The Night Village Read online

  I messaged them, attaching a photo of the sleeping baby, and felt guilty for not calling sooner. Although they’d never said anything, I could sense from their measured tone in emails and phone calls that I’d disappointed them by moving to London to launch my illustrious career and instead getting pregnant with a man I’d only just met. Although it was after midnight in Perth my phone lit up almost instantly, but I wasn’t ready to answer my mum’s questions about the birth or anything else, so I put it screen-down on the table, telling myself I’d call her back in the morning, once I’d pulled myself together.

  As it darkened outside, a porter arrived with food, and I fell upon the lukewarm chicken with shiny gravy, mashed potato and limp grey broccoli as if it was the most delectable meal I had ever been presented with. While I ate, Paul held his son. It suited him. He was unmistakably the baby’s father, and as he watched me eating, encouraging me to finish it all, I saw something new in him: a gentleness, a vulnerability, that was unlike his usual loudness and energy.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked him. ‘Everyone has been so focused on me and the baby, but you must be exhausted.’

  Over the weekend he’d been by my side the entire time, neither of us sleeping much. We’d started off counting contractions, listing each one in a notebook. God knows where that notebook was now. Abandoned somewhere between the unmade bed and the messy kitchen and the undrained bathtub and the vomit bucket, probably. All those birth and pregnancy books I’d read and not one had bothered to mention that so-called early labour could go on for days. Once we’d got to the hospital he’d been quiet, letting the midwives and doctors take over, appearing younger and meeker than I’d ever seen him.

  ‘Oh, I’m pretty tired. I’ll be fine, though. I’ll get some sleep tonight, at least.’

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it – I’ve been so focused on the birth, like that’s the main event, I haven’t really thought about what comes next.’

  A silence. He looked down at the baby for a long moment, before standing up and placing him back into the cot. ‘What comes next is sleep. Once you’re home it will be – I don’t know, crazy, probably. Try to get some rest and we’ll see where we’re at tomorrow.’

  His phone beeped and he pulled it out of his jacket pocket and checked it, then sighed and put it away again.

  ‘Who is it?’

  ‘No-one. Messages from family.’

  ‘What did your parents say?’

  ‘They were happy. Said they’ll come and see us soon.’

  Through the window, the courtyard was grey and bare as the lights inside seemed to glow brighter in contrast. Across the way I could see into a room identical to mine, where an older, bearded man in a hospital gown sat facing me. A doctor stood over him, talking and gesturing while he appeared to sink further and further into himself. She glanced out the window, then walked over to it and drew the curtains shut.

  ‘Maybe I’ll get going,’ said Paul. ‘Sort out the apartment and do some food shopping. God, I’m tired.’

  ‘Okay.’ My belly full, I felt myself falling irresistibly into sleep, away from this day.

  ‘Will you be alright here? It feels strange leaving you two.’

  ‘We’re fine. Honestly. Come back in the morning.’

  He kissed his son’s forehead and adjusted his blanket, then kissed me goodbye.

  ‘You look beautiful as a mother,’ he told me. ‘I knew you would.’ And then he was gone, closing the door behind him.

  Finally it was just the two of us, like it had been for months. Instead of rolling and stretching in my belly, here he was in the room with me. Feeling like a small girl saying goodnight to her doll, I pulled the cot closer and stared at him for long moments, then turned off the lamp, lay down and closed my eyes in relief. Sleep. At last.

  Ah-ah-ah.

  A strange bird-like call was coming from the plastic cot, somewhere close to my head in the darkness. I sat up, too quickly, and felt immediately that the painkillers had worn off. I could feel a dull ache, a swollen, pulling pain from the stitches that was like sitting on a cushion of glass shards. I found the light switch as the cries got louder and more insistent, then picked up the baby and tried to feed him again. I rocked him while simultaneously trying to force my nipple into his mouth. He frantically attempted to make contact but couldn’t, and soon he was screaming with frustration.

