The Night Village Read online

‘That would be lovely, Penny. Thanks for coming,’ I said, as warmly as I could. The atmosphere was so strained, so odd, it was all I could do to act normal. But it was probably me that was out of step. They all seemed fine, although no-one was quite meeting anyone’s eyes.

  They got to their feet and we had a long, awkward goodbye at the front door, with everyone dithering over whether to hug or kiss or both, and lots of hand touching and assurances about future visits and phone calls and family gatherings. As they finally stepped out the door, Paul’s mother looked at me and said, ‘Anyway, I’m so glad you have Rachel here. I can see she’s taking such good care of you, cooking and so on. She was always like that, the little nurse of the family.’ She reached out and squeezed Rachel’s hand one last time.

  Again, Rachel caught my eye and smiled. Something lurked there, some story. The door closed.

  Dazed, I made my way to our bedroom. As I walked past the spare room I saw Rachel had already made herself at home, her clothes all over the chair and the bed, the table covered in perfume, makeup, books and papers. Her brown leather suitcase was nowhere to be seen and I wondered how it had held so much.

  Later, as Paul and I lay in bed, the baby asleep between us, I asked him to tell me more about Rachel, keeping my voice to a whisper.

  He sighed.

  ‘Well, what do you want to know? She’s my cousin,’ he said. ‘But she was more like a sibling in some ways, when we were growing up. Our mothers are sisters, so we saw a lot of her when we were little. Rachel went to boarding school and she used to come and stay with us sometimes in the holidays because her mother was often away. And then when she was older she ended up living with us, for a while.’

  ‘Where was her Dad?’

  ‘Oh, he was out of the picture by then. Her mum remarried and ended up in Nigeria for a while, and she preferred coming to our house, I think.’

  ‘How long is she staying here for? Has she said?’

  ‘I don’t think she’ll stay long with us. She’s been drifting around for years. She’s a bit like her mum in that respect – always at some mystical sound healing ceremony in California or some self-discovery retreat in Borneo. She’ll come out with some pretty strange theories, but they’re mostly harmless.’ He yawned. ‘I’m exhausted, Simone.’

  The baby stirred a little and I could hear the bath running, the smell of my bath oil drifting in under the door. I knew I should let Paul sleep but I needed to know more.

  ‘And she’s planning to work here?’

  ‘I think so. She was a nurse, but then she was studying herbal medicine or something and now she wants to look for a job. She mentioned some clinic in Hampstead she’s been in touch with. You know what it’s like when you first get here.’

  I thought back to arriving at Heathrow almost two years ago, carrying a suitcase and a couple of phone numbers and no warm clothes. Catching the Tube for the first time and a child playing next to me with some loud, annoying toy. I was practically crying from exhaustion, and then I met the eye of a young bloke who gave me an encouraging smile as if to say, Hang in there. London had always enchanted me like that – those sudden human connections that happened when strangers were crammed up against each other, even if they never saw each other again. But there were bad moments, too. Going to a café and having my wallet stolen so expertly from my bag, which I had left at my feet, that I never even saw the person, let alone noticed their hands taking my money – ninety pounds, although I’d had another four hundred, most of my savings, tucked away in the very bottom of the bag, and they hadn’t found that. Paul had been so welcoming to me, and had made my life so much easier. Perhaps it was only fair that he looked after his cousin, too.

  ‘It is hard when you first get here. It’s good that she has somewhere to stay.’

  He sighed. ‘We’ve always helped Rachel. Her mother was pretty distracted so my parents took her in. All you can do is humour her. Don’t get into any heavy discussions about anything. That’s what I do.’

  He put an arm around me, drawing me closer to his warm-bread smell. I felt like I hadn’t seen him for days, like I’d been missing him, even though he’d been here all along.

  ‘Okay. I’ll try that.’

  ‘She’ll probably only stay for a few days while she works out what she’s doing. She’s that kind of person: one minute she’s here, the next minute she’s working in a tapas bar in Barcelona or something. She moves around.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘I’ll send her to the shops, keep her busy, get her to do some cooking. She wants to help. She said to me tonight that I should say thank you from her. For letting her be here, helping you.’

