The Sleepwalkers, page 9
Everyone so hot for each other’s dark mysteries. So horny.
I remember you being unconvinced when I told you how phony the production companies were when there was the big scramble for my first one-woman show.
But that was before you, and so it must have been your father, who was always just as unconvinced by me as you are.
Which perhaps means maybe it’s me. Maybe I am simply unconvincing.
At the time, I was losing my own father. Every day I drove to the big hospice just outside the town where I grew up and parked in the same place by the bush with pink roses and gathered myself before going in. Years before, I used to drive past the hospice on the way to one of my holiday jobs. I couldn’t ever properly take it in then, such a place of sadness and death and forced liminality. I couldn’t believe anyone had to go there, what it would be like. And then, all of a sudden, it was my turn.
Mum couldn’t get to visit Dad very easily because of her mobility issues, so I went every day of Dad’s last fortnight with whatever he asked for. A caravan magazine, a bottle of Sussex Best Bitter, a vintage cheddar wrapped in wax. The hospice was a jolly place with few rules, it being too late for rules. People were wheeled into the garden in their beds with their whole families to look at their last sunsets. People laughed in their relatives’ rooms and then came out and did jigsaws in silence. The whole atmosphere was a plane full of people waiting to jump.
Afterwards, people celebrated their dead relatives with large cigars or bottles of brandy. When it was my turn I toasted my dad with one of his undrunk bottles of real ale, and then I was told to take his things and leave as soon as possible, because of the waiting list. It was three in the morning, so I arranged to return the next day.
Overnight, the hospice had been rendered unimaginable again, but in a different way. I had a panic attack in the car and then crossed the threshold of this place that had become like a second home. The place in which one of the biggest moments of my life had come to pass.
The atmosphere that morning was suddenly that of a theatre after the show has moved on. Before, I’d barely noticed the receptionist gently asking the name of the patient I was visiting, and hardly felt the scratch of the pen as I signed in. But this time, when she’d said, “Who are you visiting, dear?” I’d stumbled. I couldn’t say it, exactly. I couldn’t say that Dad wasn’t there anymore.
“Um, he’s, er, he actually…”
“Sit down, dear. I’ll fetch a nurse.”
“It’s fine, I’ll just…” I went to walk down the hallway, and she held up a hand.
“Please wait there for the nurse to come.”
I wasn’t allowed in, because I had no one to visit.
The doors had closed on me, and on my dad. Five minutes later a hospice nurse brought me his things in two carrier bags.
But I’ve got ahead of myself again. I hope you’re following this, with all my jumps in time? Perhaps not. Maybe it doesn’t matter. I’m not even sure who I’m writing this for, or why. It soothes me to write things in some sort of order, even if it is one you’ll probably deem wrong, when there is now such chaos outside. And our lives, in tatters.
I’d got into a routine that fortnight at the hospice. Each day I arrived just after ten, and stayed until four, when I’d go home and cook dinner for Mum. On the way back I took whatever class the cheap leisure center had that day. Yoga; Body Combat; Legs, Bums and Tums. I didn’t care. The stupider the title the better. I was trying to lose weight for the auditions I still had back then.
I also had a lot of strange adrenaline I needed to process somehow, after the unnatural calm of those days. Is it odd to say that the hours in the hospice were some of the clearest and happiest I’d ever spent? Of course, it was partly because I was connecting with my dad properly for the first time. We talked about his school days up north and his coal-miner father who beat him and his brothers because that’s what people did in those days.
My father was such a solid man. He’d go out in a blizzard if my mother wanted anything. With such a devoted wolf in her pack you’d think she’d ask for foie gras and truffles, but instead it was Black Forest gateaux from Iceland that she’d eat in one sitting while watching romantic comedies on DVD. Sometimes she didn’t even defrost the cakes first, and I’d hear her crunching through them as if they were full of bones.
Dad looked after Mum, and she looked after me. That was the unspoken deal.
But I was so wayward that even Mum washed her hands of me for a while.
I suppose you have no idea of what a childhood like mine would have involved or how I became the person I am. You never really asked. You, with your big house and your plush, streamlined life. How could you possibly know? My mother liked to buy things from catalogues when she was sad, and my dad would work evenings and weekends to pay the overdue bills while the garage filled with dollhouse furniture, porcelain animals and supplies for crafting projects that Mum never started. Dad was a plumber—just imagine that—and so there was always work if he wanted it, unblocking other people’s toilets and restarting their boilers.
When I was a teenager I’d skive off school and Mum and I would loll in the pink-and-purple nest of our small sitting room, where everything was soft, and we’d watch all her soaps, one by one: Doctors, Home and Away, Neighbours, Emmerdale, Eastenders, Corrie. Mum would give me whatever thick paperback she’d just finished, usually featuring a cleaner who doesn’t know she’s a princess, or an exploited actress who ends up marrying the CEO of the movie studio and then firing all the people who were ever mean to her. The meanness in these books was sometimes workplace bullying, but since the workplace was usually a movie set or Hollywood mansion, it would often turn into lurid sex: forced threesomes or violent blow jobs, and it sort of made me think that’s how the world was.