  Eventually a tiny woman with a gentle face and light brown, very curly hair appeared at the door. She invited me to sit on a chair beside her, then placed a pillow in my lap and laid the baby on it, opening up his blanket so I could see his tiny nappy, his skinny little legs curled up against his body. Because it was what I’d seen mothers do with newborns, I started to rock him again.

  ‘Don’t rock him,’ she said. ‘You’ll give him wind. If you tilt his head towards you, his mouth will open naturally.’

  Her voice was low and French accented, and somehow its calmness washed over both the baby and me, as he managed to latch on.

  ‘If you leave the blanket open it will keep him slightly chilly and he’ll stay awake for longer,’ she said. ‘And that way he’ll get a better feed before he wears himself out.’

  And, exactly as she said, he stayed awake, his spindly, purplish legs splayed on the pillow, his mouth moving rhythmically, his body relaxing into mine and then slowly into sleep as his belly – the size of a walnut, apparently – filled with milk. What had felt awkward and unachievable on my own had suddenly become possible, even easy, with the help of this anonymous curly-headed saint.

  She melted away at some point, as silently as she had materialised, closing the door behind her. And then I was back in bed, the baby beside me in his cot, and we both fell into a soundless sleep.

  2

  Again the baby woke. The time was a little after four, according to my phone. I turned on the light and peered into the cot, where I found him crying and drawing his feet up to his chest. As I picked him up I smelled something strange.

  Laying him on my bed, I opened his nappy and in the lamplight I could see a black substance with a greenish tinge to it. It had a strange, biological smell and an oily sheen like it came from some liquefied tree, long buried in a primordial forest. In my drowsy state I wondered if he had been somehow poisoned, until I woke up a little and realised it was meconium. The stuff was impossible to clean away, clinging to his skin like tar, so I picked him up and rinsed his skinny legs and bottom off under the hand basin, making sure the water wasn’t too hot or cold.

  As he hung there, limp and helpless as a skinned rabbit, I felt so sorry for him. He had no choice but to submit to me. He couldn’t move, couldn’t talk, couldn’t do a single thing for himself. He had no language apart from wailing, and was completely dependent on my mercy. And what he didn’t know, or perhaps he did, was that I was hopelessly incompetent, in no way capable of being in charge of such a fragile being. I had never even owned a kitten.

  I didn’t have a towel, so I dried him on the sheet, found a newborn nappy in my bag and carefully put it on him, trying not to straighten his legs, which were drawn up, frog-like, to his belly, as they would have been less than a day ago when he was still inside me. Then I attempted to feed him again, like the French angel had shown me, with his bare skin against mine and his face falling towards me on the pillow. It seemed to work.

  Wrapped up again, and lying on the bed beside me, he gazed into my eyes. He seemed suddenly alert, so I put my arm around him and waited to see what he would do next. Still he looked at me and it was an eerie feeling, to know that he was staring into someone’s eyes for the very first time. His pale face was a curved glowing moon in the dawn light, his dark, lashless eyes fixed on mine with an expression that seemed to mirror my fascination. Finally we were seeing each other, after all these months together. No-one had ever looked at me like that – so honest and unguarded.

  Eventually his eyelids closed in slow motion. I waited, but they did not open. His face became as motionless as a phot
ograph. Still I kept staring at him.

  A mother had once said to me, If the baby’s happy, I’m happy, and I had assumed she was stoically making the best of what looked like a pretty uneventful existence. But I had been wrong. As soon as the baby was comfortable, fed and sleeping, I felt at peace. It seemed that while he was awake I was on duty, but once he was asleep I could loosen my grip, and his hold on me relaxed. He was stable, coasting in neutral, and I had time to work out what to do next. For now, still enclosed by the hospital, by the big silent security guard at the door of the ward, by the machines and protocols and that folder of notes recording our progress, I felt no pressure. Outside I could hear the ward waking, shifting up a gear, but here in this room it was quiet.

