Zoe woke up to find she had a creature sitting on her chest. It was some kind of large bird, but it had human arms where its legs should have been, splayed-out palms instead of feet. The palms were pressing, increasingly hard, on her chest. She tried to scream and throw it off, but it was no good, she was trapped. She could see the girl sitting in the corner of the room, watching. The pressure intensified. She wondered if this time she wouldn’t survive and then suddenly she was crying out and her arms were thrashing and there was no bird-creature and no girl. She sat upright, gasping, and then jumped out of bed.
It was two in the morning and she was frantic, exhaustion pulling at her while she tried to resist, scared of what would happen if she gave in. She went into her living room and switched the light on; immediately, the room was reflected back at her in the window and she was facing a ghost of herself. She pressed her face against the window to make sure there was nothing outside: she made out the narrow walled area, the empty street, and felt calmer. She inspected the interiors of her various mugs, selected the least horrible, washed it out in the bathroom sink and poured herself some wine from the half-empty bottle in her room. There were no curtains or blinds in the living room, so she switched off the light, conscious of how visible she would be from the street if she left it on, and sat in the dark, drinking.
It was getting worse. Something was happening once or twice a week now, either the paralysis or sleepwalking. The dreams about the girl intensified, becoming more horrid, vivid and peculiar. Often, the girl was in the upstairs room, pacing frantically, but sometimes she would be in Zoe’s room, coming closer each night, once standing by her bed, next to her face. Her expression was becoming familiar; she looked intent, focused, determined.
The sleepwalking was taking her further and further away. She’d woken up in the living room and, once, on the landing, at the foot of the stairs. Last week, she’d woken up by the window in her bedroom, facing the garden, while the taps ran in the shower room – she must have got up and turned them on in her sleep.
She’d read about sleep disorders online, and she knew they were common and caused by stress. She didn’t feel stressed, but she hadn’t felt like herself for months. It could just be her state of mind. It was possible.
And yet, on Friday night, just before she’d got into bed, she felt something cold and damp under her bare feet. She stepped away, and noticed a faint stain on the oatmeal carpet. She’d looked up at the ceiling, but there was no evidence of a leak: the plaster was blank and smooth. She wondered if it was coming up through the floorboards but the next day it was gone and it didn’t reappear. For weeks, she’d had the uncanny sense that her things had moved when she wasn’t there – the papers on her desk never seemed to be where she left them.
And then there were the things she just couldn’t articulate at all: an unexplained sense of presence. Last Tuesday, she’d got back from work and was sure someone had been in the house during the day. There were traces of life that hadn’t been there that morning – a teaspoon in the sink, Eleanor’s laptop on the table, a long thick black hair on the kitchen worktop – and yet she’d heard Eleanor and Richard leave for work. The day Duncan sent her home from work early, she thought she saw something moving in her bedroom, some kind of figure. When she went downstairs, the room was empty. It had just been a shadow, a trick of the light.
She drank the wine and tried to shut her mind down before it started spiralling. But the conversation with Eleanor about engagements appeared unbidden and then it was too late: thoughts were breeding fast, multiplying uncontrollably. She found herself thinking about Adam. It was going wrong. It wasn’t supposed to be like this.
All she had wanted was that dizzy obsessive attraction she’d felt when she met him. Everyone said that feeling couldn’t last and she understood – it was altogether too much and she didn’t want to spend the rest of her life dissolved in a stupid haze, thinking about what Adam might be doing. In some ways, she longed to re-engage with the world. But it was so exciting, that feeling, so marvellously obliterative. When she talked to her friends about it, they subtly pushed for her to do something with it: try and oust Kathryn, turn it into something else. Every film she’d seen, book she’d read or conversation she’d had suggested that if someone made you feel that wonderful, you ought to be with them. But that meant neutering the feeling, with familiarity and gas bills and compromise, and then you had to promise never to feel that way about anyone ever again. It didn’t make any sense.
Her plan with Adam was to preserve the feeling as long as possible, and if it ended, move away, find someone else. But it wasn’t working out like that. She was starting to notice unwelcome things. She used to like hearing him talk about his art – it sounded profound and sexy. It was only recently she realized that either she didn’t properly listen or she didn’t understand him – it was as though he was just arranging words in pleasing patterns. She tried to engage with it, but on some level she found it boring. Sometimes she would say something in return and he would say, ‘That’s so interesting, Zoe,’ and she would be pleased, but they never really connected: they were just talking at each other. It shouldn’t matter, yet it became dissatisfying after a while. When they’d met, she’d thought he would encourage her to be more creative, but she found they talked about Adam’s hopes and ambitions a lot more than they talked about hers. She liked sex and she liked being in his flat more than in her own and she liked the way he touched her hair. She just wouldn’t particularly want to go on a long train journey with him.
