Simone stared at the screen. It blurred slightly and she rubbed at her tired, scratchy eyes. She’d suffered from insomnia for years. It stemmed from when she’d been taken into care, when she’d been afraid to close her eyes after being put to bed at night in the children’s home.
Over the following years, twenty and counting, she had learned to cope with the insomnia, to cope with the feeling of numb exhaustion, the feeling that her body was slowly rotting from the inside. She had learned to function as a normal human being.
She craved sleep – it occupied her thoughts constantly – but when it came to bedtime, a phrase that seemed like a bad joke whenever she heard it, her body went into a cold panic. Panic at the knowledge that sleep would be out of her grasp, that she would spend endless hours lying in bed watching the red glow of the digital clock, thoughts spinning wildly out of control in her mind.
Fear, Simone knew, was particularly prevalent at night. When everyone else seems to have departed the world, the insomniacs are alone, stranded in the half-light. Simone’s insomnia had guided her into an abusive relationship and an unplanned pregnancy. She’d lost the baby soon after her shotgun wedding to Stan. It was ordinary, the doctor had said. Extremely common to lose the baby the first time you become pregnant. But it hadn’t felt ordinary. She’d been devastated. She had thought her life was finally coming right, and she’d been so excited to meet and care for the little life growing inside her.
As a newly-wed, Simone had thought that sharing a bed might help her insomnia, but again she found herself staring into the darkness. She would watch Stan as he moved through the stages of sleep: the gentle rise and fall of his broad chest, the twitch of his eyelids as his eyes flitted underneath.
Sometimes, without warning, the rhythm of Stan’s laboured breathing would break, and his eyes would open with a hungry, vacant stare. And then, at the time of night when Simone felt most vulnerable, exhausted and unattractive, he would wordlessly climb on top of her and part her legs with the back of his hand – almost dismissively, as if her legs were a tedious obstacle to what he wanted.
When they were first married, she’d endured this. The sex was often rough. It often left her in pain, but she’d thought that it was his desire for her that caused him to lose control. And besides, she’d felt that it was her job as a good wife. It was her job to make the right noises, to perform enjoyment.
And she’d longed to be rewarded again with a baby; to be given another chance to be a mother.
Then, one night when he was pounding into her, he’d bitten her on the breast. It had shocked her. The shock had almost overridden the pain. He’d lifted his head, her blood glistening on his teeth, and just carried on.
He had apologised profusely the next morning. There were tears and promises to never do it again, and for a while the late-night sex had stopped.
Then, slowly, things reverted back. It had coincided with a time where Simone was getting no sleep, not even a few fitful minutes. She was weak and desperate, and she let him do it. As the months, and then the years passed, she lost all fight, which only seemed to fuel her husband’s dark desires. She wondered how her life had ended up this way. Hadn’t she had dreams? Weren’t there things she’d wanted to do with her life: travel, escape, become someone else?
Her saviour would be a baby, she was sure – but a baby never came, and tests finally showed she was unable to conceive, a result of the complications in her first pregnancy. The devastation sharpened the problems in her marriage to an angry spike. Simone was raped repeatedly, and then left awake in the darkness in pain. Every time, Stan would leave her and go back to the land of sleep.
Sometimes, she thought she would be able to cope with the violence and the abuse if only she could sleep. The lack of sleep was more of a torture. It was unknown, malevolent. The chemicals in her brain were conspiring to keep her in the world, when others could leave and disappear into their dreams.
By the time Simone had reached thirty-five, her husband was drinking heavily and they had fallen into debt. Around the same time, they had the Internet put in, and during her sleepless nights Simone discovered a pinprick of light: online chat rooms. At first, she gravitated towards support groups, speaking to other battered and abused wives whose only outlet for their fears was talking through their experiences. But she saw her own situation reflected back in their posts, and from the outside thought them pathetic.
Then she met Duke.
Duke, like her, was an insomniac. He listened to her without judgement. They also talked about normal stuff: TV shows they liked, funny things that had happened to them. They flirted.