The Insomnia Museum

by Laurie Canciani

  Lucky took his hands from his face and looked at her. His eyes were sore and red and the green had turned greener through the lenses that she hadn’t taken off even after all this time. The hairs on his chin had grown and his breath smelled just like Dad when he had been drinking for too long and had not tried to throw it all up yet. He smiled and wiped his eyes and smoked and rolled her one and then they smoked together. They blew all the smoke into the air and it swam around their faces and made the room blur and sway and it blunted all the sharp edges of the small things that he had not yet given to the needful and upset and tired people of the town. He smiled and his smile was not silver.

  Do you like it here? he said.

  Oh yes, I do.

  It suits you.

  What does?

  I don’t know. Outside. This place. Here. Living.

  Does it?

  Yes, I think it does. I think it makes you happy.

  I like being here. I like you. I like Tick.

  I’m glad you like Tick. I’m glad that when you go outside you seem happy. I don’t think you know how much you’ve changed since we first met. You’ve soaked it all up. Me. Them. Life. You’ve soaked up all those people on the outside and you’ve soaked up living and I didn’t think that would happen. When I go outside it makes me miserable. I bet you didn’t know that. It makes me miserable and angry but I do it because I have to. I don’t know. There’s so much out there that I wish I didn’t know and so much I wish I could change. Sometimes it’s better to have walls around you so you can’t see the world every day. Windows are good. If you have to see the world it’s better to see it in little square pieces one frame at a time rather than all at once.

  I don’t know what you’re saying.

  A lot of people don’t. I don’t either.

  Do you want a cup of tea?

  Let me just sit awhile.

  I’ll stay with you.

  Does my son hate me?

  Mostly. Not all the time.

  That’s good.

  He lay back and she lay back with him and he made a pillow with his hands and she made a pillow with hers and they lay like this on their sides facing each other. He talked and she listened. He talked about wanting to die when he was her age and asked her what she thought of that. He told her that he had tried to kill himself over and over and nothing ever worked.

  The last time I tried to do it I decided that I wanted to die in the middle of the road. I picked a bus and got myself ready and waited for the bus to come but it didn’t turn up. It was strange because I really did try but someone up there didn’t want me to go. I can’t get out even if I want to. I waited for the bus but it never came because someone planted a bomb on it and it exploded a few streets back. What do you think about that?

  He was beautiful. Ugly. She leaned closer and scratched her neck and twisted the skin of her little finger and leaned back and closed her eyes and pushed her lips together for a kiss that didn’t come. When she opened them again he was looking at the ceiling and blowing tusks of smoke from his nose and thinking on. She didn’t know. Somewhere outside Dorothy was singing. In the other room the boy began to bark like a dog in the lap of his mother.

  I’d say you were Lucky, she said.

  He laughed.

  That’s what they all say.

  28

  Sweet Street

  SWEET STREET WAS a place for.

  On Sweet Street it was dark. All the lights had been smashed with rocks and everyone had to use the neon bright reds and greens from shop signs and windows to pass through and to find whatever it was that they were looking for. The street was on the black road between the town and the estate where all the buildings were old and everything was left to crumble. Tick had woken her up in the night by standing over her and stroking her hair back to her ear and she looked at him and looked at Lucky who had fallen to the left and into his own hands and he told her they had to go to work. Here, put my hoody on. Put the hood up. You look.

  Cool.

  The night was black glue. Sweet Street was a place for children. Sleepy-eyed and odd-socked. They stood on corners and in shop doorways and on the end of the street watching out for flashing lights and uniformed men all the way down that long black road and back up again. She had never seen so many children in one place and she had never seen so many that were not playing and not singing and not looking into the dreamy places beneath the pavement and in the air that whipped cold and fresh about their ears.

  The children were working. They took small clear packets out of their school bags and pockets and socks and pencil cases and handed them to the men and women who lurked from the damp and dark and the keep-away-from and the do-not-enter and killed the itches on their raw bodies and held their crumpled money out and said mercy and bless you all the way back to the dark again. Tick didn’t talk to the other children and they didn’t talk to him. A man came and took something off a girl who was chewing on a sugar necklace and he gave her money and squeezed her face.

  Fucking perv, Tick said.

  They stood together on their own corner and she had the sweets in a red backpack that matched her shoes. Tick took the money and they waited for people to come and when they did they worked and when they didn’t they watched the pavement or the road or the sky and didn’t talk. She took out a packet and looked at the white rabbit and she thought on Dad and on rabbits and how he went out every day looking for an hysterical high that came and went so fast it was like digging for stones in a sand pit with the rain coming down quick and heavy. She looked at Tick and looked down that road and she was sick and crying and she didn’t care who saw it. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand.

  I think my Dad came for these rabbits.

  Probably. Does that upset you?

  Yes, but not nearly enough.

  Two small children played with a ball on the other side of the road and when a car came and drove straight through the street they left the ball roll to the kerb and ran to the grassy bank on the other side and hid in the dark. When the car had driven off they came back again and rubbed the wet leaves and sticks off the rubber and played with the ball again. The children were small and the ball was the only one she had seen that hadn’t been broken or deflated and left to collect rainwater in the paths and cracks of the estate. The little girl with the touchable face called to the smaller children and said Mum will kill you if you get grass on your clothes, and she looked at Tick and scratched her head and looked back at the boys and then down at her shoes that lit up when she walked and into her own head that was full of.

