Can't Sleep, Won't Sleep, Volume 4: Grownup Stories for Bedtimes

By Lesley Atherton

Brilliant Short Reads

This book is volume 4 in an ongoing series of short stories, perfect for reading while travelling and commuting. Inside you’ll find intriguing tales of revenge, of compassion, and of humour.

This book is volume 4 in an ongoing series of short stories and flash fiction, perfect for reading while travelling and commuting. Inside you’ll find intriguing tales of revenge, of compassion, and of humour.

What happens when you decide to create your own detective? Or when benefits and buses are all you can access in life? Or when you miss the chance of a lifetime, or crash your father's car? Dreams and folklore, drunken teens, reflections on nursery rhymes and real life - this volume has plenty to make you think.

•Death in a studio.
•The demise of a method actor.
•Benefits and buses.
•Writing the detectives.
•Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary.
•Narcissists vs empaths.
•The joy of gardens and the love of the forest.
•Office bullying.
•Confusion of relationships.
•And so much more.

Published by Words Are Life. Do support independent publishers!

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Books by this Author
•Bigheart
•Conflict Management: Novelettes For Discerning Readers (Collection of No Matter What, Walking With Eve, Divine Intervention and Changes)
•Crash Test Dummy
•Feet On The Table: An Enormous Book Of Tiny Stories
•Life’s a Mess... and Then You Die: Hoarding, Writing and Lost Family
•Melissa And The Mobility Scooter: And Other Bedtime Stories
•The Waggon
•Can't Sleep, Won't Sleep, short story series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lesley Atherton
• Release date: Dec 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005304706

Lesley Atherton

I’ve always been a writer. I was the kind of kid who would create little books of my own, and I also did quite well at school when it came to writing projects and exams.I’ll always remember my lovely English teacher, Mrs Nash, giving us an assignment. We had to read Seamus Heaney’s poem ‘Blackberry Picking’ and then were told to write our own version.My resultant poem, though simple, used some strong words and brought positive and glowing reactions from Mrs Nash, both at the time and later in her literary flourish of an end of year report card in which she told me how much my writing had blossomed and would soon become wonderful. I loved that teacher so much. She was awesome, kind, creative and a little eccentric. Unfortunately, I don’t have her report anymore, and I don’t have the poem either. I just remember that it began something like this:Blackberry picking, sweet and sticky, Dum de dum de dum de dum, Like a gaping wound.Later in life, I married a writer who became a publisher and helped him out with office and business management. I loved the writing-related work that came with it too - reviews, articles, copywriting and editing, proofreading and the rest of the whole shenanigans. Yep, I loved all that.Later, when we split up and the children were a little older and more self-reliant, writing seemed to become my ‘thing’. It was what I wanted and needed to do.When I got a little braver I saw a poster on a bookshop wall. It was for a writing group, and it gave Michelle’s email as a contact. I emailed her a few breathily nervous messages, then we agreed to meet at a local café. It was a lovely and unforgettable meeting. She directed me to join a writing group and this was what I did. Joining the group expanded my new writing confidence massively.So I began publishing more. Writing a little less (temporarily). And Scott Martin Productions was born.The company became Words Are Life as I moved away from publishing fiction (I am truly appalling at selling things, and nonfiction sells itself to some extent). I carried on writing, ready to publish.So, that’s my history. Good at editing, not bad at imagination and writing skills, but bloody awful at selling stuff.​In recent years I’ve published ‘Melissa And The Mobility Scooter’, which is a gorgeous book of bedtime stories for children (not just girls!) between 5 and 8. Older children will enjoy reading ‘Melissa’ themselves.I’ve also published a collection of novelettes called ‘Conflict Management’. It’s an interesting collection of stories about good and evil twins, managing autism and long term illness, making serious life decisions, ghostwriting, revenge, and working with a male supermodel.My first novel originally came out under the name, ‘Past, Present, Tense’, then was slightly re-written under the name ‘Life’s a Mess... And Then You Die’. I love this book. It’s all about hoarding, family lost and found, dysfunctional relationships, vengeance and hope for the future.And, I've also written what might just be the largest, floppiest book of empowering short stories ever created. It is called 'Feet On The Table'; and is the result of many, many years of work.At the time of writing, I’ve just published my second novel, ‘The Waggon’. I normally don’t have much confidence in my work but I believe this to be the best thing I’ve ever written! It came about as the final assignment of a Masters Degree in Creative Writing. This was back before Covid times, and I was due to publish it, but lost a lot of creative confidence when I was given a Merit on the course. I genuinely believed the writing deserved a better grade, which is unlike me. Unsure about how to progress, I gave it to a number of beta readers for feedback. It is their feedback that’s enabled me to rewrite the book. I hope it is deserving of a Distinction grade, even if it is only in my own head! Better late than never.I have also just published short ebooks, 'Crash Test Dummy', 'Could This Be An Office Romance?', and 'Bigheart'. Also, my books, Can't Sleep, Won't Sleep - short story anthologies available here on Smashwords.So, that’s where I am at the moment. I’m publishing on a few different platforms and am concentrating on editing and writing. There aren’t enough hours in the day to write all I want to write, but it’s getting a little easier every day.

