Salt Slow Page 2
Boys slope off with girls and I find myself thinking about the itch of the wig I am wearing, the fierceness with which I want to take it off. My tongue is ripe with something thick and liquid, my vision tripling, quadrupling in dim light.
Beside me, a friend is mouthing at me, syllables that mean nothing and make me laugh and twitch my arms in a gesture that seems strangely involuntary.
‘What?’ I speak too loudly and she shakes her head, gesturing over my shoulder to a boy dancing in the corner.
‘Mark Kemper.’
‘Who?’
‘Mark Kemper. He told Toby Thorpe he thinks you’re interesting.’
In the kitchen, girls drink beers from paper cups and argue shrilly. Someone has kissed someone else’s boyfriend and a fight is underway. Around the fridge, a thread of girls in matching crucifixes are drinking shots of whiskey, while beneath the breakfast table, a girl is coiled asleep with tinsel in her hair.
I gnaw on the edges of my fingers, wondering when it was that the taste transformed from salt to something tangier. Someone hands me a beer and I drink it, pressing gratefully against the bodies all around. Beneath my dress, my skin is churning. My legs feel cracked in half, articulated – a spreading and a shifting, as though my bones are springing out of their intended slots.
‘He’s there again, look.’ Someone pokes me in the back, a nodded head towards the boy who seems to have followed me into the kitchen.
Before the party, my Mother had shown me photographs of herself at my age – a blinking blade-score of a girl, clear-skinned and strangely boyish.
‘I was more like you than you think,’ she had said, fanning Polaroids like playing cards on the kitchen table. ‘I was a late bloomer too. It’s a family trait.’
She had showed me pictures of her wedding day. A blurring of groom, a bride with fingers gnawed to the quick.
I move from the kitchen, passing doors and hallways and finding my way back to the dancing throng. Girls grab at my arms in greeting, cry out and pull me in. I feel my skin sever beneath their hands and wonder whether I should try to clean the pieces of myself from the floor.
We dance in celebration, yell as we do in relief at the end of Mass. A girl pinches playfully at my nose, another pulls on my wig. We bracket and circle and contain each other, twisted together with arms and legs. From a distance, I see the boy edging through the crowd towards me – a blankness of a person, recognisable only by the whispers in my ears.
‘Mark Kemper.’
‘Look – he’s coming over here.’
‘He told everyone he likes you – I swear to Saint Felix.’
He grabs for my hand with a force I’m not prepared for, says his name in a voice which drags me away from the group. He says his name again but the music seems to grow louder and I am very aware of my skin. He pulls me back, already dancing, and I have no option but to go with him, a throbbing sense of something rent or ruptured slicing down my spine as the tangle of girls around me loosens and gives way. I let him dance with me, my mouth awash with what feels like saliva, his body like the jolt before a crash.
‘I’ve seen you before,’ he is saying in my ear, and I’m not sure how long he has been speaking or whether this is part of a longer sentence. ‘You stand out, you know. You’re not like other girls.’
I don’t know what to say to this as it is incontestably true, yet doesn’t feel at all like a compliment. He says his name again. My head swills and I think of my Mother; a darkening, a cracking noise that seems to come from me.
I find he is leading me down a corridor, though I have no idea when it was we left the dancefloor or how it was he convinced me to go. In the corners and shadows and behind doors, I can see girls and boys entwined, strange graspings in half-darkness, woven silhouettes of one on one. Grabby, he has hold of both my hands and I note how small his palms are, though that may just be because my fingers now feel so unnaturally stretched. I am fizzing beneath my dress, my arms and legs consumed with pins and needles, jerking back and forth involuntarily like in the seconds before sleep.
‘I knew you wanted it,’ he is saying, and I find I have chewed my bottom lip enough to tear it. I grab his hand tighter, taste the blood on my lips.
He tugs me into an empty room – a bathroom with a long mirror – and it occurs to me that he is going to kiss me a second before he does. In the reflection, I witness my reaction, the pale, inverted version of myself in polished glass. There is a coming apart, my head swimming within the collapse, and I understand at once what my Mother meant by ‘late blooming’ – an adolescence quite unlike the one my classmates have been through.
