the eyes. My mother used to warn me that the Sandman was on his way. When I was reluctant to settle down, she would say that she could hear his footsteps on the stairs. He was as bold as John O’Dreams was self-effacing, a threatening figure in my childhood imagination who threw stinging dust under the eyelids.
‘“Sleep offers us escape from grinding reality. It says, ‘that was then, this is now”. A balance evolves through sleep, an acknowledgement of the need for order. People say “sleep on it” when they mean that you need time to consider something, put a shape to it. That’s the kind of truism my new acquaintance Joan Douglas would utter: “sleep on it, things always seem different in the morning”. I’m sure that for most people, those with everyday anxieties, it does happen; they wake and smile, realising that in the light of day, things aren’t so bad after all.
‘Depriving someone of sleep is a form of punishment or torture; apart from the physical effects, it disorders their world and makes them crazy. But then we both knew that back in 1970; do you recall that we demonstrated outside an RUC barracks, protesting about the harsh treatment of political prisoners? We sprayed the reinforced concrete wall with yellow paint to signify police cowardice and ran before they could catch us.
‘I woke at two o’clock this morning and I immediately thought, some of us punish ourselves and some of us punish others. My father punished himself for losing his job by drinking his way to an early death. My mother punished him for never being the husband she aspired to by criticising every move he made. You punished yourself for what we did by becoming an exiled voluntary worker. I have delivered punishment on two fronts, pursuing retribution against myself for what I did with you and against Martin for loving me when I didn’t deserve to be loved.
‘One form of my punishment has been to wake at two every morning since the day I got married fifteen years ago. As my eyes open I look at the clock face and there it is, exactly two, as surely as if I had set the alarm. John O’Dreams and the Sandman linked arms and vanished from my life without warning on my wedding night. It is as if I knew that I wasn’t supposed to have the comfort and pleasure that Martin wanted to give me. The memory that lies always just beneath the surface was rising up in the silence of the night. Why should you sleep, it asked, why should you know warmth and companionship? So instead of the sanctuary I had hoped for, my marriage delivered me to bleak stretches of the night when I would lie and watch Martin sleeping. Contemplating another person sleep while you ache with tiredness becomes a kind of torture. There he was sailing a balmy sea of dreams while I stood shivering on a desolate shore. I knew all the little noises Martin made, the snuffles and sighs; I counted the number of times he turned in an hour and the pattern of his movements on the mattress. I tried copying his breathing, wondering if I could catch on to the shirt tails of his sleep and join it.
‘I could never make the night my friend. It pressed down on me, a heavy, alien blanket. I had intimate knowledge of all the phases of wakefulness. I could have written a thesis on them. First the sudden, dry-throated exit from sleep, eyes heavy but watchful, then the awareness of a rapid heartbeat, the twitch of tired limbs, the efforts to find a magic position that would lure slumbers back; left side, stomach, back, right side, foetal curl, left side again. As the minutes slid into hours there would be unsuccessful attempts to clear the mind, the random racing and crashing together of thoughts. Often in the thick darkness I would see you, your hair misty with smoke from the turf fire, jazzing on Finn’s grand piano or playing duets with him. Snatches of the songs you used to sing echoed in my head, particularly that rousing chorus from Brecht:
“So left, two three,
So left, two three,
To the task that we must do;
March on in the Workers’ United Front
For you are a worker too.”
‘I could hear the thump of your ankle boot as you kept time on the ancient carpet, dislodging years of dust: left, two three, left, two three. The march would go on and on, resounding along the years.
‘Sometimes I would be awake for three hours, sometimes four; on a very bad night, five. I learned the different qualities of darkness, from the impenetrable blackness of two AM through the thinning greyness that preceded dawn and finally the pale, lemony light that illuminated the striped curtains. In the summer months I regularly heard the day stealing in. A feeling of panic would take over as the first birds whistled or a milk float whined along the street; another episode of my life was about to begin and I had had no respite from the previous one. All order, all balance had vanished. Then I might cry from sheer frustration, tears of tension and self-pity, but very quiet tears so that Martin wouldn’t wake. My poor Martin. God knows what he made of it all, watching me mutate into a semi-zombie. He must have thought the woman he’d married was cursed with a schizoid personality.
‘On campus each day I would lock my office door at lunchtime and doze in my chair, the kind of sleep where you are half alert to voices and noises, where you twitch and jitter. My watch alarm would warn me when my time was up and I would come to, dazed and hot, eyes pricking. I took to not eating in the middle of the day because food made me more sluggish. My afternoons were spent sleep walking. I delivered lectures through an obscuring haze. It was as if I was inside a tank and my students were sitting on the other side of the scummy glass. I have no idea how I managed to keep going for so long. The students were kind and long-suffering. It is just as well that I had to resign when I did. No doubt in these days of mission statements and quality monitoring one of them would eventually have complained about me and I would have been inspected and found wanting, perhaps dismissed.
‘I have separated from Martin. I left him some months ago. I was mistaken if I hoped that giving him up would mean that I could sleep again. Deep down I believed that if I denied myself my husband, made a conscious sacrifice, some pity might be afforded me. My gesture of self-denial might be taken into account, weighed on unseen scales and go some way towards restoring the order I had helped to disrupt. But of course there is no unseen dispenser or order and justice – the responsibility for that lies within ourselves. And so I continue to wake at two. I suppose that the habit of fifteen years is hard to break. Returning to a single, friendless bed made no difference. It simply meant that I had no one to watch but myself, no breathing to listen to but my own.
‘I lied to the woman you will hear more about, Joan Douglas. She asked if I had tried sleeping tablets and I said I had. I knew that if I told the truth she would have encouraged me to get some; I would have had to listen to advice about breaking the pattern of insomnia. I’m sure that at some point she would have said, “You won’t know yourself once you’ve had a couple of unbroken nights”. Joan is one of those people who needs to think that every problem has a solution. I won’t allow myself sleeping tablets because I don’t deserve them. I deserve to lie awake and contemplate shadowy demons.
‘As the clock ticked this morning I imagined Joan lying asleep in her bed, snugly lulled by her own medication. She confessed that she is sometimes wakeful. Any wakefulness you experience will have skulking in its depths our shared memory, that icy hammer that shatters the warm layers of unconsciousness. I have no idea how the passage of time might have assisted you in reshaping that memory. I know that when I turn on my computer I will find exactly what I committed to it previously but the mind shifts and transforms, illuminating the past with the light of present experience. I only know that I can describe what happened in a certain place at a certain time.
‘We last saw each other in 1972. The annual letters we have exchanged since then have been paltry things, lists of domestic trivia. We have been unable to let each other go but we never allude to what we did. Our short notes have summarised the passing years; my teaching and marriage, my ill health, your involvement in crop planning and health promotion. Neither of us ever mentioned Finn until 1994 when you wrote that you’d heard from a cousin that he had been shot with two other men by a Protestant paramilitary. It was a pub shooting
