The Night Village Read online

  ‘Oh, I’ve been here for years,’ she replied.

  She offered me a seat in a comfortable-looking leather armchair. I sat down and looked at her again, and she looked back at me, and for a moment we didn’t speak.

  ‘They gave me this room to work on the museum’s records – really, though, I’ve been here so long they don’t seem to remember me half the time.’

  She looked at me as if waiting for me to speak but I felt so tired, I didn’t know what to say. Alongside me, the baby slept on in his pram as if finally soothed.

  ‘So where did you walk from?’

  ‘The Barbican.’

  ‘Oh my goodness. That’s quite a walk with a three-week-old baby.’ She sounded surprised.

  ‘It was. Once I got going it felt good to be out in the world again. The Barbican isn’t the most baby-friendly place.’

  ‘No, it most definitely is not.’ She laughed. ‘Do you think you’ll go home for a bit? It’s a long way back to Australia with a baby I suppose, but easier now than when he’s a toddler.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of that. But maybe.’ My mum had suggested the same thing and I’d dismissed the idea as impossible, thinking there was no way I could face that long-haul flight. But now, having ventured out on my own for the first time, it seemed less daunting. I would love to show my parents the baby, to be back in that easy, familiar world for a few weeks. To take him to the beach and dangle his feet in the water, then watch him fall asleep under an umbrella to the sound of waves.

  ‘To be honest, I don’t think it matters where you are when your baby is small and portable. At the moment, you’re his home. He doesn’t need much else. And I always found London a wonderful playground for my children, once they were a bit bigger. Especially in summer when you can get out more.’

  ‘How many children do you have?’

  ‘Two daughters. They both stayed in London, which is nice. One is a milliner and the other is an accountant.’

  The kettle boiled, and she brought me tea in a wide blue-and-white mug. She moved very slowly and as she handed me the mug I noticed how pale her hands were, the skin completely without colour, and how she lowered herself into her seat with great care.

  We kept talking, about children and books and London and the museum, until I noticed that outside it was getting dark, and I could hear the strangled roar of buses gearing up for the evening commute. ‘Gosh, it’s late. I should head off.’

  ‘Are you alright to get home? Would you like to call a cab, perhaps?’

  ‘It’s okay. My bus leaves from Bethnal Green Road.’

  She took my cup and waited as I put my coat on, then held the door open for me and accompanied me back out to the museum.

  ‘So were you working, before the baby?’ she said as we walked together to the exit.

  ‘Yes. At a magazine called Dove Grey as an editorial assistant. Sort of a lifestyle magazine, I guess. Quite serious about it all. Can’t really imagine getting back to it now.’

  ‘So many opportunities here in London for that kind of work, I suppose.’

  ‘Oh, there are. But to go from that to this,’ I pointed at the pram, its dense presence, the stillness that was ready to break at any moment of night or day, and require my immediate attention. ‘Well, I feel like I’ve gone from doing my old job to being an astronaut. It’s so different.’

  ‘It changes your life, doesn’t it?’ she smiled. ‘But it’s worth it.’

  ‘It will be worth it. Once I get some sleep and work out a few things.’

  She laughed. ‘You will.’

  5

  As I left the museum gardens and stepped back into the street, I picked up on that familiar, hectic edge of thousands of people heading to their separate homes, exhausted from a day of scanning groceries or bellies, selling insurance or teaching children, wanting only to unlock the door to their own little private corner of the city and close it behind them. Usually I’d be a part of it, forging my own path on Tubes and elevators after a day under fluorescent lights in a sealed office, my eyes gritty from looking at a screen all day. But now I was out of step, getting in people’s way with my pram as they ploughed forward, hungry and impatient at the prospect of home. Everyone looked pale under the streetlights, rushing into the warmly lit entrances to the Tube, or along the footpaths like fugitives in search of a hiding place. The dress shops along Bethnal Green Road were closing, but the fried chicken and kebab shops were busy and Tesco glowed blue and red in the gloom, its checkouts jammed with people.

  I headed under the viaduct to the nearest bus stop, where I stood next to two kids, earphones in and hands busy with boxes of fried chicken, and a woman with a young boy on a balance bike. We squashed in when the bus arrived, my pram awkward and noticeable in the crowd.

