The Insomnia Museum

by Laurie Canciani

  She looked at the man who was broken on the black street. He went down and didn’t rise up again on the folds of concrete there. There was blood. There was a cold breeze. He was broken on the slabs below and he was dead. Gone in blood and anger. Dead. And surrounded by the bodies of six white rabbits that had fallen sometime before.

  Simon cried and Tick held him and she came to hold them both. When the sun came up the dog on the wall turned his tail around and disappeared and would not come back again. She kissed Tick on the face and Simon laughed and she kissed him too and Tick wiped his mouth. She pulled the TV cable up and looked at the last rabbit as it turned from them, jumped from the chair and darted down the hall. She sat with the boys in the decay of the world and she drew Simon’s head to her lap.

  They went slowly down that long corridor and down that long staircase helping Simon along and she took them both out into the street where the people had begun to gather with their hands on the shoulders of their children. She turned Simon’s face away from his father where he lay bloody and dead on the slab and they stood in the middle of the people who had come to make sure the passenger was gone. Simon laughed. He laughed at everything. Anything. He looked at a bird that came and sat on a fence in front of him and he held his hand out and pointed.

  We’re sorry, Tick said.

  She looked on and held Tick’s hand.

  One of the women stepped forward with her son’s hand in her own and she looked at her where she stood and she didn’t doglook her. The child was still and silent and the woman laid her hand on his head and she spoke.

  I didn’t see you up there, she said. I didn’t see you go up there. I only saw Simon’s father go up there. I saw him go up there and I saw him throw himself off the top and there was nobody else with him.

  A man stepped forward with his daughter in his arms and he told her that he saw the same thing. I saw him jump, he said. He was up there and he jumped off and I didn’t see anyone else there. I saw him go up there alone.

  Another came forward and then another and she watched them all as they told their own truth and their children held onto them and they each took their turns and the children didn’t have to speak for themselves.

  34

  And You Were There

  THE CHILDREN PLAYED.

  She heard them as she slept next to the boy who had cried for hours and hours at first in the arms of his Mum and then in the dark alone. The wind blew in through the window and the woman warmed the boy’s school uniform on the radiators and the sound of the children came in with the warm air and she went to the window and watched them all below. They played their games in the light of the street and in the light that came from their own front doors. They picked up their bikes and rode them through the concrete tunnels and down the concrete stairs and through their concrete childhoods that were just as lovely as any on the greener grass. They chased balls that were thrown into the air. A girl whispered to another and ran. Kids were caught and chased and they fell and raised themselves up on the wet dirt.

  A woman in a dress sent Simon to live with his mother who had not disappeared entirely from the world. She lived far away, but not too far that she couldn’t bring the boy along every once in a while to look at the birds and the buildings and to play in a garden that had been laid some months after his father’s death. Anna saw him there often, and she was allowed to play with him and so was Tick when he wasn’t in school.

  *

  Tick’s Mum raised him up early in the morning and cooked them all a fat meal and made them shower and dress and stood by the door to kiss Tick as he went out dazed and driven by complete surrender. She walked with him to school and told his Mum that she would fetch him home again and she did this every day until the boy began to talk and eat and sleep without crying. The boy talked about what he learned and then he talked about where his life would go and she listened and told him it was all a good idea.

  She took a walk down Sweet Street one night while the boy was at home helping to wash dishes and talk and fix the TV that had been broken for a long time. The road was black but the lights were fixed and she could see into all the corners that had been hidden before. The moon was high and so was the sun. A girl walked through the street with a red backpack and yellow hair and she stood outside a shop that had been boarded for some time. A moth came to land on the window and it flew off again and fluttered around a light that was bright and milky. The girl looked up as she came close and stopped.

  My Mum just bought this shop, the girl said.

  Why did she do that?

  She sells books.

  Will she sell them there?

  Yeah. It’s a dream.

  I think it will be.

  She smiled at the girl and then walked along the black road with Dad in her head. There were no more moths after that, and no more twist in her stomach. She had seen the faults of her father and he had seen the faults of his daughter but that was all there was to love, seeing and then looking beyond to that little speck of glass that still shone brightly even after death.

