The Night Village Read online

  But Paul surprised me. ‘I want you to have it,’ he said, and as I stared at him, thinking of how to reply, he appeared to be holding his breath. ‘I’ve wanted a baby for years.’

  ‘Really? But we’ve only been together a few months.’

  ‘That’s how it happens sometimes. Doesn’t mean it can’t work. I’ll look after you,’ he said, taking my hand and kissing it. ‘I’ll look after both of you.’

  And he did, coming along to the twelve-week scan and appearing humbled and a little intimidated, as I was, by the great thundering machine of NHS healthcare. He even suggested getting married, sometime in the future, and I said, ‘Maybe.’

  And when the baby was born and the doctor handed him to Paul, he spoke to the little mewling newborn so softly that I knew he had fallen in love with him, that he would always be around for him, even if we weren’t quite together in the way that other parents seemed to be.

  The baby startled suddenly in his sleep and I picked him up. Maybe it will work, I thought as I held him close, the weight of him against me an oddly familiar comfort when everything else felt so strange.

  A voice called from somewhere outside, ‘Breakfast, ladies! Come and get it.’

  ‘Seriously?’ I muttered to myself. ‘Don’t they know what we’ve been through?’

  But I was too ravenous to stage much of a protest, so I got out of bed and shuffled towards the smell of coffee, leaving the baby alone for the first time.

  As I stepped into the bare light of the early morning, the postnatal ward looked dingy and overcrowded: a modern, women-only version of a Dickensian workhouse where exhausted new mothers in crumpled gowns lined up for Nescafé and high-fibre cereal instead of gruel.

  I thought back to my giddy departure at Perth airport almost two years ago, slinging my passport with its embossed UK Ancestry visa at the border official, boarding the Tube at Heathrow with sparkling visions of career success, cocktail bars, every hair day a good one. The unkind morning light of this ward had not featured in those daydreams. As I stirred sugar into my coffee I looked down at my bare feet, and noticed that one of my toenails, which I’d painted just before the birth, had been inexplicably scrubbed clean of polish. When did that happen? Why did that happen?

  The hospital, which had felt soft-edged and safe in the hours before dawn, now felt sinister and bureaucratic. Whatever hormonal cocktail had buoyed me through pregnancy and labour, giving me endless reserves of energy and high spirits, now seemed to be departing my cells with efficient haste. Hot, urgent tears welled up in my eyes as I got back into bed and lifted the sleeping baby onto my lap. I wanted to go home. More specifically, I wanted to have a home to go to. Paul’s apartment didn’t feel like a place that belonged to me. It was his, not mine.

  As the morning went on, people came and went: a nurse to give the baby an injection, a doctor to check on the baby and me. In between visits, I tried to call Paul, but he didn’t answer. A midwife appeared and took my observations, then looked at my drugs chart and said, ‘Oh, we’ve only given you Panadol. That’s a bit mean, isn’t it? Let me write you up for something stronger.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Is your partner coming in soon?’

  ‘I think so. He isn’t answering the phone right now. He might still be sleeping.’

  ‘Are you okay?’ She sat down beside me but said nothing, leaving a practised silence for me to fill.

  ‘Oh, I feel a little bit stunned by it all, I guess.’

  ‘Is there anything you want to bring up about the birth, before you go home? Anything you want to ask about?’

  I thought for a moment, wondering how I could tactfully explain how barbaric it had all seemed without offending her.

  ‘I had very low expectations of childbirth …’ I began, but that was absolutely horrendous, I readied myself to say. I was surprised when she laughed and touched my hand.

  ‘Oh, bless you. Most women who come in here have such high expectations for their birth experience. We always say, the longer the birth plan, the greater the likelihood of an emergency C-section. They get stressed when it goes off-plan, the baby gets distressed, and off they go to the theatre.’

  ‘Well, I really didn’t expect much. I mean, I didn’t see how it could go well, given what actually has to physically – you know – happen. But it was kind of so much worse than I’d expected. And I guess I was surprised that there were so many people in the room.’

