The Night Village Read online

  ‘Thank you. That was amazing,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe we should go for a walk later, burn off all those carbs. You can show me around the Barbican. It’s so weird here … almost deserted, like some dismal 1960s social experiment. Kind of like the apocalypse but with Ercol chairs and cheese and pineapple sticks.’

  I laughed. ‘It’s pretty bleak, isn’t it? You can see what they wanted it to be, but it didn’t quite get there.’

  ‘Paul is a convert, though?’

  ‘He loves it. Refuses to live anywhere else, though I’ve sometimes tried talking to him about moving out to Hackney or even Bethnal Green.’

  ‘Really? Why won’t he go?’

  ‘He likes being right in the centre. Zone One or die. It does feel like you’re right in the action here, actually living in London, I guess. And he hates catching buses.’

  ‘And I guess this is his parents’ place, which makes it easier than renting. Paul is tricky, isn’t he? He’s tricky,’ she said, almost to herself.

  ‘Mmm …’ I said, not sure how to respond. I hadn’t realised Paul’s parents owned this apartment. He’d never mentioned it. I thought of all those gifts last night, the elegant shopping bags filled with delicate things wrapped in fine tissue paper.

  She waited, but I didn’t go on.

  ‘So how are you feeling, now? You don’t look quite as shattered as you did last night.’

  ‘I’m okay. I guess I’m waiting for it all to feel normal again, or to go back to normal, but it’s looking more and more like that isn’t going to happen. Some unbroken sleep would be good.’

  ‘No-one actually tells you how to get used to it, do they? And you’re already so tired from the birth, and then have to look after a baby. It’s brutal. Was it – was the hospital okay?’

  As soon as she said the word I was back in that room, surrounded by people, trapped on the bed. I saw again the obstetrician lifting up the forceps and me trying to get away, saying No, and him yelling Look away, look away, and so I did, trying to bury myself in Paul’s armpit, to escape all those nameless faces, those metal instruments. In any other context, a strange man coming into the room and doing that to someone would be considered assault. With a celebrity lawyer and a trial attracting considerable media coverage. Maybe even a true-crime documentary or memoir later on. Obviously, being childbirth, it wasn’t assault, and I knew it was done for the right reasons, and that my son was delivered safely, and all that matters is a healthy baby et cetera. But however much I tried to tell myself to get over it, I still shuddered at the memory of him lifting those forceps high up in the air, and knowing exactly where they were about to go. Rationally, I think he was enthused. He loved his work, he knew that in a moment I would be holding a healthy baby, and he had a crowd of wide-eyed students about to witness him do something extraordinary. But from my point of view, it wasn’t exactly ideal.

  Suddenly I had to talk about it. It didn’t matter who was listening. It could be a hamster or even a fencepost, for all I cared. It had to come out.

  ‘You know, I can’t quite believe how horrible the whole thing is. And so many women go through with it, and then go back and have another one. It actually makes me sad that women are going through it right now, all over the world. Some of them with no pain relief. It’s barbaric. And what if their partner isn’t supportive? That’s a whole new world of trouble.’

  She said nothing as a tear slid down my cheek, but I felt her close attention on me, the awareness that she was really listening. I wiped my eyes on the baby’s muslin.

  ‘You’ll heal,’ she said, very quietly, and I realised that was the one thing I’d been wanting to hear since it all happened. ‘You will heal.’

  Encouraged, I kept talking. ‘And I guess I was surprised at the birth, you know, at how long it dragged on, how many people were in the room. It felt like maybe ten people, I couldn’t count them all or really see them but it was crowded.’

  ‘Really?’ she sounded uncertain. ‘Was it really that many?’

  ‘I think so.’ Now I doubted myself, and my recollection of that morning.

  Unexpectedly, she laughed. ‘It’s funny, I sort of remember working on maternity wards when I was a student. The first-timers used to come in with a ten-page birth plan, wanting to control every single thing, when actually, the whole thing about being a parent – a mother – is that you have no control at all. We used to just laugh at them!’