My skin starts to slip off my bones with a heaviness of sheer relief and the shell beneath is something like my Mother’s; the hard, pale surface of unblemishable cold. My teeth drop, my wig slips and I am something else entirely. A suddenness of mandibles and curving neck, eyes sliding into lateral position, long hands that bend straight down as if in inverted prayer. I think, again, about my Grandmother, about my absence of a Grandfather, my Mother’s unknown thumb-smudge of groom. I twitch my head towards the boy, feel a shuffling in my back of something quite like wings. I flex my arms and raise myself a little higher as the last of my skin falls down unheeded to the bathroom floor.
It is possible the boy says something, possible he screams. My mouth is wide with anticipation. Not for kissing but for something more in keeping with my genes.
The Great Awake
When I was twenty-seven, my Sleep stepped out of me like a passenger from a train carriage, looked around my room for several seconds, then sat down in the chair beside my bed. This was before they became so usual, the shadow-forms of Sleep in halls and kitchens, before the mass displacement left so many people wakeful at uncertain hours of the night. In those days, it was still surprising to sit up and see the silver lean of Sleep, its casual posture. People rang one another, apologising for the lateness of the hour, asking friends if they too were playing host to uninvited guests.
Sleeps were always tall and slender but beyond that there were few common traits. Experiences varied – a girl I knew complained that her Sleep sat ceaselessly atop her chest of drawers, swinging its heels and humming, while another confided that her Sleep trailed its fingers down her calves, demanding cones of mint ice cream. Couples and cohabiters were the worst off – the Sleeps seemed more prone to behaving badly in numbers, as though they were egging one another on. A rumour persisted in my building that the husband and wife in the penthouse had locked their Sleeps in separate bathrooms to prevent them wrestling violently on the carpet. A man I knew vaguely from the office told me in passing that his and his boyfriend’s Sleeps kicked at one another incessantly and flicked pieces of rolled-up paper at the neighbour’s Bengal cat. My Sleep had no one to fight with and so mostly preoccupied itself with rooting through my personal belongings, pulling out old photographs and Allen keys and defunct mobile phones, then placing them like treasures at the foot of my bed.
Early on, we didn’t know what it was exactly. A lot of people assumed they were seeing ghosts. One night in mid-July, a woman in my building woke the seventh floor with her screaming. Two a.m., dark throat of summer. A bleary stagger of us collected in the corridor and were beckoned into her flat in our pyjama shorts and dressing gowns. We walked from room to room, near-strangers despite our daily proximity, taking furtive note of her decor and her sloppy housekeeping, the cereal bowls on the coffee table, the dirty novel on the bed. We found it in the bedroom, moon-drenched through open curtains. Her Sleep was lanky, crouched beside the bookshelf. It must have been the first time any of us had seen one – its wraithish fingers and ungentle mouth. The girl beside me grabbed my hand when she saw it. She was a girl I knew by sight but had never spoken to – still sticky with sleep around the eyelids and wearing the type of mouthguard prescribed by dentists for bruxism. I squeezed her hand in return and tried to make sense of what I was looking at. The Sleep crossed its palms over its neck as though prot
ecting the feeblest part of itself from harm. This was only a few days before my own Sleep emerged and I felt the uncharitable relief of a narrow escape; a strange affliction which had missed me only slightly, grazed the tender surface of my skin.
By August, the newspapers were labelling it The Great Awake, printing graphs and pie charts and columns by confused academics. News pundits speculated broadly, blaming it on phones and social media, twenty-four-hour culture, anxiety disorders in the under-eighteens. Radio hosts blamed it on television. Talking heads on television blamed it on everybody else. Ultimately, there was found to be little concrete evidence to support any one cause – it wasn’t more likely to happen if you ate meat or drank coffee or had extra-marital sex. It wasn’t a virus or a medical syndrome, it had nothing to do with the drinking water or women being on the pill. It happened in cities, that much we knew, but beyond that there was no obvious pattern. It could happen to one house on a city street and not another. It could affect everyone in an apartment building except for you. It was described more commonly as a phenomenon than as a disaster; one medical journal referred to it as an amputation of sorts, the removal of the sleep-state from the body. People wrote in to magazines to describe their symptoms: the now-persistent wakefulness, the mutation of sleep from a comforting habit to a creature that crouched by the door.
