Page 177 of The Sleepwalker
She laughs and brings the mugs over to the table.
‘Thanks.’
‘We both said plenty of stuff,’ she says, sitting down beside him.
‘Which is good, I reckon. I liked it, anyway. A lot .?.?. And I’m not going to be embarrassed.’
‘Me neither, in that case,’ she says, cracking her fingers.
‘You know you gave booze to an underage boy, right?’
‘Whoops,’ she says, sipping her tea.
‘It’s OK.’
The freckles on her pale skin are like a scattering of tiny crumbs. Her dry lips are naturally rosy, her eyebrows a soft shade of red and her lashes almost colourless.
‘Did you sleepwalk last night?’ she asks, picking up the small camera.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Shall we find out, then?’
‘I dunno, it feels a bit .?.?. wrong somehow .?.?. Even though I guess I have more right than anyone to know what I’ve been up to in my sleep,’ he replies.
‘There’s probably some clause covering this in all the paperwork we signed.’
‘But we’re rebels.’ Hugo grins.
‘Exactly.’
Svanhildur moves her chair a little closer to his and opens the lid of her laptop. The keyboard is dusty, and there are fingerprints along the top edge of the screen.
She takes the tiny memory card out of the camera and pushes it into a reader that she then connects to her computer.
‘Ready to spy on yourself?’ she asks, her face solemn.
‘I don’t know.’
‘Maybe you should be alone for this .?.?.?’
‘Nah, it’s OK .?.?. I hope,’ he replies with an anxious smile.
They shuffle closer together so that they can both see properly, and she starts the video. Hugo can feel the heat of her thigh against his leg, and he catches a subtle hint of her perfume as she angles the laptop towards him.
The mute footage from his dark bedroom is surprisingly sharp.
Hugo reaches out and tilts the screen slightly to block out the reflection from the faux window.
In the video, he is lying flat on his back. The camera on his chest is pointing up at the dark-grey ceiling, moving in time with his increasingly slow breaths.
He is asleep.
A green LED glows like the Northern Lights at the top left-hand corner of the feed.
Svanhildur waits a moment or two, then fast forwards through the recording and hits play again.
Hugo’s breathing is faster now. The dark ceiling swaysforward and back, occasionally jumping slightly to one side.
