How to Stop Sleepwalking

When we were kids, I would walk out of church to find Venus waiting for me, half naked with too much make up on, looking more dangerous than a box of matches.

We had endless sleepovers. Her bedroom was under decorated and kind of adult. There was a small pile of books to the side of the bed about the female body and early guides to sex. My bedroom was childish, three walls were purple and one lime green, a clash of colors that echoed the clash of everything inside my body and brain.

In a strange coincidence both our mums died a year apart and we’d spend weekends at Venus’s god mother’s house where we shared a blue room with a big brass bed. We stayed up all night writing song lyrics for our band, Satan’s Spawn, then slept with our bodies entwined. We spent weekends together and in the week we would write each other nonsense letters as if divided by oceans and not a short train ride. I often said it was because we lost our mums at the same time and had a silent bond, but she said it was more- that we were twins in the universe.

On her 10th birthday Venus locked me in the bathroom with her and said I couldn’t leave until I kissed her. I fought free and ran.

When it was her 11th birthday her mum asked what she wanted for her birthday and she said, “Male strippers.”

When her mum laughed and said no her reply came quick:

“Fine,” she huffed, “female strippers.”

And now she was turning 18 and we were moving in together.

“You can’t live with Venus” my cousin told me, and went on to gently try to explain to me the invisible divisions between rich and poor people.

“I can do what I want.” I said.

I couldn’t take time off work to view flats, so I left it to Venus, who found us a place.

“What’s it like?” I asked, knowing I wouldn’t manage to see it before the move in date. “Like a modern day playboy mansion.” she replied and I signed the lease.

Venus also found us a third flatmate named George. She told me George was a greek shipping heir with a posh drawl and a quirky sense of fashion. “You’ll love him” she added.

We met when we moved into our new home which was a characterless space in a Kings Cross new build. It was unfairly set up, the downstairs bedroom felt like a palace, the upstairs bedrooms felt like dorms.

I wanted the ground floor. Venus got paid to play, djing or in photo shoots and George was a trustfarian. My rent was harder to earn, in fact I barely made it and I wanted to justify the hours I worked. I interned in fashion, and also worked endless cafe and bar jobs to be able to afford to work for free.

When we pulled straws Venus won and I came last. She set up camp downstairs and George and I took the small rooms next to each other upstairs.

George was a carefully manicured character. Reserved and sly, with too much product in his hair and a rule not to eat carbs after 6. Everything about him was unlovely. He was suspicious of me, confused as to how he had come to live with a lower class person. He gave me the feeling of being an insect under his magnifying glass. I alluded to the idea that I was a drug mule, just to keep him on his toes. The next day he hired a locksmith to put an industrial lock on his bedroom door.

But I wasn’t a drug mule, I worked for a fashion label. The owners of the label, Rich and Phil, had never studied fashion. Rich had studied art history, Phil had studied philosophy and I hadn’t studied at all, but together we made things happen.

Rich was a charmer but also incredibly practical, he showed concern for my romantic tendencies. “Marry rich,” was his advice to me. A token I was never going to take. Phil was a creative genius, a gentleman from another era. He taught me to look up and think big. And I was their 19 year old secret weapon, I negotiated with factory managers on production terms, I threw big parties with no budget and I helped create prints or tweak designs.

I had begged for a job. The day they gave in I burst with shy excitement. Getting the job meant I would only have to work five days a week and not seven days plus evenings at a bar, as I had been.

To celebrate my first day off in countless weeks, Venus surprised me by hiring a mini van to take me and a handful of friends to Thorpe Park. She lied at the gates and said she was a magazine editor who had come to review the theme park and got us both VIP wristbands. Jumping the lines, we flew around the park screaming on roller coasters, getting soaked on water rides and resting only for slush puppies and fries. Even George seemed to have a good time.

I involved everyone with my new job. George had studied film for a couple of months at some point and when I needed to pull a promotional video for the brand out of thin air I persuaded Venus to model and him to film. It was strange having my flatmates in my workplace, Venus flounced about in a dress and George filmed as I tried to direct.

In the middle of filming I felt fuzzy, a heaviness came over me and I had an epileptic fit.

As I fell my eyes began to flicker with strange images, like someone switching channels at hyper speed.

I heard voices but couldn't place them, I felt I was coming back to the surface, as if waking from a deep dream. My breathing felt horse and I couldn’t open my eyes. My mind felt blank and confused as I laid shaking on the ground.

“Ugh is she dead?” I heard George ask without coming close.

“Did you see her eyes roll back?” Venus asked, “She looked like the devil.”

I laid half conscious, thinking of how I lived with the two worst people on the planet.

Unsure of how to stop me from shaking, Rich and Phil searched for a blanket but couldn’t find one. They settled instead on rolling me up in the spare carpet that had been kept in the shed, a known home to spiders and rats. I couldn’t speak to protest, the damp carpet gave me a chill and the bad smell disoriented me further.

The paramedics arrived and unravelled me from my carpet coffin. They bundled me up and into the back of the ambulance. No one went with me.

“I guess you’ll miss the film premiere tonight.” Venus muttered, considering who to take in my place.

After that George was intrigued by the label. He started coming by our studio with his video camera and filming bits. Phil and Rich took a liking to him and kept him around like a kind of mascot. George filmed our fashion shows and meetings, our travels and our designs. His constant fascination was how we did things on a budget, or with no money at all, pulling in favors or finding a way.

At home George struggled, he had a cleanliness OCD and Venus and I were two big germs. He hated our mess and constantly complained. As he ranted from his room, I hid in the fridge door, secretly drinking his pure orange juice straight out the carton. I sat on the kitchen counter to eat my popcorn, which drove him crazy because it was rude and unhygienic. I also ate honey out of the jar, but for some reason he thought that was cute.