  It was cold. She looked at Tick and watched a man come from nowhere and he stood in front of her and swayed and held his hand out for balance and took hold of a drainpipe that was rusted and barely clinging to the wall. He gave her money. She gave the money to Tick and then she looked at the man and gave him a little white rabbit in a little clear plastic pouch. He took it and smiled and muttered and looked to the fat sky and the fat of the world that steamed up green and fantastic from the hard streets below. He went off again with the rabbit in his hand, staggering along the places where no one walked but him.

  Tick slipped the money into the front pocket of his hoody and jerked his chin and said fuck over and over and waited for someone else to come. She sat on the kerb and watched the children with the ball and forgot about the rabbits in her pocket and forgot about the moths in her head. The children practised throwing and catching and then they sat down and rolled the ball back and forth between their legs and the children standing along the pavement in the neon lights of after bedtime watched them and opened their mouths and closed them again. They rolled their eyes back as Simon always did.

  The ball rolled away and the small boys laughed and the smallest one stood up and went into his pocket and pulled out a dummy and put it into his mouth and sucked the rubber end. He picked up a stick and held the stick out and ran after the ball that rolled away beneath his feet. She laughed. They were lovely. Small. Terrible
. Quick. Upsetting. Good. The boys ran the way she learned that all young boys do. They twisted their hips forward left and right and leaned over with their elbows pushed like wings out to the sides. Everything, all the momentum coming up from the groin which points at first out to their mothers, and then everlastingly out to the world.

  Dad and the moths and Tick and the big black dog on the wall were all talking but she wasn’t listening to any of it. She watched the little boy. She thought on TV until the TV went black in the back of her head and then she wiped her eyes and laughed long and hard at all the people trapped there inside the box. She laughed at the men she couldn’t see. She laughed at the women she couldn’t hear. She laughed at the children she couldn’t feed and she laughed at Lucky who nailed himself to the pages of a blank book. She laughed for the woman in the bed, the boy and his little bag of rabbits, she laughed for all the people of the estate and she laughed the longest for the ones who buried themselves behind big curtains, turned the lights down low, looked deep into mirrors, and worshipped.

  Any spare change?

  None for you. Now fuck off.

  The boys played and she watched and then she watched Tick who was talking about how he could drink so well for his age and no one ever congratulated him for it. The ball came from the other side of the road and rolled on the wet concrete and hit the lip of the pavement near her feet. Tick could drink even better than Lucky who sometimes didn’t even try. The boys came and stood in front of her and pointed to the ball and played with themselves and wiped their noses with their sleeves and whispered. She picked the ball up and looked at it in her hands and it was shiny and deep red in one light and green in another and covered in the debris of the road. She crouched on the pavement and put the ball down and rolled it to the boys who watched it come and then scooped it into their hands and looked at all the other children who watched from their corners. Tick stepped back onto the pavement. The boy with the dummy chucked the ball onto the ground and kicked it towards her again and she caught it with her feet and stepped off the pavement and kicked it back. She watched the boys as they laughed and turned and ran in their clambering swarms to catch it. Tick stepped away further into the dark and into the womb of a boarded shop that had been closed for years and years and would not open again while the street was sweet.

  A moth came to suck at the light that fizzed inside the tubes of the neon sign above the pavement where she had been standing. It slipped pure white beneath the greens and reds and in and out of the dark. She played with the small boys and the night grew cold and turned into smoke. The rainwater on the black road gathered the light where it could and mirrored it and inside the puddles was the rushing sky.

  The boys kicked. The ball rolled and spun. She kicked it back and laughed and one of the other boy children who had been counting money rolled the money in a band and slipped it into his back pocket and dropped the pencil case that had been full of white rabbits and he came into the road. She kicked the ball to him and he stopped it and kicked it into the air and balanced it on his forehead and dropped it down and kicked it back again.

  The smaller boys laughed and clapped and kicked it to her and she took it into her hands and watched all the other children that dropped their sweets and ignored their money and came to stand and play in the middle of that burning street. Those that had talent remembered it and those that didn’t watched, saw, and tried to learn.

  She called to Tick who stood somewhere away from the noise and light and he didn’t come and she called him again and he stepped into the glow and looked up and down the road as though he couldn’t find them where they had gone. As though they had stepped into a place that was too far from where he was then. Somewhere over the. She shouted again and caught the ball and threw it to Tick who opened his arms and caught it and unrolled it from his chest and looked at it. He looked at it underneath the green neon light surrounded by curls of autumn smoke. She called to him and he called back and said fuck over and over and stepped from the pavement and dropped the ball by his feet and rolled it underneath his heel and kicked it into the air and threw it onto his back and forehead and knees and elbows and scored a goal that no one kept.