  I thought back, a little stung. No-one had appeared to look down on me for being a ‘first-timer’, as she put it. If anything, they’d seemed even kinder because they knew I’d never done it before. My birth plan was limited to a scribbled message in my maternity notes to the midwives, saying, Whatever works, because I knew it was out of my control, down to biology and whatever happened on the day.

  But Rachel repeated it as if she was reminding herself, as if it was funny. ‘We used to really laugh at them!’

  She was quiet for a moment and I thought about leaving the room, because I suddenly felt sweaty, as if there was something not quite right in my belly.

  ‘Why were there so many people in the room, anyway?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know. The obstetrician came in – he had a whole lot of medical students with him. They didn’t really do anything, just stood there.’

  ‘Ah, medical students.’ She nodded to herself. ‘They’re vultures. They sort of hang around the labour ward, keeping their fingers crossed that a high-risk delivery comes along. Were they men or women?’

  ‘I don’t even know. It feels weird that I can’t picture their faces. That they were all there, but they never said a word.’

  ‘Oh, the male ones are the worst. They would have had plenty to say afterwards …’

  ‘I feel like they should have at least checked with me, before they all came in. I feel like I should have been asked.’

  ‘They didn’t ask you?’

  ‘Well, I think I ticked a box somewhere saying I would allow medical students to observe, but I didn’t think they would all troop in for the birth. It was weird.’

  ‘Medical students are vultures,’ she said again. ‘They would have seen you as a piece of meat, nothing more.’

  I thought back to the obstetrician, a bespectacled Nigerian man with such a relaxed, open face, who had looked me in the eye and spoken to me as if we were equals, in a normal social situation, despite the fact that I was out of it on pethidine and half-dressed and barely verbal. And how he’d chatted to me afterwards, commenting that birth was not as easy as the movies made it look, and how I was going to be ‘very unhappy with all of us later for causing you all this pain’. And how, looking back, what he was really saying to me was, if you are unhappy about this birth, blame me. Blame us. Don’t blame your baby, and don’t blame yourself.

  ‘Well, the midwife said I was lucky to get the obstetrician I did. He doesn’t normally deliver babies, apart from at the Portland. So maybe a gaggle of students was a fair price.’

  ‘Really? I remember the students as being so insensitive. The midwives all hated them, they were such arrogant little brats.’

  I suddenly realised we’d been focused on me for the whole conversation, yet I still knew so little about her. Maybe if I did it would be easier to like her.

  ‘So did you work as a nurse for very long?’

  ‘Not that long. Well, it felt like a lifetime, but it wasn’t, really. Very grim places, hospitals. So many rules, bureaucracy. Demanding patients. It wasn’t for me.’

  ‘What made you go into it?’

  ‘Oh, I guess I was sort of directed into it by people who were … in my life at that time. I did like it, but there was so much pain and sickness and injury. So I left after a few years.’

  ‘Paul said you’ve been studying in Brazil?’

  ‘I did. I’ve done all kinds of things. And then all of a sudden it was as if I was being called back here.’ She trailed off, looking out the window.

  ‘Fair enough. What is yo
ur work going to be, anyway? Paul explained it to me but I’m not sure I understood.’

  She got up. ‘I’m a herbalist and I’m training in naturopathy. A few different things.’

  ‘Sounds like you’ll have loads of options.’ I paused for a moment. ‘So … have you started looking for a job?’

  ‘I will do. I’m getting to it. There’s some other – there’s stuff going on that I need to deal with first.’ She looked at me strangely. ‘Is that the time? I’m going to go and have a shower. I’ve left the kitchen in a bit of a state, is that okay?’

  ‘Yeah sure, I’ll sort it out.’ The conversation had left me oddly drained, and when the bathroom door closed I sat for a moment, going over it in my head, wondering if I’d said something to annoy her. This is why people go to work, I realised. Staying at home all day wrecks your head.