Mum would go to bed early with her magazines, and if Dad was working late I’d take the bus into town and drink cheap cider in the Railway Tavern and play cribbage with the regulars. One of the younger ones, Gav, turned out to be a trainee of Dad’s, and one day when they were unblocking someone’s toilet Gav mentioned this eager little slut he knew who’d give you a blow job for a snakebite and a packet of salt-and-vinegar crisps. Whenever I script this nightmare scene I can’t decide on the moment when Gav identifies me. Does he say my name, not noticing the surname is the same as Dad’s? Or does he give a description of a vaguely emo girl in polka-dot tights, a Joy Division T-shirt and a too-short black velvet skirt? Anyway, Dad beat him to a bloody pulp and then came home and sat in silence drinking whiskey for hours. I don’t think anything could have been more heartbreaking for Dad, really. Drugs would have been a lot better.
In the hospice, all those years later, it was all fixed. Everything.
It was the Tuesday of the first week when I learned I was to become a big success. Emails were followed by phone calls, all about my Edinburgh show, and how it might translate to a TV series. There were meetings booked in my agent’s office for three weeks hence. I scheduled a haircut, and shopped online for silk tank tops and flattering jeans, late into those nights after cooking big fry-ups for Mum and watching old episodes of Real Housewives with her. My dad was so proud of me.
One of the producers, Tilda, had my phone number from a previous encounter (her company had got me into their office the previous year to pitch ideas). She rang me on my mobile on the Thursday morning, just before ten.
“I’m actually in a hospice car park,” I said.
“Oh gosh, how fascinating,” Tilda replied.
“It’s my dad,” I said.
Most people get unnerved when you say “hospice.” It’s almost a safe word in our society. It means “be gentle with me” and also “leave me alone.” But for Tilda I realized that it was just another topic of conversation. She started telling me all about the time she’d been a volunteer hospice visitor when she was at school. I knew I should have hung up and gone in to see Dad, but I was craven and desperate and so I joined in with her happy banter, telling her about the awkward schoolboy who popped in every day at around three thirty to offer to read to Dad, even though he was quite capable of reading to himself.
“There’s also someone with a zither,” I said. “A music therapist.”
“Oh my God. Wow.”
“Yeah, my dad said he’d literally rather die than be visited by a zither-playing music therapist.”
Which was true. It had been funny in context, but I resented Tilda when she guffawed. It didn’t stop me, though.
“They bring a drinks trolley around twice a day,” I told her. “Noon and after supper. It’s the leftover booze from all the dead people, you can tell.” It was true. Dusty bottles of Cointreau and Chartreuse, and the ancient Armagnac my dad always went for. “The woman who pushes it is hilarious,” I said. “Blue rinse, slippers, the works.”
Because of the phone call I was late in to visit Dad, and he seemed forlorn and expectant when I arrived. He’d been looking for me at ten, when I usually got there. I hadn’t even realized he’d noticed my timing, but of course he had.
“I thought maybe you weren’t coming, love,” he said, with loneliness in his eyes.
I hated myself then.
Later, Tilda phoned again. She wanted to know how I might see a second season.
“I’m actually walking down the corridor of the hospice right now,” I said, trying to sound cheery.
“I don’t need much detail,” she said. “Just something for the head of drama.”
I burbled about using the same cast to create a different version of what the character thought had happened, and I could tell Tilda wasn’t impressed. But she still wanted the rights to my original show because everyone else wanted them too. She was an obedient spaniel, and I was a dead pheasant she’d been instructed to bring back to the hunt.
Actually, I was right the first time. It was you I told about all this, but of course we talked about it later, once you and I were together. You knew Tilda’s husband, it turned out, and we had drinks with them in London, remember?
We were in a bright new bar in King’s Cross. Tilda twittered about this and that. Everything was “fascinating” to her. She was one of those types who makes other people talk much more than they want to about subjects that feel private.
“That’s right!” she said to me, after her husband had said something about their Iranian cleaner, who apparently didn’t iron his shirts very well. “Weren’t you once Richard’s maid?”
She literally said that.
Or maybe she didn’t. Later, when we were arguing about it, you claimed it had been more innocently meant, more delicately phrased.
“You were like a housekeeper, for his family?”
I agreed, she’d said that too. She kept pressing the point, how interesting it was that I’d used this as inspiration for my show, until I’d stopped giving what I thought were obvious social cues to change the subject and simply said, “Can you drop it, please? It’s not something we really like to talk about.”
And so you and I argued, as usual, when we got home. I’d been “rude” to her, when she’d simply meant well. She just wanted to know about me, you said. She was interested. You wondered why I couldn’t be as interested in other people as they were in me. Was I perhaps a little self-obsessed? Was I a narcissist?
I tried to tell you about the hospice, and how fake and desperate Tilda had been then, and how she’d only cared about trying to get the option her boss must have sent her for, and not at all about my dad, but you thought I was “reading too much into it.” Just like you always do.
* * *
We paid the taxi driver, and the cab turned and ground its way down the driveway, back toward the sea.
We hurried inside the Villa Rosa, to avoid the worst of the rain. We just meant to shelter in the reception hall before making our way up the stone staircase. It had been an OK evening, and I think you were in the mood for some makeup sex. We certainly had no intention of disturbing Isabella’s big dinner party.
