Staying Up

The first time I saw it was on the A425 back into Leamington, after Ben and I had spent a Thursday in Towcester at a friend’s leaving party. A tractor had stopped dead on our side of the road, making it a matter of courtesy for drivers going the other way to let us through. Therefore, having just entered Warwickshire, we were waiting some time. When we did eventually pass the tractor, I rubber-necked along with everyone else to see what was going on, and was slightly perturbed to see the driver sitting motionless in his cab. I would’ve thought he was dead, if it weren’t for the people who had parked up in front of the tractor who were shaking his body, and shouting in his ear.

Ben stopped over for another night before going back to Oxford, and we went to the White Horse and sat in the beer garden to enjoy the warm end of another fine August evening. We were joined by my housemates Nick and Obi, who had spent most of the early evening getting half cut at a barbecue, and we told them of what had happened on our journey over. We joked that perhaps the tractor driver was a narcoleptic, or that the people who were trying to wake him were in serious death denial. Obi mentioned another story he’d read about a man in Spain who had been taken to Hospital after he didn’t wake up; nothing could disturb his sleep. But otherwise, doctors said, he was in rude health. We got drunk and laughed and went home and crashed out.

The next morning we all awoke fresh, Nick cooked a round of bacon and egg sandwiches and I made the tea, and after watching the qualifying for the European Grand Prix Ben left. The day was relatively quiet, we all did the dishes and some rudimentary tidying up, and I retired to my room to work on a comic. Lying on my bed with my sketchpad out, I didn’t even notice falling asleep.

I was awoken suddenly by Obi shouting my name and roughly shaking me at the shoulder. Being woken like this first of all scared the living shit out of me, and then put me in a bad mood, which I was quick to share.

“What the fuck?! What are you doing?” I rubbed dried saliva from my cheek whilst glaring at him.

“Jesus, I’m glad you’re awake! You know about the sleeping people?”

“What?”

“On the news? You haven’t seen? Okay, you haven’t seen. C’mon, this is real messed up.”

Blinking in the light as my eyes readjusted themselves, I checked the time (23.07) and followed Obi downstairs to the living room, where Nick was stood in the doorway looking wide-eyed and white faced.

“Glad you’re awake,” he said. “This is fucked up.”

Now I was just getting annoyed. Obi explained what was happening.

“You remember last night, I told you about the guy, the Spanish guy who didn’t wake up? It’s happening all over the world, like, everywhere. People are starting to panic, there’s no way to wake anyone up. On the news people are being told not to go to sleep until they know what’s going on, basically.”

I was sceptical, at first, but as I sat down and started to watch the news, and read Nick’s laptop over his shoulder, I was convinced. I actually pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming, not that that’s actually worked for me before. I didn’t tell the others I did this, because they seemed much more panicked than me, and I figured my antipathy would only annoy them.

Nick and I tried calling our parents, to no avail. I tried to reassure Nick by telling him that they’d be alright, and were probably asleep naturally, and that we’d try again in the morning. Our sister was in hysterics, because her son wasn’t waking up, and it took the best part of forty minutes to calm her down. I couldn’t explain to you now how I managed to remain so rational during the beginning of this. It just didn’t seem that terrible, I guess.

Obi didn’t get through to his parents on Skype, but he spoke to a friend on instant messenger who would drive up to see them for him. After that we kept the news on in the hope of hearing any updates, or that someone may have woken up, and I prepared a round of regular coffee. I’ve pulled all nighters before, and know that the trick isn’t to go for strong coffee – that only leads to a caffeine headache within a few hours, which only encourage sleep. It’s best just to have one when you feel like it, and otherwise smoke lots of cigarettes. I’d actually given up in June, but I figured why not, if I wasn’t going to be getting up in the morning?

So we stayed up all night. When it got to about four am and there was still no breakthrough, we left the television talking to itself and played ProEvo upstairs instead. By the time we’d finished a league between ourselves we had enough time for another coffee, then wandered into town.

This was unlike any end-of-all-nighter I’d ever pulled before. As we walked up into the town centre in the bright, foggy, purple tinged light of early morning, I found myself bemused. Where usually the roads would be dead and the only people you’d encounter would be tradesmen and keen pensioners in their Sunday best, today was like a Saturday mid-morning. An eerie, unsettled air had entered the town. Rude boys normally found cruising the streets with their windows down on a Friday night were driving up the high street repeatedly, blasting out drum and bass. The Police had cars positioned at various tactical points on and off the Parade, I guessed in case a burst of sleep-deprived rioting occurred. An old man had fallen asleep on a bus stop bench, and a group of kids were circled around him, shouting in his face and prodding his arm. The look on their faces was half amused, and half scared. Then we went into Tesco.

