Sleepless

He thumped a card down onto the desk in front of her, wrinkling his nose at it as if it smelled.

‘They say I also got to get feedback from you. The guests. You gotta fill in that form. About your stay. Apparently the last ones said I could offer a’ – he stopped and shuffled through the other cards he had in his hand – ‘more sophisticated range of amenities. I mean, what else do they want? They gotta kettle and them little fancy soaps … Anyway. They made me watch a video about it. So, there you go.’ He passed her a snapped-off chunk of chocolate.

Then he stuffed some dry leaves into her hand, ‘Couldn’t get rose petals. Sorry.’

Thea studied the melting, leaf-studded chocolate in her palm.

‘Umm … I think you’re meant to put those on the bed? The chocolate and the … petals?’ she managed.

He stared at her with his arms crossed, a face of stone.

‘I know.’

The next afternoon Thea stood on the deserted dock, feeling queasy.

A seagull screeched above her and she felt the sound in her teeth. There was a rhythmic slapping of waves against concrete and the sky was the colour of stewed tea.

Harriet had said she could opt out after Phase One, no matter what. And Phase One was just orientation, a “getting to know you”, probably some sleep tracking and questionnaires. This was the social media age! Everyone was now accountable for everything! What could they do? The worst was that any information gained on her sleep would then be passed on to some big data company and for years afterwards businesses would try to sell her mattresses and herbal tablets any time she searched the web.

So, all she had to do was buckle up, get through a few weeks and then go home, dignity, data and brain intact.

The queasiness remained.

That morning she had filled in her accommodation feedback form with the comment “Couldn’t have asked for more”. She had found herself kind of admiring the pub owner for his resistance to hospitality even though that was his actual business.

A plate with a bacon roll on it had appeared by her elbow at breakfast. She had glanced up at him as he had left the room, but his face remained a mask of pitted granite. Maybe the feedback card had softened him up. There had even been a sprinkling of flour on top of the roll – at least she had hoped it was flour and not just more dandruff. She had eaten it anyway. It had smelled delicious and he had been right, the breakfast provided had been kitty litter.

Her thoughts about bacon and anti-social pub owners were interrupted by the confident tap-tapping of someone walking determinedly in heels towards her.

It could only be Harriet. She was the only woman who would wear stilettos to get on a boat.

‘Thea! Early. Nice to see. Raring to go?’

Harriet flicked the end of her scarf back over her shoulder. Thea tugged at her bobble hat and nudged the hem of her jeans over her old trainers, feeling dowdy in comparison, a bedraggled stray next to a sleek house cat.

‘Is it just me?’

‘Oh … yes. You’re the last, you see. We had to wait for the weather to clear to make the crossing again for you. Not that I’ll overwhelm you with introductions tonight. Plenty of time for that.’

Thea felt she should fill the pause.

‘What did you do before—?’

But Harriet interrupted her, standing on tiptoe to wave.

‘Boat’s here!’

Thea gingerly stepped on, steadied by the skipper, trying to avoid the slippery bits while Harriet strode through as if she was on a New York catwalk and immediately joined the skipper at the front, which was sectioned off by glass; whether this was to intentionally discourage any more questions, Thea couldn’t be sure.

She kept her eyes on the mainland receding behind her. The queasiness settled as sour bile in her throat. She watched as the coastline became a blocky shape, and then finally impressionist splodges of muted colour. Thea was leaving behind all of that; instead she was out here, in the grey waves, free, released from job, routine, her whole life, such as it was.

‘You okay, Thea?’ Harriet called back towards her.

‘Fine!’

‘Because if you’re seasick—’

‘No! I’m fine!’

She was fine, even though she’d never learned to swim, had never even put her head under the water in the bath and the boat rocked around alarmingly like a fairground ride – except those rides went through safety checks, didn’t they? The sea didn’t.

Not for the first time, she cursed her mother for spending hours and hours trying to save the oceans but no time at all teaching her own daughter how to swim.

What had Harriet said? Think of it like a luxury hotel stay.

Okay, so this was a luxury hotel stay. She could go for bracing coastal walks along the clifftops, read books by an open fire, meet new people … meet some new people … okay only a few new people. She wasn’t great at people. A holiday.

As a lab rat.

‘Look!’ Harriet pointed ahead of them.

Out of the gloom rose sheer cliff walls, black and slick, the waves whirling and churning against them. Dragons. The cliffs looked as if they should have dragons perched on top of them, waiting for one to shrug its wings open and send a scorching arc of fire across the rocks. As the boat got closer, these cliffs blocked out the sky and the world turned to shadow.

Suddenly Thea felt very small.

Chapter 8

‘Good morning, Thea Mackenzie.’

Thea stuck her head out from under the duvet and rubbed her eyes, looking for whoever had just come in. ‘Huh? Good morn—’

‘Your schedule for today is being displayed.’

Thea was talking to the room. She blinked sleepily and her schedule appeared on one wall.

