Night Waking

by Sarah Moss

  ‘Mummy?’ said Raph. ‘Have you ever seen a baby raven?’

  ‘They nest on the cliffs.’ Giles lay back, hands behind his head, and closed his eyes. The Cassingham nose in all its splendour shone in the sun. ‘They don’t want people to see their babies.’

  ‘I found a worm,’ said Moth. He held it up, squirming. ‘I eat it. In my mouth.’

  I stood up and held out my hand to him. ‘Put it down, love. The worm wants to wriggle in the ground. They don’t like the sun. And we don’t eat them, do we? Shall we go see the cottage?’

  The painting was finished and it was the first time I’d been there without feeling Jake potentially or actually peering over my shoulder. Telling me what I deserved. Giles had been right about the white paint. Sunlight spilt across the floors and the walls glowed like tanned skin. It was almost hot; perhaps we should have thought about blinds. Raph lifted his face as if there were a nice smell.

  ‘I like it in here.’

  He lay down in the middle of the floor, his copper hair spreading across the boards. He looked like an installation in the Tate. Fallen Angel. Moth pattered over.

  ‘No standing on Raph, no not.’

  ‘No, love, that’s right, no standing on Raph. Come and see the seagulls.’

  Raph flung his arms wide. ‘Can we live here?’

  I looked at Giles. We’d discussed it, of course, all those evenings when we spread the architect’s drawings in the two-up, two-down behind the station where we could hear the neighbours closing the cupboards in their kitchen, built for Victorian navvies and now inhabited by City lawyers and academics with hereditary wealth, and graced with organic paint and a hanging basket of (long-dead) geraniums.

  ‘Instead of the big house, or instead of Oxford?’

  He rolled over and lay propped on his elbows as though reading. ‘Instead of Oxford of course. Could we, and never go back to school? Please?’

  Giles turned back from the window. ‘Raph, there’s a difference between moving to Colsay and not going to St Peter’s, you know. You have to go to school wherever you are, it’s the law.’

  ‘No, it’s not. Paul’s home-schooled. He doesn’t go.’

  ‘Moth, come away from the stove, please,’ I called. ‘Paul’s mother doesn’t have anything else to do. No, Raph, absolutely not. We’re about a hundred miles and four hours from the nearest copyright library. Moth, leave that alone, please, love. Moth!’

  ‘You wouldn’t need a library if we lived here,’ said Raph. ‘You wouldn’t need to work. You could look after me and Moth like Jessica’s mummy. And Marcus’s mummy. And Edward’s mummy.’

  ‘Stop it,’ I said. ‘No. I’m not that kind of mummy.’

  I am the kind of mummy whose absence, at least some of the time, is good for you. Giles turned back to the window. The views are better from the cottage, closer to the beach and built for seeing rather than being seen. There’s a research group at the University of the Highlands and Islands that has been courting him, and he’d make enough money for food and books. We’d need a much better boat to get the children over to Colla for school, and we’d need a better internet connection and a more reliable electricity supply, which it would no doubt be Raph’s pleasure to design. Maybe I could commute weekly to Oxford, pick up the sleeper at Inverness. The sale of the Oxford house would fund a few years of that. Assuming, of course, I had anything to commute to Oxford for.

  ‘Anyway, we’d all miss our friends,’ I said. ‘There was a reason why everyone left Colsay, you know. But we’re lucky to have it for summers. Come on, let’s get it ready. They’re arriving in a few days.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Giles. ‘You know, maybe some of those reasons have changed. With the internet.’

  ‘When the Bodleian Library is on the internet and you can get internet childcare we’ll talk about it. Meanwhile, I expect the Fairchilds would like sheets.’

  Raph didn’t move. Moth poked his ear.

  ‘Fairchildren,’ said Raph. ‘I’d like to live here.’

  ‘There are universities closer than Oxford, you know.’ Giles opened a drawer, which contained knives and forks gleaming like mirrors and heavy as guns, and watched it slide silently closed. ‘You’d be able to pick up sessional teaching. Make some contacts.’

  Raph rolled over. ‘I thought you hated college anyway.’

  ‘Mummy likes institutions,’ said Giles.

