer own any pyjamas or nighties; I threw them all away a couple of months ago. Luke tried to talk me out of it, but I needed to do it. It was too depressing to see them every time I opened my wardrobe, sitting there in a smug, neatly folded, pastel-coloured pile.

  I sit up, open my eyes. My eyelids hurt; I must have been pressing them shut too hard.

  Do something useful. You’ve got a whole night to get through – another one. Do some ironing. Check the girls’ homework diaries.