Axel Dawe was sick of spin. Everywhere he looked, nothing was true. Everything was a lie, an exaggeration, a slice of marketing gobbledegook, from adverts for shoes, socks and silencers to press releases for headrests, knives and elephants. Worst of all, though, were the paeans in praise of the latest sleeping remedy. These infuriated Axel, an intense man at the best of times but one who tended to the psychotic when deprived of precisely seven hours and six minutes’ sleep. Sadly, sleep deprivation was a fact of Axel’s life. Born into a middle-class and nondescript family of travelling mobile phone salesmen (and women), he first encountered insomnia at the age of 11. Then the cause was sexual desire, as it was for many other pre-pubescent, pubescent, adolescent and adult nights. But sexual longing was not Axel’s only undoing, between the covers, and at night, that is. No, he was prone to fretfulness, to worry, to agonising over everything and anything from his football team’s latest setback to his mother’s choice of hat. His team once wore black but had been transmuted to 11 pink men and true, because their new owners believed that pink was irresistible as a marketing tool; clad in the pink, the Team Formerly Dressed In Black suffered a succession of defeats so much so that Axel’s mother, herself not an acolyte, decided to sport a large black sombrero by way of mourning. This only exacerbated Axel’s discombobulation, especially when his mother, who had somehow contrived to be known as Luxury, came into his room to kiss him goodnight. She would lean down and invariably her sombrero would get in the way, knocking this, banging that, until Luxury would decide that kissing her son was futile. Off she would go, leaving Axel to his sleeplessness, his dreams of a life without Luxury, or without her sombrero at any rate, a life in which his team once again took to the field in black and came off it in black, too, legs black, arms black, backs black, hair black, everything black, back to black for black, said Axel to himself, is the colour of night, the colour of sleep, the colour of rest and without seven hours, six minutes of it what is the point, we may as well all give up.
The morning after, unrefreshed, Axel’s routine was invariable. His bedroom looked out over the suburban hinterland. In the foreground, grey pavements and tarmac. In the middleground, warehouses. In the distance, more of the same. Axel loved his view for to him it represented a kind of apotheosis, a summation of mankind’s efforts to impose order and calm, a mute and yet beautiful contrast to the angst of his darkness hours, immutable, spinless, unspinable. “If only,” said Axel, “there was a remedy, something to end thought and bring sleep, something like the view from my bedroom.”
(TBC)
