The Night Village

by Zoe Deleuil

  ‘Not really. It’s starting to hurt.’ And it feels like it’s all I do, I wanted to add. And I haven’t had more than two hours of unbroken sleep since I went into labour.

  ‘It’s often like that at the start. But let me help you.’

  The midwives stayed for a while, helping me feed the baby, who seemed to sense their authority and calmed himself enough to fill his belly and then fall asleep in my arms.

  After writing some notes in a folder and handing me more brochures on local support groups, they prepared to leave.

  ‘Call if you need us.’

  A week passed, and then it was Christmas. We marked the day with a couple of festive ready meals heated up and eaten in bed. The baby – we had named him Thomas, after Paul’s grandfather, but I still thought of him as ‘the baby’ – alternated between a still, almost breathless sleep and what appeared to be pure, unfiltered rage. His whole head flushed a deep pink and his mouth grew huge, his eyes locked on mine. Was he terrified, dying in agony, or simply hungry? I never knew. The sight of him in that state left me drained, yet wired. Afterwards, I’d pace around the apartment, trying to get back to neutral. Or I’d lie beside him, wanting to sleep, but knowing that as soon as I did he would wake me again. Sleep had become something unpredictable that fell upon me, wiped me out like a heavy grey wave, then dumped me on the shore, wide-awake again, at three in the morning or five in the afternoon, alert and terrified.

  One dawn, when he was maybe two weeks old, I had a magical thought. As I lay beside him watching objects in the room slowly become visible, knowing there was no point in closing my eyes, it suddenly came to me: I didn’t need to sleep. How had I never realised that before?

  When my mother called I told her everything was going fine, not wanting to worry her. I posted photos of the baby to Facebook, and liked every comment from friends and relatives back home. And when people dropped over to hold the baby and give us gifts of teddy bears and tiny shoes, I smiled and talked and accepted the tea and the cakes they’d brought with them, feeling oddly light and detached, like they were very far away. Of course sometimes I’d drop into sleep, unexpectedly, but mostly I didn’t bother.

  ‘He loves you so much,’ Paul kept telling me.

  ‘Really? How can you tell?’

  ‘He just does. He needs you.’

  And he did seem to. Curling into my belly, asleep, I could see how he’d lain inside me. It was as if everything else – the whole messy world – had vanished, and now there was only me and him, existing in some strange, lamp-lit world of blankets and toast crumbs and the remote control.

  Paul seemed very far away – he was the sound of dishes being washed in the kitchen, or a sleeping presence beside me during the wakeful nights. The orderly progression of working weeks followed by trying to pack as much enjoyment and sleep as possible into the weekends was gone. A constant checklist ticked over feverishly in my head – change nappy feed baby buy food coffee water feed baby nappy bath shower dress. It all blurred, the need to both look after him and keep him safe. He was surrounded by peril, requiring me to be completely present, listening for the stirrings from the bassinet where he never slept for long, summoning me at any time of day or night, while Paul hovered in the background.

  Sleep when the baby sleeps, said the pristine, bossy baby books that I’d read before he was born, and I had planned to do exactly that. But what I hadn’t realised then was that the unpredictable hours when the baby slept were the only times I had to myself. Why would I miss them by sleeping? Instead I wandered from room to room, staring out of the windows at the office workers busy at their desks, thinking of all the things I should be doing, but usually ending up slumped on the couch, watching a hospital emergency documentary on TV, which in its messiness and panic and general grimness suited my mood perfectly.

  The baby himself was the only thing that seemed to make sense. While my thoughts wandered down dark corridors and my body felt pinned down with pain and exhaustion and baby weight, there was still the quiet pleasure of wrapping him up, tucking away his tiny-boned hands and long, mottled feet. Some dim, primitive corner of my brain revelled in attending to his small and perfect body.

  And then, at the end of week three, as Paul was getting ready for his first day back at work, his phone rang. He looked at the screen, got up and walked to the spare room, quietly closing the door behind him. He was in there for a long time. And then he was sitting down beside me.