Book preview

Alien

The pain, though expected, had been excruciating and being unable to move had made it all the worse. Weightlessness in a gravity-free environment is known for reducing the discomfort of arthritic joints and aching muscles, but this was something else. Zara had given birth, post-alien-abduction, strapped to a far-too-warm slab on what she could only assume was an alien spaceship. Far away from the atmospheric confines of planet earth, there was no symptomatic relief, and she experienced no benefits from the zero gravity. She certainly didn’t receive any of the home comforts she’d been longing for when she half-heartedly scribbled up her birth plan which included as long a hospital stay as possible, and a birth that would consist entirely of a full-body epidural and full volume ‘Queen’s Greatest Hits’ on the stereo. Not for her the home delivery with hired pool and whale music accompaniment.

Zara had been eight and a half months pregnant when the aliens abducted her.

Zara had been eight and three-quarter months pregnant when she gave birth, alone and still disoriented. She assumed by her physical state and the hallucinations that accompanied the birth that she’d also been drugged.

Whatever the truth, she knew that she hadn’t seen another living soul for a very long time. Two weeks, perhaps?

One the birth process began, Zara’s panic turned to terror, and this in turn transformed into pragmatism.

Who would cut the cord? She did it with her teeth.

How would she ensure the baby didn’t float away? Constant vigilance.

And, just as importantly, what would it mean for her son to be born outside of the earth? He would be born an alien too, without a town or city to call home, and without a birth certificate, nappies or clothes.

The baby’s entry into this alien world had been bloody and long-winded. Zara’s body, exhausted by the alien experiments, and by the lack of mobility their wires and probes afforded, was filthy and bruised, yet still, she managed to grab her new-born, hold him to her body and attempt to wedge him under her arms.

As he was the first man, as far as she was aware, in this new and uncomfortable world of bedsores and strap marks, Zara named her son Adam.

Her father would have described him as ‘alieni generis’ (of a different kind).

Her father was a pretentious arse.

Tim, her baby’s dad, wasn’t. This beautiful alien boy was the exact image of him, and in Zara’s more lucid moments she remembered how she’d met him at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh. She’d visited in a mildly intoxicated state, only for a laugh and to escape the rain, but Tim was an actual art lover. He had been staring intently at the portrait of Robert Burns and Zara had immediately noticed a resemblance between the two men: they shared the same intelligent face, the same long sideburns, and the same dark, fluffy hair.

‘You could be his double,’ said Zara.

‘I know,’ said Tim, ‘and you could be the double of Joan of Arc’.

