Don't Wake Up
The systems room, after hours
After eight the floor emptied and the room got louder, because the machines were the only thing left making noise.
The overhead lights were off. What was left was one strip light over the racks and the blue wash off the monitor, where a progress bar had been crawling all evening.
A desk with two screens. A chair somebody had adjusted wrong years ago. A window at the far end that showed the crane over the new build — red light, white light, red light.
The restore was going to run until it finished, and Wren had decided some time ago that she was going to sit here until it did.
There was nothing to watch. That was the point. A bar that barely moved, and the air handling going the way it always went.
It was better than the flat. At the flat there was a chair with a shape in it.
She heard the lift.
Nobody comes up to the systems floor that late. She was already turning round when June came through the door with her coat over her arm and a paper bag in her hand.
“Don’t,” June said. “Before you start. Don’t.”
“Wasn’t going to say anything.”
“You were going to say visiting hours, or the office equivalent of it.” She put the bag on the desk. “Security let me up. I said I worked here, which is true, and that I’d left something up here, which is now also true, because I’ve left this.”
Wren looked in the bag.
Two packets of the salt and vinegar crisps. The pink wafer biscuits that come in a paper sleeve.
And a bottle of the cheap orange stuff she had drunk every day of school. She had never once said out loud that she liked it. It wasn’t the kind of thing you said out loud.
“You went to a shop.”
“I went to a garage. It’s the same food but the lighting’s worse.”
Wren put the bag down and did not say anything about the orange.
She took the chair by the window, the one nobody sat in, and pulled it round.
“How was today?” Wren said.
June stopped with the bag half open.
“Don’t do that.”
“Do what.”
“Ask me about my day.” June sat down. “It was your day. I was at it.”
“Right.”
“How was today?”
Wren turned back to the screen.
“Fine,” she said.
“Wren.”
“There were more people than we expected. The car got there late, so they held it for us at the top.” She heard herself doing it and kept doing it. “They said that was fine. You could tell it wasn’t.”
“Wren.”
“And the food was too much. Dad ordered too much. There’s a load of it in the boot of the car and I don’t know what to do with it.”
June didn’t say anything for a moment.
“Okay,” she said.
“Okay.”
“For the record, I’m not asking again. I’m going to sit here and eat garage cheese. If you want to say something you can, and if you don’t, that’s completely—“
“June.”
“Yes.”
“Stop leaving me doors.”
June stopped. Whatever she’d been about to do with her hands, she didn’t do it.
“You do it every time,” Wren said. “You put the door in before you finish the sentence. You’ve done it since we were kids.”
“That’s a very rude thing to notice about someone.”
“You asked me how my day was.”
“I did.” June opened the chocolate. “All right. Then here’s the whole sentence with no door in it: I’m staying until that bar gets to the end.”
She stayed.
For a while she talked, in the way she could, about nothing — a man at her office called Beckmann who tapped desks, a lift that announced the floors in a voice that had clearly been recorded by someone having a bad afternoon. Wren said things back at the right places. It was easy in a way that nothing else that week had been easy.
Then June got quieter, and then she stopped, and after a bit her head went over against the side of the chair.
Wren looked round.
Asleep. Properly asleep, sitting badly, one hand under her cheek and her coat slipping off her knees.
She watched the progress bar move. She let a decent stretch of time go past, so that it wasn’t a thing she was doing.
Then she got up and took her coat off the back of her own chair and put it over June, tucking it in at the shoulder where it would slide.
June didn’t move at all.
Not the way people move when something lands on them. Not the small shift, the head turning. Nothing. She lay absolutely still, and Wren noted it and put it down to how tired she must be, because she had seen June’s face in that yard this afternoon and tired was not a strong enough word for it.
She crouched down to pick the fallen coat off the floor.
From there June’s face was very close and lit blue from the screen. There was a bit of hair stuck to her cheek from where she’d been leaning.
Wren’s hand got about as far as it was ever going to get. Then it stopped, and came back.
She stayed crouched there for a second longer than she should have.
“You’re not comfortable,” she said quietly. “You never sit properly in these chairs. You never have.”
Nothing.
The air handling went on. Somewhere below, a lift door opened and closed on an empty floor.
“She asked about you,” Wren said.
The words came out flat and small and completely without permission.
“Not at the end. Before that, when she was still — when you could have a conversation with her. She asked if you were all right. She asked more than once.”
Wren looked at the floor between her shoes.
“Said you were. Every time. Didn’t know, obviously. Just said it.”
The bar on the screen moved.
“She knew,” she said. “About — she knew. Never said the word. Neither did I. We did years of not saying it and now there’s nobody left in the world who knows, which is a stupid thing to be sad about on top of everything else, and I am anyway.”
She put her hand flat on the floor to keep steady.
“Seven years,” she said. “That’s the whole thing. That’s all of it. Seven years and a cupboard door.”
The room did not do anything. Rooms don’t.
“You’d be kind about it,” Wren said. “That’s the part. You’d be so kind about it that I’d have to leave the building.”
June’s hand moved under her cheek. Just the fingers.
Wren went completely still.
She waited. Listened to the air handling cycle, and cycle again.
Nothing else. Only the slow in and out of somebody sleeping badly in a chair.
“Don’t wake up,” she said. “Please don’t wake up.”
She got up off the floor.
She went back to her own desk and sat down and put her phone face-down beside the keyboard, and pulled her sleeves back the way she did before touching something that wasn’t hers to break.
The restore had another hour on it.
Wren opened the log window and started reading it from the top, line by line, the way you do when you need there to be a next line, and the typing went on in the dark for a long time.