In those early weeks, a live morning show with a viewership of some four million was yanked unceremoniously off air because the host had been attempting to present a segment on seasonal salads with his Sleep in shot behind him. The figure was only a little taller than average and mimed laconically along to the host’s actions, shadowing him as he reached for tomatoes while lecturing viewers on proper knife technique. The Sleep mimicked a paring knife, chopping smoothly at the air. It was a Tuesday, people ironing shirts before work. I remember the squeal and stutter before the screen cut to a placard reading Technical Difficulties – Please Stand By. I remember the host’s eyes, the wakeful crescents beneath the lids. In time, of course, this kneejerk plug-pulling became impractical. By September, half the media personalities in the schedule were turning up to work with wan faces and with their Sleeps in tow. A new series of a property show started with one of the two hosts introducing her Sleep quite candidly, her co-host standing off to the side alone. Television became a gradual sea of doubles, of familiar faces and their silent, unaccustomed companions.
It became so swiftly ordinary – not a thing to be longed for, but nothing whatsoever to be done. Like chicken pox, inevitable. People slept until their Sleeps stepped out of them, then they went on living awake. Shortly after our first encounter on the seventh floor, people in my building stopped sleeping at a rate of about one a night. Mine appeared early, an awkward guest to whom I first thought to offer tea or the newspaper, though I quickly discovered that Sleep was not a companion who wanted much entertaining; it appeared more than content to roam the flat in silence, straightening picture frames where they had fallen askew. I continued to talk to it despite little indication that what I said was appreciated, occasionally replying to myself in a different voice to keep the conversation going. I told my Sleep it reminded me of Peter Pan’s shadow, and wondered aloud whether I ought to try to attach it to me with a bar of carbolic soap. My Sleep only shook its shoulders and pulled the clock from the kitchen wall to adjust it with a gentle nudge to the minute hand. ‘Yes, maybe you should,’ I said in a different voice and nodded to show that I had heard. Later, it transpired that no one’s Sleeps would speak to them. A strange enough curse, to be wide awake with a companion who pretended you weren’t there.
My brother called, quoting our mother – only think about what moving to the city will do to your health. His Sleep had appeared only two hours previously and was pacing round the kitchen, rattling chairs and humming the theme to a radio soap for which my brother had once unsuccessfully auditioned.
‘Janey, does yours look anything like Granddad?’
I squinted sideways at my Sleep, its steam-coloured skin.
‘I don’t think so. If anything, it looks like Aunt Lucy, but that’s because the only time I saw her was at the open casket.’
My brother chuckled; a muffled sound, hand hovered over the mouthpiece. It was three o’clock in the morning, heavy-lidded sky.
‘Pretty spooky,’ he said. ‘Plus kind of a bore. There’s nothing on TV this time of night.’
When we were younger, our mother told us warning stories about the proliferation of ghosts in big cities; ghosts in office chairs and office bathrooms, hot and cold running ghosts on tap. Cupping an ear to the evening stillness of our rural home, she would describe to us towns that seethed with spectres, mime the permanent unsettlement of a city night. Intended as a deterrent to leaving, these stories quickly became the basis of our preferred childhood games. Collecting cardboard boxes and empty Tupperware containers, we would fashion knee-high cities in the basement and chase phantoms around their miniature alleyways, stacking books into the shapes of high-rise apartments and imagining them jittery with ghosts. When the two of us grew up and moved away – to our long thin city of narrow stairs and queasy chimney stacks – our mother cried and demanded we reconsider, insisting that cities could not be lived in but only haunted, that we would simply become two more ghosts in a place where ghosts already abounded. We had gone anyway, of course, my brother to audition fruitlessly for city theatres and me to temp in chilly offices and work shifts in bowling alleys and cafés, almost welcoming the bleakness in exchange for the notion of escape. We had lived apart, to show our mother we could do it, and had fallen into inevitable patterns of silence and strange behaviour. My brother had developed a mortal horror of the silverfish which squirmed between his kitchen tiles. I had grown uncomfortable with the sight of myself in full-length mirrors – the breadth of space around me in the glass.