8 a.m.: breakfast, cafeteria, main hall

9 a.m.: welcome address

9.10 a.m.: yoga and meditation, lawn

10 a.m.: health assessment, lab 7

Noon: lunch, cafeteria, main hall

1 p.m.: Sleep School, lecture theatre

3 p.m.: break, free time

3.30 p.m.: cardio, gym studio 2

4.30 p.m.: shower, own room

5 p.m.: health assessment, lab 4

6 p.m.: dinner, cafeteria, main hall

7 p.m.: fitting of sleep monitoring equipment, own room

10 p.m.: recommended wind-down time

Sleep School sounded horrendous. For some reason, Thea could only imagine this being a room full of prone bodies and the sound of chanting as someone yelled ‘SLEEP!’ in the face of anyone who dared to open their eyes.

She’d probably got about one hour of sleep. She couldn’t blame the room: there was a bed so plush it threatened to swallow her whole as soon as she got into it. She ran a hand over the surface of her bedside table, almost expecting her fingers to sink in, so glossy was the material – too glossy – it was starting to remind her of a sick, sweaty fever sheen. The only thing in the space that wasn’t cream or white was Thea. She had her penguin pyjamas to thank for that.

As she cleaned her teeth after showering, a towel wrapped around her, she wandered over to the door. Last night, Harriet had closed the door after her as she’d left. Thea hadn’t thought about it since. But, looking at it now, the edges of it merely a pencil sketch, she couldn’t even work out how it opened – let alone try to lock the damn thing. As she was peering closely at it, it slid open smoothly and Thea found herself nearly nose-to-nose with Harriet.

Harriet stepped back sharply, her startled expression quickly replaced once again by a smile.

‘Ah, good morning, Thea. I see you are already up and awake. Perhaps … put on some clothes?’ She held out a stack of neatly folded material.

Thea reddened and clutched at her wet towel.

‘I was trying to work out how the door opened.’

‘There is a biometric sensor – just there.’ Harriet pointed to a spot on the wall that looked exactly the same as the rest. ‘Just look at it and the door opens.’

‘How does it lock?’

‘Lock?’ A crease appeared between Harriet’s perfectly symmetrical brows. ‘A lock isn’t needed, Thea. The same biometric device is on the outside of your door. Only those with clearance have access to your room. Completely safe.’

The smile intensified.

‘Now, the clothes?’

There was a flowing tunic top and trousers in a soft, stretchy material accompanied by a pair of fur-lined moccasins. Her mother would feel vindicated, Thea thought, because there was no way around it – they were cult clothes.

Harriet led her to a cathedral. This cathedral, like every cathedral before it, was built to stun the masses into greater belief. Thea did feel a bit stunned: it was probably all the glossy whiteness everywhere. A glass roof curved over them.

A reverential hush of voices swelled into the space, which consisted of the main hall and the cafeteria. The Sleep Centre was comprised of two large spherical buildings, or “bubbles” as Harriet called them, and currently Thea was in the Client Bubble. Three storeys high, the upper floors were accessed by a gleaming stainless-steel lift in the middle, walkways radiating out from it to the higher floors like rays from the sun.

Out of habit, Thea avoided eye contact as she made her way through the tables.

‘How many people are on this trial?’ she asked Harriet.

‘Fifty.’

And there they all were, choosing food and chatting to each other. It was already making the small of her back sweat. When talking to new people, Thea became an overinflated balloon, stretching out, out, out, until her rubber couldn’t stretch anymore and eventually burst, scattering disjointed small talk. Luckily, Harriet guided her to a table on their own. It hadn’t escaped Thea that Harriet still got to wear her own clothes: today a silky jumpsuit, the kind that didn’t suit Thea because it highlighted the fact that she had too little leg – and too much middle.

‘Until the system gets to know you and your dietary needs, you have a pretty standard breakfast. Hope that’s okay?’

The plate of food was so wholesomely healthy it looked as if it should have been artfully placed next to a bunch of flowers, or a sunset, and then posted on Instagram. Usually, Thea sploshed milk on some muesli in a Tupperware container when she arrived at work. The most important thing in her mornings was to make sure she got out of the house on time, preferably washed, as she was always still half-asleep. Food was way down on her list of morning priorities.

‘So? Excited for today?’ Harriet stirred at some purple sludge in her glass. She didn’t wait for a response. ‘I’ll be with you for most of it, unless you’re having a health assessment, or you’re in a lecture. You’re going to love Sleep School: so informative. Sleep is fascinating, don’t you think?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t get much of it.’ The drink in front of her looked like coffee. She sipped at it. It was definitely not coffee.

‘Made from mushrooms! Amazingly good for you. You’ll get used to it. I swear I’ve lost about a stone working here and I just feel so energized. All the time. It’s crazy!’

It was as if someone had turned Harriet up a few notches. Her smile was wider, her voice chummier, her eyes warmer. She was altogether more … everything … compared to the woman who had come to her house a month or so ago. Maybe someone had slipped something into her sludge. Maybe they all had drugs in their food and, in six weeks’ time, Thea would wake up to find this had all been a mushroom dream.

‘Fellow pioneers!’

A voice rang out. People looked around, confused, trying to locate the person speaking, until others who had worked it out nudged them and pointed upwards.