  Soon we’d have to go home. It was a place I’d never given much thought, but suddenly the prospect of living somewhere like the Barbican with a baby seemed odd. A famed modernist development rising in stained concrete from a wartime bombsite, its public areas were windswept and bleak. Even the ducks in the formal rectangular ponds looked subdued. It was a place for finance professionals and rich artists and eccentric elderly lawyers. Not babies, or their mothers.

  I had moved in with Paul towards the end of last winter, after staying there more often than not and falling into a dream-filled sleep every night thanks to the underfloor heating that kept the whole apartment deliciously warm.

  My real home, if you could call it that, had been a narrow Victorian townhouse in Finsbury Park, where the landlord, who lived next door, kept the heating on for exactly one hour in the morning and one more at night, never quite taking the chill out of my dark, creaky single bedroom. I’d found the place online a few weeks after I’d flounced out of Perth and realised that my salary wouldn’t quite stretch to the one-bedroom flat in Borough I’d been anticipating.

  It had felt a bit weird to be sleeping in a single bed again in my late twenties, but the rent was cheap and all-inclusive and my bedroom window looked out over a patchwork of back gardens with wooden sheds and purple buddleias, and a golden-haired fox sometimes lazing on the grass. These were the wild, unloved gardens of people who worked full time in the city and rarely thought about them. Each owner at some point had made their attempt at planting a tree, and so crowded along the back fence were pale birches and an apple tree that flowered extravagant pink in spring, and a lone thin pine that sharpened the air when I hung washing out there on a rare sunny day. It was a long commute after work, catching the Victoria line to Finsbury Park and then a bus up Stroud Green Road.

  So somehow me and my unironed work clothes from cheap high-street shops, and a few books and toiletries, had become semi-permanent fixtures in Paul’s tightly sealed Zone One apartment, where the bathroom had a long white tub with endless hot water, and a garbage chute in the kitchen wafted foul and ancient odours from the depths of the building, and a curved concrete balcony, stained by chemical rain, overlooked the office blocks of Farringdon, which were permanently lit up, even at three in the morning.

  Here in the heart of the financial district everything felt controlled and sterile. Nothing much grew apart from the unnaturally bright pansies that spilled from hanging baskets outside old pubs, and they were maintained not by the pub owners but by a private gardening company. Security guards patrolled the main roads into this maze of narrow streets, and even the walk from the Tube was fast and warm, through a sheltered underpass. At the front desk were doormen – uniformly grey-haired and closely shaved – who never acknowledged me, yet must have recognised me as they always let me walk past them and into the lift without comment.

  Paul worked in the city for an American bank as an information security threat management specialist, whatever that was. He wasn’t around much, but then neither was I. He left before dawn to go to the gym and then to the office, and didn’t return until eight or nine at night. He made money, though. Enough to take me to dinner on a Friday night at Le Café du Marché, or to bring me home Swiss chocolates or roses or tickets to Paris on the Eurostar for a weekend. Compared to me, on my entry-level salary as an editorial assistant at a lifestyle magazine in Mayfair, he was rich.

  Even when he wasn’t at the office, he was often out, or away on business trips, and I would sometimes wonder, as I opened the door to the empty apartment, whether this was actually what I wanted. He had chosen me, really, casually asking for my phone number at the end of a work colleague’s birthday party. Her boyfriend had been to uni with him in Bristol, and a week later he’d called me up and invited me to supper at his apartment.

  His cooking that night had been careless but somehow impressive – asparagus, pasta with fresh clams, still in their greyish shells, and a block of dark chocolate for pudding, as he called it – and his apartment was sparsely furnished with the obligatory Barcelona chair, a soft white leather couch, a shabby Persian rug.

  We shared a bottle of champagne and I stumbled out, sometime around midnight, suspecting that he would be happy if I stayed but wouldn’t really care if I left, either. To me he seemed like a rich kid who had been given everything he needed in life, and while he was always kind to me, I was wary of getting too attached to someone so comfortable. I didn’t want to get too used to his apartment, or the ease with which he could throw his credit card at problems. Those expressionless and clean-cut white men who guarded the lobby would have seen plenty of young women heading up to his apartment. I didn’t want to start thinking I mattered.

