This Is All (35 page)

‘Dad,’ I said.

‘What?’

He took a bottle of whisky and set it on the worktop while he dried one of the glasses he had just washed.

‘I’m sorry.’ (Is it always so hard to say that simple word?)

Of all of life’s everyday experiences, I think sleep is the strangest, the weirdest, and the hardest to understand. I can see why I have to breathe and why I have to eat, and why I have to move my bowels and pee, and why sex is biologically necessary as well as the human function that gives me the most pleasure. I can even understand why I have to blow my nose and pick it sometimes, and why I have to vent private gases in the form of belches and farts, and why I have to wash my body and clean my teeth. With the beating of my heart I am comfortable. With thinking I have no problem. But sleep!

Why spend on average one third of our too-too-short lives comatose, flaked out, dead to the world, unconscious, footloose in dreamland? (
Perchance to dream – aye, there’s the rub
, as Hamlet says, though I don’t find dreaming a rub at all, I find it very entertaining and one of the reasons why I’ve come to enjoy sleep so much, but this is another topic requiring a disquisition all to itself.)

I know there are all sorts of high-powered biological-evolutionary-psycho-physico-medico-socio-emotional and no doubt spiritual reasons why we need sleep. I have read all about them in
Human Beings Explained
and though I’m much better informed than I was before I don’t feel I’m much the wiser, as I find at least half of the explanations about as clear as pea soup and not much more interesting. But what
HBE
doesn’t explain or even mention are the benefits I like most about sleep, which I shall therefore list here and might even dress up and send to the writers of
HBE
, who do seem to need some help in this matter. As:

Item
Sleep is good because it isn’t just a lovely rest for my body but is a rest from the many and horrible pressures of my life at the moment. It’s a rest from being pushed for exams, it’s a rest from expectations and exhortations to ‘do well’. It’s a rest from Dad, especially when Dad is in one of his off or brooding periods. (I’m quite sure he suffers from male PMT

No reply.

‘It was such a surprise. No warning. I wasn’t prepared.’

He brought the glass and the bottle and sat down opposite me. Good sign.

‘Give me time to get used to the idea. Okay?’

He poured himself a two-finger noggin. Bad sign. Once he got started he wouldn’t stop till he was beyond hope. How I detested and feared his binges. I suppose it’s because of them and the trouble and pain they’ve caused that I hate even mild drunkenness – the kind people call ‘having a good time’. Having a bad time in my language.

‘Did you phone Doris?’

‘I did.’

He drank half his noggin.

‘Is she coming?’ (She was the only one who could keep him sober.)

‘Told her not to.’

(Mild panic.) ‘Why?’

‘Thought you wouldn’t want to see her. We’ve had enough upset for one day.’

(Desperation.) ‘But I expect you’d rather be with her than not?’

‘Correct.’

He downed the second half.

Time to risk all. If I failed I’d be no worse off than if I did nothing.

I pushed my plate away, reached across the table and took his hands in mine. (As much to keep him from the bottle as out of affection.)

‘Dad, I know I’ve upset you. I know I’ve behaved badly. But will you do something for me?’

He looked at me for the first time since I’d come into the room.

‘Depends what it is.’

‘Go to Doris. Stay with her tonight. We can talk tomorrow.

far more than I suffer from female PMT, or maybe, come to think of it – and o lordy what a thought! – he’s suffering from the male menopause, in which case all the gods and their angels help us.) It’s a rest from having to be ‘on’ and looking right and satisfying various people, not least of which (whom?) is Ms M., and not excluding myself. It is also a rest from horrible world events.

Item
It’s a rest from Will. I know I shouldn’t want a rest from him, but I do sometimes. I feel guilty confessing this even to myself, but it’s hard work loving him, and maybe everyone needs a rest now and then from giving love and even from receiving it. In fact, I think I find receiving love even harder work than giving it. (I haven’t thought this thought before until this very second as I write it down. I can see this is such a big topic it requires a separate disquisition.)

Item
When I’m asleep I just ‘am’. I’m not trying to be anything else. And if my dreams are anything to go by, there’s an awful lot more of me and I’m far more weird than I know when I’m awake and am busy-busy being the me that I am when I’m conscious.