  ‘Get out of the way.’

  I looked around and saw an angry man staring down the mother and her boy from the bus stop. The boy’s balance bike seemed to be leaning against the man’s leg.

  ‘Move the bike, you stupid, selfish bitch.’

  The boy’s eyes widened as another drunk-looking man leaned towards him, holding out a spindly hand to lead him away, but instead terrifying him with his yellow leer.

  The mother said nothing back to the angry man. She can’t, I realised, because she has a small child with her. She can’t allow it to escalate because while she could get away on her own, if she needed to, with a child it would be much harder, and she would be putting him in danger. No-one said anything, including me, as she did her best to move away from the man and reassure the boy. I thought of the phrase women and children, used so often in war reporting, and suddenly I understood what it meant. Women and children are weak and vulnerable. At this moment, on a London bus, it means this mother cops a bit of verbal abuse from a stranger and no-one stands up for her. Elsewhere, it could mean anything at all. Yet another thing I’d been mostly oblivious to in my former life.

  The baby started to wake up and then cry, and I pulled him out of the pram and onto my lap. He was hungry, his mouth wide-open, and I knew what needed to happen to stop him. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. Was I actually about to do this? I didn’t sunbathe topless, I didn’t walk around changing rooms naked, I didn’t even wear low-cut tops. But if it would stop the screaming, I would do it. My old self looked on, fascinated and mortified, as my new maternal self unbuttoned my coat and, as discreetly as possible, pulled out a veiny, rock-hard breast on a London bus. It was done, and somehow the world went on.

  Except that it didn’t work. I felt, rather than saw, every drawn, blank face on the bus turning towards me curiously as he tried to latch on, becoming increasingly vocal about his distress. My vision closed in and I thought suddenly of the birth, of being surrounded by silent faceless strangers.

  ‘Maybe try the other side?’ said a woman beside me, quietly, in an accent that was Spanish, or perhaps Italian.

  I tried. It still didn’t work.

  The bus was hot, packed with bundled-up bodies heading home and the kind of silence I had always enjoyed in London, being among people but quiet and still. But tonight it was unbearable as the baby fretted against me, and although no-one had said a word apart from the woman who was trying to help me, I felt like I had to leave, like me and the baby were too loud, too needy, too exposed.

  ‘I think I’m going to get off,’ I whispered to her, panicking, buttoning myself and ringing the bell and pushing past her, past the small child on the balance bike whose mother had her arm around him.

  ‘Your baby doesn’t like the Number Eight bus,’ observed the drunk man, giving me a sympathetic smile.

  ‘Looks that way,’ I said. You can’t ignore drunks on a confined bus but, like toddlers, you shouldn’t encourage them either. At the bus stop I pulled the pram awkwardly down into the street, with the baby in my arm.

  ‘I reckon he’s well within his rights!’ yelled the man, as the door closed behind me. ‘There’s always been something deeply fucked up about the Numbe
r Eight bus!’ He sounded outraged.

  My breathing slowed. The bus rumbled away towards Liverpool Street Station, leaving us alone in the kind, spacious darkness, away from the emergency that wasn’t, in fact, an emergency except in my noisy brain. Away from people and bright lights and panic was a bench, close to the bus stop but in a pocket of darkness. Settling into the hidden quiet, it was easy to feed the baby and I sat for as long as I could with him tucked under my coat, compact and warm against my bare skin. I stared across the road and through the window of a Japanese restaurant I’d been to once with Paul. My belly rumbled. I kept the baby in my coat, supported by my left arm, as I threw my bag into the pram and headed in the direction of home.

  Paul always declared the Barbican an architectural masterpiece, and spoke of its ‘brutalism’ in hushed tones. Built in the 1960s on a vast bombsite close to Liverpool Street Station and the border of the East End, it was some kind of idealistic postwar attempt to create a self-contained community of terrace houses and tower blocks, sealed and comfortable and built of solid concrete. I’d never admit it, but privately I thought of it as cold and institutional, a kind of failed utopia, and tonight I felt a sense of foreboding as I neared the estate.

