A Spy by Nature - Charles Cumming [108]
I nod.
‘Truth is, I admire you,’ he says. ‘You were in a bad place after not getting into the Foreign Office and you sorted yourself out.’
Now is when it is most difficult. Now is when none of it seems worthwhile at all.
‘Thanks,’ is all I can say. ‘That means a lot to me.’
He leans back and I decide to call it a night.
‘I’m bushed,’ I tell him. ‘Going to get some sleep.’
‘Sure,’ he replies. ‘See you in the morning.’
And he turns back to the TV.
I sleep in the room where I always stay, a study with a futon in it, the walls lined with paperbacks and hefty academic tomes left over from Saul’s days at LSE. I take down a paperback copy of Out of Africa and climb into bed, wearing boxer shorts and an old white T-shirt. From down the hall I can hear the roar of a goal-celebrating crowd and Saul quietly shouting ‘Yes!’ to himself as someone scores. I lie there for a while, trying to read, but my eyes grow tired after a single page and I put out the bedside light.
Then, of course, I cannot sleep.
Every night now for more than a year the pattern has been the same: an urgent need to rest ignored by my wandering mind, raking over every imaginable thought and anxiety, solving nothing. To sleep so little, so agitatedly, has become commonplace, yet somehow my body has adjusted to being starved of rest. On a daily basis I still manage to work, think, exercise, lie; but at some basic level I have forgotten how to feel. The jadedness is gradually erasing my better instincts, any capacity I once possessed to evaluate consequence and implication. It is as if every time I am woken up at three in the morning by that awful, gradual, caving sense of worry creeping around my subconscious, some better part of me begins to fail. Even a few straight hours of unbroken sleep will always be ended before dawn by mind-racings, concerns somehow magnified by the quiet and black of the night.
So, as ever, I turn to sex to try to shut it all out, lying there in the dark with the noise of the TV in the distance and some girl fucking me to sleep. She’s never anyone I care about, never Kate. Only the ones I tried to have, but couldn’t, even some woman I saw at a bus-stop who gave me the eye. Every now and again I relive an actual sexual encounter and try to make it better than it was: screwing someone from years back, or Anna again. Tonight it’s her, with her showered skin and tits bouncing uselessly above me, that look of sated lust in her eyes which I failed to recognize as malice. Nothing works, though. I hear Saul shut off the TV at around two o’clock and follow the noise of his footsteps going up and down the passage. He visits the bathroom, washes, then turns out all the lights. The flat is quiet.
I find myself thinking back to when I broke up with Kate. Saul and I would spend long hours in a Brazilian bar in Earls Court trying to dream up ways for me to win her back. These talks were, for the most part, serious and full of regret, as the realization that I had thrown away my one pure chance of a kind of happiness gradually dawned on me. But they were also good conversations, punctuated with laughter and optimism. This was all down to Saul - I was a mess. Quietly and selflessly over the years, he had watched and understood Kate and me to a point where he knew us both intimately. And now that understanding was paying off: he could explain her apparent cruelty, he could see when I was allowing a particular line of thought to become warped or exaggerated. It was uplifting in itself just to talk to somebody who also knew and loved Kate. And he never once tried to make me get over her; in his heart he knew that we should be together, and he wasn’t about to conceal that from me. I respected him for that.
Three months later, with ridiculous symmetry, Saul’s long-term girlfriend turned round and told him