You Took My Sleep

It is still dark when the four of us awake, and there is a kind of film-set condensation on all the windows, tiny dribbles of morning struggling down the glass like artists looking for galleries. A few stumbles and much laughter later, we are hurtled like fugitives across the capital in a bright red people carrier, the river glinting with alien colours, the light brightening only slightly, and the city still asleep. Our driver talks to himself. He smiles at what he is saying. (It must be good.) As passengers, we set the camera at various speeds and experiment with shots of the street lighting as we weave in and out of people still walking home. Eventually we reach the station all photographed out and clamber like comedians aboard the train, as if straining to get out of the fumbling metropolis, desperate to shed our urban skin, before it all wakes up, before several million reasons for humanity shake our dream and pluck us all back in again. Result. The train pulls out of the station and we are unrestrained: we are safe. The capital peels off. The carriage is warm, maybe too warm, and we are so sleepy in it, it could be that we are in fact dreaming all of this and are still tucked up in bed. I drink coffee. The artist peers at me from across her plastic cup. The eight-year-old writes and the five-year-old stares out the window. A round of newspapers sit like facts on the table, their news of yet more devastation round the edges of the war zone no real surprise. I stare into space. 'You took my sleep,' I hear a child say. 'You took my sleep.' The child is not ours and her father has just woken her. 'You took my sleep,' she repeats. What a beautiful phrase, I am thinking. Meanwhile, the artist looks relaxed and strangely at peace without her work. There is a light mist hanging like a spectre above the green fields and a bright sun now burns through, to the frost still clinging to the grass. We are off to the foothills. We are off to the mountains and nothing can stop us.