The Sleeper (6 page)

‘Aha!’ he says, pointing at me from the doorway. ‘You are the famed sister! Loitering with wine! Cornish-woman come to work in the city, no?’

‘That’s right.’ I don’t want to know what she has been saying about me.

‘Enchanted to meet you,’ he says with a little bow. ‘I’m Allan.’

‘Hi, Allan.’ He is looking expectantly at me. She clearly has never mentioned my name. ‘Lara.’

He stretches out a long arm, and we shake hands with a strange formality.

‘Lara.’ He rolls the word around his mouth. ‘Lara. Sorry to whisk your sister away on your first night, Lara. Would you care to join us, Lara?’

I am tempted to accept, just to see her face.

‘No. Thank you, though. I’ve got lots to sort out. Have a good evening.’

‘We most certainly plan to.’

Allan bids me a polite good night as they leave. Olivia pretends I am not there as she sweeps past me and out on to the new-yet-dirty landing carpet.

I speak to Sam for half an hour, amazed that I have not yet been away from home for twenty-four hours. As we talk, I pace around the flat, into and out of the sitting room that is bright even when dark closes in, illuminated by the street lights outside, into the tiny kitchen where I help myself to an olive, a piece of pitta bread dipped in hummus and then, on my third circuit of the flat, a refill of wine.

‘What have you been doing, then?’ I ask, hating my patronising tone. Sam does not seem to notice it.

‘Oh, you know,’ he says. ‘Slept badly without you. Bed’s too big. No one to complain when I wrap myself in the duvet. It’s all no fun without you.’

‘Oh, I know,’ I tell him. ‘Same here. Me too.’

‘I’m rubbish on my own.’ He starts speaking quickly, his pent-up frustration released in a torrent. ‘I wish we weren’t doing this, Lara. It’s a mistake. I wish we’d laughed at it and called it a ridiculous idea. I wish we’d put ourselves, you and me, ahead of the money and everything else. I wish you were here, with me. This is all wrong.’

‘I know.’ I am not just saying this to make him feel better. Even though London has been exciting today, and being at work was stimulating and amazing, I suddenly wish I were in Falmouth, in our little house above the docks, with Sam. Sam makes me feel safe. He, and our home, suddenly look like a harbour in more ways than one. We could have struggled through without the money. ‘I’ll be back on Saturday,’ I remind him.

‘But it’s only Monday!’

‘It’s the end of Monday. And I’ll be back at the very start of Saturday. It’ll go quickly. You’ll get used to it. You can watch
Man v. Food
as much as you like! You can leave the loo seat up.’ I stop because I know how pitiful this sounds.

‘Yeah.’ Neither of us speaks for several seconds. ‘So,’ he starts at exactly the same time that I say: ‘And.’ We pause, awkwardly, each waiting for the other to continue.

‘Go on,’ Sam says. We both laugh, and the tension is gone.

‘I was just going to say, and at least you don’t have to live with Olivia. At least you’re in our home. Let’s go out for lunch on Saturday. To one of the nice pubs.’

‘Yes.’ He is suddenly decisive. I like it when that happens. ‘Yes, I’ll book a table at the Pandora, or the Ferryboat.’

These are the two pubs we love near Falmouth, both situated on the water. The Pandora Inn is on the banks of the Restronguet Creek; it is a thatched pub that burned down then miraculously reopened almost exactly as it had been to start with. It has a jetty which, on a sunny day, has sailing boats moored to it while the sailors call in for lunch, where children catch crabs and throw them into plastic buckets.

The Ferryboat, meanwhile, is situated on the Helford Estuary, in Frenchman’s Creek country, with a river beach, flat water, and boats moored for as far as you can see, while the eponymous ferryboat takes people back and forth across the water. Both of them are havens of tranquillity: they are places where nothing bad can happen. These are illusory, peaceful worlds, populated exclusively by people with money and security. Last time we went to the Ferryboat, I looked around at the families of upmarket beachgoers, at their healthy children expertly peeling prawns and drinking organic lemonade, and I tried to tell myself that everyone has sadnesses, that some of the adults would be hideously miserable in their marriages, that people would be having affairs and drinking too much and addicted to gambling, that lives would be on the verge of falling apart, families breaking up, businesses going bankrupt.