  She picked up my notes, read through them. ‘Ah, yes. Instrumental delivery. And you had very high blood pressure. You would have a lot of doctors for a high-risk delivery like that. Two for the baby, one for the birth, one for you. Plus two midwives.’

  ‘I didn’t realise it was a high-risk delivery.’

  ‘A lot of them are. Birth is a risky event. But you were in the right place. Do you have any family here, or just your partner?’

  ‘Not really. They’re in Perth. I think they’ll come over in the summer, when things have settled down a bit.’

  ‘And your partner? He’s supportive?’

  ‘He’s great. He’s really happy, I think.’

  ‘You think?’ She tilted her head.

  ‘He seems happier than me.’

  ‘Well, he didn’t just deliver a baby. You’re allowed to feel a bit shell-shocked. It would be strange if you didn’t.’

  ‘I know. One more thing – what happened to my toenail?’ I showed her my foot, with its four perfectly manicured pink nails and one scrubbed clean.

  ‘We take the nail polish off if it looks like it might go to a C-section. Your nails turn blue if you’re oxygen-compromised.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ I suddenly thought back to all my glossy pregnancy books, with their photos of serene women and illustrated cross-sections of babies gliding smoothly from ‘birth canals’. When I got home I was going to take every single one of them to the charity shop. Or chuck them in the bin, and spare some other woman the nonsense.

  We sat quietly for a moment, and I was about to mention the feeling of panic, the fact that I hadn’t really slept and didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing with the baby, but just as I opened my mouth Paul burst in, looking larger than life, well-rested and eager, bringing with him the cold air and hustle of the outside world.

  ‘Hello. How’s the little man?’ He leaned over the cot and picked up the baby, who had been lying quietly, eyes open, as I talked with the midwife.

  ‘How are you doing, Simone? Should we get going? I want to take him home.’

  ‘Do we need to go now?’ I asked the midwife.

  She looked conflicted. ‘You can go now, if you feel up to it.’

  I really don’t, I wanted to say. But I also knew how busy London hospitals were, how there were never enough beds for everyone that needed one. If I left, someone else would be in this room within half an hour. Yet part of me wanted to stay here, to put off the moment I had to go home and face up to my new existence instead of being a passive patient.

  ‘I think you should come home now,’ said Paul. ‘We’ll be fine. We’ve got everything we need and you can get some proper sleep in your own bed.’

  He started packing my bag, throwing my phone and water bottle into it, gathering up the baby’s nappies and wipes from the table.

  Soon we were ready, and I put on my coat. The midwife had gone to see another woman, and I was suddenly returning to the real world. The security guard checked our form and the ID wristband on the baby and opened the locked door of the postnatal ward, and then I was back in the lift that I had whimpered in two days earlier with a contraction, my face pressed to the wall, telling myself, Soon this will all be over.

  ‘You okay?’ said Paul as we stood in the hospital entrance, waiting for the rain to stop, while the woman at the reception desk cooed over my sleeping newborn, tucked into his car seat.

  ‘I’m fine.’ I scanned the car park for hazards, half-expecting someone from the hospital to stop us. It seemed absurd that I was allowed to shuff
le out of here with a day-old infant.

  ‘You sure? I feel like I had a smiling girlfriend two days ago and I’ve walked out with a stranger.’

  I looked at him blankly. ‘I’m fine. Just tired.’

  He stared at me for a long moment.

  ‘I guess I’m surprised that they let us go,’ I said. ‘I mean, neither of us knows what we’re doing. Well, I certainly don’t.’

  He smiled, looking relieved. ‘You’ll be fine, Simone. Really, how hard can it be? Feed, sleep, change nappies.’ He picked up the car seat. ‘Okay, it’s easing off. Let’s race out now.’

  Once in the car, I tucked a blanket over the baby, making sure his head looked comfortable. I’d read somewhere you weren’t meant to leave babies in car seats for long as they could suffocate, and the rush hour was still on.

