The UnSleep - Chapter 1

2 a.m.
I stared at the wall in front of me, nothing better to do. The wall was plain, no paintings, no pictures, just greying white. Dull and ever-so-slowly ageing.

I sighed helplessly, if I’d had a cat I’ve have kicked it but instead I lit a fag. ‘Must get a cat’ I thought to myself as I took the first much-needed drag. With my left hand I picked up the empty bottle and twirled it in my hand. Inside me, in the vast chemical experiment of my internal organism, the 26 pills did – nothing. Bloody useless! I flipped the bottle over to look at the bright light lettering on the label. ‘Sleepy Time’. Did I feel sleepy? Did I fuck.

I hadn’t slept for three weeks now. No reason. Oh yeah, the psychologists and doctors and experts will tell you I was ‘stressed’. Stressed, of course I was fucking stressed. I hadn’t slept for three weeks. But aside from that I had no problems, I was ‘happy’. And work was fine. Apart from being knackered of course. Because I wasn’t sleeping.

I grumbled around my apartment in foul mood. In the far left hand corner the grey flickering of a 1940s movie emerged from my old, just-about-still-working, portable TV screen. I had the sound down though, else the neighbours would complain. The walls in my place are paper thin, you could hear a pair of ants shagging on the neighbours’ bed. But I like to have it on. It feels like company. I watched the screen for a bit, watched the movie. The Nazis were played by a bunch of queer English actors who pranced across the set in gay Nazi walks. In a small dank cell the hero, an American, smoked a cigarette, smiled for no reason, and refused to talk. Not that I’ve have heard him.

By 2.30 I’d given up any hope of sleeping and went for a walk. I left the TV on, in the sure knowledge that the gay English Nazis would be beaten in my absence. I sat on the seafront for a bit, looked at the water, then went down the alley at the back of my house. Halfway down I turned down a crumbling winding stairway, which stank of piss and pigs, ‘til I reached the tattered black door at the bottom. ‘The Bar’ read the sign above it, and below that ‘Open’, the messages illuminated by black bulbs – pretty flash huh.

I’d known about the bar for years. It was at the back of my house for one thing, though where exactly I couldn’t work out, buried somewhere underneath; in a maze of tunnels, like Hitler’s bunker. I only went there, though, when I wasn’t sleeping. The usual crowd were in there. The UnSleep I call them, like the Undead, but living, breathing, only like the undead because of the effects of never sleeping, not ever, not in all the years I’d known them, faces pale and drawn from unslept nights, bloodshot eyes, clothes hanging off them like rags on a corpse.

I was greeted by the usual silence. The friendly silence, the type they reserved for one of their own. I got a beer and joined Hal and Ank. “Hi” said Ank, Hal couldn't be tempted away from his silence.

I plonked my beer on the table, but the sound was soon soaked up by the dark atmosphere and the thick oak wood of the table. We sat there, saying nothing, for some time. It's not that they were unsociable, it's just how the UnSleep communicate, though long, blank, silent stares. You just have to learn the language.

On the back wall a football match was showing. In silence, else Leppy would get complaints and loose his licence. He didn’t have satellite or cable so he mostly showed videos of matches from the 70s; Watford’s hay-day. Or, if not Watford, one of their rivals, in a key match. No-one ever found out why Leppy liked Watford so much, as far as we could tell he'd never been there.

None of us were watching anyway. The three of us sat looking into each other's beers for a while, just enjoying the darkness of the bar, the near silence.

In the corner Balla threw darts at a board. The board was barely lit but he still threw accurate. When I’d started coming to the bar I’d played him of course, but there was no sport in it. He was too good. Even with a 400 start he’d get down from 501 before me. Word is he’d played that Phil Taylor once and thrashed him. Three games to nil, won each game by over a hundred. “You should turn professional” I said, “lots of money to be made from darts”.

"Na," he'd spat back, "who'd want a life like that?"

Behind the bar Leppy was enthusing about his beers to Ya, who for some reason chose the company of the five men in the bar over complete loneliness. “This beer here is Norwegian ‘Chuhol’, the first beer ever brought into this country. Made by a little known sect from the East of Norway. They brought them over here as a bribe, a peace offering to English monks, hoping to win them over in a war against the papacy.”

“Aha,” muttered Ya into her beer, her long blonde hair shaking slightly at the effort of speaking, illuminating briefly, as it did so, the whole bar, the excess of light making even old Balla miss the triple twenty, his first miss in over a month. "Good is it?"

