(Sleep)Walking London by Akio Lê

For two months of Summer, I spent my midnights wandering the streets of London with a sleepwalking girl. It wasn’t voluntary, to be honest. I was on my way home one night after my shift as a street cleaner: the pavement was empty of pedestrians, roads empty of cars; the night shift staff stirred the dim lighting of the dining rooms with their exhausted silhouettes; tumbleweeds of Gregg’s wrappers flew past my peripheral; pigeons strolled mindlessly over the large tiles of Trafalgar Square pecking for bits of croissant between the cracks; rats drunk on Aperol spritz bin-hopped in a chorus of squeaks; waltzing flies cast flecks of shadows beneath a streetlamp.

I noticed her walking with her eyes closed and, suddenly drawn from reverie, called out, “Excuse me miss, are you alright?” She hadn’t replied, and I figured from the lack of a walking stick that she wasn’t in fact blind, but sleepwalking. I followed a good distance behind her to make sure she got home safe.

She wasn’t remarkably put together from what I could see, so much so that she probably would’ve drawn less attention had I not been there. Still, I thought I was doing the right thing: I followed her to the 15 to Blackwall bus stop, then to the Lidl she got dropped off at, and then to the entrance of her apartment complex. Once she arrived, she stood in front of the door without moving, her head hanging. I waited for roughly ten minutes some distance away before finding her keys in the pocket of her jeans and passing them to her outstretched hand. She opened the door and disappeared past it, the lock shutting in sync with the door.

This routine had begun in early June and would continue every night for roughly two months. I couldn’t explain why I waited sometimes hours after my shift just to follow her across central London. Because of the space I put between us, I found that these midnight strolls were not much different than walking by myself.

This loneliness reached its peak on the seventeenth of July when I found myself curious as to the appearance of this girl; I decided that night to gather my courage and walk beside her. Sleep-tossed bangs pointed every which way; neatly filled in eyebrows contrasted the plain and naked skin; a round blunt nose that sometimes twitched to the smells of the closing restaurants we passed; the tips of an overgrown bob spilled over the collar of her hood; she had an expression verging between openly attentive and blankly passive – she had fit the appearance of a sleepwalking girl fairly accurately in my mind, no doubt. There was also a strange grace to each of her movements which might have been absent had she been awake: it was this unnatural quality of sleepwalking which seemed to imbue an honest beauty into her plain appearances.

I think what drew me the most to her was the vulnerability of her eyelids. I’m not exactly an eyelids kind of man – if there is such a thing – but I found myself strangely attracted to their even complexion, save for the comma-like birthmark on one of them that I found even more endearing. It was a small, harmless secret that I took pleasure in keeping.

Had we met in normal circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have ever noticed that birthmark. I thought of the possibility of rejection and the lack of intimacy if our relationship had begun in the waking world; then I thought of our current predicament when something as simple as the colour of her eyes was a kind of forbidden knowledge and found no greater comfort or reassurance in the fact. I didn’t want to confront what could have been. I even hoped that we’d continue on in this way: growing older together and dying together without ever needing to meet eye-to-eye.

On the nineteenth of July, I tried talking to her.

“Excuse me miss, you’re sleepwalking,” and the sentence sounded so ridiculous out loud that I began laughing to myself with little care for whether or not she actually responded.

I tried again: “Excuse me miss, but if you’re going to sleepwalk around Trafalgar Square and return home, at least have the courtesy to draw your own keys out of your jeans – I’ve developed a rash from how many times I’ve had to reach into your pocket.” She never responded, however, and only walked on and on, following the same route as always.

I tapped her shoulder once when she had forgotten to ring the bus for her stop, and I suddenly thought, ‘She’s sleepwalking! Give the girl a break!” Even then she was unresponsive and I had to press the button myself.