Zara had snorted with one of her instinctive, guttural laughs. Sure, she had short sharply-bobbed hair and was small in stature, but it wouldn’t have taken anyone long at all to become aware that Zara was NOT similar to Joan of Arc in any other way. She lived for the pleasures of Thundercrack cider and vodka chasers. She’d never needed anything else, not even Tim. Not even the baby. But that was then.

‘I miss you,’ she said out loud, and the unaccustomed sound of her voice ricocheted within the small, hot room. ‘I miss you’ echoed back, and she knew it was true right down to the marrow of her being. She didn’t miss just Tim, she missed everyone and everything. She missed knowing what the time was. She missed drink. God how she missed drink. But she mainly missed the reality of human contact.

She still missed them despite most of her friends being mad at her for drinking so heavily while pregnant. Though Zara had sworn at many of them, she even missed their lectures about foetal alcohol syndrome and threats to call her social worker. She missed them despite their attitude towards her while she was pissed and laid out on the ground next to the sixth-form college’s bins.

It was only now, after alcohol-free weeks and virtually unendurable pain that she’d wondered if she’d been right when she shouted at Tim that it was her life and that the National Health Service would sort out any problems with the baby when it came. And, so what if she smoked? Everyone knew smoking made your baby smaller and that meant an easier birth.

It was sentiments like these which had led to the argument in which Tim called Zara a selfish bitch, a heartless drunk, and much worse. That led to Zara throwing a pint of Rogers Old Brew in his face. And that led to Tim breaking up with her in what can only be described as a macho huff. Tim had tried everything to get her to stop drinking, smoking and taking drugs. Her adamant refusal, his demand for custody of the baby, and Zara being thrown out of her rented room for non-payment of rent, just added to the chaos. Zara smirked to herself as she adjusted her wrists within the restraints and tried to move Adam to a more comfortable position. The only advantage of being abducted by aliens was that Tim couldn’t get his hands on the baby. Her baby.

Struggling to get comfortable on the warm slab as her sweat and crusted body waste burned into her skin, Zara had regularly wondered what Tim would have done when she disappeared. Undoubtedly, he’d have called the police and been in touch with all the hospitals, and then each one of her friends and relatives. Some would have denied all knowledge of their bad-girl family member. But the odd ones who might have talked of her with some fondness would have excused her drinking and disappearance by saying she was a high-spirited gal with too much energy for this world.

But she wasn’t in the same world now.

It was like the homework eating the dog, or the cap wearing the boy. It was a world topsy-turvy rather than rule-free, and Zara found it more confusing than any stoned or drunk experience. So, she wriggled a little on the slab, enabling her to move her arm slightly as she tried to grasp her new-born son closer.

The alcohol withdrawal had been at its worst at the time of Adam’s birth, and the surge of hormones and the pain she’d been in, as well as the loss of blood, had all contributed towards Zara’s incapacitation. She lost her grip on the baby who drifted into the room space. So weak and confused was she that she wasn’t even aware of his loss at first. She was also powerless to sense the alien drifting in and increasing the dose of whatever it was that made her woozy, and to sense its departure as it drifted away again, licking its lips, with Adam in its hands.

Zara would never know that the plundering alien crew were carnivorous to the core and had developed specialist skills in human abduction and husbandry. The baby newly acquired was a little skinny for their needs, but no matter – the feeding tanks would fatten Adam up for a few weeks and he’d soon be primed to grade 1 delicacy meat. He’d fetch a high price on the open market amongst the wealthy and the needlessly extravagant, especially as he had been cider-marinated pre-birth.

It didn’t take long before the aliens dropped Zara back onto her own world, bottle in hand. They didn’t need her, so the earth could have her back. She was minus memory and showed only stretch marks and restraint burns to offer any kind of clue as to where she had been and what she’d been through.

Back to Contents

Artistry

The entrance door to Frankie’s studio was almost hidden between two shops.

