Free The World and Other Places by Jeanette Winterson

Stetson for my father. They are the children now.
    Time passes through the clock. It’s time for me to leave. They come outside to wave me off.
    ‘It’s a lovely plane,’ says my mother. ‘Does it give you much trouble?’
    I rev the engine and the neighbours stand in astonishment in their doorways as the plane gathers speed down our quiet road. A moment before the muzzle breaks through the apostal window in the church, I take off, rising higher and higher, and disappearing into the end stream of the sun.

Disappearance I
    This morning I noticed there was one room missing.
    I had woken up as usual to the morning noise of singing drills and chirpy workmen, and the aviary of tradesmen building individual nests out of the hollow of a derelict house.
    I wound up my clockwork sufficiently to tick out onto the waking streets and buzz a newspaper off the sleep-deprived vendor. Like the rest of the poor in sleep of the coming twenty-first century he was a money junkie, trading shut-eye for a tight fist. Nobody can afford to sleep anymore. Do you realise how much it costs?
    ‘Wake-up Benny,’ I said, his head on a pillow of tabloid tits.
    ‘Where’s the money?’ he said. ‘Give me the money.’ Then, as the morning light took a swing at his retina, he saw it was me, and slumped back again onto the newsprint bosoms.
    ‘You need to get some sleep,’ I said.
    ‘Some of us have got a wife and kids to support.’
    ‘And a Mercedes and a mistress.’
    He scowled at me through the slits above his nose.
    ‘Get lost.’
    ‘I will, I’m going back to bed.’
    ‘Bloody pervert.’

    I know, I know. It’s the likes of me who …
    The likes of me who what? I am single. I have a girlfriend. I rent a nice flat with a kitchen, a sitting room and a bedroom, and in the bedroom, with the curtains drawn, sometimes open, sometimes in the middle of the day, sometimes for pleasurable hours all morning, naked, warm, I sleep.
    How did it start?
    It started before I was born. The little kicking foot pitching in the goal-space of my mother’s belly. The round ball of me netted and home, safe to sleep before the long header down the tunnel and out into a stadium of lights.
    When I was born. Pharaoh-domed and blue. Pointed and Picasso’d. A Cubist baby of lines and planes. Not breathing human yet. Still corded to God’s architecture. Small gasps and liquid eyes. Look at me now, here I am, I slept.
    When I was a wriggler, a crawler, a toddler, an upright, a walker, a runner, a high-flyer, spaced-out, I slept. It came naturally to me. I lay down, closed my eyes. I slept.
    Everyone I knew slept too. Even my parents. The Vicar. And then.

    And then I was offered the job of a particle in factory physics. I was offered the job of an electron in an office atom. I was offered the job of a frequency for a radio station. People told me I could easily make it as a ray in a ray gun. What’s the matter with you, don’t you want to do well? I wanted to be a beach bum and work on my wave function. I have always loved the sea.
    Most of the jobs advertised these days insist on a non-sleeper. Sleeping is dirty, unhygienic, wasteful and disrespectful to others. All public spaces are designated ‘Non-Sleeping’ and even a quick nap on a park bench carries a £50 fine. You can still sleep in your own home but all new beds are required by law to have a personal alarm clock built into the mattress. If you get caught on a bed-check with a dead alarm, that’s another £50 fine. Three fines and you are disqualified from sleeping for a year.
    I don’t have a new bed. When I invited my girlfriend to my flat for the first time, she had never seen a bed like mine.
    ‘Wow. Is that an antique?’
    ‘Do you like antiques?’
    ‘Well, they’re so … old.’
    ‘This is my bed. My one and only.’
    ‘What do you use it for?’
    ‘I sleep in it.’
    ‘For special occasions?’
    ‘Every night. Nine or ten hours every night.’
    ‘You mean every week.’
    I