Art Pact 118

There's no day so perfect, of course, that a sleeper can't spoil it. It's doubly galling if you've managed to convince yourself that you're free of sleepers. We'd thought the training had worked, but apparently I'd picked up at least one sleeper made of sterner stuff than the others. I don't know how she did it, but Doctor Singh suggested (later on) that a particularly self-aware sleeper might have been able to subvert the meditation in such a way as to block herself out of the conscious mind completely. His theories, as always, were vague and untestable, and since it was his work that had convinced me I was clear to start with, I was even less inclined to believe them. Doctor Singh typified the expert in that regard - he was no more likely to be right than the average man, but was always able to somehow explain his failures. I disregarded his theories about variation in sleeper willpower. They may be true, who knows (they have the scent of truthiness about them, at the very least), but they are at best unhelpful.

My sleeper was triggered by a shopping trip, of all things. I was out with Ellie and the boys on the Saturday three months after the Coventry thing - late August, it would have been, because I remember quite distinctly that the stated purpose of the trip was buying a new school uniform for Joe (who'd grown out of his old one with alarming speed) and stationery for Tom (who'd managed to destroy or lose all of his pens, pencils, rulers, etc., in a summer orgy of trips to friend's houses, holidays, his hated homework club, and so forth). In actual fact the shopping was just an excuse to get us all out of the house together so that we could wander around town in the late summer warmth, enjoying a little bit more of the summer holidays together before the hassle of the last week was upon us and the dreary return to school/work routine (Ellie and I had been at work, of course, but not having to get the kid's out the door for school every morning had made the days seem strangely relaxing).

We strolled around Marks and Sparks for a bit, fantasizing about buying clothes there rather than at the discount school store around the corner, and it was one our way from one to the other that my sleeper went off.

"-don't really care," Joe was saying in his level-headed tone. "They're all trousers."

I was about to agree with him, but found that my mouth had begun to feel gummy, as though I'd taken a huge mouthful of peanut butter. My vision swam for a second, and I had the distinct impression that I should have been standing on a bridge by now, that I was late and that someone was going to be angry with me. Who? I looked at the children, then at Ellie, and as I did so she looked back and started slightly.

"What?" I asked.

"I thought-" she started to say, then cut herself off. We both knew what was happening. "Would you mind nipping to the cash machine?" she asked, pointing to the Barclays on the other side of the road. "If we're going to Nandos I don't want to use my card."

The kids, perked up by the thought of chicken, paid no attention to the fact that I'd suddenly began to twitch furiously around the mouth. I nodded as best I could, and began to walk away. Ellie hustled them on, shepherding them away from whatever it was I was going to do next.

The first thing I did was to not do what I'd been told. We did need cash, it was true, but if the sleeper was coming into full control it was better not to immediately tell her what my PIN number was and provide her with a handful of walking-around money. Old sleepers are OK for that - they don't know what ATM cards are, so there's only so much they can do with them. But you can't tell who you've got - if a sleeper less than forty years gone has got into you they might have the sort of problem that emptying your account can help with. No bank will recompense you for that sort of loss.

I walked over to the marble surround of the fountain outside Boots and sat among the various resting shoppers, trying to keep my distance from them in case of a sudden attack of the arm spasms. The smell of half-eaten McDonalds burgers swirled around me, and I wondered for a moment who had been eating takeaway on a bridge. I could feel the gummy sensation come over my mouth again, and I had to take a serious of slow deep breaths in order to relax enough to forestall a panic attack.

Passers-by were beginning to look at me a little oddly - seeing the sleeper's image rather than me. That was when I knew for certain it was a woman, because I noticed that single men would stare directly at me, men in couples taking only furtive glances when I was out of the field of vision of their girlfriends or wives. Most of the women ignored me, although a few teenagers gave me the sort of half-aggressive/half-disgusted scowl of bitter jealousy. So whoever's coming up, I thought, she was beautiful.

Sometimes flattery annoys them, but this one was obviously vain enough to fall for it, because I felt the stickiness in my jaw lighten a little. It was still there - when she came up fully she wasn't going to let me have control of my voice - but began to feel a little more like a horse being ridden rather than a puppet being worked by his strings.

I felt my head turn towards a middle-aged man in a nondescript grey suit. He was standing under a lamppost, checking his watch and shifting his weight uncomfortably from foot to foot.

A venom wash of rage flashed through me, and I knew that I was looking at her trigger.