Sleep and His Brother by Peter Dickinson

his long chin. His green eyes glanced rapidly at Pibble, then flickered round the room before coming back to him.
    â€œBe with you in a minute,” he said genially, speaking in a normal voice as though there were no danger of waking the sleepers. He bent to the other eyelid.
    The outer windows were half obscured by scaffolding and hoists, though a great swathe of London rooftops could be glimpsed below the planks; so Pibble went and peered out over the courtyard. From here he could see how simple the design of the house was, beneath all its frills and flounces. A rectangle, two stories high, surrounded a cobbled courtyard; an arch led out at the back, flanked by round-topped coach house doors—so the ground-floor rooms must maintain their pompous height the whole way round. Yes, the passage on the other side had run to the back with no sign of stairs; presumably it continued from there over the coach house and the arch and joined up with the back of Kelly’s Kingdom.
    Pibble grinned to himself at the idea of how wickedly Rue must have enjoyed bashing those nails through the coarse timber and into the beautiful wood of the door behind the notice. Rue was the most violent antiaesthete he had ever met, clever and voluble, happiest in extreme positions. The garish corridor below, scientifically useful and aesthetically awful, was a perfect Rue production, a physical equivalent of his pub argument that Oscar Wilde should not have been jailed for his morals, but should have been shot for his philosophy.
    For a moment, gazing blankly out of the window, Pibble could see the ugly interior of the Black Boot, hear the jostle at the bar, smell the steam from the vast shepherd’s pie behind the snack bar. He’d found the place a couple of years ago, when the pub he’d used before became involved in a brewers “rationalization” and started to dispense a bitter he despised. He’d had a job then, so had gone there only on a few evenings or sometimes on weekends, and had merely noticed the thin-faced, green-eyed young man who was occasionally present; but his being sacked had changed that, bringing him there at weekday lunchtimes to prevent Mary’s hydra-headed guilt feelings from forcing her to cook him yet another square meal. All of a sudden he and Rue Kelly were cronies.
    Not friends. That implied a wider knowledge. Not acquaintances, an altogether weaker relationship. Cronies. Pibble, in his new, disoriented life, was uncomfortably aware of how intense his reliance on Rue Kelly had become. Before, work and the abrasion of colleagues had kept him tuned, sharp, alive ; now the rust and dust of retirement were settling on him. His garden kept his muscles in trim and he’d always been lucky with his digestion, but he needed the two-man debating club in the Black Boot much as a prisoner doing solitary needs his daily trudge round the yard.
    Wondering, not for the first time, what the other member of the club got out of his company, he turned back to the ward in time to see Kelly straighten and stand humming. The sleeper’s eyelid fell like treacle. Kelly ticked the chart on the wall, checked a tube which ran into the child’s nostril, and spun round grinning.
    â€œPint of blood, mister?” he said.
    â€œThere jokes the eternal student,” said Pibble.
    â€œWho’s died, Rue?” said the girl.
    â€œNo one.”
    â€œAngela was crying.”
    â€œWas she? I told her Mickey Nicholas had six days.”
    â€œYou can’t be sure.”
    â€œYes I can. Another brick is added to the house of knowledge. Rue Kelly sees the future! Let him foretell your fate!”
    He clapped the ophthalmoscope to his eye, squinted at them across the room, and began singsong chant.
    â€œI see through the clouds. I see the mists part. I see you, my pretty one. There is a man with you. I cannot see his face. But I can see what he is doing. He is cutting you up and putting you in a