  She hadn’t disappeared. She was more in that place than she’d ever been before and the children looked at her as though they had not seen her before then. She kicked and laughed and watched for skill and triumph and everyone was the same when they were raised into the green light. Children who had not been there before poured into the road from the cracks and hollows of the estate and both dark and pale men and women who had been looking for rabbits forgot what they were hungry for and came instead to play and to forget. There was no time behind them and no time in front of them. They kicked and called and followed the red ball and so did she and so did Tick and so did all of them good and bad and hungry like her. They didn’t concern themselves with money or the anger of their mothers or the fear of their fathers or the men who came to knock on the door looking for money and clean bones. Being was remembering. Playing was forgetting.

  Sometime in the middle of the night or the middle of a dark morning a silver car came slowly down that stormy road. It came slow, parting the rising smoke and stirring up the swirling orange puddles and breaking through the threads of green light that all at once fell to the children’s feet.

  She felt her heart bump against her chest. The face of the passenger looked out. The car was bigger than she remembered and its front lights lit the road and burned all the colours away. The children stood still and quiet and then moved aside when the car came close and the two young boys went to the grass and hid their faces and some of the children held hands and others stuck their hands into their mouths and sucked. The car stopped in the middle of the shrinking crowd and it kept its engine running and kept its windows drawn up.

  Tick watched the car. The ball was in his hands. The other children had moved further back. He looked at her and she didn’t know what to say. A dog barked. The night had no temperature at all and the rain existed only in the beams that shone from the front of the car. She felt something move in her fingers and she looked at her hand and saw a small girl standing next to her trying to hold on and she took her hand and looked at the child and the child looked at her with large absent eyes.

  Tick whispered something into the driver’s window. Then he went into his back pocket and pulled out something small and flicked it up and it beamed the light from eye to eye. It was a small silver knife.

  He looked at his hands and then he stuck the knife deep into the ball and held on until the rubber began to collapse. She felt it. The knife. Deeply. She shook her head and so did the children who at first started and then held their fingers against their faces and looked on at the slow death. The little girl was crying. Tick whispered again and then he crossed the road and threw the ball past the grassy patch and over the wall that had no other side.

  A game, Tick said. This is all just a fun. Game.

  The car began to move again, slowly. She saw Dorothy return to the path in front of her and make rude gestures to the blackened windows and side mirrors and doors. The car drove away and turned around a corner and faded into other business on other streets.

  *

  They didn’t talk as they walked back from Sweet Street. Tick was too much in his own head and didn’t say fuck and didn’t jerk pretty and wild.

  In the park the dog on the wall was laughing as she approached with the boy just in front of her looking at his own boots. The dog looked at them and searched the ground for something that was buried and he barked and fixed his eyes on them as they approached. The boy stopped and sat on the swing and played with the money that was in the front pocket of his hoody.

  Can I tell you something? she said.

  He looked at her but didn’t speak. She sat down next to him and handed him the five white rabbits that she couldn’t sell that night and as he counted them and pocketed them she talked.

  I want to tell you something that’s
true about me.

  He looked at her.

  I want to tell you that I’m afraid of small spaces because my Dad kept me locked inside until he died. He died a few weeks ago. A month. I can’t remember. Everything is different now. It could’ve been years ago but. At the same time I can still smell his aftershave all mixed with death when I close my eyes. And sometimes I think I’ll go to sleep and I’ll wake up and I’ll still be there. Where the walls are too wide and the wallpaper is giving way to rot and so many insects. I can’t sleep because I’m thinking about it all too much. It’s not in my memory anymore. The museum. It’s not back there in a crumbling building. It’s in my head. I have moths in there too that I know aren’t real but I can feel them chewing everything up and I can hear their wings and sometimes it sounds like talking and sometimes it sounds like buzzing and it gets so loud I think I’m going to smash my head in. My Dad was a mess and sometimes I don’t know whether or not to blame you for that. Mum. She’s just another memory. When I was little she went away but I have a secret about that. It’s a big secret that I keep right back in my mind so deep that sometimes I can’t even find it. Not even Dad knew. Can I tell you what it is?

  She swung gently and kicked the stones under her feet.

  My Mum murdered me twice. She murdered me by going away when I was four. Dad and I needed her more than. Then she murdered me a second time, when she came back. That’s my secret. My Mum came back. It was years after she first went away. I was maybe ten or eleven. Dad doesn’t know. If he did he would probably hate me. He said he was always looking for her and he didn’t know where she went. I was alone. I heard a voice through the letterbox and I knew it was her. She called my name. I’m sorry I’m crying. I know. She said Anna, Anna, Anna. She told me she’d come back and wanted to be my Mum again and wanted to be with my Dad. I was so.

  Tick held her hand.

  I only remember thinking one thing. I remember thinking that Dad always said he loved her so much. What if he loved her more than me? What if they loved each other so much that there wasn’t enough room for me? I couldn’t fit in there. I didn’t like small spaces and my parents were always so loud and fantastic and I was so small and sick and there would be nowhere to put me. She asked me to open the door. I panicked. I shut my mouth and stepped back into the dark and she called me over and over and I put my hands over my ears. Dad would leave me. I would be alone. Dad loved her more than he loved me. I was crying but I dried my eyes and cleared my voice and I talked. Do you know what I said?