It seemed like her sense of smell was the only sense wholly intact, which I observed each time we passed by a certain chicken and chips shop; without fail, she would pause outside of this shop, tilt her head up to the sky like a wolf rearing its head to the moon, and sniff the air with little flicks of her head before moving on. By the time I had seen this occur a handful of times, I was accustomed to carrying a small notepad to write down anything of interest; one of those nights I wrote, ‘Loves chicken and chips.’

Of course, her nose would twitch as we passed other closing restaurants and shops, but it was this one in particular that she would stop in front of – Chips and Chicken! it was so cleverly named. In fact, as time went on, she would sometimes forget to halt the bus, miss a turn, or wait in front of the wrong complex – her pauses at the shop, however, remained hilariously consistent. I once bought one of their waxy boxes soaked with oil a few hours before walking with her just to see her reaction; I ended up having to eat it quickly because her nose was drawing her head in all sorts of directions with sharp twists of her neck.

The night after, I wore the most expensive cologne I could find in my small porcelain saucer of perfume samples and noticed that she walked slightly closer to me. The pendular swings of our hands caused our knuckles to kiss each time they passed one another in their arcs; as we waited patiently at glowing red crosswalks, the pad of her thumb would often graze over my fingers with such a mechanical efficiency that I thought she was counting them.

As we arrived back at her apartment on the twenty-third of July, I said, “Excuse me miss, but while you’ve been asleep, I’ve been in love with you,” and the door closed behind her without a word.

            I felt bad about the last bit of makeup remaining on her face while she sleepwalked – sleptwalked? sleepedwalk? sleptwalked? Never mind. On the twenty-nineth of July, I bought makeup wipes and helped remove her eyebrow liner. I decided that it would be easier to do this on the bus instead of during her pauses in front of the shop, given that the warm amber light spilling through the front windshield would warn me when it was going to move again.

We sat at the front that night and I gently wiped the eyebrow liner away at the first red light. She jolted slightly to the cool moisture at first, but grew more comfortable as time passed. The smudged impression the liner had left on the wipe was a novel sight for me. Folding it to repeat the unfamiliar process for the other side, I noticed the naturally lighter hue of her eyebrows coming through and thought how odd it was that only her eyebrows were done.

When we arrived in front of her apartment complex that night, I grabbed one more makeup wipe and went once over the rest of her face. I felt beneath the damp wipe the contours of her delicate face, and pulling away, I fanned the leftover moisture on her skin with both my hands.

            On the first of August, I was cleaning Trafalgar Square of its rubbish at about two in the afternoon when I saw the sleepwalking girl. She was walking with her eyes open – what a strange thing to clarify – with such a plain expression of happiness that I thought it rude to interrupt her with my inevitably strange introduction: ‘Excuse me miss,’ I might’ve said, ‘we like taking strolls while you sleepwalk.’

So I stared at her from a distance, unable to note any particular detail – especially the colour of her eyes.

Later on she passed me as I was depositing an empty Walkers bag in a bin. Our shoulders brushed ever so slightly – I raised my eyes and met hers. She seemed a completely different person: guarded with her face of makeup; aloof with her scrutinising gaze; vague with her mixed expression; the ends of her straightened bangs tiptoed along the tops of her eyebrows with each small movement of her head; a fashionable, slightly oversized brown suit was paired with a pocket square of Where’s Waldos; the corner of her birthmark peeked at me knowingly beneath the crushing fold of her double eyelid; her eyes were underwhelming because they were no different from my own – they were simply human, and suddenly it hardly mattered what colour they were; her knuckles whitened as she held her clutch purse; without a look of recognition, she apologised and went on her way.

She left and I turned, brushing past the shoulders of fate.

I waited for her that night sitting by the fountain in front of the National Gallery, but she didn’t come. The company of the pigeons gathering around the water provided little comfort. The next hour of waiting always seemed as promising as the previous; it was an endless loop of hope gained and hope lost. After four or so hours, I went home without a word.

As time goes on, I still find myself stalling after each shift – the heart is a reservoir of unrealised love.

Akio Lê

Image: trafalgar Square fountain and builidng floodlit. Trafalgar Square at night by pam fray, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons