She leaves. Her heels on the corridor floor, receding.
He closes the door and leans against it. Shuts them.
‘We can’t do this here.’
The laugh comes out before I can catch it. Nervous, stupid.
He doesn’t laugh. His face is the colour of the corridor walls.
‘That woman,’ I say. ‘She looked at me.’
‘She looks at everyone. It’s her default setting.’
But his hands are in his pockets. Knuckles press through the fabric.
03:14. Red numbers on the phone on the carpet next to the bed, and I’ve been watching them for an hour, two, maybe more. The dark has the texture it only has between three and four in the morning, the hour not belonging to yesterday or tomorrow.
I can’t sleep.
This isn’t a thing that happens to me. I’m the person who falls asleep on buses, in bathtubs, in philosophy lectures I didn’t mean to enrol in. Ron used to come into my room at six in the morning and sayOi, clever one, wake up, your toast is burning, and I’d have slept through the smoke alarm. Sleep and I have an arrangement. Tonight my pulse is behind my eyes and in the tips of my fingers—the carpet pattern of his office floor, the colleague’s heels receding down the corridor, the noise I made that I cannot unremember.
I turn over, dark above me, room guessed from memory, then turn back. The phone is in my grip before I’ve decided:you awake—noquestion mark. Send.
03:16. The three dots start, stop, start again.
No.
Typed and sent in under ninety seconds at quarter past three in the morning—still awake. A pause. Then the three dots again.
Why.
Notare you okay, notwhat’s wrong, justwhy—the one-word question he uses when he wants you to do the work yourself.
can’t sleep, I type.
Delete.
my head is loud, I type.
Delete.
I am eighteen, and this is mortifying. I sit up against the headboard, pull my duvet over my knees, and press the call button before I can think about it for one more second.
It rings once.
‘Hello.’
‘Hi.’ My own voice is strange in the dark room, too loud, so I drop it.
Neither of us knows why we picked up.
‘Did I wake you,’ I say, for something to say.
‘You didn’t wake me.’
More silence. His breathing reaches across the line. Carpeted room, low ceiling, a bedroom, I know. Left side of the bed. On his back. Phone to the right ear, which is wrong for a left-handed man. His left hand is doing something. Somewhere.
‘Are you alright,’ he says eventually.
