Sleep

Kim was at the window again, looking tired. Jenny was making scrambled eggs because there wasn’t anything in the freezer.

“Jenny,” she said. “You’ve not been here in the daytime and Clea says you’ve not been here when she’s called at night either. You need to look after yourself. You need to sleep. You can’t just let yourself wither away. Believe me.”

“I can’t hear you,” said Jenny, though she could perfectly well. “The fan’s too loud.”

Kim landed on the floor, and walked over to the cupboard next to Jenny, getting a wine bottle and glass out. Jenny didn’t look at her and stirred her eggs very vigorously.

“You know what I said,” said Kim, as she poured a measured amount of the deep red wine into the glass, watching it all the time. She glanced at the eggs. “You should eat more vegetables,” she added.

Jenny reluctantly shifted some mushrooms from another universe into the eggs.

“Preferably without stealing other people’s.”

“Is there anything I am allowed to do?” Jenny asked archly. She turned the hob off and slid the eggs onto some toast that had just popped up from the toaster and been placed on a plate. She stuck some salt and pepper on it and walked over to the little table. Kim walked with her. Jenny wished she hadn’t.

Kim sipped slowly from her glass. Jenny bit into her toast.

“I know what you’re feeling, Jenny,” Kim said. “I know. Let me help you.”

Jenny was staring at her toast and chewing slowly.

“Please,” said Kim.

Kim watched as Jenny and the toast slowly vanished, and the only sound was the strange distant beating of butterflies’ wings. She sighed, and walked over to the window, drawing the blinds to the fresh morning sun that was waking like a laughing baby, and headed off to bed.

***

Jenny stared daggers at the bed. Hm. Sleep. She could sleep. She was good at sleeping. Her hand shook a little, and she stopped it. Sleep sounded awfully nice. So why wouldn’t she? She was fluttering around the question like a robin darts around a person with food. Her eyes wanted to rest, she wanted to run and run into the distance, beyond the bed and the room which shrunk around her and rested heavy on her shoulders with its memories. She wanted to cry. Her eyelids screamed at her and jumped up and down at the front of her head, leaving it with a dull ache that she almost didn’t notice, but it was there, like clouds streaking across a pink and purple sky. Jenny pulled off her clothes, and got into her pyjamas. She brushed her teeth, thinking of nothing in particular, and laid down in bed. The covers were soft and warm. The pillow was too hard, so she turned on her side. Her ear got slightly squished, but that was alright. She sunk into the hollow in the bed she had made. Well. This wasn’t too bad, after all. It was nice. Warm. And there weren’t any thoughts about – well. She didn’t have to think of how lonely it seemed in that bed. She had the covers for comfort, and the warmth of her body pressing into itself, and everything seemed in that strange hazy state between waking and sleeping, the liminal existence between reality and everything else, falling falling falling away, and –

Rat-a-tat tat tat tat!

Somebody was at the door. Jenny groaned, got out of bed, pulled her dressing gown on, and went to answer. She felt she probably oughtn’t to be answering the door in her dressing gown, but she didn’t think it really mattered. The door opened to the pale soft-faced hawk-nosed face of her next-door neighbour Manning Grey, looking somewhat perturbed but, as always, very polite. He always dressed, Jenny thought, in the dullest fashion anyone ever could – indeed, in a tremendous feat of nominative determinism that would, she thought, have greatly interested her Aunty Zuleika, he never wore anything that wasn’t grey. His faded suit was grey, his shoes were grey, his hair was grey, his socks were grey. Even his eyes were grey!

“Ah,” he said. “Hello, Jenny. I’m sorry, were you…”

“No, no,” said Jenny, quickly. “It’s fine.”

“Oh, good,” said Manning. “Uh… May I come in?”

Jenny gestured for him to enter, and sit down at the little table sat in the kitchenette. He did so.

“Tea?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, please,” he said, running a hand through his thin grey hair.

Jenny perched on the counter-top as the kettle bubbled away next to her and drummed her fingers absent-mindedly on the cupboard door.

“What did you want to see me about?” she asked.

Her neighbour looked startled, somewhat, seemingly haven gotten quite comfortable sitting, then his face grew longer and more mournful.

“It’s Herbert,” he said, sniffing. “I’ve really gone and blown it this time.”

“I’m sure that’s not true,” lied Jenny. “What happened?”

