Kind of Cruel (14 page)

‘I’m glad you’re enjoying this, because there’s more. Dinah told Mrs Truscott that a good leader needs to be strong and fair. They’d learned about it in history the day before. Strong as in not giving in to pressure from idiots. Fair as in not breaking promises you made last week. On being told she was a rubbish head and an even worse human being, Mrs Truscott apparently said very little, apart from that she was going to ring us and speak to us about what had happened.’

‘Which she hasn’t. Has she? Did you check the messages?’

‘Of course she hasn’t! She’s putting it off, terrified of being told the same or worse by you.’ Luke gives me a stern look. ‘Which wouldn’t do any good, Amber, however true it might be. There’s no need for you to do anything, all right? I’ve dealt with it.’

I make a non-committal noise, unconvinced. Normally, things that have been dealt with by other people are precisely the ones in most urgent need of my interference.

‘Dinah and I made a deal,’ says Luke. ‘She’s going to apologise to Truscott first thing tomorrow. Hopefully Truscott won’t then feel the need to . . . do anything more. I
think
I also persuaded Dinah to ask if she can have a go at writing another play for the Christmas show, one a bit less—’

‘Fuck that!’ I’m full of chilli and wide awake, ready to fight all night. ‘What, a play about kittens and lambs cuddling each other, with nice little bows round their cute necks?’

‘You know, you said that in a really menacing way.’ Luke grins at me. ‘There’s no way I’m going to see
that
play. I’m scared. Those kittens and lambs, they’re evil.’

‘Dinah and Nonie’s days at that school are numbered.’ I’ve warned him before; he doesn’t think I mean it.

‘No, they’re not,’ he says, infuriatingly calm. ‘It’s a good school.’

It’s the school Sharon chose for them
. That’s not what Luke said, but it’s what I heard. ‘A good school with a spineless head,’ I say stubbornly. ‘As our leaving letter will make clear. Or maybe I’ll spray-paint it on her office door, so she can’t hide it and carry on pretending everyone loves her.’

‘Good plan.’ Luke nods. ‘Why don’t you really stick it to her by making a dog’s breakfast of the girls’ education? Could you speak any French or Spanish when you were eight? I couldn’t. Did you know there was a difference between simple and complex Chinese? I didn’t. Dinah and Nonie
do
. Nonie told me the other day that Jackson Pollock was an abstract expressionist artist, and what that meant.’

‘What did you tell the girls?’ I ask, reaching for the wine bottle. ‘About this afternoon, where I was.’

‘I said you had to go back to work for an urgent meeting. They didn’t believe me.’

‘I’m not surprised. As lies go, it’s a pretty boring one.’

‘So let’s hear the interesting truth,’ Luke says. ‘What happened?’

I fall easily into my usual pattern of telling him almost the whole story. I even tell him that Katharine Allen was murdered on Tuesday 2 November.

I say nothing about my driver awareness course, the one I didn’t attend, having taken place on the same day.

Fifteen minutes later Luke goes up to bed, and I am pitched into the stretch of evening I dread most: the hour between ten thirty and eleven thirty, when I’m left alone to face yet another sleepless night. Eighteen months ago, when I first stopped sleeping, I assumed that the surges of crushing panic that accompanied my insomnia would prove to be temporary: either I would learn to sleep again, or I’d get used to not sleeping – psychologically and emotionally, it would get easier. It hasn’t, and I no longer kid myself that it will. The censorious voice in my head starts up the second Luke kisses me goodnight and leaves the room.

This is when and how normal people go to bed. They go upstairs, without fear, and change into their pyjamas. They don’t break into a sweat, their hearts don’t beat as if they’re about to explode, they don’t suddenly find that they need to empty their bladders every ten minutes. They brush their teeth, yawn, roll into bed, maybe read a couple of pages of a book, eyelids drooping. Then they turn out the light and go to sleep. Why can’t you do that? What’s wrong with you?