When she said she didn’t want anything more from him, her friends who had partners looked concerned and consoling, as though she was deluding herself. She reacted by emphasizing how much the arrangement satisfied her – it wasn’t entirely true, but then whose relationship did satisfy them? It seemed an utter fiction that being in a relationship made you happy, but no one ever challenged it.
But the days alone in the shop were slowly becoming harder. Having to hoard and protect her small salary, obsessively counting and rearranging, just to get to the end of the week was exhausting, as was waking up in the middle of the night worrying about student debt. Then it would all be punctuated by ecstasy and intrigue, but it was impossible to know if that made it worthwhile. She reminded herself that it was her choice, but in certain lights, that made her feel worse; she had done something irrational and destructive, and it was all self-inflicted. Particularly in the unforgiving light of the small hours, when she worried that she had chosen the wrong thing.
*
When it ended, she was surprised at how quick it was. It was New Year’s Eve, the year before she’d moved to Litchfield road, and she’d been unpacking the shoebox on the bed, in the one-bedroom flat in Homerton she shared with Rob. She was resentful at having to go out. She disliked New Year’s Eve for the same reasons everyone else did – the expense and the crowds and the pressure – but it used to excite her too, in a childish, auspicious way. A whole year, full and heavy, suddenly extinguished, a new one in its place. A revolution in less than a second.
That year, she felt something else: a kind of dread that had become increasingly familiar. It was slowly intensifying, making itself known at birthdays and anniversaries, and it had started to infect everything: she could barely move without feeling it. This New Year’s Eve was the fifth she’d spent with Rob. And it would be their anniversary in March – there was something ill-fitting and wrong about that. Six years. It didn’t suit them.
Her dress didn’t look the way it had in her head, when she’d decided what to wear: maybe she’d put on weight or it just hadn’t been right in the first place. She opened the Ikea wardrobe and stared blankly at her clothes. The wardrobe was too small, like everything in the flat, and her clothes were compressed so tightly against Rob’s shirts that she couldn’t really see what was in there. She didn’t have the energy to look properly so she shut the door again. She took her new boots out of the box and eased her feet into them, the leather cold and stiff as card. They were too shiny and made her feel curiously raised. She might as well start breaking them in tonight.
Rob was pacing around the room, getting in her way. It was a tiny flat above a shop, which cost more than half their salaries, but talking about moving never went well, so they tried to contain themselves, jamming their things in cupboards. They couldn’t agree on where they would move to: Zoe didn’t want to move further out of London; Rob wanted a house with a garden. He had plans to make fortunes, involving mortgages, up-and-coming areas and transport links. He became an authority on Crossrail. The whole idea seemed absurd to Zoe, but she was beginning to find this sort of thing genuinely impossible. If one person wanted one thing and the other wanted something else, how did you choose, without one of you feeling resentful and diminished? She knew couples managed it all the time, fluidly and effortlessly, but she had no idea how.
Rob was hurrying her and she had to stop herself snapping at him. She had been trying so hard lately. She kept remembering something her brother had said, aged thirteen, about a friend he went camping with: ‘It’s not his fault he annoys me.’ It wasn’t Rob’s fault he annoyed her, but it was exhausting, clamping down on irritation all the time. It left no room for anything else and it made her feel constantly guilty.
She knew that he was trying too. They’d talked about how they needed to work harder at the relationship, and she was; she just couldn’t tell him that all her energy was going into not snapping at him. She was tired all the time – too tired to go to late-night exhibitions, have sex or cook a proper meal. Rob kept wanting to do things like go to the theatre and they did a couple of times, but it really fucked up your evening, the theatre – there was no time to eat or drink properly, so you ended up roaming around London at half past ten, ravenous and light-headed from interval wine, and then you’d eat some expensive and disappointing noodles. Better to stay at home and have pasta. At the same time, she loved the way he wanted to make their lives better; there was a resourcefulness about him she found very attractive. He was a good person. He would be a good person to marry. She tried to nurture this wave of fondness. She kissed his cheek and stroked his hair.