  But then, one Friday night at Le Café du Marché, he surprised me. I mentioned how exhausting it was travelling up to Finsbury Park after work, when I wasn’t staying over, and how packed the Victoria line was in the mornings. As Paul started on his côte de boeuf, he appeared to be thinking.

  ‘Why don’t you live with me?’ he said, as casually as suggesting we stop by Waitrose on the way home. ‘You don’t have much stuff, do you? And most of it’s at my place now anyway. Maybe you can help out a bit with bills, but you don’t need to pay me rent. You don’t even need to pay for bills, actually.’

  ‘Really?’ More than half of my pay was tucked into an envelope for my landlord each month.

  He smiled at me. ‘Yeah. I don’t mind. You’re here most of the time anyway. I mean, all that rent you’re paying. Keep it for yourself. Or spend it on me.’ He poured himself another glass of Beaujolais.

  ‘But we barely know each other. Doesn’t it seem a bit early to be living together?’

  He looked at me fondly. ‘Not really.’

  ‘And what will your parents say? I’ve never even met them.’

  ‘They will think you’re wonderful. A gift from a benign god. You’re sweet, hard-working, clever. Trust me, you’ll make them very happy.’

  I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand, I barely knew him. But I liked him. He was good company. Funny. Passionate, when the mood took him. Sometimes he went a bit quiet, and a few times he’d neglect to answer his phone and I’d go home alone, wondering if I’d misunderstood our plans to meet up that night. He’d always ring the next day, sleepy and apologetic, and I’d let it go.

  It was too soon to be living together. But my commute would be so much faster, so much less hideous. His apartment was warm. And it would be a relief to live with only one other person, and not in a shared house, always competing for limited fridge space and hot water. We weren’t that close, it was true. But maybe I could fall in love with him over time. Maybe I did love him?

  ‘You really don’t mind?’

  In the dimly lit room he had looked so solid, his white shirt sleeves rolled up, his dark blond hair gleaming in the candlelight as he sliced his rare steak with an unhurried certainty that seemed to come from knowing there would always be more food. And that he could pay for any number of equally fine dinners in any London restaurant, pulling out two or three rumpled pink fifty-pound notes and tossing them onto the silver tray so they fanned out slightly, before the waiter came to take them away.

  He shook his head, his eyes on mine.

 
; ‘Okay.’ I lifted my glass of wine and clinked it against his. ‘Thank you.’

  And just like that, I moved in with him. The following Saturday I hired a white van and packed it with my collection of mismatched suitcases and plastic bags, and soon my room in Finsbury Park was empty and I told the indifferent landlord I wouldn’t be leaving another envelope of cash in the fridge for him on the first working day of the month.

  Paul seemed happy enough to have me there, when he rolled in late at night from work or the gym or the pub and sidled up to me, warming his cold face against mine. But it was lonely sometimes, up in that tower block, without the chatter and slamming doors of a shared house, let alone a Sunday-night roast dinner at my parents’ house or a long morning at the beach with friends. At least until I was pregnant, and had a baby tucked in my belly for company.

  He didn’t need me and I didn’t really need him, either, when it came right down to it. It was, for me, a place to pass the tail end of winter; for him, a warm body in his bed, someone to come home to so he didn’t have to go looking.

  It wasn’t really fair to bring a baby into our precarious arrangement, I realised now, looking down at my newborn’s solemn face. A pregnancy was not part of the plan, and when I broke the news to Paul I expected a throat-clearing, followed by the tactful mention of some private clinic in Surrey where the matter could be quietly taken care of. Not that I would have gone, because when I saw those two strong pink lines on the supermarket test I felt ready, sensed that there would be no letting this one go, whatever Paul might say about it. I comforted myself with the thought that I could always slip back to Australia if he turfed me out, could send him photos and birthday cards and be a single mum back in Perth. It wasn’t exactly how I’d pictured motherhood, but I’d seen friends make a success of it, and maybe I’d meet someone else eventually.