Item
In my opinion, when you dream you’re thinking in a way that’s different from awake thinking. What is the difference? I wish I knew. I mean, I wish I could work it out, but when I try I get stuck for words to describe what I think I think. Except that a dream is like thinking being acted out, with me as both the actor and the audience. A dream is not words. Sometimes there are no words at all, like in a silent movie. Sometimes there’s talking. But the dream itself isn’t words. I feel I’m actually doing whatever it is that’s happening – or is being done to me – while at the same time I’m observing what’s happening or is being done to me. This is thinking in action.

Thinking when I’m awake is more like reading a book. The ‘thinking’ is the words running along in lines and making

I’d rather be on my own. Mooch around. Sort myself out. Will you? For my sake.’

He sighed. Looked at the bottle, looked back at me. His hand wanted to reach for the whisky. I held it down.

He said, ‘That’s what this is really about, isn’t it?’

(Honesty is the best policy. If I lied, he’d know and I’d lose.) ‘You getting drunk. Yes.’

‘I feel like getting drunk.’

‘More than you feel like being with Doris?’

‘Maybe.’

‘If you’re going to marry her—’

‘I
am
going to marry her. Make no mistake.’

‘It won’t last long if you go on boozing.’

‘That’s none of your business.’

‘Doris won’t stand for it. You know that.’

Eyes down. No answer. (Good.)

‘And if you love her. The way you say you do. Don’t you think you owe it to her?’

He raised his head and stared at me with the defiant look of a child who won’t admit what everyone else knows is true.

‘Please, Dad … You told me to grow up. I can only do that if you treat me like a grownup and talk to me like a grownup.’

He pursed his lips and said nothing. I felt I was his mother rather than his teenage daughter and he my teenage son rather than my father.

‘Dad? … You’ll have to make a choice. You know that. These last few weeks you haven’t been drunk at all.’

He nodded, a reluctant admission. (Good.)

‘Because of Doris? Because of getting back together?’

Another nod. (Gooder.)

‘I’m glad. Honestly I am. You’ve no idea how much it hurts me, the times you’re – Well, maybe you have.’

‘I’m not that blind. I know.’

He cleared his throat and looked away. His hands started to sweat.

sentences and paragraphs and pages. I’m hearing them in my head. And though the words might make pictures in my mind, like watching a film or a play, the thinking itself is made of a flow of words. Or it starts as a sudden flash of an idea that ‘makes sense’ all at once without me ‘thinking it’, but then I have to think in words in order to understand it.

Item
But the weirdest thing about sleep is how it starts and how it finishes. I lie down to sleep and am conscious that I’m lying down. Then without knowing it, without being aware of the moment when it starts, I’m asleep. I’m asleep and don’t know I’m asleep. I’m not aware of myself. I just ‘am’. But then comes the moment when I ‘wake up’ and right away, instantly, I am myself again and know that I am me. Did the me I’m aware of when I’m awake go away while I was the me I am while I sleep? And how can this awake me be right there being me, all systems go, the very second that I wake up, as if it’s been waiting all the time I was asleep? Old Shakes calls sleep ‘the death of each day’s life’, and I’ve read that sleep has been called ‘the little death’. I sometimes wonder if the big death, our one and only Death, is like a Big Sleep, and if so, who I will be then, just as I know when I’m awake that I have an asleep me who is different from the me I am when I’m awake.

In my opinion, sleep is a great and wonderful mystery, a magic part of life.

Graceful people, graceful things

A simple black well-cut dress.

The way Izumi eats.

Jasmine tea in a snow-white cup with no handles and blue flowers on it.

A black cat stretched out along the top of a brick wall in the sunshine.

I sat back, releasing him. And waited. It was now or never.

He was silent. Hanging in the balance.

Then he stood up. Like he was lifting a weight off me. (Success!)

I heard myself say, quite without meaning to, ‘I love you, Dad. I love you both. Tell Doris I’m sorry. I’ll see you tomorrow.’