  She climbed the stairs of the fallen tower and went along the corridors and into the black room where the passenger had fallen. The room was the same. The walls were black and pictures hung in jig-jags and stuck corners and there were scraps of furniture and wet wallpaper all shoved into the middle of the room and blue police tape over the edge. On one wall was the TV and she wiped the black soot off the screen and off the top of the video player that was underneath. She kneeled down and pulled Dorothy out from her bag and opened the cover and took the tape in her hand and she slipped it into the player. The thing chugged and the machine spun and whirred and remembered what it once had been. She pressed the power button on the TV and hit it on the side and then pressed it again. The TV fizzed and sputtered and then it came on. In the black room the TV was lit and her body was grey and then full of colour. She sat watching the film play. She listened to all the songs. Dorothy looked out from the TV and the music drowned out the quiet that had stayed too long in that part of the world.

  She watched the film. The light burned into all the corners and shone brightly from the room and lit the darkest part of the estate. She watched the film all the way through, until Dorothy stood in the middle of the Emerald City and said her goodbyes to the phantom men and women who would miss her in the end. Then the film ended with Dorothy in her bed, the credits rolled on the screen and then the video clicked and purred and another film rolled. She looked up. She crawled along the floor and placed her hands on either side of the TV. On the screen was a film that she hadn’t expected. It was a recording of life as it really was. Past. Old. It was something from long ago, a small rolling picture. She raised her knees up and held them tight. On the screen was the face of her mother.

  It was taken a long time ago, long before Simon and long before the creeping habit and the walls that wouldn’t let her alone. Her mother sat leaning against a wall with a round belly, singing Somewhere Over the Rainbow. She clapped her hands to her face and listened as her mother’s voice filled up the estate.

  She watched it again and again, all the way through.

  She walked along the black road and looked at all the places she had played with the boy and all the places she had driven with Lucky and she came into the park and sat on the swing. The boy would finish school soon. He would come to the park and he would talk about everything he had learned and then she would learn it too. They would look at books. They would swing and they wouldn’t smoke. She swung and looked at the wall where the dog used to be and was now gone. A man came up to her and scratched his face and held out his hand and she gave him money and he smiled and went away again.

  Some time later Tick came to sit with her and Simon came after and they were allowed to take him and stand next to him while he swung. He shouted and made little noises and they swung him higher and higher because he wanted the feeling of flying or of letting go or the same feeling he got when he was flung over the car and cha
nged forever. And maybe he thought he could jump. And maybe he liked to fall. Tick talked and she listened. Everything was beautiful. Ugly. She looked at the moon as the boy swung higher. Tick talked about school. English. Science. Music. He talked about all the things that filled up the world and made it bigger. Infinite. She listened as Tick’s voice filled up all the spaces that had been empty in her mind, and it grew above the background of the estate and ate up the noise from the streets and the noise of the women with thick arms and pink tops singing songs and hanging up their washing on the thin black lines. Their voices mattered more than the noise of the angry crowds that gathered and shouted near the river that sliced the town in two, or the crackle from the TV that was not the same, or the calls from men who knocked on doors and wanted money or furniture or children for unpaid bills, or the moths in her head, or Lucky carrying boxes and talking about Jesus, or Dad and his rabbits, or the one rabbit that lived wild in the estate. That nobody could catch. And her. She was louder than all of it. Louder than that nothing from the other side of the wall, and the men and women who were children once who came dazed and thoughtful with their hands outstretched, and the long lovely back of the woman who was no longer in bed, and the children who saw fear in the eyes of their parents, and that good ugly love, and everything, and everyone. Line them up and make them shout and hear how they make no sound at all.

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  Acknowledgements

  About Laurie Canciani

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Acknowledgements

  I would like to acknowledge the support of Dominic Richards, Jayne Canciani, Christian Canciani and Louise Canciani, without whom this book would never have been written.

  I would also like to thank Will Francis, Helen Francis, Jennifer Edwards and Angela Morelli, who offered constant encouragement and the best advice.

  I’m forever grateful to Linda Ruhemann, Phillip Morris, Samantha Harvey, Leyton Tanner and to all the incredible teachers and mentors who helped me along the way. You made the difference.

  To the teachers and staff at Bryncethin Primary School during the 90s, you told me I could write, and I remembered. Thank you.

  About Laurie Canciani

  Laurie Canciani was born in 1986 and grew up in Bridgend, South Wales. She battled with a brief but crippling bout of agoraphobia when she left school and rediscovered her love of writing and reading when she was in her early twenties. She received an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and The Insomnia Museum is her first novel.

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  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Apollo is an imprint of Head of Zeus.

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  This Apollo book was first published in the UK in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Laurie Canciani, 2018

  The moral right of Laurie Canciani to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

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  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (HB): 9781788541763

  ISBN (XTPB): 9781788541770

  ISBN (E): 9781788541756

  Design: Hayley Warnham

  Cover images: Shutterstock.com

  Author photo: © Dominic Richards

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