Escalating exhaustion isn’t the worst thing about not sleeping, not by a long way. The loneliness is worse, and the distorted perception it brings with it. People often look surprised when I tell them this, shocked when I compare prolonged insomnia to solitary confinement in prison. Your mind starts to gnaw away at itself like a deranged rat, I explain helpfully. I’ve had plenty of time to work on an appropriate metaphor – I might as well use it, even if it does make whoever I’m talking to sidle away, remembering somewhere urgent they needed to be ten minutes ago.

Don’t think about how many minutes and seconds there are between now and six thirty tomorrow morning. Don’t go and sit in front of the clock in the dining room so that you can count them off as they pass.

I stay where I am – where Luke reluctantly left me, cross-legged on the sofa – and wrap my arms around myself for protection, but the feelings I’m hoping to ward off come anyway: piercing isolation, the usual guilt accompanied by the conviction that this anguish is my punishment, disgust at my own freakishness, terror that’s not attached to anything in particular, which makes it all the more frightening. As always, I want to beg Luke to come back downstairs. He won’t be asleep yet, won’t even be in bed. As always, I stop myself, try instead to concentrate on fighting the voice.

What if tonight’s worse? What if I don’t get any sleep at all, not even twenty minutes here and there? What if that becomes the new pattern? What if I get so tired I can’t do my job any more? We wouldn’t be able to pay the mortgage.

I haul myself up off the sofa and walk slowly to the dining room, concentrating on my footsteps, willing each one to take longer than it possibly can. I stop on the threshold, look at the clock. Ten thirty-five. I go back to the sofa in the lounge, lie down. Close my eyes.

I used to go to bed when Luke did, even knowing I wouldn’t sleep; that was our tactic at first. We were both sure it was the best way. Every night, we’d review our policy and agree on it all over again. It became a ritual. Luke would hand me whatever book was lying on my bedside table and say, ‘Do what you used to do. Read for a bit, then turn out the light, close your eyes, keep them closed, and see what happens. Even if you don’t sleep, you can lie still and relax, get a bit of rest. And if you do happen to fall asleep – well, you’re in the right place, aren’t you?’

‘Exactly,’ I’d say. My answers tended to be short. I was too afraid of what the night had in store for me by this point, with my head actually on the pillow, to hold up my end of a normal conversation. Luke once told me that I looked as if I was standing in front of a firing squad, except I was horizontal.

The policy changed once we spotted the glaring flaw in our plan: I was incapable of lying still. My agitated shuffling and wriggling kept waking Luke up. He didn’t mind; he would happily have rolled over and tuned back into whatever dream I’d interrupted, except that, desperate for company after too many dark hours of silent, churning misery, I would block his route back to sleep by snapping, ‘I’ve had my eyes closed for four hours, I’m not relaxed, and, as you might be able to tell, I’m still awake. What do you propose I do now?’

Luke was too wary of upsetting me to suggest I move into another room; after six months of wrecking his nights as well as my own, I suggested it myself. The previous owners of our house had turned the attic into a long, triangular guest bedroom with an en-suite shower room at one end, so I moved up there for a while. And then, three months ago, I decided enough was enough and moved out of that room too. Time to get tough with myself, I thought: someone who doesn’t sleep doesn’t deserve a bedroom.
If you want a bedroom, let’s see you earn it
. Since then, I’ve camped on various sofas – in the lounge, in Luke’s home office, in the girls’ playroom. Sometimes, if Luke’s made a fire, I lie down on the rug in front of the still-glowing coals, hoping the warmth might help to loosen the knots in my mind. Now and then I used to curl up on the floor beside Dinah’s bed, but Nonie put a stop to that. I told her there was no chance of my being able to fall asleep on her floor even for ten minutes, not with the light on all night. Her response left no room for negotiation: if I couldn’t sleep next to her bed, then I mustn’t sleep next to Dinah’s either. Both or neither – anything else wouldn’t be fair.