There on one of the second-floor walkways, a woman stood looking down on them. She had incredibly long, incredibly straight, incredibly red hair.

‘Is that Moses Ing?’ someone whispered loudly near Thea. ‘Thought he was a man?’

Harriet frowned at the whisperer, a young woman with a pencil securing her dark, frizzy hair who smiled widely at Harriet and gave Thea a little wave. The woman on the walkway continued.

‘My name is Delores. On behalf of Ing Enterprises I welcome you here today and wish you a happy and healthy stay with us. We are on the cusp of an exciting future.’

Harriet looked up at Delores with the bright-eyed face of someone who has seen God.

‘A human being sleeps for roughly eight hours every night. Until very recently, those eight hours have been an unknowable land for scientists. Technology is now allowing us to take a peek at that land, to map and explore it. Getting you to sleep will not be a problem; I guarantee it. Give us a week or so to allow the systems to get to know you and we will then be able to facilitate you into the best sleep of your life. But better than that, we will then be able to help you start building the person you have always wanted to be. How? Through the untapped power of your sleep, and your dreams. You lovely people here before me’ – she gestured down to the upturned faces below her, smiling warmly – ‘you are the beginning of something that will help humanity take the next evolutionary leap.’

Harriet started to clap enthusiastically, and others joined in. The way she felt today, Thea would not be able to help evolution make a leap so much as a stumbling sprawl. Her eyes felt as if they’d been put in the oven for too long.

‘One last bit of housekeeping before I leave you all to it,’ Delores said. ‘Those of you who have been here for a few days already know that, for clients, there is no internet coverage nor mobile signal.’ There was a very slight murmuring and Delores raised her hand for quiet, smiling widely. ‘I know, I know – we are all addicted to our phones, myself included.’ She waved her own smartphone at them. ‘But the studies all agree: these gadgets of ours affect our sleep, not only its duration, but also its quality. If we are here to try and fix your sleep issues, it seems foolish to start off with the biggest problem still lurking in our pockets. Of course, landline phones are available free of charge to allow you to keep in touch with friends and family.’

Thea didn’t have a pocket in her cult clothes, but she’d shoved her phone into the waistband of her trousers and she pressed a hand to her middle, feeling the outline of what was now essentially a lump of useless plastic, glass and metal.

‘Enjoy today!’ The woman raised her voice. ‘Enjoy every moment but, best of all, enjoy the new and improved you that is just around the corner!’

At that she stepped out of view. Harriet turned back to Thea and sighed happily.

‘Shall we begin?’

Chapter 9

‘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.

Chapter 10

Rory’s beard, and the rest of him, was waiting for her at her health assessment the next day.

‘Hello, Miss Mackenzie. Tried to knee anyone in the balls lately?’

His colleague looked rather startled and a deep blush spread across his acne as he scuttled from the room. Thea hopped up onto the bed and swung her legs back and forth, feeling at ease for the first time since she arrived, even with the pale blob of a face at the monastery window still lingering in her mind.

‘Haven’t had to. Don’t give me a reason.’

He chuckled at that and started flicking through the papers on his clipboard.

‘I’ll do my best. Pretty straightforward. We’ve done all the baseline tests so now this is it: the big day. Time for the tech.’

Thea waggled her feet. The walls seemed to have less of that sticky sheen in Rory’s lab, not that she could see that much of them – the Centre’s sleek simplicity had been elbowed out of the way by monitors, wires, coffee mugs and little action figures posed mid battle.

‘You didn’t say you’d be working here too,’ she said.

Rory turned to consult a computer screen. ‘Didn’t know at the time. A place came up.’ He faced her again. ‘Weird how things work out, eh?’

‘I’m perhaps not the best judge of weird right now.’

She could have asked him about the monastery then, and the face that was probably not a face but something else completely. Maybe there were more staff quarters over there. That was probably the explanation, Thea thought – steadfastly ignoring the fact that the place was clearly a ruin and uninhabitable.

Just as she was about to open her mouth, Rory brought a box over to her and they both stared inside, Thea acutely aware just how close his arm was next to hers. He was wearing a chunky black watch that looked as if it had had a hard life so far and today’s T-shirt was as baffling to Thea as the last one: a logo for a university that was probably some hip television reference. She returned her attention to the box, not knowing what to expect.

Inside were two five-pence-size metal discs.

‘This is such amazing tech,’ Rory whispered as if he didn’t want to disturb the discs. ‘Eventually, when it’s gone public, each person will need these little beauties and an app in order for it all to work properly. But there’s already rumours that they’re working on a completely hardware-free version.’

‘No discs? How?’ Thea lowered her voice too, in case she woke the disc-babies.

‘If I knew that I wouldn’t be here, would I?’ He carefully lifted one out and held it balanced on the tip of his finger. ‘I don’t know how it works – that’s not my pay level. I just read the data as it’s fed to my computer. So, welcome to Phase One.’ He gave an elaborate bow. ‘The discs will get to know you for the next two weeks and find out your sleep patterns. Then it’ll know what to do with you.’