  Paul’s apartment was in one of the three huge towers that blocked out the light and loomed over pedestrians scurrying past. Between the towers were low-rise apartments, which enclosed a huge courtyard of paved terraces, rectangular lakes, a gated garden and a playground, built around remnants of the Roman wall that once ringed the city. Long walkways with obscure yellow signposting all pointed to a cultural centre at the heart of the estate, where elderly residents dozed over small glasses of sherry on the red leather couches in the vast foyer, and outsiders arrived breathless and late for concerts or films after scurrying down the endless windy walkways. At night-time, the streets around the Barbican were eerily deserted for central London, and as I hurried down the darkness of Chiswell Street and into the dimly lit reception I felt, as always, something at my back. Imaginary, I hoped, but never quite knew for sure.

  As I burst into our apartment, I smelled food and heard voices in the living room. Rachel was in the kitchen, pouring red wine straight from an open bottle into something bubbling away on the stove, a full glass in her other hand. Voices in the living room fell quiet as I closed the door behind me.

  ‘Oh, you’re back!’ said Rachel. ‘We didn’t know where you’d got to. Paul’s been calling you. George and Penny are here to meet the baby.’ She was talking very fast, and gulped down her wine once she’d finished speaking.

  Paul’s parents. Wheeling the pram into the living room, I said hello as they stood up, then leaned into the pram where the baby lay.

  ‘You’ve been out for a while. Where did you get to?’ said his mother, a slender, quiet woman with dark hair and a nervous manner.

  ‘I went for a walk and then got a bit stuck in traffic on the way home. I didn’t know you and George were coming over tonight. Sorry.’

  ‘Oh, it’s alright. We were just a little worried.’

  She looked at the baby with a strange expression, I thought. Somewhere between love and trepidation. Maybe, like me, she was wondering what kind of parents we would make, what kind of a team.

  ‘Well, he’s absolutely perfect,’ said Paul’s dad briskly, giving me a gentle pat on the back. ‘And how are you? Should you be out so late?’

  ‘I kind of lost track of time,’ I said. ‘Where’s Paul?’ And then suddenly he was behind me.

  ‘I’ve been here waiting. We all have. Where were you, Simone?’ he asked. ‘I tried calling but you left your phone at home.’

  ‘Oh, did I? Sorry. I told Rachel I was going for a quick walk, but then I somehow ended up at the Childhood Museum in Bethnal Green.’

  ‘Really? What a funny place to go. I don’t think I’ve been there since primary school,’ said Rachel. ‘I remember it being kind of spooky, all those old toys and creepy masks and things.’

  ‘Well, I liked it,’ I said.

  Paul looked pale as he took my coat. ‘Sit down, Simone. You need to rest.’

  So I sat, taking in the warmth and the conversation flowing around me and wondering how soon I could politely steal away with the baby to bed. Paul, who looked to be on his second or third glass of wine, lifted the baby out of the pram and passed him around until he ended up with Paul’s father, where he lay against his broad chest looking utterly at peace. Paul’s father seemed tense, though, and I wondered if he looked down on me, for getting pregnant so quickly and trapping his son.

  Penny sat beside me with a big Liberty shopping bag, and began unpacking things for me to look at – a soft grey blanket of Welsh wool, a tiny yellow sleepsuit, handmade leather baby shoes and finally a voucher from John Lewis, in a cream envelope, for a thousand pounds.

  I looked at her. ‘This is too much – I can’t take this.’

  ‘Of course you can.’ She shook her head quickly. ‘It makes it easier for us. I didn’t really know what you needed, and then I thought, well, this way you can decide for yourself.’

  Paul wasn’t keen on baby shops, so collecting everything we might need in the months leading up to the birth had fallen to me. I’d bought a second-hand pram and a cot off Gumtree, and found most of the clothes in cheap high-street shops, as I hadn’t liked to ask Paul to contribute when he was already giving me somewhere to live and covering bills. Now, though, I started thinking about what I could do with so much money. Buy a better pram, for a start. And get a few things for the baby’s room, once Rachel moved on and I could set it up.

  ‘Thank you. This will be really helpful,’ I said quietly.

