The Actor

At night

Jenny

It's the closest a sane person will come to the experience of psychosis. The hours of insomnia and a mind that won't do what it is told.

A blanket of heat had fallen on the city. The welcome chill of an early autumn had reset back to the fug of late summer. This delirium Jenny was feeling as she lay in her bed covered by a single sheet; it wasn't accompanied by fever in any medical sense, just the heat of the atmosphere and the friction of her churning thoughts. Overtiredness: she remembered the word from her childhood. It had seemed a nonsense back then, a contradiction in terms and another chink in the façade of parental infallibility. But too much had happened in the last twenty-four hours, and with no dreamtime to put the day's memories in order they had begun to regurgitate of their own accord, rising like bile and echoing the nausea of the morning's hangover.

She thought about Chris and their evening together. She thought about Simon and the night they had spent, their meeting again in the afternoon. She cursed herself for lack of courage. Why didn't she bring it up; it was her role, that much had been clear from the beginning. Simon would never voluntarily... And damn him and this ridiculous case ... She'd grasped at it with relief: an easy excuse for anger; an alternative outlet for whatever strange amalgam of feelings she harbored within ... Could it have been on purpose? Could Simon possibly be that conniving (it seemed unlikely) ... Much more conceivable for everything to have simply fallen into place, the way things always did for him, another bit of convenient fate ... The way he had betrayed her trust, made use of the things she had revealed to him to get the new case accepted ... Yet what if it had been planned, if only at some subconscious level? Why, after all this time, had he finally asked her out? Jenny didn't believe for a moment that he was taking instructions from his mother.

She pictured Simon's face above her. It had been dim, not dark, with streetlight enough coming in through the window. What had she seen, her eyes open to the end, locked on his face as her legs had locked around his? Was he right: did she really want to hook him up to the machine, to poke about inside? To see what lay beyond the outer shell of instinct and manners? Yes of course she did. And would it matter to her if there wasn't all that much to be found?

What had he seen, she wondered, as he looked back down at her? That was what she really wanted to know.

She was normally such a good sleeper, brain-weary from an honest day's work, body loosened by the walk home, by fussing about in the kitchen to prepare herself a meal and tidy up afterwards, clean from her nightly shower. She twisted onto her side, turned her pillow over and felt a moment of relief in its coolness. It didn't last, she turned on her back again, arms to her sides, one cheek against the pillow. Would she feel better if she cried? She felt no inclination to cry.