  The baby was asleep in my lap, so I carried him carefully to our bedroom, and went into the kitchen for a glass of water. It was chaos, with open jam jars and eggshells and dirty pans and croissant flakes and spilled coffee grounds everywhere, along with all the dishes from last night, which had been left piled next to the sink. How did she make such a mess?

  My foot came down on something sharp. When I lifted it I saw a globe of blood and the sparkle of fine glass. Quickly I pulled it out with my fingernails and got on with cleaning the kitchen. The health visitor was due and I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t coping.

  Rachel spent a long time in the bathroom and when I listened at the door I realised she was in the bath, running the water continuously. As I waited for the health visitor, I felt uneasy about something. What she said about the hospital: They would have seen you as a piece of meat … They’re vultures … They would have had plenty to say afterwards.

  None of it really chimed with what I had felt from the people at the hospital. Not that it really mattered, because I would never see any of them again anyway. But it bothered me. Whatever good I had felt about the birth felt oddly diminished now, as if I had misread what had happened.

  The baby woke and I was feeding him when the doorbell rang, causing him to scream in outrage as I broke off his feed, put him on a rug on the floor, and went to answer the door. It was the health visitor, who introduced herself as Mary. She was a slight, middle-aged woman who stepped inside and busily started investigating, taking notes and discreetly sniffing the air, looking, I realised later, for trip hazards and evidence of smoking and co-sleeping and illicit drug use.

  Eventually we sat down in the living room where she smiled in a perfunctory way and started firing questions at me, about domestic violence and bed sharing and diet, telling me I shouldn’t be drinking coffee or eating garlic as they would cause colic. As she rattled on, I tried to feed the baby while answering her questions as best I could, the baby becoming increasingly distressed, and all the time she sat there watching me with what felt like deep disapproval.

  ‘Your house is very tidy,’ she said, looking around with narrowed eyes. ‘How are you feeling? Okay?’

  ‘I guess so.’ I stared at her blankly. ‘It’s tiring, though. I’m still getting used to the broken sleep.’

  ‘Well, we like to see a messy house, because that means you’re looking after the baby, not cleaning your house and ignoring him.’

  No-one told me that. It would have been easier to not clean up.

  ‘Oh, I’m not ignoring the baby. I don’t see how I could, he wakes me every two hours for a feed.’

  ‘You’re pretty lucky, living in a place like this,’ she observed. ‘Some of the women I visit on the council estates around here, you should see how they have to live.’

  And she was right. Compared to what some women were going through, I had it so easy. This was a situation I could manage, if I could work out how. After one night of solid sleep I could map out a way forward. But when was that one night ever going to arrive?

  ‘Okay, well, I’m going to go now. It all looks fine here, I suppose. Call your GP or us if you need anything. All the numbers are in your Red Book.’

  She left in a flurry of mild disapproval, darting a final pointed glance at the tidy kitchen as she passed. Rachel was still in the bath, and I needed the toilet.

  The baby started to wail, so I carried him to the bedroom, shut the door and lay down beside him, and then I wailed too.

  7

  My phone beeped as I was drifting off to sleep.

  Hey! I’m passing by, off sick from work (not actually sick) … Can I drop in and see you and the angelic blob?

  It was Soraya. We’d met at work when we were both newly arrived in London, her because she’d fallen in love with an Englishman who was moving home from New York, and me eager to find myself a bolthole and a life in London.

  Sure, me and the angelic blob are ready for you

  Be there in 5

  The buzzer rang. Soraya sounded frosty. ‘There’s a midget Satan on the front desk, wanting to get confirmation from you that I am a legitimate visitor. And would he be doing that if I were white? I don’t think so.’

  This was followed by a deafening clatter, as if she’d dropped the phone on a hard surface, and then someone picked it up and sighed deeply. A terse male voice spoke. ‘Hello there. You have a … Soraya here to visit you at the front desk.’

  ‘Thanks, send her up.’

  Soraya burst through the front door in a rush of perfume, dressed in layers of plum and grey knitwear and sporting pink streaks through her curly hair and new glasses with rims of clear emerald green.