They were going to a party at Rob’s friend Simon’s house, just off Mare Street. Simon was a friend from Rob’s art foundation course, his gap year, the last frivolity he’d allowed himself before he started studying architecture. Simon now worked for a company that made things out of neon tubing and had produced work for artists Zoe had heard of. Zoe liked him, when she could be bothered.
She thought they were getting there too early – it was seven thirty and all she could think about was that they wouldn’t be able to go home for at least another five hours – but Rob insisted. Simon answered the door and gave Rob a lengthy and emotional hug, while Zoe stood awkwardly in the doorway. The house was a large Victorian terrace, shared with five or six others. Jess, Simon’s housemate, appeared in a green silk dress that didn’t fit properly, vertical creases scored across her chest. She had an imposingly square build, with a nose ring and tattoos, offset by long blonde hair and red lipstick. Zoe had never quite been sure about Jess and she couldn’t work out whether it was because Jess wasn’t sure about her – which one of them was manufacturing the doubt. Tonight though, she seemed strangely excited to see Zoe, squealing and kissing her. Zoe wondered if they were already drunk.
Very few people were there, and Zoe felt a private, righteous flare of anger: they were definitely too early. They stood around in the grubby kitchen, drinking warm prosecco out of plastic cups, and eating a chocolate cake that Jess had made. Zoe had no desire to eat cake at half past seven in the evening, but she did it anyway. Rob and Simon were conferring about something and kept disappearing. Other housemates and their boyfriends and girlfriends faded in and out, were introduced and forgotten.
Zoe felt Rob put his hand on her back. ‘Come here, I want to show you something.’ She let herself be dragged out of the kitchen and up the stairs. ‘What’s going on? Are we even allowed up here?’ ‘It’s fine, you’ll see.’ He led her right to the top of the house and opened the door into a small attic room, which Zoe guessed was Simon’s. It was fastidiously neat, and dark, apart from candles and a strand of fairy lights, so she supposed the room was part of the party, even though it was so far away from the kitchen and the living room. Rob shut the door behind them and suddenly she felt nervous. She thought of the first time she’d had sex, aged fourteen, in someone’s parents’ bedroom at a house party. She hadn’t felt entirely in control of what was happening, but embraced it hungrily anyway.
Something was wrong. Rob had started to cry and was telling her that he loved her. She told him that she loved him too, quizzically, reassuringly, but that made him cry even more and he started saying her name over and over again. Zoe looked at him, trying to read his face for clues, while he gulped words at her. She wondered if this was it for them, if this was how it was going to end. She felt a tiny shot of fear. He was staring at her intensely, searching her face for a reaction. She started to panic. She had no idea what she was supposed to do.
He said, ‘Right, OK,’ and crouched down on the floor in the corner, fiddling with something. There was a flash of white light and neon tubes lit up the corner of the room. It must be something Simon had made – why was Rob showing it to her? He was crying harder than ever. In large, plain, white capitals, it said, ‘MARRY ME’. But Simon wasn’t going out with anyone. She looked back at Rob and the realization came cold and quick: this was happening to her.
For a moment, they were suspended, standing, listening to Rob crying. It was not normal crying. He was making noises she hadn’t heard before, strangely high-pitched moans. She had no idea what to say; only what she couldn’t. Her panic threatened to edge into hysteria.
‘We need to go out,’ she told him, and took his hand and ran down the stairs, through the hall, only half aware of some kind of stir in the kitchen as she opened the front door. She ran down the road, towards Mare Street.
It was New Year’s Eve. It was fucking freezing. The wind was aggressive, litter was hurtling at their feet. The shops were shutting, the restaurants were full, the pubs would be charging for entry; they were locked out of the city. Zoe reeled around, wondering what was going to happen next, when she saw a sign glowing and familiar, and shouted, ‘Quick, run!’ She set off down the pavement, her new boots feeling heavy and stiff, concentrating on weaving between the crowds without letting them slow her down, not even turning round to check Rob was following her, half hoping he wasn’t. Then suddenly she saw a clear path ahead of her, pavement stretched out like a dirty grey ribbon, and she let go, accelerating until her legs felt long and loose and her chest burned and she was dancing, flying. The bus stop was empty. She prayed for someone to want to get off, or for the driver to see her and take pity on her; the bus slowed down teasingly before drawing away. She doubled over, heaving breath from the pit of her stomach. She realized Rob was standing next to her.