  ‘Not at all. A girl should always have money. Especially when she’s the mother of my grandchild!’ she laughed.

  ‘Such beautiful things,’ said Rachel, appearing beside me and picking up the miniature leather shoes. ‘So sweet. Tiny.’

  Penny seemed to freeze for a moment as she held them up, resting them on the palm of her hand, and I felt suddenly embarrassed at being showered with all these expensive gifts when Paul’s parents barely knew me.

  We’d first met last spring, when they were in London for the weekend and had come by to leave some shopping at the apartment while they’d met friends for lunch. Paul was out when the doorbell rang, followed almost instantly by a key digging into the lock. And then a neat woman with a dark bob, dressed all in black with a long silver necklace and chunky rings on her fingers, was standing in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh! Hello!’ She practically fell over herself in her rush to shake my hand. ‘I’m Penny. Paul’s mother. And you?’

  ‘I’m Simone.’

  ‘Ah, yes, Simone. You’re coming to the wedding, aren’t you? Paul mentioned it last week when I spoke to him, that he was bringing a friend.’

  I nodded, smiling, and wondered if she knew that I – Paul’s friend – had moved in with him. Somehow, I’d managed to ignore the fact that he had a family, a whole network here in London and beyond. He was skilled at keeping everything separate, I realised. Discreet. Maybe it was a British thing.

  ‘Paul said he was on his way – oh, I think I can hear him. Hellooooo!’ She gave him a kiss as he walked in, pulling off his bike helmet.

  ‘You’ve met Simone?’ he asked, smiling at her.

  ‘I have.’ She had looked approvingly at me, and so did he, until I got embarrassed and put the kettle on for something to do.

  ‘Lovely,’ she’d said. ‘Just lovely.’

  ‘You still with us, Simone?’ said Paul now, interrupting my thoughts and pulling me back into the room where his parents now smiled at me, the mother of their first grandchild.

  ‘Yes. Sorry.’ I rubbed my face, trying to wake up a bit.

  A little later, Rachel called us to the dining table and served up a rich beef stew with buttery mashed potatoes and green beans, heaping my plate lavishly and fussing over me.

  ‘Here you go, Simone, have lots. I thought the iron might be good for y
ou.’

  ‘Thanks, Rachel.’ I was ravenous. ‘It looks really good.’

  As Paul and his father fell into a conversation about Paul’s work, his mother leaned over and said quietly, ‘And how was the birth, Simone?’

  ‘Oh, it was … Well, it all went fine, I guess, in the end. But it was – you know – a bit of a shock.’

  She nodded. ‘I know. It is. No-one warns you. They can’t, really. We were going to come sooner, but we thought we’d give you a few weeks to get settled. Are your parents coming over? Your mum, I mean?’

  ‘Oh, maybe. We’re still working it out. She’s thinking of coming in the spring, or I was thinking today I might fly home to see them.’

  ‘Oh, right.’ She looked worried and glanced over at Paul, and I realised I should probably talk to him before dreaming up plans to leave the country with our son. ‘Well, they will have a lovely time if they come to London in spring. And you have some good help here with Rachel in the meantime.’

  ‘It was lucky timing, I guess, that I was moving to London,’ said Rachel, before I had a chance to speak. ‘It’s only to help out for a bit, until Simone finds her feet.’ There was something disdainful in her tone, and I sat up straighter, trying to look more alert than I felt.

  ‘I’ve been managing okay,’ I said, as neutrally as possible.

  ‘Of course! Of course you have,’ Rachel said, with insincere enthusiasm.

  ‘Do you want to go to bed, Simone?’ Paul asked. ‘You look exhausted.’

  ‘Thanks, Paul.’

  Rachel raised her eyebrows and looked at Paul’s parents, as if to say, Oh dear, Paul’s in trouble.

  ‘I don’t mean you look bad, but maybe you should get some rest.’

  ‘We should be off anyway,’ said Paul’s mother, putting her knife and fork together on her half-eaten meal. ‘We’re booked to stay at the Thistle tonight. We can walk there from here, and then we’re up to Scotland first thing in the morning on the train, to visit the Crawfords for a week. We might try to pop past on the way back and bring you some food.’