  Paul drove with his usual pushiness through the streets, braking hard and accelerating harder. I gritted my teeth. He didn’t like me commenting on his driving, but sometimes, behind the wheel, he was a different person, engaging in petty warfare with every other driver, swearing and blaring his horn and fuming to himself. Usually I could ignore it, but not today.

  ‘Can you please stop that?’ I finally said.

  ‘Stop what?’

  ‘Driving like that. So aggressive. And swearing at everyone.’

  ‘I always drive like this. It’s London. This is how you drive.’ He looked at me in apparent disbelief.

  ‘But with the baby here, I think you need to slow down a bit. Not get so angry.’

  He sat back and took a deep breath. His driving slowed, and he looked a little contrite. ‘You’re right. I’m sorry, Simone.’

  As we drove past Old Street and turned off towards the Barbican I felt my mood shift. By the time we made it through the reception I was almost in tears. It hit me that life as I’d known it was over and I would never adjust to this. Everything I’d had – sleep, work, freedom, a body free of injury and pain – was gone without warning. What had been an exciting checklist, another rung on the ladder of being an adult – getting ready for the baby – was now a life sentence.

  As I sat down on the couch and picked up the baby, who was waking up and crying with hunger, I had a sudden memory of last year, in early spring, when I’d just arrived in London and was staying at a flat in Kennington with an old school friend, Michelle.

  I had gone out in the morning, the sun shining, wearing a t-shirt and jeans, buoyed by the pale blue sky and the tall mauve tulips growing in the park. But as the day went on the temperature dropped, until I was colder than I had ever been in my life. A bone-deep, aching cold that made me long for a hot bath and then a warm bed.

  When I got back to Michelle’s flat, I realised I was locked out, and when I called her she was stuck on a slow-moving bus from Brixton. The entire front of the old Georgian building was covered in scaffolding, but I could see that her third-floor living room window was slightly open. So I climbed up the builder’s ladder, planning to walk along the timber planks and enter through the window.

  But I went too far up the ladder, all the way to the top of the building, and suddenly I was looking out over the rooftop and across south London. There was no more ladder, nothing to do except contain my fear and try not to panic or look down and see how far I might fall, or how precarious my hold was on the paint-spattered metal. Slowly I edged down, reminding myself that the builders did this every day, that if I kept going I would soon be safe.

  This was the exact same feeling of panic, of vertigo. Of suddenly finding myself doing something I was in no way qualified for, and that was nothing like I had expected. There was no more ladder. This was it.

  3

  As the weak winter daylight outside faded away and the office buildings glowed in the dusk, me and the baby – and I needed to stop calling him that, we had to think of a name – lay together on the bed, him wrapped in my grey cardigan, a tidy little bundle, beside me. Paul had made me food and tea and I could hear the TV in the living room.

  Sometime later, I opened my eyes to darkness. The bundle was motionless beside me, sinister and quiet. Half-asleep and panicking, I yanked it towards me, thinking that the cardigan had slipped over the tiny nostrils and mouth and suffocated him. But he was breathing. Still, a moment of inattention, a deep sleep, a fall, could be catastrophic.

  The clock beside me read 11.10 pm and as I lay there, it felt like a dark sheet had slid off a movie screen in my mind and a scratchy film began playing of all the dangers that now surrounded us, which I half-remembered from news stories and the lives of people around me – former neighbours, cousins of friends.

  He was a baby, but he was also a light, delicate object. How easy it would be to slip and drop him from one of the Barbican’s walkways, or over a stairwell, or for his pram to roll in front of a Tube train, or for a blanket to cover his airway in his sleep. For some innocuous rash or cough to turn deadly. To leave him on a bus, or out in the rain. For someone to steal him away from me. And then to be forever living in the aftermath, imagining all the things I would never know about him. The scenes rolled in front of my eyes, each one making me hold my breath and squeeze my eyes shut. These were cut with out-of-body moments from the labour ward and all those blank bodies in uniforms surrounding me, and even though I was still so tired I resisted sleep, because I felt as if the only way I could keep us both safe was by watching him.