‘Sorry,’ she said, when she could speak. ‘I thought it would take us home.’
They sat next to each other on the narrow red bench. She could see people walking past them, but she was entirely submerged – they may as well have been in another country. Rob had started to cry again, in little involuntary yelps, like hiccups. She stared straight ahead, waiting for him to stop. ‘I love you,’ he kept saying, as if it would help.
Zoe leant back and felt the cold glass at the back of her head. Of course she had thought about marriage. People asked her about it all the time and Rob had made enough hints that it was what he wanted; she’d just ignored them. She had tried, of course she had, to imagine a life together, but it never felt real or close. She had been waiting for the vision to draw a little nearer but it had kept its distance. It was only in the past year that it dawned on her this might not change. She’d told Laura that she was terribly conflicted about their future, but she wasn’t really. She knew what the answer was. She just didn’t like it.
She clung to the least relevant thing. ‘I suppose Simon and Jess knew about this.’
‘Yeah. I got Simon to make the lettering.’
‘I can’t believe they were all in on it. That you would tell Jess before you told me.’
‘Well, it is their house, Zoe. I did have to tell them. And I wanted it to be on New Year’s because . . . Oh, never mind.’
She looked down. ‘It’s just so humiliating.’
‘You’re humiliated. Right.’
‘Why would you do this without asking me first?’
‘What do you mean, ask you first? That was me asking you! I can’t ask you if you want to marry me before I ask you to marry me!’
‘I mean – why did you have to ask like that, why didn’t we talk about it or – something? Why would you just spring it on me like that? In public?’
‘I didn’t think it was going to pan out like this, OK?’ Then his tone changed and his voice was small. ‘I thought it was romantic. I thought I was doing what I was supposed to do.’
They sat in silence a bit longer.
‘I meant it, Zoe. I want to get married. I know I kind of fucked things up tonight – it was probably a shock for you – but it is what I want.’
She looked down at her new boots. ‘I don’t feel ready.’
‘I don’t understand. How can you not be ready?’
‘Rob, I haven’t been particularly happy recently . . . I need more time to think.’
‘I know you don’t like your job, but that’s not anything to do with us. If you just wait till I’m earning a bit more, you can leave, I’ll support you. We can live wherever you like. You don’t have to take my name. You don’t have to do anything. Just say yes.’
She didn’t speak.
‘I’m going to be thirty soon, Zoe. It’s been six years.’
‘I’m only twenty-six!’
Did it have to end, because of this? The thought was agony. Maybe they could just put it away, not think about it, go back to how things were, wait for something to happen. But something was happening. And could she really sustain another year or two, testing each other out, getting on each other’s nerves, only to find themselves here again, older and more tired?
‘So, when do you think you will be ready?’
When she imagined being married, she was filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. How could she explain that? How do you tell someone that you love them, but that your love is insufficient? She imagined the two of them, paired up and isolated from the world. It would be so lonely.
His tone changed. ‘Do you really want to be on your own? Don’t you want children?’
He was trying to manipulate her now and she hated him, but at least that made it easier. She didn’t say anything.
‘For God’s sake, what is wrong with you?’
What was wrong with her? Wasn’t this what she was supposed to want? Wouldn’t she be desperate for this moment eventually, on the shelf, biological clock ticking? What made her think she was any different?
‘Zoe, we have to do something. It’s not working at the moment, you know it isn’t.’ He gripped her arm. ‘Please. Let’s just do it. Let’s just be together and be happy.’
Suddenly, it was unbearable. ‘I’ve got to go, Rob; I’m sorry.’ She pulled away from him and ran off down the street. She didn’t know it was over; she felt it, like a change in weather. She felt a detached sense of curiosity: so this is how it ends. She realized that somehow, maybe even from the day they’d met, she’d been waiting for the end.
Her run turned into a fast walk. She took the first turning she came to and the next, in case he decided to come after her. She wanted to lose him. She had a memory of being five or six, telling her mum she was leaving home, packing a bag, even opening the front door, all the time her mum calmly asking her to stay. It was a performance; they both knew that. Her mum would never let her go too far.
She could sense Rob just behind her and she was furious – she wanted to leave, why wouldn’t he let her? She’d seen a way out, for both of them, and she was following it – please, please don’t take this away from me. But when she turned round, he wasn’t there.