“Oh dear,” said Manning, and he got a great grey handkerchief out of his pocket and blew his nose like a trumpet. Jenny noticed his eyes were a very pinkish shade of grey, and thought he must have been crying. “Oh dear me.” He dabbed at his eyes with it. “Well, I came back from work, and Herbert was there at his desk working on his book, and the flat was in such a state, I don’t know. And he does work so very hard on his books, but I’m afraid I had a bit of a go at him, saying that he ought to do more, and I think he could do a bit more around the flat, you know, every now and then, it’s not a large flat, well, you know, it’s the same size as yours, but he does go working on his books all the time. I mean, he’s only at the university once or twice a week, and the rest of the time he’s there at his books, and they don’t bring in much money, those books, though they are very well-written, and here am I at the call centre every day, answering calls from all sorts of people, working my backside off to earn us a decent life, and I think he might at least help out a bit with the housework. Well, I said so, I did – not exactly in those words, perhaps, but pretty much – and then he got quite hot and bothered and called me an uncultured charlatan and said that I didn’t appreciate him and that he did do housework, only then I came and messed it up again. Well, I don’t know, I really don’t. When I work so hard and all. But perhaps he’s right. I do get rather caught up in my work, and the flat’s quite often clean when I come back. Clean-ish. He doesn’t clean well, you know, he leaves bits and misses bits and I think most of the time he’s off in a world of his own, and he doesn’t see these things, you know, so it’s not really his fault, all in all, but I do think he could make more of an effort, you know. Well, I really had a bit of a go at him, then, and we both said some dreadful things, and now – ” Jenny could see he was welling up, and he blew his nose in the most tremendous way. “I think it’s really over, Jenny. Twenty years we’ve been together. Twenty years. It seems such a long time now, to think of it, but it really feels like only yesterday we met at that business party in Cardiff Bay. And we have been arguing a lot lately, but until now I had thought it would all come through in the end. But now – ! Oh dear.”

The kettle had long boiled by the time he had finished this tirade, and Jenny poured out some tea for both of them. Manning took the tea thankfully, and held it tight to him, though it must have been very hot, and it seemed as though it anchored him somewhat. He dabbed at his eyes with that great grey handkerchief Jenny still marvelled at, and took a great swig of the tea, which comforted him, though it made him cough.

“Well,” he said. “I was going to ask my sister if I could come down, but she’s dragon-hunting in Canada until tomorrow, and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind my coming down and using her place without asking, only there’s the train strikes, you know, so I can’t get down, so I was wondering if I could… possibly… sleep on your sofa for tonight?”

Jenny sipped her tea, and looked oddly at him. She felt very strange and alive and at once longed for sleep more than ever, though she knew what it would bring.

“Do you love him?” she asked.

“What?” said Manning.

“Do you love Herbert?” she said.

Manning’s fingers circled absent-mindedly around the mug, and he looked fully miserable.

“Yes,” he said quietly. “He’s the most wonderful man in all the world.”

“Well then,” she said. “Go to him, and say that. And say that you want to make up. And talk to each other. You’ll work it out. It’ll all come right. You see if it doesn’t.”

Manning finished his tea, and pulled himself up from the table, with a strange, determined look upon his face, mingled with a great many emotions, marbled there in the lines of his cheeks and the look of his eyes.

“Thank you, Jenny,” he said, quietly. “I’ll do that.”

Like a man in a dream he walked from the apartment, like a man possessed by weariness, like a man in love he walked away, and Jenny sat down and felt awfully odd. The light hurt her head. She wished it wouldn’t. She went back to her bed, lay in the softness of the sheets, and closed her eyes. There was comfort there. She longed for comfort; every part of her seemed to scream for it, wail for it, waiting for softness and relief and anything. She thought this badly childish of her, but made no move to stop it, and she didn’t know that she would have if she could. But she wasn’t thinking of that now. She wasn’t thinking of anything, in particular, except of the warmth and the niceness of the bed and the duvet. The pillow was too hard, but you couldn’t have everything. Sleep. That would be good. She hadn’t enough of the stuff. Jenny had a vague notion that with sleep things would be better. Only it was hard to lie there, with such a heavy head hanging there on the pillow like a bell, and wait for sleep. When there was nothing to do the emptiness of the bed seemed so much more apparent. Furthermore, to sleep was to dream, and to dream was – well, she preferred not to.