  ‘Oh, did she? That’s nice, I guess. She doesn’t have to thank me, though.’ I kissed him. ‘Night.’

  Despite the long walk, as soon as I heard Paul’s breathing change from wakeful to slow and steady, I became alert, my thoughts stumbling between my new life and my old.

  I felt uneasy about Rachel. It wasn’t something I could be as rational about as he was; it was a gut feeling more than anything. I wondered what my mother would advise me to do in this situation and realised I had no idea. Mum wasn’t one for confrontation. She seemed to come from a gentler world where you faced down any hint of interpersonal tension with a benign comment about the cooler weather we’d been having or that nice tree over there. Maybe that was the smart approach. Maybe I should try to get along with Rachel, to be pleasant, to pay less attention. And wait for the situation to resolve itself without me having to do anything. After all, she hadn’t actually done anything wrong. It was more about me being tired and oversensitive and paranoid. She was here to help, according to Paul. All she wanted was to help.

  The baby woke, and I fed him until he rolled away from me, milk-drunk. Feeding him made me drowsy and I rolled towards sleep with blissful ease.

  When I opened my eyes again it was to the sound of smashing glass. Something being pounded with efficient, furious force. A destructive, mindless din. I struggled to think while my body remained deeply relaxed, then adrenaline flooded my brain and my muscles tensed. I reached for the baby and found him there beside me, the soft, cotton-covered hump of his back curved away from me, moving up and down with his breath. What was that noise? Were we being invaded? Had someone found their way into the flat? Whoever it was, they were fast and strong and methodical.

  I shook myself awake. The sound had stopped. Beside me, the baby was asleep but Paul wasn’t there. The light in the room was subtly different, the grey of dawn, and I realised I’d been having a nightmare. But my heart was still thudding, and my breath was fast from the terror of the sound, and from the certainty that some force had found its way into the apartment and was wrecking it with efficient strength. I heard quieter noises, muffled sounds of something moving, and then Paul appeared in the doorway. As he slipped into bed I turned towards him.

  ‘What was that noise?’

  ‘Oh – you’re awake?’

  ‘Did you hear it?’

  ‘Hear what?’

  ‘That banging. It sounded like the whole building was shaking.’

  ‘No. You must have been dreaming,’ he told me, pulling me close to him so I could smell his skin, its familiar scent. I breathed in, trying to ease myself back into sleep. The minutes slipped by as I lay there, trying not to look at the cold numbers on the digital clock as they flicked silently into early morning.

  On my bedside table lay a baby book I’d bought from Foyles a few months earlier. Maybe reading would help. Getting up as lightly as possible from the bed, I went out to the living room and settled on the couch, then looked through the contents page to see where to begin. A chapter titled ‘Your Head’ stood out, and as I read I could hear the author’s voice, as if she was speaking directly to me: When you have a child, you need to decide what you want to give him or her from your own history, and what you want to make new.

  I closed my eyes, and I was back home in Perth, where I had everything I needed and mo
re – two loving parents at home, books, education, clean air and water – and yet I’d been so restless to see new things. As a teenager I used to sit in my room for hours, mostly reading novels set in faraway places or plotting out in my diary my eventual escape to the chaos of a big city. London had called to me, like it did so many people from Perth. But it was meant to be a rite of passage – you went there for a year or two on a working visa, partied and travelled and slept with inappropriate people, then drew a firm line under the whole episode and went home. I’d certainly complicated things now. Could I legally leave the country, now I had a baby? Why had I not considered this earlier? Because I hadn’t planned to have a baby with Paul. That night in Soho was the only time we slipped up. I thought about it briefly, then let my mind skip away from it.

  When I found out I was pregnant I was swept up in Paul’s happiness, relieved and happy that we both wanted this baby. But one evening, as I arrived home nauseous and exhausted to Paul’s empty flat, I suddenly wondered if I was making a mistake.

  I had called Soraya, my friend at work, and she’d been calm and matter-of-fact, as if she’d anticipated this conversation and knew exactly what to say to me. ‘Look. You know you don’t have to do this if you don’t want to. I have the number for a very good clinic. If you need someone to hold your hand, I’ll do that, and if you need money, I have that too.’

  ‘You’re right,’ I said to her. ‘I think you’re right. I’ll talk to Paul.’

  ‘So I’ve been thinking,’ I said to him when he arrived home, before he even got his coat off. ‘Do you think we should do this? Have this baby? I know it’s a lovely idea, and maybe we could think about it in a year or two, when we know each other better, but not now. It’s too soon.’ My speech had been rehearsed; its logic was impeccable.

  But he simply shook his head and smiled, folded me into a hug, and talked me out of it. Every time I spoke, tried to argue my case, he was talking again before I’d even finished the sentence, his voice, so low and reasonable and persistent, rolling easily over mine so that I became confused, unable to complete my own thoughts while listening to his, and feeling a rising frustration at his ability to keep talking, deflecting, when I was the one who had to actually go through with it all. Eventually, I gave in. Fell silent. All I wanted was for the conversation to end, and as I drifted off he had the last word.

  ‘It’s okay to be scared, but this is a good thing. It’s going to be wonderful,’ he had said. ‘I know it.’

  Back in the bedroom I could hear the baby stirring, and I put aside the book and got up, oddly happy to be needed by him. As I breastfed him, a sadness that was becoming more familiar descended, and I wondered if there was some innate biological wisdom to a new mother feeling a bit depressed and flat. After all, if I were happier, more like my old self, I’d probably be distracted by other things, other people, when what a tiny infant needs is a kind of benign, responsive, milk-producing mass to huddle against.

  All I wanted was to be here, gazing down at the baby’s face. It hadn’t been a mistake. Even though what I felt for him wasn’t exactly love, or what I’d previously understood as love, the prospect of being apart from him was unimaginable.

  6

  Again, I woke to stirring beside me in the low morning light. Paul had left early, for the gym and then work. The baby was crying and flapping so I picked him up and brought him closer, lifting my t-shirt and feeding him.

  Eventually his head fell away, his mouth open, a milk bubble forming and popping at his lips as his face became still. I closed my eyes. It was a little after seven, but I didn’t have to be anywhere, and thought I might get an extra hour of sleep while I could. Except that I saw a shadow under the door, and then it opened, and Rachel was standing there. ‘Are you awake?’ she asked, in a bright, eager voice, as if she couldn’t wait to see me, to see the baby, to start this fresh new day.

  I wanted to delay it as long as possible, but the longer she stood there, the more I was waking up, as the baby slept on beside me.

  ‘I’m going to keep sleeping for a bit,’ I mumbled, hoping she would get the hint. ‘The baby was up a lot in the night.’

  The baby was now motionless beside me, and the oxytocin or whatever it was that was released by breastfeeding was dragging me down into velvety darkness. Except I was being pulled out of it again by her voice – her soft, insistent voice.

  ‘Do you want to come and have some breakfast?’

  ‘No. I want to sleep. Sorry.’

  Even in my drowsy state I registered that she was again doing something that seemed at once entirely reasonable and well intentioned, yet didn’t recognise my needs at all. Was it deliberate, or was she incredibly laid-back and I was the unreasonable one?

  She stood there for a long moment and the silence was full of some emotion – anger or something else. Her silver bangles clinked lightly as she hugged herself for a moment, then walked away, leaving my bedroom door ajar so that the light from the hallway shone in. I heard her moving about in the kitchen, first the radio coming on, and then the slamming of cupboard doors, a noisy rattling through the cutlery, and finally the smashing of something that sounded like a glass jar. The warm winter smells of coffee and toast drifted into my room, followed by Rachel’s voice as she chatted on the phone to someone, the sound reaching my room very clearly, as if she was standing at the kitchen door and talking in my direction.

  I was aching, a dragging muscular pull deep in my pelvis that I felt as soon as I sat up. It was silly to have walked to Bethnal Green, so soon after the birth. But I wasn’t going to get back to sleep now, so I climbed carefully over the sleeping baby and went to have a shower.

  The bathroom was a welcoming white-tiled cave, the hot rushing water a guilty relief because I wouldn’t hear the baby cry while I was in here, breathing in the steam. Awake and blissfully alone. No-one to look after but myself. After a few minutes, though, I felt uneasy about cutting myself off from his cries, and turned off the water. Stepping out, I dried myself quickly, expecting to hear full-volume howling. But the apartment was silent. When I pushed open the door of our bedroom, the bed was empty.

  Still in my towel, I went in search of the baby, nauseous with sudden anxiety. The kitchen was messy but empty. I couldn’t hear Rachel, or the light clinking of her silver bangles that usually accompanied her movements around the apartment.

  Something outside caught my eye, and I saw her on the balcony, holding the baby up on the thick balcony surround as if showing him the city. I moved slowly, not wanting to startle her. The surround was a metre thick, and it sloped upwards, a curved modernist sculpture of concrete, deep enough for people to sit on at parties. He couldn’t fall. I knew that. Yet I also knew how defenceless he was. I’d seen it myself that first night in the hospital when he’d hung so helplessly from my hand, and I didn’t want him outside, I didn’t want her holding him, and I didn’t want him anywhere near the edge of the building. I slid open the door, but didn’t know what I should do next.

  What held me back from saying something to her? Was I scared of her? There was something about her that made me wary. Maybe it was the way she looked at me, a strange mix of pity and longing. What did she want? I felt the need to tiptoe around her, or maybe it was my tiredness, or hormones, or some strange maternal instinct telling me to be very polite, to not show anger or fear. I tried to keep my voice as even as possible as I said, ‘Oh, there you are. Can you bring him in? He’s probably hungry.’

  Don’t ever touch him again, I wanted to tell her, saying each word very clearly. Don’t take him from my bed when he’s sleeping.

  ‘Oh, is he? Sorry, he looked so lonely lying there, I couldn’t resist picking him up. And then I think I woke him, so I brought him out here to see all the buildings and to show him where he was born. They love being talked to, you know.’

  She came inside, settled herself down on the couch with him on her lap, facing me, her eyes fixed curiously on mine.

  ‘Is it weird, m
e holding him? I mean, do you feel like snatching him off me?’ She smiled, watching my face. ‘Does it make you all, like, protective?’

  Yes.

  ‘Oh, no, not really,’ I laughed uneasily.

  She looked disappointed. ‘It’s okay to feel like that, you know. It’s good, in fact.’

  ‘Is it? I guess so. I should probably feed him soon.’

  Still she looked at me, not making any move to give me the baby. At least she’s inside now, I thought. She can’t throw him over the balcony.

  ‘I need to feed him,’ I repeated, walking over to her and holding out my hands in a way that looked like I was pleading. Which was ridiculous.

  After a long pause she gave him back, with a small sigh.

  ‘What are you doing today?’ she asked, as I held the baby, felt relief at the weight of his body, his head resting against my chest.

  ‘I hadn’t really thought about it. I didn’t get a great night’s sleep … I’ll probably stay here. The health visitor is coming today.’

  Uneasily, I looked at our living room. It was squalid, with unwashed cups and wine glasses on the coffee table, and random headphones, dirty socks and old newspapers littering the floor. The whole apartment looked as if someone had given it a good shake – Rachel’s clothes and shoes had somehow made their way under tables and over chairs, and baby paraphernalia – wipes, sleepsuits, printed flannel blankets – cluttered every surface.

  ‘Okay. I’ll stay here too, then. Do you want some breakfast?’

  ‘Yeah, I’m starving. That would be great.’

  ‘I’ll go to Waitrose.’

  She swept out and while she was gone I got dressed. Fifteen minutes later, she returned with plastic bags filled with food – pain au chocolat, almond croissants, bread, raspberry jam and bacon. Then she disappeared into the kitchen and I smelled the croissants in the oven and coffee brewing and bacon frying. I was ravenous. Some combination of breastfeeding and exhaustion was making me hungry for carbs and sugar and fat, and I ate and ate while she picked at a croissant and sipped black coffee. Too late, I realised that she had barely eaten a thing. She looked pleased as she took my empty plate back to the kitchen.