“Honey, are you asleep?”
I say no. I haven’t slept for two days in a row. I hope I can get some sleep tonight.
“I can’t sleep.”
I roll over and find Vera staring at me. I take a strand of her dyed brown hair and start playing with them with my fingers.
“Let’s talk,” she says.
“Sure,” I say. I pull out a white hair among the strand. I look at it closely and realise it is a lighter shade of brown. I pluck it out in one swift motion.
“What should we talk about?” she asks in her dreamy voice.
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t know either.”
She is still looking at me. I am looking out of the window. There is a red dot moving slowly in the sky. I watch it flying further and further away until it gets out of my sight.
For a minute or two, we just lie there without talking. I am looking at the sky. She is staring at the ceiling.
“Remember that time when we stumbled upon this antique shop in Central? That time when we couldn’t find that Thai restaurant where we were meeting your sister and we were late and she got real angry about it? I wanted to go in so badly but then the lady in there looked so intimidating and we were late. Let’s go back there some time.”
“Sure.” I try to think of the shop she talked about, but I can’t remember anything about it.
“But it’s been over a year now. Do you think it’s still there?”
“I don’t know. Probably not.”
“What a shame,” she says. There’s not a hint of disappointment in her voice.
My left foot finds Vera’s feet under the cover. I stroke her toes slightly with mine. She strokes back. We continue like that for a while and then she goes on talking about getting a new sofa from IKEA.
“What colour do you think we should get?”
“I don’t know. White?”
“I like white. But it gets dirty very easily. I was thinking about grey. What do you think?”
“Grey sounds good.”
I hear a man and a woman arguing downstairs. The man shouts “what do you want me to do?” and the woman is crying. I cannot make out what she says because she is crying. Then none of them say anything. I wait for them to speak again, but nothing comes.
“Joe,” she says. “Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“I was saying, should we get a fabric or leather one? I saw this brown leather sofa the other day when hanging out with mother. It’s perfect for the house. And she was like, ‘If you like it so much then buy it.’ I really wanted to. But it costs quite a lot. Something around seven thousand and five hundred. I said I’d ask you about it first. What do you think?”
“Whatever you like,” I say. I turn my head to look at her. She is lying on her back with her eyes closed. For one second I thought she has fallen asleep. That reminds me of how I used to wait for her to sleep first so that I could watch her sleep. I loved the way her eyelids would flicker every once in a while. I still do, but I don’t watch her sleep anymore.
“Maybe forget about it,” she says. “The one we have now is still in good condition.”
“Sure,” I say. I continue staring at her face. A few times she opens her mouth and then closes it again. I can hear the sound of her breathing, her chest rising and falling in a slow rhythm. Then she opens her eyes.
“Joe,” she says calmly.
“Yes?”
“Do you remember the first night we spent in this house? It was so empty. There was no furniture. No sofa. Nothing. Just a bed.”
“Yes. Just a bed,” I say. I remember ordering pizza and spilling the whole cup of coke on the three hundred dollar rug that night. That rug is gone now. And I remember waking up late the next day. It was a Sunday. We were happy.
“This bed,” she says.
“Yes.”
“Maybe it’s time for a new bed.”
“Maybe.”
Then both of us remain silent. I try to think of something to say, but I can’t think of any. She is probably trying, and probably failing, too. I look at her and she looks back at me. Both of us are waiting for the other one to say something. Things that we need to talk about. Things that we never talk about. But none of us say anything. We just lie there and look at one another. A while later we decide that it’s best for us to stop talking and we say goodnight to each other. She says it first.
Somewhere along our conversation the sparrows have started chirping. The room is less dark than before. I turn to the other side and look at the sky. The clouds are visible now. I feel Vera shifting behind me. We both did.
ns 18.68.0.80da2