  I felt as if I was being circled by wolves.

  ‘I think they’re interesting, that’s all. Go on. You and Daddy do the beds. And no, OK? No.’

  Giles took the sheets, which were only slightly damp, up the open-tread stairs. It’s one advantage of having been sent away to prep school at six: he can make beds the way he thinks they ought to be made, with linen sheets that should be ironed and hospital corners. After some experiment, I engaged the child-lock on the washing machine and stopped bothering to convince Moth that it wasn’t hungry and didn’t want a banana. I started trying to break into the parcel of books I’d ordered, which soon became interesting enough for Moth to abandon his passionate interaction with the pedal bin.

  ‘Ow! Bloody Amazon.’

  ‘Bugger amazons,’ agreed Moth.

  ‘No, no, not a good idea. Damn. Giles? Giles! Have we equipped this place with scissors?’

  ‘Kitchen drawer,’ he called.

  Moth ran ahead of me. ‘Sharp, Mummy. Careful.’

  It was hard to choose the books. We’d agreed that I wasn’t just going to buy what I wanted to read and then borrow it, but I was determined to offer something more local than people were likely to bring with them. I’d provided Walter Scott in deference to the Heritage Experience approach to holidays, George Mackay Brown for those who like their islands whimsical, and a selection of the more accessible literature on the Clearances so that liberals could have the pleasures of indignation and conservatives could be reminded how they got here. Then I’d realized we had no women, and actually nothing I particularly wanted to read myself, so I’d added Margaret Oliphant’s ghost stories and rather more contemporary Scottish women’s poetry than perhaps took account of ordinary reading habits.

  ‘Stand back, Moth. This is very sharp.’

  I took the bread knife to the carapace of glued cardboard. He came over to investigate the result of all this knife-wielding and strong language.

  ‘More books.’

  ‘Books for the visitors,’ I told him. ‘Moth, we’re going to have visitors. People coming to the cottage.’

  He prodded the bubble wrap. ‘Go away people. Moth not like visitors.’

  Giles went back to the puffin colonies after lunch. Moth wasn’t particularly tired but I was particularly determined and eventually he went to sleep. Violating the bad news blackout for the sake of my work, I’d given Raph a graphic account of the end of Pompeii over lunch and suggested that, if he worked outside, he could collect some of the darker sand from the far end of the beach to represent lava. I tried to connect to the internet from the sofa and found again that I could, so I settled there where I could see Raphael building Pompeii out of Lego while consulting Life in Roman Towns.

  I logged into J-Stor and ran a search on ‘women’s history’ and ‘infanticide’. Bones might outlast history but I’ve never heard of a prehistoric textile. Wet wool rots fast. But a baby dead even as much as a hundred years would be relatively tolerable, and there was a lot of infanticide in the nineteenth century, when ‘funeral clubs’ in the most deprived areas paid out on the death of a child. The clubs were meant to provide insurance against children’s funeral expenses for parents who could barely afford to eat, and so, in practice, paid desperate families to neglect or even kill their youngest members. You had to provide a death certificate to get the money, but you didn’t have to have a funeral. I skimmed the results. All the infanticides that make it as far as the secondary literature – a subset which necessarily excludes all that were successfully concealed, which this might have been – were carried out by unmarried
girls who denied their pregnancies, delivered alone and subsequently claimed that the baby was stillborn. Which, as juries tended to agree, they could have been. The bodies were usually found under the bed or in the privy, and it seemed that in the cases of most of those buried outside the house the mother had had what the courts took to be an accomplice, although it seemed to me that he was more likely to be the killer. Newly delivered women are rarely capable of going outside and digging a grave. Those were also the babies who tended to have had their throats cut – I remembered the Wild Boy of Aveyron – or been hit on the head. Mothers acting alone usually went for suffocation, or sometimes strangulation with the umbilical cord. Raph’s cord was cut before I saw it because, without my consent, they’d injected me as he was born with drugs that shouldn’t cross the placenta, but I remembered Moth’s, disconcertingly alive, a grey snake throbbing with blood, and my dismay when the midwife held it out to be severed. It should have hurt, that cut. The bloody ends looked like eighteenth-century images of guillotined necks.

