"I never sleep. Not ever."
"Just resting your eyes?" She snuggles closer.
"Not even that." I'd rather stare blind at the night. At least that's natural. Just an absence of light. The darkness behind eyelids is another matter.
"Well, if you're not going to sleep, can you listen out for the cat." She yawned and stretched under the covers. "I think he's locked in. If you could-" She trailed off into another yawn.
I don't sleep. I have never slept.
The sounds of her breathing grow regular and deep. Outside the muted buzz and roar of traffic. A distant television muttering. Words always seem more important when you can't quite catch them.
They say that without sleep you first go mad. And then you die.
I've been lying to her all day. All week. For the three weeks since we met. That I don't sleep might have been the first true thing she has heard from me.
A door slams. Far off. I wonder about it. What possibilities it closed on.
Those whom the gods destroy, they first make mad. They say Euripides said that four hundred years before Christ drew breath. But it's a lie. People like to pin wise sayings on dead men; the longer dead the better. But some truths just bubble from the ground. Seep from our bones.
She mumbles, dreaming already. A word escapes her. "Euripides."
I don't sleep. I don't go mad. At least not entirely. I think it leaks away. I think it finds new homes in those around me.
When I was a baby I screamed. Not now and again, not when I was hungry, but any time I was awake. Twenty four and seven as they say.
My parents gave me up and I came to rest in St Agnes Children's Home. I think a little madness bubbled out of me there and lodged awhile in Sister Constance-Patience. That or the screaming just tipped her over some ledge she'd sat on those many years. Either way, on a November night in eighty-seven, peace returned to St Agnes. Sister Constance-Patience had sewed my lips together with a dozen careful stitches.
Susan tosses in her dream, tries to speak. "MmmMgg." She can't. I push her away and she claws the pillow.
They took the stitches out the next day, and huddled the Sister away to a closed sect on a remote Scottish isle. It has to be said though, it did the trick. No more screaming. They took the thread out and threw it on the fire, but I can still feel it there. I have to break it every time I speak.
I used to wonder about dreams. What it would be like to dream.
As I grew, I poisoned those around me, spilling insanity night by night as I lay and watched the darkness, or read by candle-stubs. I was a child in Bedlam. I grew amongst broken people, amid murder, depravity, the howling damned.
