Insomnia by Sarah Pinborough

Author:Sarah Pinborough [Pinborough, Sarah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2022-02-03T17:00:00+00:00

34

It’s gone two in the morning. The window glass is cold under my hands as I press up against it. My mouth open, I breathe a wide ‘O’ of condensation. How would I seem to someone down in the garden looking up? I press my body closer until I feel the cold through my shorts and T-shirt, and then turn my face to push one cheek against the window even though it hurts my whiplash. I want the chill to lift this haze of dread that fuels the tics that fill my nights.

Madness.

During the nights, I’m as worried about me as Robert and Phoebe are. At least I don’t have to think about Robert waking up. He’s fully out thanks to another NightNight. He’d asked me if I only wanted Chloe to go to university so the money would be gone and he couldn’t have his bar. What kind of woman does he think I am? What kind of husband is he?

And what kind of wife drugs her husband?

Who am I? Exhausted daytime Emma, crashing cars, shaking kids, paranoid and suspected of murder, and night-time Emma, carried along on a haze of odd behaviours that somehow reassure me. Is the real me stuck somewhere in between?

I imagine myself in the garden looking up – the me who’s always ready to take on the world, the me who knows exactly what she wants and how to get it. The one other people always turn to. Pull yourself together, that’s what she’d be saying down there, the me I used to be. Get a grip on this situation. Get to the bottom of it and move on. I’m fighting the overwhelming urge to go down to where the understairs cupboard is calling me to climb in. I have to break this cycle. I have to.

‘Two hundred and twenty-two one hundred and thirteen one hundred and fifty-five two hundred and eighteen …’

I don’t realise I’m whispering the numbers until I’m suddenly not. A shadow shifts at the end of the corridor to my right and I freeze. An intruder in the house. My children. No. Too small a shape. Watching me.

‘Will?’ Speaking aloud jars me back into the moment. The shadow retreats back into his room and my night haze falls away momentarily. It must be him. God, what must I have looked like, smearing myself against the window? I go after him.

His night light isn’t on, and the room, so cheerful in daylight, is soaked in ash-grey gloom, only a little moonlight creeping in from outside. It’s unusually tidy, his thick coloured pens and colouring pads all in their boxes and his toys in his trunk. Did Phoebe do it? Or Robert? Surely not Will, my little tornado, always leaving mess in his wake. Not so much this past week, I think sadly. I’m not the only one who’s not been myself recently.

He’s back in his bed, to all outward appearances fast asleep, but I can see his breathing is fast and his eyes are moving behind their lids.

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