  ‘Mummy! Look, I’m putting under-floor heating in the baths!’

  I opened the window. It wasn’t exactly sunny outside, but you could see where the shadows would be when the clouds moved.

  ‘That’s lovely, darling. The baths had lots of rooms, didn’t they?’

  I found a table showing the ages of infanticide victims at death. More than 80 per cent were under one week, the rest divided between those killed by fathers and childminders who couldn’t stand another minute of screaming – odd, but perhaps in evolutionary terms not surprising, that mothers, who are after all exposed to more noise with less sleep than anyone else, in fact rarely resort to this means of procuring a moment’s peace – and those suffocated by mothers who couldn’t feed them and didn’t want to watch them starve. One such woman told the judge, ‘My husband left me with five under ten. I knew the baby was like to die anyway, having lost three already, and I couldn’t find food for all. He’d been crying three days with hunger. The two older boys are already working and need what we can give them. I couldn’t find it in me to watch him die so slow.’ The judge drew the jury’s attention to the defendant’s extreme thinness.

  ‘Mummy, did they have some kind of air-conditioning for the caldarium? It’s hot in Naples.’

  The wind ruffled his hair. There were more freckles on his face, but I cannot bear to subject Raph to the physical force necessary to apply sunscreen.

  ‘I expect they were just good at designing buildings to be cool. With lots of marble.’

  He sat back on his heels. ‘How?’

  ‘I don’t know, love. Let me get this work done, OK?’

  ‘Sorry, Mummy.’

  I tried to remember the size of the orchard baby, and the size of newborns. I could hold Moth against me on one arm, his head in my hand and his feet tucked under my elbow, and he was a kilo heavier than Raphael at birth. I looked out at Raph, who was waving his feet in the grass as he attempted a curved archway. He’s probably as tall as a lot of nineteenth-century Scottish adults already, although the islanders fared better on fish and oats than the teeming poor of Glasgow on adulterated bread and jam made with sawdust. What we saw of her skull was small, more of a shell than a coconut, but the long bones were at least big enough to be recognizable. I remembered newborn arms and legs as largely decorative appendages to the twin spheres of head and stomach, seeming to be there more as signs of human form to come than for any present use. Whereas the orchard baby – call her, like so many female skeletons, Eve – had bones that looked functional. Maybe all bones look functional. I’d rather, on balance, that she’d barely taken a breath, not adapted to light, never left the daze of surprise at air on her skin and sounds not muffled by water in her ears. Never quite come to life. Moth was born in his bag of waters, asleep, and when the midwife told me to pick him up from between my legs he hadn’t started breathing, didn’t know he’d been born. He’s not breathing, I said in panic, he’s not alive, and Jane said, wait, it hasn’t been a minute yet, the cord’s still pulsing. I took another deep breath for him, to oxygenate our blood. And then he opened his eyes, eyelashes still filmed with amniotic fluid, looked into my face, and started to breathe. He began his life in my arms. It wasn’t yet time to wake him, but I closed my files and went up to watch Moth sleep.

  ‘Mummy,’ said Raphael.

  ‘What? Look, Moth, what’s that?’

  ‘Elephant,’ said Moth. He giggled. ‘Elephant jumps on a garage!’ The elephant from the Noah’s Ark leapt on to the second floor of the wooden multi-storey car park (‘complete with helipad and functioning lift for hours of imaginative play!’).

  ‘Mummy?’

  The elephant was followed by a giraffe, which had to go in sideways.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Cows going in a lift!’ exclaimed Moth.

  ‘Mummy, I think there’s something you should know.’

  He sounded as if he was about to tell me he was gay, or had decided to join the army, or both. I don’t think I would mind not having grandchildren – it would in some ways be a relief to know that the rot stops here – certainly not as much as I would mind a child of mine being paid to kill people. He came to stand in front of me.

  ‘Go on.’

  ‘You might be frightened.’

  I dropped the rhinoceros.

  ‘Crash rhinoceros!’ said Moth.

  Raph twisted his hands. ‘It’s – I don’t like saying it.’ He hid his face.

