6 EGGS

Ruth

Now

The light is dim in our west-facing kitchen. I keep the curtains shut. I call the care home and say that I am sick and then I climb back into bed and take a sleeping pill. The sun doesn’t go up for six whole days, six empty shells of days, nothing in them, just me either asleep or about to be.

In this dream you feed us spoonfuls of bright white cream. There is something wrong about its colour; too white, iridescent. That can’t be right, I’m thinking in the dream. ‘It’s organic,’ you say, lifting your thumb to show me the picture of a cow on the tub, sketched by a grown-up imitating the hand of a child.

After he leaves me, I take to sleeping on my side with a pillow held against my belly and I dream of babies. It’s unclear which of the two acts has triggered the other: did I begin clutching the pillow because of my dreams or did the clutching bring about the dreaming? I am comfortable sleeping like this, so I see no reason why I shouldn’t continue. I dream of baby girls, never baby boys.

In this dream I miss her first steps, but you tell me it happened in the park. It is not clear why I wasn’t also in the park, nor do I have a clear image of what the park looks like or where it is located. You refer to it as if it is a familiar location that needs no further specification, and it is implied that we often go there together as a family. You tell me that she got up to chase a ball and off she went, like she’d been doing it for ever. Walking, unaided, almost running away from you. It was a red ball, you say, with white polka dots. As if knowing this particular piece of information will make me feel better about not having been there.

This is how, in sleeping, I pick up my first solitary habit: I either sleep too much or too little. Sleep comes to me in uncountable portions; it surprises me, knocks me out like a seasonal sickness with no early, recognizable symptoms. I’m not used to sleeping on my own. When I was very little I shared a bed with my mother, our dotted spines lined up against one another, like rodents sleeping under earth. Then, for a year, I slept alone in my college room. It was the year I almost starved myself to death.