An interview ran in a Sunday broadsheet: a young woman studying history at university, who described the experience of falling in love with her Sleep.
He’s a great listener, a great talker. (I call him ‘He’ – I don’t know if that’s politically correct or possible, but that’s what he feels like to me.) People say their Sleeps don’t talk but I wonder whether that’s just because they’re expecting speech in the traditional sense. My Sleep doesn’t make any noise but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t talk to me. There are gestures – he moves to the corner of the mattress to give me more space, he alphabetises my books. Sometimes he touches my forehead. Talk can be all kinds of things.
I read this article aloud to my Sleep, asked it whether it was trying to talk to me and I was just too preoccupied by its silence to hear, though of course I received no response.
‘I think mine might just be a bit of an arsehole,’ my brother said. He was drowsy the way we were all becoming, plum stains in the hollows of his eyes. ‘It hides my scripts and scribbles all over my calendar. I’ve missed three auditions because it’s scratched out the dates. It’s like living with a shitty poltergeist.’
We were sitting on the front steps of my building, drinking hot chocolate from polystyrene cups. It was 4 a.m. on a Tuesday; thin light, city moving like an agitated creature. We were all still growing used to the night-time, the blue-veined hours of morning that lay only lightly, the white spiders and noctule bats. Without sleeping, it was harder to parcel up your days, to maintain a sense of urgency. The extra hours granted a kind of fearless laziness, a permission to dawdle through the day with the confidence that there would be more time, later, whenever you liked.
‘I don’t think mine likes me very much,’ I said to my brother, finishing my hot chocolate and reaching for the dregs of his. ‘It always seems so distracted.’
My brother shrugged, squinting down towards the bottom of the steps where our Sleeps were jostling elbows and kicking at each other’s feet.
The girl with the mouthguard knocked on my door one midnight in mid-September and asked me to come and confirm something for her. She was wearing a nightdress – I h
ad torn mine up for dishcloths, having little other use for it – though she had taken the mouthguard out and was holding it gingerly in one hand when I opened the door. Without it, her voice was a curiously clean thing, freshly scrubbed, as though her vocal cords were brand new. Her flat across the corridor was the direct reversal of mine; the kitchen sink and cupboards facing in the opposite direction, the books strewn about in apparent parallel to the ones that littered my bed. It turned out that what she had imagined, on waking, to be the shape of her Sleep in the corner of her bedroom was in fact only the shadow of her dressing gown thrown over a chair. And what she had assumed to be the sound of her Sleep shifting about beside the bookcase was only the rattle of mice in the walls. She was disappointed, bleary from waking. Everyone in her family already had one, she told me. She went to sleep every night and felt like she was missing out on something, this all-night party she was too exhausted to attend.
‘What’s stupid is I’ve always been a very troubled sleeper,’ she said, gesturing to her mouthguard. ‘You’d think I would have been one of the first.’
Her name was Leonie and when she talked she beat her hands together with a sound like popping corn. She wore the mouthguard to correct excessive tooth-grinding owing to an abnormal bite – an affliction she’d lived with since her late teens when she had lost her back teeth crashing her bicycle into a stationary car. This she told me lightly before blinking and apologising for the overshare, though I only shook my head. I had found that people seemed to speak more freely in the night-time – a strange release of inhibitions that came with talking in the dark. I left a message for our building’s maintenance department about the mice in her wall and sat with her until she fell asleep the wrong way up on top of her bedclothes. She was pretty, a fact I noticed in a guilty thieving way. She had fine buttery hair and a gentle cleft in her chin. My Sleep, which had followed me across the corridor and into the flat, oversaw all of this with no particular interest, wandering about and pulling lampshades off their stands.