Still, it was warm there in the bed. Warm, and calm, and soft, and sleep began to slowly wash its way over her like the tide, at first just lapping at her sides gently-gently, stroking her softly to see if she would move, then, encountering no resistance, moving further, rising from the lowest parts of her slowly-slowly up until she was almost completely submerged, nearly-nearly, then –

Rat-a-tat tat tat tat!

Seriously? She never had visitors! And yet here was another, so soon after the last had went out that same door! Jenny sighed deeply, pulled her dressing gown on once more, and stomped over to see who was there.

The figure that greeted her this time was considerably shorter, and she had to tilt her head downwards somewhat to see, though she wasn’t at all tall, a dark-haired, nervous figure dressed in clothes that didn’t seem entirely sure of themselves. Jenny Everywhere sighed. She loved the thirty-six Abstracts that made up some sort of conceptual underpinning of various fundamental multiversal concepts, she really did, but the Abstract of Loss always rather got on her nerves.

The Loss grinned at her broadly and somewhat nervously.

“Hi Jenny!” she said. “Sorry to bother you! I was just wanting to… see how you were!”

Jenny sighed deeply.

“No worries,” she said. “You’d better come in. Tea?”

“Thank you,” said the other, gratefully.

They headed in, the Abstract fidgeting all the time, and she sat bouncing on the chair whilst Jenny stuck the kettle on again. Jenny looked at the awkward anthropomorphic personification as the water in the kettle started to churn and hiss and steam emerged. She poured the tea, and brought it over to the person sitting so strangely in Kim’s chair, who gratefully received it (as everybody ought to tea).

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing!” lied the Abstract Eishiyai cheerfully, taking a sip of tea and nearly throwing the cup across the room in shock because it was too hot. Luckily she managed to catch herself, but she made a very distasteful expression, which Jenny took to mean she had burnt her tongue.

“You’ve got to wait for it to cool down,” she said, sagely.

Eishiyai’s leg was bouncing even more now, and the woman stared up at the ceiling (which was not particularly interesting, as ceilings go, but there’s no accounting for taste) very hard.

“Right,” she said. “Sure.”

Jenny smiled sympathetically, and the air left her lungs like somebody was pushing down on them forcefully.

“Look,” she said. “You don’t have to tell me what’s up, but sometimes it can feel good to get these things off your chest.” She felt somewhat hypocritical then, but didn’t make move to change anything, materially or mentally; there was a strange part of her, though she would not admit it, that enjoyed the disconnect, the solitary wallowing in one’s own odd emotions, and thought that all the magic of them, the strong, painful magic, would pale and wither if they were scared. Plus it just terrified her to think of telling anybody her secrets, though she liked to think of herself as open. She was Jenny Everywhere! She was mysterious, she had secrets; she entered a place and nobody would know who she was and it would stay like that; her past, her present, her future weren’t anybody’s business but her own (and there was quite enough of her to keep her occupied for a while).

Eishiyai looked oddly worried, then sad, then angry. She buried herself in her tea in confusion at these. Jenny watched her bemusedly, with more fondness than she would have expected to find for the odd woman. She didn’t think Eishiyai drank tea a lot, but she certainly seemed to enjoy it well enough. Jenny took a sip of hers. It was pleasantly warm, and it nursed her eyes and made her think again of sleep and the warm comfort of pillows.

“Well…” Eishiyai said at last, and her finger tapped against the glass, a fast little staccato rhythm that went round and round and round. “I… It’s just… I’m fine, really, just I… I keep thinking about Chaos.”

Oh yes. Chaos. The Abstract that had gone rogue, and, well, abstracted. Jenny had fought him lots; she had a lot of fun, fighting these sorts of people, and other hers, who were her really, but also not, had fought him lots too. She felt slightly guilty, then, though it was all in good fun. Chaos had, once upon a time, been a brother to the other Abstracts: a tender, if unreliable, one, who had been fun. Now, though… she shuddered to think, and felt very sad and tired. She wished the man would just stop trying to destroy everything; it would make her life a lot easier. He was like the Oblivion; he never stopped. But then, she supposed, nothing ever stopped, not really; just went on and on and on dreadfully in a strange sort of continual roly-poly down the hill of time, changed by the journey but still the same as when it was pushed off way back when.