  She clutched me to her cleavage for a moment, then pushed me impatiently aside and looked beyond me to the apartment. ‘Let me see him! Let me sniff his head!’

  She swooped into the living room, where the baby lay on his mat, blinking up at the ceiling. Placing a hand on her chest, she looked over at me and said, ‘May I?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Bending over, she scooped him up expertly and inspected him. ‘My God, you really have produced the perfect Aryan child. So blonde. Although his eyes aren’t ice-blue. More of a dark grey – does that mean they’ll change?’

  ‘Maybe … maybe they’ll go brown?’

  ‘He’s completely adorable. So, how are you?’ She looked at me curiously, perhaps wondering if I’d changed. She had no kids herself, and hadn’t ever expressed much of a desire to be a mother, although she did tell me once she’d made thousands and thousands of dollars babysitting the children of her neighbours on the Upper West Side of New York, where she’d grown up with her academic parents.

  ‘I’m okay.’

  ‘And how’s the Alpha Male coping with fatherhood?’

  ‘He’s fine,’ I said. Paul and Soraya circled each other warily for some reason I had not yet worked out. I remembered how she’d offered me money for a termination and the number of a clinic when I’d rung her in a panic, convinced I was making a huge mistake. What did she think of the fact that I’d changed my mind and gone through with it? She would never bring it up, I knew that, but some small part of me wanted her to see I’d done the right thing.

  She shuddered. ‘Don’t tell me a thing about the birth. I’d really rather not know. But how is it going generally?’

  ‘Ah, it’s going okay. We’re staying at home, mostly. Trying to get some sleep. Haven’t done much since we left the hospital.’

  As she settled the baby on her lap, I waited for the prickliness, the desperate urge to snatch him back that I felt when Rachel held him, but it was absent. Soraya handled him carefully, but she was looking at me, seeing me, like she always had.

  ‘Here. I brought you some gifts.’ She reached into the bag beside her and handed me two packages, one containing four nursery rhyme puzzles, the other four dinosaur-shaped plastic bath toys. Soraya was someone who shopped with a mix of generosity and extreme skill, throwing things into her basket for this friend or that, a running list in her head of who had a birthday coming up, who was leaving work next week. She knew all the best sample sales, from Ho
use of Hackney to Issey Miyake, and she could speak with authority on any brand you cared to name.

  ‘Oh, Soraya, thank you! These are great. I keep having to remind myself that he’s going to change, that this newborn stage will be over and he’ll start doing stuff.’

  ‘Of course he will.’ She looked at me over her glasses for a long, sober moment. ‘He won’t stay a blob. That’s why I got you toys, Simone.’

  ‘Thank you. And what’s been happening with you?’

  As she told me about work and her new boyfriend, I had a rare opportunity to study the baby properly. When he was close to me, he felt like my equal, someone who was as communicative and persuasive and powerful as any adult I dealt with. Away from me, he looked small and defenceless, and I remembered how new he was, how much easier things would feel when we were more used to each other.

  Rachel appeared in the doorway and I watched the two of them size each other up. Rachel looked immaculate – dressed all in black, with perfectly blow-dried hair framing her made-up face, and long silver chains around her neck. She lifted a hand to her hair, adjusting it slightly, and her bangles clinked. My stomach tightened at the familiar sound.

  ‘Hello,’ said Soraya, in her most formal voice, and I had a sudden hysterical urge to laugh.

  ‘Hi.’

  ‘Soraya, this is Rachel. Paul’s cousin.’

  Soraya looked at me, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Rachel has just moved to London, so she’s staying here for a bit while she looks for a place to live.’

  ‘Oh.’ Soraya looked unconvinced. ‘That’s tricky timing, isn’t it, coming here when there’s a new baby?’

  Rachel stiffened, and I smiled at Soraya and widened my eyes slightly. She got the message, and when she spoke again her tone was friendlier.

  ‘And where are you looking for a flat, Rachel?’

  ‘I don’t know, really – maybe south? Brixton or Kennington or Vauxhall, around there.’