I don’t remember falling asleep, but I must have. One minute I was looking at the clock with bleary, headachy eyes, waiting for it to click over onto 4:44, the next minute I was blinking into Delilah’s furry face as she butted her whiskery nose against mine and tried to tell me it was time for breakfast. I groaned. My head ached worse than yesterday—although I wasn’t sure if it was my cheek or another hangover. The last gin and tonic was half full on my bedside table, beside the clock. I sniffed it and almost choked. It must have been two-thirds gin. What had I been thinking?
The clock said 6:04 and I calculated that meant I’d had less than an hour and a half’s sleep, but I was awake now, no point in trying to fight it. Instead, I got up, pulled back the curtain, and peered into the gray dawn and the thin fingers of sun that trickled into my basement window. The day felt cold and sour, and I shoved my feet into my slippers and shivered as I made my way down the hall to the thermostat, ready to override the automatic timer and start the heating for the day.
It was Saturday, so I didn’t have to work, but somehow the work involved in getting my mobile number assigned to a new phone and my bank cards reissued took up most of the day, and by the evening I was drunk with tiredness.
It felt as bad as the time I’d flown back from Thailand via LA—a series of red-eyes that left me wild with sleep deprivation and hopelessly disoriented. Somewhere over the Atlantic, I realized that I had gone beyond sleep, that I might as well give up. Back home, I fell into bed like falling into a well, plunging headlong into oblivion, and I slept for twenty-two hours, coming up groggy and stiff-limbed to find Judah banging at my door with the Sunday papers. But this time, my bed was no longer a refuge.
I had to get myself together before I left for this trip. It was an unmissable, unrepeatable opportunity to prove myself after ten years at the coalface of boring cut-and-paste journalism. This was my chance to show I could hack it—that I, like Rowan, could network and schmooze and get Velocity’s name in there with the high fliers. And Lord Bullmer, the owner of the Aurora Borealis, was a very high flier indeed, from what I’d gathered. Even 1 percent of his advertising budget could keep Velocity afloat for months, not to mention all the well-known names in travel and photography who would doubtless have been invited along on this maiden voyage, and whose bylines on our cover would look very nice indeed.
I wasn’t about to start hard selling Bullmer over dinner—nothing as crude and commercial as that. But if I could get his number on my contacts list and ensure that when I phoned him up, he took my call . . . well, it would go a long way to finally getting me that promotion.
As I ate supper, mechanically forking frozen pizza into my face until I felt too full to continue, I picked up where I’d left off with the press pack, but the words and pictures swam in front of my eyes, the adjectives blurring into one another: boutique . . . glittering . . . luxury . . . handcrafted . . . artisan . . .
I let the page drop with a yawn, then looked at my watch and realized it was past nine. I could go to bed, thank God. As I checked and rechecked the doors and locks, I reflected that the one silver lining to being so shattered was that it couldn’t possibly be a repeat of last night.
I was so tired that even if a burglar did come, I’d probably sleep right through it.
At 10:47, I realized I was wrong.
At 11:23, I started to cry, weakly and stupidly.
Was this it, then? Was I never going to sleep again?
I had to sleep. I had to. I’d had . . . I counted on my fingers, unable to do the maths in my head. What . . . less than four hours of sleep in the last three days.
I could taste sleep. I could feel it, just out of my reach. I had to sleep. I had to. I was going to go crazy if I didn’t sleep.
The tears were coming again—I didn’t even know what they were. Tears of frustration? Rage, at myself, at the burglar? Or just exhaustion?
I only knew that I couldn’t sleep—that it was dangling like an unkept promise just inches away from me. I felt like I was running towards a mirage that kept receding, slipping away faster and faster the more desperately I ran. Or that it was like a fish in water, something I had to catch and hold, that kept slipping through my fingers.
Oh God, I want to sleep. . . .
Delilah turned her head towards me, startled. Had I really said it aloud? I couldn’t even tell anymore. Christ, I was losing it.
A flash of a face—gleaming liquid eyes in the darkness.
I sat up, my heart pounding so hard that I could feel it in the back of my skull.
I had to get away from here.
I got up, stumbling, trancelike with exhaustion, and pushed my feet into my shoes, and my sleeves into my coat, over the top of my pajamas. Then I picked up my bag. If I couldn’t sleep, I’d walk. Somewhere. Anywhere. I’d try to exhaust myself into sleeping.
If sleep wouldn’t come to me, then I’d damn well hunt it down myself.
- CHAPTER 3 -
The streets at midnight weren’t empty, but they weren’t the same ones I trod every day on my way to work, either.