Free The World and Other Places by Jeanette Winterson Page A

took her in my arms. Tonight, this night, tomorrow night, the nights in gentle stars, with you, if you like, rolled and dark and quilted with stars. I asked her to sleep with me.
    ‘You mean lie awake with you? Everybody wants to know if we’re lying awake together.’
    ‘Sleeping together.’
    She was worried. Now she knew she was with a real heavy number.
    ‘Nine or ten hours a night?’
    I nodded, addicted, dumb, sleep-hooked, sleepy.
    She left. I advertised in an underground magazine called
SNOOZE
. ‘Girlfriend wanted. Must have own bed.’
    I am not rich but my sister is. Lie her down and cover her in gold and not even her left eye would be showing. She works for a German giant called Fafner UK. Their business is other people’s money and the more they have the more they want. My sister was one of the first to give up sleep for the sake of her career. She works a twenty-hour day in two time zones. She worries about me.

    ‘Hello. It’s your sister.’
    ‘It’s the middle of the night.’
    ‘I was worried about you.’
    ‘Don’t worry about me.’
    ‘I saw your small ad in
SNOOZE
magazine.’
    ‘How did you know it was me?’
    ‘You put your name, address and phone number.’
    She told me to see a doctor and get some waking pills. She offered me a job. I asked her why she had been reading
SNOOZE
magazine. She didn’t like that. She knows it’s pornography. If you can find it in a shop it’s always the top shelf, and by top shelf I mean you have to ask the assistant for a ladder. It takes a particular kind of somnolent courage to clatter the aluminium steps through the eager beavers in the Hobbies Section and clamber up past Adult Entertainment, S-M, Snuff, Corpse, until you can fumble for the plain brown wrapper of
SNOOZE
. I have asked the assistant to keep it under the counter for me, the way she does with the incest magazine,
MOTHERFUCKER
. She shook her head. ‘I can’t do that with
SNOOZE
. Not
SNOOZE
. In any case, from next month you’ll have to sign for it.’
    So there I was, with a Sleep magazine on prescription. Yes, prescription. Doctor’s orders dear Sister. It’s my new job, didn’t I tell you about that?

    I know we are walking home by a roundabout route, but after I bought my paper this morning I decided to go to the park and feed the rubber ducks. The real ducks died because so many people were feeding them in the new twenty-four-hour working day that not a drake nor a duck had a moment to itself. Some sank under the weight of soggy bread, others exploded. The rubber variety are much more adaptable.
    The sun shone. Maddeningly, it won’t shine during the night, but we are working on it.
    I walked quickly, purposefully through the dead-eyed crowds taking a breakfast break, until I got clear of the feeding areas and on to a crisp grass knoll. No one ever comes up here, it’s too aimless, there’s no reason to come up here, no swings, no cafe, not even a bench.
    I flung myself down and watched the clouds bumping each other, the break and mend of a morning sky. My body was relaxed and the ordered chords of my thinking mind began to separate into component notes, to replay themselves without effort, without purpose, trailing into … sleep.
    I dreamed I was a single moment in a single day.
    A note struck and vanished. A sounding. A reckoning. Gone.
    I was awoken rudely. Far too rudely. The keeper proddedme with a sharp stick as though I were a beast in a zoo. I opened my eyes and the clouds were gone. A grey face, a dirty uniform, the customary slashes of the barely open lids, and the clenched fist scrawling a ticket.
    Do you remember when park keepers used to spear litter and chat to mothers at the sand pit? No more. These scabrous patrols have stun batons and two-way radios. They clean up homosexuals and sleepers and prefer to be known by their offical tag of Public Space Enforcement Officers.
    Unfortunately mine had fallen over. It happened suddenly. He was punching out his