Once I dozed for half an hour in the bath, which I’d filled with cushions, and woke up with an agonising crick in my neck. Occasionally I go outside and try to lose consciousness in the car. I no longer own any pyjamas or nighties; I threw them all away a couple of months ago. Luke tried to talk me out of it, but I needed to do it. It was too depressing to see them every time I opened my wardrobe, sitting there in a smug, neatly folded, pastel-coloured pile.

I sit up, open my eyes. My eyelids hurt; I must have been pressing them shut too hard.

Do something useful. You’ve got a whole night to get through – another one. Do some ironing. Check the girls’ homework diaries.

Jo once told me I ought to make the most of what she called my ‘extra time’ at night, use it to accomplish something: learn a language, take up painting. I pretended to think it was a great suggestion, then cried for an hour after she’d left.

Do anything. Open the front door and start screaming.

I think of the letter from Social Services on the kitchen table, and my heart leaps. In no other circumstances would it be an appealing prospect, but at this precise moment it’s my best chance of not going mad. Reading it now will upset me exactly as much as reading it in the middle of the day would, which is what I want: a source of worry and misery that isn’t night-specific.

I go to the kitchen, sit down at the table – facing away from the time display on the microwave that would like to remind me that it’s ten thirty-eight – and pull the letter out of its envelope. A postcard falls out too, lands face-down – a typical Ingrid card, from some art gallery or other: a painting of a group of nuns sitting in a garden, under the trees. I pick it up, read it first. ‘Don’t be downcast,’ it says. ‘School fees threat
clearly
not in girls’ best interests. All grist to our mill. M has shot herself in foot! We will win!’

I sigh. Ingrid, our social worker, has been competing with Luke for the Counterfactual Optimism Cup for several months now, unchallenged by me. I’ve given up trying to force them both to face the truth, which is that we might or might not win and there’s no way of predicting which way it will go.

I read the formal letter. It tells me what I’d already worked out from Ingrid’s card: Marianne is threatening to stop paying the girls’ school fees if Luke and I are allowed to adopt them.
So what
?
We’ll pay the fees ourselves if we have to, somehow. I’ll forge myself a certificate and work nights as a hypnotherapist – might as well, since I’m awake anyway. I’ll charge people eight hundred and forty quid for the privilege of sharing their memories with me.

Dinah and Nonie love their school. How can that bitch Marianne threaten to deprive them of it, knowing what they’ve lost already? I guess the clue’s in her name – the ‘that bitch’ part.

If Luke were here, he would quote back to me my own words about the girls’ days at the school being numbered. He doesn’t understand that I have two categories: things I enjoy saying I hate and bitch about endlessly, and things I really hate, like Marianne, which I try not to think or talk about at all if I can help it.

Apart from the unexpected school fees detail, the letter from Social Services contains only the information Luke and I were expecting: Marianne has lodged an official objection. ‘I just don’t think it’s right – you’re not the girls’ parents,’ is the only thing she’s ever been willing to say to us on the subject. ‘They’re Sharon’s children, not yours.’ We have tried to point out that Dinah and Nonie will always be Sharon’s children whether or not Luke and I adopt them, and that not already being the parents of the children you’re hoping to adopt is actually a pre-requisite condition rather than a barrier, but all she does is look past us and shake her head mechanically and too fast, as if someone’s wound a key in her back.

I don’t think I would ever kill anyone or arrange to have someone killed – not unless Dinah’s or Nonie’s life was at stake – but I would love, love, love it if Marianne Lendrim dropped dead tomorrow. She needn’t wait that long, in fact; tonight would do just as well. I should probably feel guilty for wishing her out of existence, but I don’t. My job as Dinah and Nonie’s guardian is to deprive them of harmful things: first their only surviving grandparent, later alcohol, drugs, tattoos and piercings they’ll regret, gap years in unsafe countries.