On the far side, and nearest to the station, was the ‘We Wash’, the district’s tattiest and dodgiest dry cleaners. Despite their advertising poster offering same-day cleaning for a very reasonable £2 per item, I had never seen the shop boasting a single customer. I daydreamed that the shop needed no laundry business as it was obviously a front for a criminal organisation or drugs den and was sure there would be a secret back entrance.

The shop front I usually walked past displayed a garish neon sign reading ‘Jarvis How – Bookmaker’. Its frontage (in common with many bookies, sex shops and amusement arcades) was covered in black-painted boards, but this didn’t deter its customers - seven or eight balding middle-aged men who hovered in its doorway, smoking rancid-smelling fags.

As I prepared to pass the bookmaker I kept my head down and made my usual wide arc around the small crowd and their accompanying cloud of grey smoke. The regulars at Jarvis’s all knew me by sight as I had been coming past and up to Frankie’s studio for the last four years. We weren’t on first-name terms or even nodding terms, but I did get the feeling that they were less guarded round me than they would be round your average passing stranger. I often caught a little of their whispered conversations in the doorway. Today’s snippet was a little clearer than usual.

‘Get a car. Get a gun. Can you do that, numbskull?’ A grizzled older voice.

I looked up quickly to see a bearded, but otherwise slick-looking elderly gentleman handing a brown envelope to a scruffy kid who emerged from the bookmaker’s entrance. The boy’s eyes were blank and his hair long, yellow-brown, matted and dirty. Maybe I’d seen him before, but I wasn’t sure. I’d seen a lot of lads like that round here – kids far younger than me, whose appetite for life had already been replaced with drugs, crime, alcohol, gambling... You name it.

The kid caught my eye at the moment I also caught his: and this was clearly too much contact for us both. My lips pursed automatically, and the kid looked to the ground, hunching his shoulders a little more.

‘Beat it,’ another man shouted. And whether he was shouting to me or the kid, it didn’t really matter. Both of us beat it. The scruff lurched backwards into the betting shop’s doorway, and I averted my eyes from Jarvis’s crowd of regulars, continuing a couple of paces further to the entrance I wanted. I was shaken, but that was nothing new. My dad had always told me that this area was rough as sandpaper and that I’d have to be scalpel-sharp to survive living here. And my dad would know, believe me.

Frankie’s studio was three floors above ground level, and stone steps led the narrow passageway steeply up to the first of three storeys, each with its landing and its own single set of rooms.

‘Rawlinson and Hall’ was the wording on a gold plaque screwed to the first door, followed in smaller letters by ‘Best for Legal Advice’. I’d passed that sign thousands of times yet always read the plaque. It somehow made me feel safe, though I would never trust the company with any serious legal problem, especially as the only reason the sign was there was that the solicitors had absconded some weeks back and the landlord hadn’t yet re-let the rooms.

Bolted onto the second door was the usual hexagonal metallic sign which made it clear that behind the door was a ‘Private Flat’ and that no callers were welcome. On the third floor, Frankie’s studio door stood open. That was unusual, though the joss stick and weed-infused smell wafting out towards me, was not. It was often possible to smell that heady scent even from the level below - and not for the first time I marvelled at how Frankie’s neighbours at ‘Private Flat. No Callers’ must be pretty laid-back people. In my building, the police would be knocking the door down as soon as an interfering neighbour witnessed you buying a packet of rolling papers.

Frankie’s door had once displayed a hand-painted poster with the slogan ‘Walk into my Trap’. It wasn’t one of his best artistic creations, but the door still seemed empty without it. I walked towards the doorway, and I stubbed my toe against Frankie’s heavy incense burner. A frankincense stick was still glowing and smoking.

As I winced and rubbed my foot, I took in the view in front of me. It was clear that this studio flat had become Frankie’s trap, for beneath a large pile of canvasses, pre-stretched and ready for Frankie’s particular style of priming, and beneath hundreds of pounds of tubes of oil and acrylic paints which had been opened, squeezed, and were