  ‘So that was Rachel on the phone. Do you remember her? My cousin?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘She was at Lucy’s wedding. Tall? Dark hair?’

  ‘Oh. Sort of.’

  ‘She wanted to know if she could come and stay. She’s been away for six months on some forest herbs research thing in Brazil and is hoping to get some work in London.’

  Every word in that sentence made my head pound, but I didn’t want to be rude about his cousin, so I kept my voice steady.

  ‘But does she really want to stay here? It’s chaos at the moment. No-one is sleeping.’

  The thought of anyone seeing me in this state did not appeal. I seemed to be devolving into a near-mute, soft-edged nocturnal creature, blinking at bright light and incapable of wit or decision-making or even basic small talk. I could chat on the phone and appear normal when I needed to, but the prospect of never being able to drop that facade was daunting.

  ‘She said she wants to help you.’

  That swayed me. Paul handled some tasks with surprising competence, changing nappies, bathing him, dressing him with sure fingers. But whenever the baby cried, he handed him straight back to me, often disappearing into the bathroom or spare bedroom as if he couldn’t tolerate the noise, and he was going back to his normal life today. Having someone around might be nice, even if I didn’t know her that well.

  ‘Rachel. I’m trying to remember her …’

  As I stared down at my newborn, I pieced together my first impression of Paul’s cousin. We’d only met once, at Paul’s sister’s wedding last May – a gathering of impeccably dressed people with refined accents, endless gin and tonic flowing, the hum of serious hunting talk and light banter filling the spring air. The ceremony was held on Paul’s family estate in Dorset, a rambling sixteenth-century manor with some beautiful ancient name and surprisingly unrenovated interiors, a dog lolling on every shabby couch and faded Persian rug. The actual service was held at a small chapel on the property, the evening reception in a vast white marquee in a back paddock. There was a lot of food – prawns, roast beef, Eton mess and cheese – and a subdued atmosphere that was at odds with other weddings I’d been to back home. As an Australian, and the only foreigner, I was treated as something of a novelty, and no one seemed to quite know what to say to me, although his mother, Penelope, made a special effort to introduce me to everyone. Paul and I were given an attic bedroom to share with thick plaster walls and a huge bed covered in a heavy red quilt, matted in dog hair.

  Rachel was a bridesmaid, and when we arrived she walked up to Paul and looked me up and down while he made introductions. Something – some mood I didn’t understand – was right there between them. She was willowy, but tall, much taller than me, with a pale oval face and dark hair, and she had a way of looking down at me that seemed to shut me out.

  ‘This is Simone,’ he said, smiling at me encouragingly. ‘Rachel. My cousin.’

  ‘Lovely to meet you, Simone,’ she said. ‘We’ve heard about you. You’re from Australia, right?’

  ‘That’s right. From Perth.’

  ‘Never made it to Perth,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘Now, can I get you a drink?’

  Paul went on to get horrendously drunk, drinking with Rachel and their old friends, and eventually I left him to it.

  Feeling dizzy and nauseous with morning sickness, it had been a relief to give in, to not even try to keep up with him and his family. Leaving the marquee glowing white in the darkness of the field, I’d made my way back to the house a
nd fallen asleep in the attic room around midnight, and woken at six, alone. He appeared an hour or so later, and was sweet to me, almost apologetic. A few hours later he packed up the car and I drove us back to London straight after breakfast, and I hadn’t given his cousin another thought until now.

  ‘You can say no, of course. I said I’d check with you first.’

  ‘Okay. It’s fine.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Well, maybe she can sit up with him sometimes, in the mornings. And do some cooking, if she wants.’

  ‘You can honestly say no. She can easily find somewhere else.’

  But he looked at me as if the decision was mine alone to make. I thought of them at the wedding, how close they’d seemed. What could I say? It was his apartment. She was his cousin. If he felt obligated to put her up it wasn’t my place to refuse, and anyway, I didn’t have the energy. I closed my eyes, wanting the conversation to end.

  ‘Yeah, it’s fine, I guess. When does she want to come?’

