‘Kiddy fiddlers,’ a man in downward dog whispered to Thea.
‘Huh?’ It was only a few hours after Delores’s inaugural speech and Thea was contemplating her knees very closely.
‘The monks here. The monastery was closed down by the Catholic Church years ago. Kiddy fiddlers. Until then it was quite a nice spot. The monks made fudge.’
Thea wasn’t sure what the expected response would be to that, and they were now in cat pose so she went with a vague ‘Right?’
The monastery itself was up on the hill, not quite at one with the cutesy ducks-and-ice-cream vibe of the green below it where they were currently doing yoga. It was an eyeless, austere blot: a retinal detachment of a place with a bell tower bleeding rust down one wall.
‘Why did people want to visit that?’ she wondered aloud.
Everyone was attempting a back bend. Thea lay and looked at the sky. The man was more successful, his upside-down face turning purple as he gazed at her, a shark-tooth necklace dangling the wrong way up his nose.
‘Beats me,’ he wheezed. ‘Now, the lighthouse – round the other side of the island? That’s where I’d go.’
Maybe one day, Thea thought, people might come to take pictures of the Sleep Centre. It was an awkward cuckoo amongst the rest of the island’s structures, two huge white golf balls separated by a blocky middle bit.
‘Bit phallic, no?’ her mother had observed when Thea had described it to her via landline after breakfast. ‘And in which testicle do you live?’
Thea had smiled. ‘The left one. It’s called the Client Bubble. The other one is the Staff Bubble where the staff live and there are labs and everything.’
‘So, you live in the left testicle. Just making that clear.’
‘Yes, thank you, Mother.’
She hadn’t been able to see it properly when she’d arrived last night, but now, in the daylight, she could fully take in its clean, sci-fi strangeness. If there were any ghost monks floating around the place, she wondered what they would have made of the Centre: crossed themselves and muttered about the devil?
Meditation ended the session. She took a breath in and then let it out …
One …
Two …
Three …
A warm, wrapped chocolate was pushed into her hand. Thea opened her eyes and found the frizzy-haired woman with pencils in her hair from earlier sitting next to her. The woman pressed a finger to her lips and smiled, then she glanced around at everyone else with their eyes closed and carefully reached into her shoe once more, bringing out more chocolate for herself.
The Centre frowned upon caffeine, refined sugar, processed foods and alcohol.
Foot chocolate was still chocolate. Thea ate it and smiled back.
It was the walls.
Perhaps it was their fever-sheen gleam, or the way they swallowed noise, but after only her first day, Thea felt that they just might swallow her up too. One second there she’d be in her beige clothes, the next she would wander too close to the equally beige walls and they would liquidly close over her and she would be like fruit sinking in cream, never to be seen again.
It was late afternoon and she had half an hour to shower after her gym session. The shower had taken her precisely five minutes and now the walls of her room pressed in on her. She had lived on her own for years and had never experienced a problem with walls before. She liked them. The walls of her house had kept the world out and given her a cocoon in which she’d tried to burrow deep and sleep. Walls were fine.
She wandered into a corridor, smiling politely at the people she passed. Maybe that was it. Maybe it wasn’t the walls. Maybe it was the people. In her sleep-deprived experience, people were exhausting, with their egos and subtexts and hints and emotions and needs. She’d always tried to limit people. And now, here she was – surrounded by them.
And the walls.
Her steps quickened.
She had to get out. There was a lighthouse to see, after all, and out in the fields with the empty sky around her, perhaps she would have a chance to think.
Despite half expecting shouts and alarms to go off as soon as she set foot on the gravel, the doors opened without a sound and Thea stepped through. The air was the kind of cold that woke a person up, but politely, without the bite of winter just yet. It was exactly what she needed. There were a few people sitting on the green so she skirted it and took the uphill path that would lead her to the coast.
Her first session at Sleep School had taught her there were two stages of sleep. The first half of the night was ruled more by NREM sleep where the muscles relaxed, but then in the second half, it switched to a dominance of REM sleep, which locked the muscles and allowed the brain to safely dream.
If she’d taken anything away from the lesson, it was that she was obviously not getting enough REM sleep. She wasn’t sure she wanted to know what a lack of it could do to a person – maybe she’d skip that lecture.
Thea’s thought process was interrupted. She hadn’t really ever done much rambling and she was discovering that, as it was the middle of October, the polite cold was actually becoming pretty sharp, especially as she hadn’t been issued with a coat and was only wearing her thin cult clothes. Worse than that, nature, at that moment, had turned into a stony path, which she wasn’t sure her stupid soft-soled moccasins could handle.
Thea had to stop. She was more out of breath than she was going to admit and, so far, she hadn’t seen any sign of a lighthouse. The moccasins were not going to make it, she could feel sharp little stones gouging into the butter-soft leather with every step and she wasn’t keen on destroying them on her first day. She resolved to ask for outdoor shoes.
The path, however, had taken her somewhat closer to the monastery. A small field of scratchy-looking plants separated her from its stone walls, mottled with moss and pockmarked like diseased skin. Nasty things had happened here, and walls remembered.
She gazed up at the empty glassless windows, the wind blowing her hair in her face, so she wasn’t sure later, when she thought about it, whether the slight movement at one shadowy aperture had been her own hair, or something within. It flicked across her vision with the speed of a snake’s tongue.
Her hair.
Probably.
Or a bird.
Though, for the briefest second, she could have sworn she saw the pale blob of a face.