I convinced myself in the end, mainly by looking at Sam and me through the same eyes. To outsiders we must have looked perfect: a couple in their thirties having lunch together at a waterside pub. No one would have known, from the front we presented, that our third round of IVF had just failed, that we were trying to accept that we would never have a child of our own, that we were many thousands of pounds in debt, and that one of us was far more at peace with the idea of childlessness than the other.

Then, when I looked around, I caught the desperation at the corners of people’s eyes, their misery, the fake smiles they showed to one another. I saw people trying to text under the table, surreptitiously, but being foiled by the fact that there was no reception. It made me want to cry, and I wished I had kept the cynicism shut away.

‘That would be lovely,’ I say. ‘Whichever you like. That’s something to look forward to.’

‘How’s it been with Olivia?’ he asks, and I love the fact that he is the only person in the world, apart, perhaps, from Leon, who genuinely cares about this. ‘Is she giving you a hard time?’

I force a laugh. ‘Oh, nothing I can’t handle. We’ll get through it by avoiding each other. Yeah. The sisterly reconciliation I was hoping for. That’s not going to happen. She’s gone out tonight with a nice stringy man who was kind to me. It’s fine.’

‘Don’t take any of her crap, OK?’

‘I know.’

‘I love you, Lara. That’s all that matters, really, isn’t it? Everything else is detail.’

‘Yes. It is.’

I put the phone down. Then I have a shower, because I know that if I went to lounge in the bath I would use too much water, and Olivia would come home and find me there and complain. I tip the rest of the glass of wine down the sink, wash up carefully, then shut myself in my tiny room and sleep fitfully, jumping awake as soon as my sister’s key turns in the lock, listening to her crashing around the place. I smell the toast she makes and wish I could get up and join her.

She sobs, a sudden, ugly sound that she tries to stifle. I hear her ragged breathing. She is trying to keep it quiet. I check my clock: it is three in the morning. I don’t want to listen. I want to go back to sleep, but I am transfixed. Olivia is crying, harder and harder. It is wrenching, heartbreaking.

She would hate it if I went to her, so I don’t. I lie in bed, and I listen to her crying, and pretend to be asleep.

chapter five

October

Friday night at Paddington station is the only time I am genuinely and uncomplicatedly happy. I look forward to it all through the week, and when I step off the train at Truro I start looking forward to the journey back on Sunday. That truth makes me wince as I push through the crowds. It should not be this way, but it is.

The station is different on a Friday: the air is thick with expectation. People are going home from work and not coming back tomorrow; or they are heading away for the weekend, bags packed and ready for fun. I walk diagonally across the concourse, looking forward to seeing my friends.

Then I stop. For a second, I am convinced that someone is close behind me, so close they could reach out and touch me, wishing me harm. The malevolent presence is almost tangible: in fact, I think something did touch me, so gently it was barely there at all. I spin around, looking at the people in the crowd, scanning faces, but there is nothing. Nobody is even particularly close to me. Most people are walking in different directions, or standing still as I bustle past. Someone was there, though. Something was there.

It was not, I tell myself. Nobody was there. You are being ridiculous. This has happened several times. I feel something, eyes on me nearby, and I shiver, utterly convinced that someone is there and that something catastrophic is about to happen. I feel, at these moments, as if I am tightrope-walking like Philippe Petit between the towers, and wobbling.

I march straight to the first-class lounge, flash my ticket at a woman reading
Metro
, who smiles briefly at me, and go to join the rest of the waiting night-train passengers.

I am the first of my little gang, so I take a plastic bottle of fizzy water and a little packet of two biscuits, and sit down to wait. I am still shivering, despite the fact that nothing happened, and grab my phone to occupy myself.

I send Sam a text announcing my location, adding then deleting a rant about Olivia’s latest rudeness (dumping the broken microwave in my bedroom), and look at the news headlines which are appearing in cack-handed subtitles across the bottom of a muted TV showing the BBC news channel.

‘Lara,’ says Ellen, sitting next to me, tapping on her iPhone, tucking her hair behind her ears and rearranging something in the pocket of her overnight bag, all in one go. ‘Good evening. Happy Friday.’

‘Hi,’ I say, opening my biscuits, delighted to see her. ‘Good week?’