  He sighed. ‘Well, that’s the tricky thing. She gets here tomorrow. We’ll have to organise the spare room a bit, make up the bed. I can do it now.’

  ‘Don’t worry, I’ll do it. You need to get to work.’

  ‘Okay. You’re a star. Thanks, Simone.’ He kissed me, rubbing his face against mine for a moment and I wished he could stay for longer.

  As he stepped out the door, closing it behind him, I envied him for his ability to slip so easily back into the world, back into his work, despite the fact that he’d become a parent only three blurred weeks ago.

  The bed in the spare room was a double, with a new mattress and a huge, downy quilt. I had thought about making it into the baby’s bedroom eventually, if Paul didn’t mind, as it was larger than his study and next to the bedroom we shared. Unfolding a white cover from the linen cupboard, I wrestled it over the quilt. Then I found two pillows, stretched a fitted sheet over the mattress, and dusted the furniture with a damp towel.

  Once the bedroom was ready I gave the baby a bath. He was relaxed in my hands, the weight and shape of him already so familiar that it was like washing myself.

  My phone, when I checked it, was full of messages, along with my inbox. Cards and flowers from work colleagues and friends and family back home still crowded the bedside table, but were starting to get lost among the milk-stained muslins and half-full water glasses. This was the new normal, I realised, at home all day with a tiny wordless human my only company. I picked up the cards and read through them. Flowery and pastel-coloured, they referred to a safe delivery and a healthy beautiful baby and enjoying these precious days.

  Reading them, I felt like a captain on a lonely ship, far out at sea, receiving well-meaning messages from shore. None of the friends I’d made here had babies yet, and I didn’t know where to find the women who did.

  ‘Maybe it would be good to have some company,’ I said aloud to the empty room. The baby stared at something I couldn’t see, and made no sound.

  That night, I lay awake as Paul fell easily into sleep and the baby stirred and began to fret beside me. I fed him and tried to settle him but still he cried. I rocked him and tried to put him down in his bassinet, again and again, but every time he woke up and wouldn’t stop screaming until I held him again. Still Paul slept on, so I carried the baby out to the living room, where two walls of glass let the city in: offices to my right, a tower block of council flats straight ahead, across the road.

  There, a single light shone. It was three am. The light glowed yellow against the darkness, cosy and intimate, and I stared at it as I held the baby, rocking him against my chest while he howled.

  It was probably some young couple in there, home after a house party or a night out in Shoreditch. They would have been talking nonsense, the bloke getting hotter and funnier with every loose glass of vodka and soda. The two of them drawing closer, their friends glancing over every now and then but leaving them to it. Heading out together after some effortlessly negotiated agreement when it was clear where things were going. Still talking all the way down the middle of luxuriously deserted London streets. Silent dwellings all around, and only the two of them out in the night. Maybe a lone insomniac watching from a window as they finally kissed on the footpath. Stumbling up a flight of stairs, into a bedroom. Out of clothes, the alcohol easing everything, and then finally to bed, skin against skin. Drunk enough for it to be uninhibited, not so drunk that it would feel like a mistake in the morning. I could see all of it in that lit window, that yellow light.

  Fools. Completely oblivious to what might lie ahead. Up in the night, holding some small screaming creature speaking a language you should understand, but don’t. Silently panicking and sleep deprived and broken. Hormones all over the place. In no fit state, physically or mentally, for an easy drunken night like that ever again. The whole world dark and lonely and somehow skewed. And definitely no vodka.

  When morning came I dressed the baby in a newborn nappy, then a white bodysuit and finally the cardigan Paul’s mother had knitted him, a tiny pale blue thing of tightly packed wool, as if each stitch had been pulled hard. He looked compressed in it, the dense wool like armour against the cold, his face the brightest, freshest thing in the whole world. I was so tired now I couldn’t see beyond him, beyond his little body. It had all vanished.

  Sometime around five in the morning I had finally given up on the bassinet. He hated it, woke instantly when he was in it and cried like some pitiful animal abandoned in a forest. So by dawn he was in bed beside me, instantly asleep. I woke a couple of hours later, still on my side, curled around him, one arm below his wrapped legs, the other supporting my head, cold and stiff from being so still.