  Every hour or so he would stir in his sleep and begin to fret beside me, wanting to be fed. Feeding him was starting to hurt, his dry, peeling hands scratching me, his mouth on my raw skin, his little face banging against me as he failed to latch on and I started to sweat with panic. At some point, I must have fallen asleep, but then the city started to wake up, with the thump and crash of the slow-moving garbage trucks and the hum of traffic dragging me back to myself and the restless baby beside me.

  By morning, my head felt like it was wrapped in a fog-coloured blanket. My eyes were gritty, my body dragged. The apartment felt different, too, cold and bleak. In the last days of pregnancy, after I’d gone on maternity leave, it had felt like a peaceful little nest high above the city. I watched movies and walked in the Barbican’s residents-only garden, the trees still holding a few papery apricot-coloured leaves and the baby warm in my belly, and slept through the short afternoons until night fell. Through those last days of pottering and folding baby clothes and imagining what lay ahead of me, he’d been an invisible presence who demanded nothing, and the prospect of meeting him or her had made me almost faint with happiness.

  And now he was here, and I was constantly vigilant, wondering what he’d require next, and how I might deliver it. A little stranger, as the Victorians had called newborns, and he was. A small, howling stranger, so different from that lovely, unseen creature in my belly. It felt like he’d barely slept since the birth, and as a result neither had I. How long would this go on for?

  Around noon, the doorbell rang. Paul was in the hallway and I expected him to deal with it, but I heard him shut himself into the spare room. The bell rang again, this time a little longer, as if someone was pressing down hard with a finger. I got up slowly and made my way to the front door. Two women stood there, dressed in puffer jackets and boots. They smiled at me warmly, and I remembered reading something in my NHS Red Book about home visits after the birth.

  ‘We’re from the hospital. We’ve come to check on you.’

  They came into my bedroom and weighed the baby, holding him up in a little calico sling attached to metal scales. He slumped in the cream fabric, dangling in the air like the stork was delivering him. The clear winter light crossed his sleepy face and I wanted to hold him close.

  If I focused on him and nothing else, I felt euphoric, admiring that perfect skin, his soft and compact body warm with life, his clenched fists and his rich baby smell that I suddenly wanted to bury my face in. His eyes were starting to sprout lashes, I saw, when the midwife handed him back to me.

  In the hallway, I heard Paul’s p
hone ring and him stepping out of the spare room to answer it.

  ‘She’s with the midwives at the moment.’

  A pause. I listened, wondering if it was Paul’s parents calling to arrange a visit. The door closed and I couldn’t hear anything more.

  The midwife was looking at me. ‘How are you going, generally?’

  Her voice was so gentle that my eyes filled with tears. ‘Okay.’

  ‘Day three. Totally normal to be crying,’ she said cheerfully, and I felt a bit happier, even as I tried to wipe away tears with my sleeve. She pulled out a box of tissues from her bag and offered me one.

  ‘And it looks like you have a supportive partner? Is he off work for now?’

  ‘Yes, he’s got three weeks off. He’s been great.’ I dabbed my eyes. Of course he was supportive. But neither of us had known what we were getting into, what it meant to have a child. And what had been so casual between us now felt precarious, the responsibility of the baby hanging like a heavy, priceless ornament on a spindly Christmas tree. I struggled to remember why we’d done this, what the thought process had been. How I’d even gotten pregnant.

  It had been, most likely, one night when I’d gone out in Soho with my work colleagues. We went to Black’s, a club that our magazine’s art director belonged to, crowding into a basement room of timber-panelled dark grey walls and creaky tables, with glass jars of fresh spring flowers providing the only spots of colour in the gloom. I sat with my colleagues late into the evening, emptying bottles of red wine as people’s legs passed by on the pavement outside. And then someone from home appeared, a boy from my high school history class who now lived in Notting Hill. I’d been quite drunk, chatting to him about London, and then Paul was somehow beside me –

  ‘Any more questions? Is the feeding going okay?’

  I looked at the midwife in confusion, because for a long moment I’d been back in that blurry Soho basement. There was something about that night I’d forgotten, something important.