Jenny really wished she knew what to say. What did one say to a small sad woman who sat before you and burnt her mouth on tea? What did one say to the concept of loss when it sat before you looking strange and diminutive? What did one do at any time? Jenny’s fingers tapped a short, curt rhythm on the edge of her mug and her eyes blurred together like there were tears there, only there weren’t, it was just the tiredness that prickled her eyes, grazing the inside of her head as though her flesh and blood were a gorse bush. She squeezed her eyelids together and tried to smile, but it was really more of a grimace.

“Did you talk to him?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Eishiyai, very quietly. She was barely a woman, really, Jenny mused; more like a child. Only so grown up! And she – why, Jenny was just barely an adult herself! Still a teenager, for god’s sake. Why did one have to live so much so young? Couldn’t one just get on with growing up in peace? Only it was all part and parcel, supposed Jenny blearily. Her thoughts were melting into mush like butter in a saucepan.

“Lot of bloody help you are,” Eishiyai said. “Thanks a bloody million. Right. Yes. My friend’s feeling shitty, so I’ll not even comfort her, just give her bloody stupid advice.”

“Did I say we were friends?” said Jenny dreamily, feeling altogether detached from events that nonetheless squirmed in her heart like a burrowing worm and caught, nauseous, at her throat. She was staring very intently at her tea. It was odd, how the surface rippled, how the light caught at the light brown water, how it smelt, how it warmed her. She heard the Abstract look at her, and wished that she didn’t.

Eishiyai spoke, quietly now, quiet as the beating of a skylark’s wings high, high above.

“I’d sort of assumed,” she said, and she walked out of the flat, to goodness-knew-where, leaving only heavy bitterness that clung like strong mist to the floor and around Jenny. Jenny took the bitterness to bed with her, hugged the brown cloying stuff to her chest with the heaviness of her tiredness and the heavy warmth of the sheets and lay there in a strange and heavy silence in the state that preceded sleep. She was just dropping off again when –

Ding dong!

The doorbell rang. Well. She had sort of been expecting that.

(Did they have a doorbell? She couldn’t remember, suddenly, though evidently somebody had rung it, whether they had one or not.)

She opened the door, and there stood a great and powerful man with antlers like the great redwoods that sprung from the depths of the darkest forests, arms like mountains risen in splendour, a gaze that dripped with the blood of new-mated salmon; this was Herne the Hunter, Herne who had welcomed the tides when the world was new, Herne who had walked the world a thousand times over, Herne whose breath foretold the purple broken air of the night and become great storms over sea, who had wrecked a thousand ships, forged a thousand forests, wept a thousand rivers, on whose brow was written both death and life, Herne the Hunter, who now stood imperious in Jenny Everywhere’s doorway, ready to impart on her a message of the greatest import and begin a great and perilous quest which would be doubtless long talked of by the bards of future times. Herne drew himself up to his (not at all inconsiderable) height, and breathed in, a look of great urgency on his face. He was just about to speak, he, who had walked with the ironsmiths of ancient times and knew every forgotten song in the world – he, to Jenny Everywhere! – and he opened his mouth, and –

Jenny Everywhere shut the door in his face.

She went back to her bed. She got into it, pulled the covers over herself. She lay in bed. It was warm, and soft. She lay in it. She didn’t cry.

Yes, it’s definitely checks notes Friday two months ago, why do you ask?

(As you can see, I fell off on the update schedule a bit. That’s alright; it was probably getting to be quite a lot to read, all in all.)

The Abstracts were created by Benj Christenson and are available for use by anyone.

The character of the Woman in Mauve was created by Lowri Llewellyn and is available for use by anyone.

The character of Clea was created by Joe Macaré and Nelson Evergreen and is available for use by anyone.

The character of Laura Drake was created by Jeanne Morningstar and is available for use by anyone.

The character of the Man in Grey was created by Callum Phillpott and is available for use by anyone.

The character of Kim was created by Scott Sanford and is available for use by anyone provided they don’t break the continuity of the “Parallax” universe.

Professor H. M. Wogglebug, T. E. was created by L. Frank Baum and is in the public domain.

Herne the Hunter is in the public domain. The specific reimagining of him here stems from my story Deer Deer!, but I’ve no objections to people using it it if they like.

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition: This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, that others might use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

All characters and concepts original to this story, and any alterations to characters and concepts already so, are hereby made available for use by anyone, with attribution welcomed but by no means necessary.