  After his bath, my head foggy from deep sleep, I had breakfast and fed him and put him down for a nap, and as I was about to have a shower, the doorbell rang.

  It was Rachel. She was wearing a thick, smokey layer of makeup on her eyes, with some glitter mixed in, and a tightly fitted, dark maroon dress, the kind of thing I would love to own, that I would have loved wearing before I had a baby. No coat, which was odd. Beside her stood a brown leather suitcase, worn but expensive looking.

  I was still heavy from the pregnancy, and wearing billowy clothes that enabled me to breastfeed. I cared, but I didn’t care.

  She didn’t quite meet my eyes as she said hello, looking beyond me, into the apartment. Before I could invite her in, she picked up her bag and slipped past me, heading for the lounge room as if she had been here before, and knew the apartment well.

  ‘How are you getting along?’ she asked over her shoulder.

  ‘Not too bad.’

  ‘Can I have the baby?’

  Was that a weird question? Three weeks in, and I was so tired, I was finding it hard to have even the simplest conversations without getting confused. But I knew one thing: the baby was still and quiet in my bed, and she wasn’t going to disturb that.

  ‘He’s sleeping at the moment.’

  ‘Oh, that’s okay. I might go and look at him.’

  She walked away from me, down the long corridor to our bedroom, and I found myself following her uncertainly as she opened the door and stepped into the dark mess of our clothes, our unmade bed, the intimate smell of our shared sleep and, in the squalid lamplight, because I hadn’t bothered to open the blinds yet, the shameful sight of our pink flannel sheet stained with milk and even some dried blood.

  I didn’t want her in the room, but how could I say it without sounding rude? She didn’t seem to register my embarrassment as she sat down on the bed, and I tried not to think about her journey here, probably sitting on some filthy Tube seat.

  The baby lay with his arms flung above his head in an attitude of complete abandon, his chest moving very slightly as she leaned closer and started stroking his head, right at the fontanelle where I knew there was no bone protecting the brain, only a layer of skin. I had only touched it once myself, by accident, and recoiled from the feeling of the ridged bone giving way
to soft skin and nothing else between it and the baby’s brain, but she stroked it, again and again, her hand trembling slightly, and I had to bunch my hands into fists to stop myself from clobbering her.

  Just as I was about to say something, she stopped.

  ‘He’s so beautiful, Simone. Do you mind if I pick him up?’

  Yes, I wanted to say, but she was already reaching for him, not waiting for my response.

  He startled in his sleep when she lifted him, the falling-from-a-tree Moro reflex that the baby books told me he would soon lose, and I had to fight down an urge to take him from her. She was Paul’s cousin, related to him by blood, I reminded myself. It was only normal that she would want to hold him. He wasn’t mine, I had to get used to sharing him. I was probably being precious, and possibly unhinged. Except that he was mine, in some indefinable way. He wouldn’t always be mine, but right now he was. A few weeks ago he’d been living inside me, and there was something painfully raw about him that compelled me to keep him close, against my skin and away from other people’s.

  As he woke and started to writhe in her arms, clearly unhappy, I wanted to ask for him back, but I forced myself to wait for her to offer. I always used to hand babies back when they got restless; there was nothing worse than holding someone else’s howling baby. Yet Rachel seemed oblivious. She held him up, laughed at his little cries, put him over her shoulder and patted his back in a way I already knew he hated.

  ‘Let’s go for a walk,’ she said to him in a baby voice, and took him into the kitchen, where she stood for a while in front of our calendar, which had all of our doctor’s appointments scribbled on it.

  ‘Now let’s go this way,’ she said to the baby, kissing the side of his face again and again. Her silver jewellery clinked and I could smell her woody perfume as I followed her helplessly through the apartment and the baby’s cries got louder and more urgent.

  ‘Um, Rachel? I think he might need a feed.’

  She stopped walking, and I thought I saw annoyance in her face. ‘Does he? Are you sure you don’t want me to distract him for a bit, give you a break?’