‘Fine. Yes thanks. You? How’s that sister of yours?’ She looks at me with narrowed eyes. As she has only had my word for it, she considers Olivia to be quite the witch. I constantly try to qualify my stories by adding things like ‘I’m sure if you asked her she’d have a completely different perspective’, but Ellen and Guy never care about that.

I look around quickly for Guy.

‘Oh, you know,’ I say.

‘Get your own place! I’m going to keep saying that until you do, you know. You’re a professional woman. You earn. You’re allowed to rent yourself a studio. It doesn’t have to be hideously expensive. You can take yourself out of that whole toxic relationship, you know.’

I sigh. Ellen, I have realised in the short time I have known her, says exactly what she thinks. She is right, I know it.

‘If I tell her I’m moving out, she’ll never let me forget it.’

She shrugs. ‘And? You live in her box room. She snubs you at every turn. She makes you feel like shit. You don’t have to be there. Rearrange your life.’

‘I know. I’ll think about it over the weekend.’

‘Talk to Sam about it. Properly. You know he’ll say the same as me.’

I look around, again, for the third member of the gang. Guy, Ellen and I are the only ones who do this every week, all the way from west Cornwall. He lives somewhere near Penzance, with a wife and teenage children. For the past two Friday nights the three of us have consumed too many gin and tonics in the lounge car on the way west.

‘Is Guy coming back tonight?’ I ask.

She nods. ‘He said he was. Who knows? Maybe his family have come up for a London weekend or something. You see? That’s another reason why you should totally leave Olivia’s place. You could get Sam up for a weekend if you had a studio. Just a tiny place in north London or something would do it. It would barely cost you a thing. Then he could come up and you could do the whole theatre-galleries-restaurant business.’

I decide against challenging Ellen’s definition of ‘barely costing a thing’.

‘Do you do that? Does Jeff come to London?’

She waves a dismissive, and perfectly manicured, hand at the very idea.

‘Oh Christ, no. Jeff hates London. And I don’t want to do that shit anyway. Been there, done it. A weekend expedition for me is a walk to the pub at Zennor. Not fighting through Leicester Square. I’m talking about you, Lara. You get the buzz from the London thing. You guys lived here. From everything you’ve said about Sam, I think he’d enjoy a top-of-the-range London weekend with all the frills.’

‘You know what? He would.’ I think about it. Sam’s birthday is at the end of July. That is too far away: perhaps I could do it for Christmas instead. I imagine us looking at the lights in Oxford Street, skating at Somerset House, sheltering from the biting cold in a cinema. We could stay in a lovely hotel. I resolve to sort it out, at once. ‘Thanks, Ellen. Good idea. We could do it in December.’

A First Great Western woman strides into the waiting room and says, ‘Just about ready for boarding, ladies and gents.’ Ellen and I stand up and join the general shuffle for the door. We nod at a few familiar faces belonging to older men in suits, and I smile at a woman I have never seen before, a woman in her late thirties wearing a short skirt, a brightly patterned coat and a flower hairclip. She has to be a designer or a writer. Ellen says those are the people she likes to meet in the lounge car, the ones who keep the train interesting.

We get to board at 10.30, though the train does not leave until just before midnight. A train guard I have not met before, a young, earnest woman with a blond ponytail, shows us to our compartments, which are both in carriage F, five doors apart. I unpack just enough, putting my pyjamas on the end of the bed and the toiletries I cannot get from the pack of train freebies beside the flap that covers the sink, then take my handbag and head straight for the lounge car.

Ellen is, somehow, already there, sitting back in one of the luxuriously large chairs, flicking through the free newspaper. Two men in suits are at the next table, and more people are coming through.

‘I took the liberty of ordering our usuals. They’re not quite ready yet, but when they are, ours will be first off the block.’

I settle down opposite her. ‘Lovely,’ I say. ‘Thanks, Ellen.’

‘You’re welcome. The first drink. The start of the weekend. I rarely drink in London. The train G and T is something special.’

‘Isn’t it? I drink most nights in London, now. I have to.’ I think of Olivia, of the arch war of words and behaviour that we have drifted into. We are bristling against one another constantly. I try to smooth things over every single day, and that inflames her more than anything else I could possibly do. Perhaps next week I will try to smooth things over by being more confrontational.