Happy People Live Here

9A

  It was still very much night, especially for those lying comfy in their beds. Linda lay in hers, curled into a tight ball with her thick blanket scrunched up towards the end of the mattress. She wore red woolen socks on her feet and red woolen mittens on her hands. And her hands, they were clasped together, as if she were wishing hard for something terrific in her sleep.

  She wore pajamas, a white top, and white bottoms. They were decorated with little colored houses, like the type she grew up in when she was a little girl. And her pajama legs were tucked into her socks so that they didn’t ride up and let a draft at her legs. A night gown wouldn’t do. With all her kicking and fussing while she dreamt, it would end up around her neck and catching on a post or something and would probably end up choking her; that was the conclusion her mother had come to, half a century ago.

  Linda had slept like this since she was a little girl and like many things in her life, she had never seen a reason to do it any other way.

  But it was night still for most people. It was two a.m. And the night, it was pitch black, with the stars hidden behind a veil of grey sweating clouds, thickened by the polluted perspiration of truck exhausts and crackling embers that had been smoldering for the good part of a month in someone’s back garden, upwind from Linda’s open bedroom window. Though the smell crept into her sheets and into the pores of her skin, it was less bothersome than sleeping with the windows closed and having to spend electricity on a fan the whole night through.

  The alarm buzzed loud and obnoxiously and Linda threw her arms about in a spasm, cursing at someone for leaving egg shells on the floor when the king would be arriving at any second. And while she cursed blindingly, she uncoiled herself and stretched out to the end of the bed to remove her cell phone from its charger, turn off the alarm and then curl back up on the warm patch of the bed, pulling he covers back over her shoulders and then drifting back into the regal dream from which she had awoken.

  She was asleep for only a minute or two before she was dreaming once more and shifting and turning on the bed, making sour faces and pushing the blanket away with her disquieted feet. And then she was fetal again, curled into the tiniest little ball.

  The next alarm rang at three thirty and then the following at ten to four. And much like the first, Linda woke briefly from her dreaming to reach blindly for the phone and pull it close to her face so she could see the time, so she could see how early it was and how much more time she still had to sleep. And she cuddled up with the phone close to her chest as if it were her favorite pet as if its obnoxious ring were an affectionate lick from a kitten’s coarse tongue.

  The next eleven alarms rang out between the hours of four fifteen and five-O five, which was her ‘get up or else’ alarm, the one that sounded like the music of young people, up to no good.

  Normally Linda would get up at the five o’clock alarm. It was a song she rather liked by a band she couldn’t remember the name of, that had that bit in the middle, where they sang about being watched over by an angel and also they helped people in Africa too, and that was important.

  At five-O one Linda was still asleep. Her favorite song had played and she didn’t even hear it, she didn’t even budge. At five-O two, she muttered something about a blue pencil and then rolled onto her back, her dry tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth which hanged open like an excavator’s bucket, shoveling in the cold morning air.

  At five-O three a motorbike zipped down her street, backfiring as it turned the corner with the broken street lamp, narrowly missing the mischief of prostitutes and the car that was idling alongside.

  At five-O four, there was a scream. And it was loud enough for Linda to almost jump out of her skin. She shrieked on the bed, overcome by fright and painted in a hundred billion shivers, thinking someone had broken into her apartment and was about to accost her.

  But where were they?

  And why didn’t she have a concave mirror?