He stopped at the door. Turned. Looked at me. And said, ‘Doesn’t your old dad deserve a goodnight hug?’

‘Course!’ I said and embraced him.

When he’d gone, I went to my room, feeling like I’d just climbed a mountain, flopped onto my bed, held the egg in my hands, and let out a body-emptying sigh.

How good to be alone. No one to attend to. No one to please.

I’ve learned I need time on my own in my own space. I need it no matter how happy I am, no matter how much I love someone. One of the necessities of life. Will was like that too; one of the reasons we got on so well. We each needed times apart, times to ourselves in our own rooms. And silence then. Which, as I’ve told you, was something I recognised at Ms Martin’s. Silence. Silence as active as the sea. To swim into the depths of it, like exploring a vast, a limitless ocean. I couldn’t live without it.

I must have fallen asleep. The next thing I remember was a call from Will wanting to know what had happened since we parted earlier that day, which seemed like a week. I talked and talked, pouring it all out. Will was always a good listener. Another of the qualities that helped us get on so well.

And when I’d talked myself out, Will’s lovely quiet reassuring voice saying, ‘Want me to come over?’ and me saying, ‘Please. Yes please.’

Even though we didn’t get to sleep until after three, I was stark awake by six. There was too much going on inside me.

The long slim neck of a ballerina.

A person who listens attentively without interrupting mid-sentence.

Izumi when she says nothing in lessons for days and then comes up with one brilliant idea expressed in her Japanese English.

A candle flame in a dusk-dark room.

A new moon when it is barely more than an arc of white.

A bright full moon shining in a cloudless daytime sky.

Ms M. when she is teaching and suddenly recites one of her favourite poems to us from memory and then goes on with the lesson without any explanation.

Will when playing his oboe for me alone in Doris’s music room.

Will when drying himself after a shower.

A heron standing on one leg like a ballet dancer on a riverbank.

Music, music, music.

Will when he is fast asleep.

Actors when they take their bows after a not-so-good performance.

Trees on busy roadsides in cities.

A novel that ends in exactly the right way.

People who can be simple when everyone else is trying to be smart and clever.

An old man talking to a small child, not as a grownup nor as a child, but as an equal.

Old people waiting patiently for a bus in the cold.

A new loaf of brown granary bread with one slice cut off it.

My granddad when sitting silently by his father’s grave.

Will’s hand resting on my knee while he is absorbed in a book.

Will was dead to the world. I’ve never known anyone who fell asleep so quickly, or slept so soundly, or was so fresh as soon as he woke.

I got up and sat in my chair, wrapped in my dressing gown, alternating my brooding gaze between the somnolent body of my gorgeous Will, sprawled like a naked god, my Adonis, across my bed, and the mist-veiled street outside my window.

Cruising above the mist in the dawn sky were a pair of buzzards who lived in a wood not far away. I’d watched them often, surfing the air, sailing, gliding, wheeling slowly. I would only know they were there from their sharp high-pitched cries to each other, for though they were the largest birds in the area by far, they were hard to spot until they turned at exactly the right angle in their looping flight, when I could pick out the dark broad shape of their wings against the sky. They were like elusive old friends. And that morning, as I watched their aerial flirt I thought of them as Will and me, because they were always together and were always talking to each other and were always on their own and were so different from all the other birds – which sometimes mobbed them, especially those loud-mouthed pesky chavs, the magpies and jackdaws.

Meanwhile, I was broody with thoughts that couldn’t be expressed in straightforward words – loose images, like fugitive pieces from a jigsaw puzzle, and scraps of turbulent phrases, and crazy questions, accompanied by surges of feelings that came whirling through my body.

After a while these segments of thought and currents of feeling gathered into a mope, as if attracted by a magnet into a verbal forcefield.

I didn’t know then where my mopes come from and I do not know now. They arrive like gifts from nowhere, offered to me by someone unknown. (Why me, I ask, why me?) Sometimes they rise up inside me like fish from the deep, alive and fully formed. All I have to do is land them. They

A person who asks exactly the right question in exactly the right way at exactly the right time.

A half-used turquoise pencil lying on a blank page, just before I pick it up to write with it.