At the back of the house the whirring stopped, gasped and then started again. Lights flickered. I thought I could hear the sound of something like swearing in Greek, and a thump that I imagined was Kostas kicking the generator.
“You are here.” It was Isabella, in a long, wine-colored gown, flushed and slightly vampiric.
We were standing by the chiffonier. The bundles of paper were now all gone, but the guest book was still there, its leather cover lit by flickering candlelight.
I realized there were candles everywhere.
“The rain,” you said, with a sweet smile and a little shrug.
“Sorry,” I added.
“Come,” she said, a grin slicing her face. “Have brandy with us.”
“I mean, we should really—” I began.
“Thank you,” you said. “That sounds nice.”
She took you by both hands and sort of danced you through the doors and into her private dining room. I followed, leaving wet footprints behind me.
A lavish, fetid smell hit me as soon as I entered the room. It wasn’t wholly unpleasant, but it was very strong.
The dapper little man was sitting at the table doing something with a ball of string. He looked up sharply, as if we were a couple of small insects he might like to lash with his tongue and then swallow whole.
“Kalispera,” he said, I thought slightly sarcastically, in an accent that sounded more French than Greek.
“Oh my God, Marcus, it’s them!”
It was the film producer’s wife, the one you’d said had been sick on the plane. Her accent was American, New York-ish. She sounded like someone who might be described as a “broad,” who would probably cackle when she laughed. Well, that’s what someone would think if they spoke to her on the phone. In appearance, she was more like a rare bird waiting to be put in the oven. Her body had clearly been well cared for, perhaps a little too much, and she sat with an aristocratic, haughty air. As she craned forward in her seat to stare at us I saw there was something carcass-like about her, as if she’d been starved and electrocuted and plucked. Over the carcass, she wore a delicate golden gown with a pearl choker and large diamond earrings.
“The sleepwalkers!” she said, clutching her throat, staring at us.
“Oh Debbie, don’t be such a drunk,” said her husband.
Isabella bit her lip and slightly rolled her eyes, as if she might laugh, or, possibly, cry.
“We’ve been having such a fun evening,” Isabella said, a little too fast, more to you than me. “Please, I would like you to meet Mr. Marcus Drake and his wife, Debbie.”
“Oh honey, we’re not married!” declared Debbie. “No pre-nup in the world is ever gonna make that happen.”
“Yeah,” said Marcus, grasping her bony shoulder. “We’re just fuck buddies.”
“For the last twenty years,” added Debbie.
Marcus was standing by the table, still in his yellow linen suit. I wondered what you were seeing, how much you were taking in. The impression the room was making on me was equally singular and kaleidoscopic, with its various pieces all swirling around.
There was Marcus’s large cigar, sticking out of his face like Pinocchio’s nose, creating some of the fetid smell. The cigar looked like a dick, as all cigars do, but there was no need for an objective correlative for Marcus’s penis, because it was completely visible through the thin fabric of his trousers. Did he know? The penis was semi-erect, like a small snake asleep in a thicket. Had I developed X-ray vision somehow? I could see it all. The stitched outline of his white y-fronts around his sleeping viper, a few fronds of pubic hair escaping here and there, even a tiny splatter of something that could have been mineral water or rain, but could equally have been semen.
I looked away.
The room was a mess. Remnants of a large meal lay everywhere. A gravy boat sat in the center of the oval dining table, still almost full, with a congealed layer of fat on the top. Underneath it was a white paper doily. There were grapes, cherries and blueberries strewn around the pale tablecloth as if they’d been part of some sort of game. Almost all of them were squashed and bleeding their juices into the fabric. There was a half-eaten bowl of pâté next to a large and lavish cheeseboard, which was the main source of the fetid smell. A Camembert had a cigar stub in it and only a blue cheese remained untouched.
Half-eaten rare steaks sat wetly on plates decorated with yellow flowers. On the table just in front of where Marcus was standing was an empty plate with small smears of blood on it.
In the center of the table was a large plastic cool-box, of the sort you’d take on a picnic. Marcus now gestured at it.
“Wanna steak, kiddoes? Brought ’em all the way from Milan.”
“There’s no fridge here due to the storm,” said Debbie. “Right, Isabella? We gotta eat them all before they go bad.”
Isabella shrugged charmingly. So much for her “vegetarian” hotel.
“Please,” she said, pushing a plate in front of you. On it was an untouched rare steak. “I will fetch a salad.”
“We’ve already eaten,” I said.
You glared at me.
“We ate quite lightly,” you said, picking up a knife and fork. “This looks amazing. Thank you.”
Isabella hissed at Christos to run and get a salad. Then she brought over a bottle of cognac and poured some in a crystal glass for you. She seemed to look around for someone who was not there—perhaps the glitter-boy, whom I had not seen since we’d entered the villa.
I picked up the only intact blueberry and rolled it in my fingers like a nipple. Isabella continued to fuss over you, producing a clean napkin in a silver ring and a small side-salad. No one offered me anything.
Isabella then went to the dapper little man and refreshed his glass.