Venus loved to annoy him, when he left his bedroom door unlocked one day she ate her lunch messily on his bed. Then, feeling unsatisfied by her destruction, she filled condoms with milk and threw them around his room, hiding some in his draws and one under his pillow.

When he found the mess he was furious, he chased her but she squirted him with ketchup, some splatting onto the walls. Eventually he pinned her down and brushed her hair with the toilet brush, she screamed about revenge while trying to slap him in the face with her giant dildo. I looked on, the perpetual adult.

I worked crazy hours, partly because I loved my job and partly to escape myself. My big secret was that I was frail. I had feelings inside so deep they scared me, and although I kept pushing them down, they were finding ways to seep out.

At night I would sleep walk, often waking George as I crashed about in the hall. He would guide me back to bed, softer seeming in the moonlight. Somehow I became aware that if someone read to me as I was falling asleep it would prevent me from sleepwalking. Exhausted from being woken each night, George agreed to give it a go, sitting on the end of my bed he read me Salinger at night. He protested at the stupidity of the situation, sulking for a couple of minutes each evening before beginning the bed time story. But it worked, my sleepwalking subsided, and I couldn’t help but think George was benefiting from some gentle human interaction.

When I headed to Paris for work with Rich and Phil, George decided to tag along, filming in scenes. We went for dinner at an exclusive spot, guests of a fabulous old man I didn’t catch the name of. George and I sat together, excluded as the grown ups spoke in french. He drew a portrait of us on the place mat. I was a big bird with a long neck and crooked beak and he was a gnarly little thing, a cross between a badger and a crocodile, maybe. He signed it and I kept it.

“Why do you film the label?” I asked

“Because I’m making a film about it.” he replied.

“You never told us.” I said

“That’s because I can’t make the film unless I have a good ending.” he paused, “I’m really hoping the label will go bankrupt.”

I frowned at him, surprised at myself. For a second I had forgotten he was a bad guy.

For his birthday Venus and I decided to make him a cake. She kept me company while I did all the baking. I made huge amounts of mix and baked it in large trays. Venus sat on the counter painting her nails weird colors while I moulded and decorated the cake until it was finished, a pink fender guitar cake- shaped to scale. She admired the cake, happy to take half the credit for it. George arrived and we sang happy birthday and guided him to the cake.

“That’s the nicest thing anyone’s ever done for me” he said. I took a photo of him blowing out the candles and we each had a slice.

“strawberry, my favorite!” he said, and then we all made a wish.

After we had to cut up the cake. It took up every shelf in our fridge and the rest just had to be covered and kept on the counter. We ate it for days and eventually had to throw the rest away.

On weekends, Venus and I would climb into each other’s bed to wake the other up. We usually went shopping or wandering about, sometimes she’d go on a date and I’d tag along, frustrating the guy. Other times we’d go to lunch and she’d pull a dress out of her bag.

“I stole this for you,” with a big grin and I’d say thank you.

I tried to keep my mental health issue quiet. Venus and I left our diaries open for each other to read, she was unconcerned by my depression, believing it to be a normal part of being 19. At work, I tried to keep it under wraps, too. George saw the most, but he also cared the least.

When we talked it was usually to critique the films that we’d sometimes watch together in his pristine room. Other times we played like children, a game in which you had to make it around a room without touching the ground, or we’d wrestle- but I’d always win. Sometimes I saw his stoney exterior crack into an awkward smile. Sometimes he thought about giving me the spare key to his room so I could access his extensive film collection, always deciding no.

I went to New York with work for fashion week, and instantly fell in love with the city. On the taxi ride from JFK we rode over the bridge in Queens and I saw the whole Manhattan skyline out my window.

“What do you think!” asked Rich.

I didn’t know what to say, it was the most romantic thing I’d ever seen.

I was unprepared for the New York snow and froze traveling between meetings. We put on a fashion show and I worked backstage dressing the models and counting them in. At the last moment, when we were one model short, I hopped into the dress and onto the catwalk.

The following day we had breakfast at Balthazars, we felt like kings. We picked up a copy of the New York Times and opened it to find a photo of the three of us onstage accompanied by a rave review. New York had loved us and we felt elated by it all. The universe had opened a door for me, I knew I would one day come in NY to live.

Soon after, George booked a trip to America, he didn’t know how long he’d be away so he decided to leave the flat. His belongings were meticulously packed and labeled. He told me he liked to say goodbye to his rooms when he left. He said it was his tradition.

“Good bye room” he said, “You’ve been good to me.” He patted the wall, and then turned to me.

“Good bye, Lils” he said and left.

We returned to Paris for work, this time without George filming. It seemed like the sales and orders were going well but Rich and Phil were uncharacteristically restless. I was excluded from most dinners and meetings. I tried not to take it personally.

At home Venus was restless, too. She seemed to miss torturing George. She said that London was beginning to bore her and became interested in traveling.

Tensions continued to rise at work, cuts were being made and my wages would often arrive late, or only in part. A couple of months passed and the label filed for bankruptcy. Something I could not have seen coming. It was as if George putting the idea into the universe had made it come true. I was out of a job just in time for the end of our lease. It felt like everything came to an end at once, even my secret relationship to an older Etonian that had turned out to be more unhealthy than I’d realized.

“Well I guess you have the ending to your film.” I told George, on a long distance phone call.

“You know,” he said, his posh drawl as thick as soup. “I don’t think I can be bothered to make that film, after all.”

It all felt like failure and as everything crashed, so did my mental health. Then I became fuelled by the kind of freedom that comes to someone only when they have nothing to loose, no home, no money, no job, no love but plenty of fearless optimism.

I packed a bag full of some floral dresses and got a flight to New York. Sitting on the airplane flying towards nothing but question marks, I knew in my heart I was doing exactly the right thing.