  ‘What? Raph, love. Come here.’

  Moth sat pink-cheeked and giggling. I pulled Raph towards me and held him. He ground his forehead against my collarbone.

  ‘Cuddle Moth too!’ Moth crawled over and tried to push between us. I moved Raph round.

  ‘There! Raph, tell me. I won’t be frightened. It’s my job to stop things frightening you.’

  He pulled back and Moth seized his opportunity. ‘I thought it was your job to write your book?’

  I felt slightly sick. ‘That too. Go on.’

  Raph went over to the window. ‘There’s something in the attic. Something that moves about and makes a noise. I keep hearing it. I thought it was a burglar.’

  ‘Raph—’ I said. ‘Raph, it’s not—’

  He turned and went out, turning his face away as he walked past. Moth pulled my top forward and peered down the neck. ‘There Mummy’s tummy.’

  Raph spoke from the stairs. ‘It’s that baby. It’s that dead baby.’

  I picked Moth up, took Mog and the Baby to distract him, and followed Raph up the stairs. He had got into bed and pulled the duvet over his head.

  ‘Raph hiding,’ said Moth. ‘Peepo Raph!’ He pulled the duvet back and Raph growled.

  I sat on the bed. ‘Leave him be, Moth. Look! Here’s Mog and the Baby!’

  Moth sat on the floor, in the perfect straight-legged, straight-backed yoga position of the person who has never sat at a desk, and began to leaf through a faux-naïve account of post-natal depression encoding a thinly veiled warning about what will happen if you leave your screaming baby with a motherly neighbour for an hour in order to go shopping (it will crawl into the path of oncoming traffic and survive only by grace of an improbably positioned cat, to which you will then owe a lifetime of gratitude and service). I stroked Raph’s shoulder.

  ‘Raph, there’s nothing in the attic. Really. How many times have we been up there, and never seen anything? There’s nothing scary here. That baby probably died hundreds of years ago, maybe even before the Vikings. Lots of people used to die when they were babies and now we’ve got so good at making sure people have enough food and clean water and doctors to help when they’re ill that nearly everyone lives a long time.’

  He pushed the duvet back from his face. ‘Lots of babies still die because of dirty water. It gives them diarrhoea and they get dehydratated and people won’t give them a bit of sugar and salt to make them better.’

  ‘Dehydrated. I know. But at least we do know, so we can do something
about it.’

  ‘Do we do something about it?’

  No. We spend our money doing up the blackhouse and buying olive oil and books and designer clothes from Swedish catalogues which cheer us up and we don’t, once we’re grown up, give the dehydrated babies a moment’s thought from one week to the next.

  ‘We can give money to charities who do something about it. But Raph, the baby isn’t in the attic. The police are looking after her bones and the rest of her is gone.’

  ‘There’s something up there,’ he said. ‘I keep hearing it.’

  ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Sit up. Look, next time you hear it, come and find me and we’ll go look together.’

  He flinched.

  ‘Or I’ll go, and tell you what’s there. And now, shall we go down and make some popcorn?’

  ‘In a minute.’

  I gave him a hug. ‘All right. Moth, shall we come down and make popcorn?’

  ‘Moth have some hotcorn too!’

  Popcorn offers a uniquely consoling combination of snack and controlled explosion, which I emphasize by making it in a Pyrex bowl, which burns the bottom layer but allows the children, standing on chairs pulled irresponsibly close to the stove, to watch things blow up as they are not allowed to do in any more conventional setting.

  Raph took another handful and I burnt my fingers trying to pick the blackened ones from the bottom of the bowl.

  ‘Mummy, if you put oil in would they not stick?’

  ‘More hotcorn!’ said Moth.

  ‘The only time I put oil in, it caught fire, remember?’

  A small fire, easily extinguished with a pan lid and a wet tea-towel. Another secret from Giles.

  ‘Anyway,’ I said. ‘We’re going to Colla this afternoon. To the library.’

  Raph stopped with popcorn half way to his mouth.

  ‘I don’t want to go to the library.’

  ‘You’ll like it,’ I said. ‘Come on, it’s full of books. We’ll get you a ticket and you can borrow engineering textbooks.’