I had never seen it like this. It was barely seven o’clock in the morning, and people were barging through the aisles, filling baskets like they would a bomb shelter. The newspapers were being taken off the racks as soon as they were put on, like everyone wanted a souvenir for later use, definite proof that they were there the moment the world went to sleep. The soft drinks were almost gone, as were the sweets and anything sugary, and in the hot drinks aisle, now almost completely cleared, I saw a lady and a man fighting over the last tub of Nescafe, whilst another man was hurriedly filling his basket with as many boxes of tea as he could. I laughed openly at this scene. The longest time a person has officially stayed awake is 276 hours, or eleven and a half days. I counted nine boxes of eighty tea bags in this guy’s basket. Unless he was planning on breaking a world record, or had a rather large family, he would have to consume sixty-two cups of tea a day to get through that amount. Making that many cups of tea would make me sleepy, to be honest. We were waiting almost twenty minutes to get served at the cigarette aisle, and had to settle for a box of Benson & Hedges. It seemed cigarettes were in as much demand as caffeine.

The rest of the day passed almost uneventfully. We tried my parents again, and couldn’t get through to them. Obi’s friend had found his parents, tucked up asleep in bed. My extended family had spoken to my sister, who was keeping vigil over her son. She had wanted to drive down to us, but pile-ups on the motorways had left the roads in chaos. Speaking of which, someone had fallen asleep whilst driving up our road, and crashed into several parked cars. The ambulance was called, and after they had taken the lady from the wreck of her car and tended to her wounds, they said she was sleeping, and there was nothing more they could do. This made me smile, as I thought of a vet telling a small child why they’d never see their pet rabbit again.

We had another barbecue that evening, listening to the kids shouting in the street a few rows over, and all the different loud music coming from every direction. For our part we had vintage Brit-Pop playing at some volume, a choice all three of us could agree on and epoch-making enough to serve as end of the world music. We gave up watching the news sometime in the afternoon as it was making us sleepy, and still no-one had woken up.

Obi was the first of us to go, at about half past ten that evening. It was odd seeing someone sleeping, completely limp and lifeless, but so cosy. Nick and I carried him to his bed, and put the covers over him, then went to play more ProEvo.

“Do you think this is the end of the world?” Nick asked me. His face looked ashen and he was on the verge of tears when he spoke.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Even if it is, it’s not that bad. I always thought it would be tidal waves, or a wall of nuclear fire, or... Something else. I never thought humans were good enough to deserve to die peacefully.”

“Yeah. I guess we’ll just dream on. I hope we dream, anyway,” he looked at the window for a moment, as peaceful as a twitching, bleary eyed person could. “Just keep on dreaming...”

His voice trailed off, and I knew that at some point, sooner or later, we were both going to sleep. I tried to tell Nick that old thing about dreams being reality and waking life being a dream, like your reflection being the real you, which goes off and does other things when you’re not looking in the mirror, but I lost my train of thought, and it didn’t look like he understood what I meant anyway.

At half past two that night I got back into Nick’s room from the toilet to find him slumped on the bed with his eyes closed, I tried shaking him and calling his name, but I knew it was too late. I put him into his bed and turned his light off before going downstairs.

At sunrise I was dancing halfway between the garden and the kitchen, smoking cigarettes and drinking a whiskey and ginger beer when my phone went, it was Alex. Him and the guys in Sheffield had come into a load of Class As and were staying awake that way, although completely off their heads. They were checking I was still awake, as they were driving south to pick me up and, it seemed, sort me out. They said they would get here in about half an hour. After the phone call I didn’t really feel much at all, it was like all my senses were wearing ear muffs. I guess I was glad they were coming; it would be something, a bit different. But time wasn’t working properly, either. The Hefner album I was listening to had finished a long time ago, I thought. But then I realised that it was the space between tracks, and it started again, and I continued singing and dancing. I struggled to the kettle and poured another coffee into my stained mug. Even this was becoming little use, my eyes were tired and rough like sandpaper, or so it felt, and I burned my tongue on the freshly boiled water.

The cigarettes ran out on the last track of the album, but I knew there were some more in Nick’s room. I walked in and looked at him, so peaceful in his bed, and hoped he was dreaming. I don’t know how long I was stood there for, but when I was aware of myself again the music had stopped, so I went into my room for another album. There was nothing in the top of my CD rack I wanted, so I got on my knees and looked at the bottom, then I tilted my head to the side to read the titles properly, then I rested it on the floor, then I started to close my eyes and –

Sod this, I find myself thinking with a sudden burst of energy. If I’m going out sleeping beauty, I’m doing it with dignity. I manage to climb, with exacerbated difficulty, onto my bed, and throw my sketchpad to the floor. I put my head back onto my pillow, and my eyelids start to roll like rocks, unstoppable across my vision. I think I can hear a banging at my front door, as the World turns black. If I wake up, I’ll let you know.