Page 53 of Insomnia

Phoebe is my sister, the rational part of my brain thinks. We love each other.Do you really?the whispering voice immediately counters.Does she love you? Why would she? You married a boy she brought home—the first boy she’d ever brought home and you’ve never known her to have another. Isn’t that weird? Isn’t she weird? She turns up and your life is now going down the drain and she’s always, always there. And someone told Will what happened. Someone wanted to scare him.

Maybe you’re right. Maybe Phoebe did go mad at forty. Maybe she’s the one who’s like our mother.

I head back into the corridor, still muttering the numbers, and the song starts playing in my head. So much noise, making it so hard to think. Numbers. Lyrics. Mum. Phoebe. Me. This old house makes the past and present feel more closely entwined. I pause at the top of the stairs. I’ve already been down there. Pacing and muttering.Nothing like her, I’m nothing like her.

The banister post is round at the top, old-fashioned, just like the one back then. “Look, look,” I whisper, “A candle, a book and a bell.” Did our mother pause here in her house that night? Like this? I feel her dry hand tight on my wrist and the glossed wood under my fingertips and our hands become one. I wonder if I’ll see myself on the stairs if I look back down. I close my eyes and breathe deeply as the past threatens to drown me with memories in the dark.

We come in through the back door, Phoebe rattling the loose handle to get it to open where it sticks, and the daylight that peers in, curious, is as brief as the fresh air I manage a gulp of before Phoebe closes the door again and we’re plunged into the stinky gloom of the house we know as home.

I look at the floor. A half-hearted attempt has been made to clean up the mess of broken eggs, but the tea towel she’s used to scoop up the shells and their rotten contents has been dumped in the middle of the rest of the clutter on the kitchen countertops. Phoebe tries to wash up when she can, but there’s always more, and a lot of the space is taken up with half-empty wine bottles or other spirits, spilled coffee, and random items Mum’s taken out of the cupboards and not put back.

One whole end of the surface holds a collection of milk bottles from when the milkman used to come. Me and Phoebe aren’t allowed to touch those. Mummy says if we touch one, they’ll all fall downand smash. Then we’ll have glass in our feet and won’t be able to go to school. I don’t understand why she doesn’t give them back to the milkman and then he might start bringing milk again.

Phoebe tugs at my sleeve and points at the kitchen table. The fortieth birthday card we made—HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUMMY—is sitting in the middle, warped with dried egg, but displayed. We look at it, hopeful. This is the kind of thing Phoebe calls “a good sign.”

“Mummy?” she says. “We’re home, Mummy.”

There’s some noise in the hallway and I go first. To me, the events of the morning are further away than they are to Phoebe. She’s eight. I think time is different when you get older. Anyway, Mummy picked our card up. She loves us. Maybe today is going to be a good day. Or at least a better day.

The floorboards creak under my feet and I frown a bit, my confidence wavering. Mummy’s crouching in the hallway by the under-stairs cupboard, her back to us. The door is open and she’s viciously scratching something into the inside of the door. Her head tics, erratic little movements, as she mutters fast under her breath.

“One hundred and thirteen one hundred and fifty-five two hundred and eighteen...”

Suddenly aware of us, she stands, spinning around to cover the inside of the open door, and drops the school protractor she’s been gripping. She glares at me with wide, sleepless eyes, and even though I know Phoebe is only a few steps behind me, it feels like there’s an ocean between us.

Mummy lunges forward and for the second time that day her fingers are digging into my arms, but this time instead of shaking me, she pulls me toward her. No, not toward her. She’s dragging me to the cupboard.

“No, Mummy, please no!”

Darkness yawns in front of me. Hungry. And then it swallows me whole.

I’m in there a long time.

It’s so dark and I’m pressed up against the wall, my knees under my chin. From somewhere far away—somewhereoutside—I can hear a distant rumble of thunder. My face itches from tears and sweat and my breath comes in short, fast pants. The long hours since getting home from school have turned into an eternity, and even though I know the cupboard is small, all I can see is an endless ocean of black that makes everything shadowy when I shut my eyes. I don’t know what I’m more afraid of, monsters that might be living in here, or Mummy out there. I can hear her in the hallway, pacing up and down, up and down. She goes upstairs. She comes back down. Sometimes she pauses, right by the door, and I pull back tighter into myself.

I can hear her muttering.

“One hundred and thirteen one hundred and fifty-five two hundred and eighteen...”

Something thuds heavily, maybe a bottle dropping on the carpet, and the muttering stops. There’s a long moment of silence and I hold my breath, and then there’s the sudden loudness of the bolt moving and the cupboard door opens.

Mummy is crouching in the doorway, her smile too wide behind the ragged curtain of her hair. Behind her, the house is grainy dark. It’s the dead of night. Neither of us moves, and the sound of the storm outside is loud, as if a door is open somewhere. A slight breeze confirms it. The back door maybe.

A flash of lightning illuminates Mummy. She’s soaking wet. Her eyes are odd. Empty. Looking at me but not seeing me. Looking at somethingpastme. I think she’s more frightening this way. More “funny Mummy.” I almost want her to shake me again so I know this is my Mummy.

Her head tilts to one side and there’s a long pause before she speaks.

“Ah, there you are.” Her voice is soft. Calm.

She stands up and pushes the door closed once more, drowning me again in darkness, and I bite my hand so I don’t cry out or scream and call for her to come back, to not leave me in here forever. The hallway creaks as she walks away.

“Back up to bed,” I hear her say before the stairs I’m buried under start to groan with her tread. As she moves over me, I wriggle toward the door, the blackness in here now too much to bear, and kick it. It swings open easily. She didn’t relock it. As I crawl out, my heart threatening to burst from my chest in fear that Mummy will somehow come out of the cupboard and grab me back in and we’ll be lost in there forever, I see the scratchings on the door. Mummy’s special numbers.

1 1 3 1 5 5 2 1 8 2 2 2 1 1 3 1 5

No monster grabs me to pull me back, and I drink in the fresh rain-damp air as more thunder rolls angrily overhead. I straighten up, my school uniform creased and my legs sore. There’s an empty wine bottle on the dirty carpet. Farther along, an abandoned glass. I look back at the kitchen and see that mine and Phoebe’s birthday card is on the floor again.

Phoebe. Has Mummy gone up to see Phoebe? The thought fills me with a dread that I’m too young to understand, something built deep into my DNA, a survival warning signal. Despite my fear, despite wanting to run out into the storm to find the nice lady and tell her Mummy is being funny again, like Phoebe did that time before, I force myself toward the stairs. Phoebe is up there. I need to get to Phoebe.

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