“No” Leppy shook his head with a laugh and put the bottle back on the shelf. “It's awful. The English monks though they were being poisoned and slew every last one of the Norwegian sect. I’ve had a lot of beers in my time, a lot of beers, and this is the worst, the absolute worst.” Leppy shook his sadly at the memory of it, the betrayal of it. The oldest, rarest, most prized beer in his bar, and it tasted like .. well as Leppy put it “I might as well be serving Heiniken,” he’d said.

“This though” he said holding up a Belgian Skitslaw “is the finest beer I’ve ever tasted, the best ever made. Made in the early 19th century this was, by the pre-marxists, the socialist rebels that began the movement that led to the revolutions throughout Europe in the 1840s and 50s. And this,” he held up the beer to the light of hair, as if it were some kind of miniature God, living in an ancient brown bottle because it was a god and it could live wherever it wanted, “this was their secret weapon.

"This beer paid for it all. Every rifle, every streetmap, the hall-hire for every revolutionary planning meeting, every pamphlet. What the pre-marxists did, to overthrow the state, they brewed the best beer ever, a populist beer, a beer for the masses, and the money from it, well it massed, and when the beer was withheld, the masses were putty in their hands. ‘Storm the bastile’ the brewers said, and the masses stormed."

“If it's so good, why'd they stop selling it?” asked Ya.

“Well it was banned you see. When the revolutions failed, when the armies won. Every trace of it, every mention of it, was banned. History was re-written. Skitslaw never officially existed, not even in the oldest records in the basement corner of CAMRA’s Head Office. As far as I know there’s not another bottle of it anywhere else in the world.”

I'd had this conversation with Leppy when I first started coming to the bar. “Have some” he’d said to me, the very first time I went down there. “But not if it’s so rare” I said, “not if there’s no more anywhere in the world. Shouldn't it be saved for history's sake?"

“Hah, there’s loads more” he’d laughed. “I’ve got dozens of crates back there (I never did find out where back there was) dozens of crates, several hundred bottles of it”.

And it was. It was what he said, the best beer ever. The best beer there ever was, ever will be. It became ‘my usual’. And it felt good, I’d never had a usual before. A welcoming repetition.

Conversation on my table was livening up. “I should go home," Hal said. Hal often said this, usually when it was someone' round. Ank banged his beer on the table three hollow times, and Leppy brought three beers over.

We sat in silence for a while. Ank was distracted and muttered something to himself. I couldn’t hear exactly, it sounded like “hej, hej, hej” but couldn’t have been. Meanwhile, back at the bar, Ya was still being the most beautiful woman in the world. I went over to her, plonked myself down on the seat beside her. “Hi” I said.

“Hi” she replied, into her bottle, but addressed at me.

“Do you wanna come back with me” I asked?

“Okay,” she said with a shrug, and left her seat slowly, like a tortoise slowly undressing from its shell.

We left the bar together arm in arm. Back at my place the lights had gone, the electric was out again. I fumbled with a match, fumbled with a candle, and then fumbled with her top, the buttons seemingly buried in the folds of her blouse.

We kissed wildly, open mouthed. Sometimes when I kiss I’m fully aware of the fact that all we’re actually doing is exchanging saliva, swapping warm spittle. But I still do it, it’s just part of the process, like the opening moves at chess, formalities really, but important all the same.

In the bedroom I finally worked Ya’s buttons out and flung her top out of the way.

“On the bed,” she said as I removed her bra, gazing at her breasts, lit by the light of her hair, and the corner candle casting our shadows behind us, somewhere away, unseen. I stroked her belly delicately, gradually working my way up, and she moaned with pleasure. I touched her breasts, brushing them slightly at first, then stroking them, kneading them, needing them. I couldn’t resist, so I licked and sucked her left nipple, greedily guzzling a much tit as I could get in my mouth in one go. Ya moaned ecstatically and, pushing me aside, remove her skirt and knickers, opening herself invitingly.

The sex itself was nothing special. Necessary though, a much more rewarding experience than the Sleepy Time, better than watching a 40’s film at least. I pushed myself on top of her and found my way in. Our bodies locked; hers cold, in need of my warmth, all my girlfriends say I’m very warm. I could feel the wet sweat, her bites on my shoulder, the overwhelming feeling of pleasure. I could hear her gasping, desperate.

I pushed on dutifully, needing to, enjoying it, though my ankles ached from too much sitting on trains, in the office, and in the bar, and the physical exertion just added to my overwhelming sense of tiredness. I came with a big grunt. Ya came too, and we lay there, not sleeping, naked.

In the morning Ya left, saying nothing. I showered alone, washing away traces of the previous night’s passion. I dressed, shaved, got ready for work, all the time – hoping, that maybe I’d see Ya again that night. I walked to the station and on the commuter train, in my business suit and tie with laptop and stressed face, no-one would ever have known I'd been that close to one of the UnSleep.