A Life's Work (17 page)

Over at the coffee station, a broad woman with a vast bosom and a brutal helmet of grey hair asked me how many children I had. One, I said. She appeared disappointed at this meagre reply. Oh well, she said, I'm sure there'll be more. Immediately I recognised her as one of a local species I had seen and heard countless times in the past weeks, at the doctor's surgery, at the shops. Before we came to live here, when we were looking for a house, we had met just such a woman whose mouldering property we had come to view. When we rang the doorbell she had burst forth, dressed like a plain-clothed nun, looking wildly around her. Where are they? she had cried. Who? we asked, bewildered.
The children!
she said.
Where are all the children?
I've got five, the woman before me now stated matter of factly. You'll find it gets easier. She told me that her eight-year-old daughter was about to go to France on an exchange programme. Gosh, that's quite young to be going away on your own, I said. How long is she going for? A year, said the woman breezily. So that's one less to worry about. She looked at me concernedly. That's what I mean when I say
it does get easier.
I saw that my daughter was standing on her own in the middle of the room. She looked bewildered. The organiser tinkled her spoon against her coffee cup. Ladies! she cried. Ladies! I think it's time for some songs, don't you? For the first time, I noticed that there was a man in the room. He wore thick glasses and his hair stood wildly on end, as if he were being electrocuted. He was sitting on his own. A small, plump girl clung silently to his knee.

We all sat on the chairs, in a circle with our children in our laps. The organiser placed herself at the centre. She was holding a teddy bear, not, as I had at first thought, as a child-substitute but as a girl-guidish symbol of leadership. Singing seemed rather an intimate thing to do with people I hardly knew, but it was, at least, preferable to conversation. We began with ‘The Wheels on the Bus', a hymn to public transport to which everyone except me knew both the words and the accompanying hand movements. ‘Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star' followed. I was quite happy to sing, finding something profound and absolving in the naïvity of the words. I clutched my daughter's warm little body. Sometimes, in such moments, she and the world forgot their quarrel and convened to assure me that I could protect her, enclose her, look after her. She struggled in my arms and I set her down. She lurched intently across the floor and prised the teddy from the organiser's hands. I looked about for the man and saw that he had gone. Row, row? said the organiser to the group. There was a chorus of approval. I knew the tune of this one, but the words, I soon found, had changed.

The final line was followed by a communal shriek, pitched unthreateningly high so as not to frighten the children. Not long after, we left the town and moved elsewhere. The memory of our time there faded quickly, leaving the strange taste of a dream. Although she never learned the song, my daughter loved the scream that accompanied it. Even if the fluting sound she made was incongruously welcoming, I admired her ability to seize the punchline, the kernel of a thing. Every time you sang the words delight would dawn across her face, and she would remember, and scream.

My daughter's birthday chimes another anniversary besides hers: it has been a year since I had an uninterrupted night's sleep. I ponder this fact like someone who has been kept in exile by the machinations of some impenetrable bureaucracy, promised again and again that tomorrow or next week the passport, the tickets, the papers will come and they can return home; because for each night of that year I have sincerely believed that sleep will be returned to me. My hopes are tarnished, threadbare. I thirst for the privacy and solitude, for the oxygen of day's lung, night. Instead the hours of darkness are a bleak corollary of those of light, an unpeopled continuum in which I remain on duty, like a guard in a building from which everyone has gone home.

This can't, I am sure, be normal. I suspect some failure in myself: of force, of identity, of purpose. I remember hearing, in my pre-maternal days, of the phenomenon of ‘broken nights', and remember too feeling the youth and vigour of my will flex itself at the mention of this and other examples of infant tyranny. If I ever have a child, I said – I hope only – to myself,
I simply won't let that happen.
A strange desire to crush the privileges, to deny the claims of children would beset me when I heard about the ways in which they ruled their parents; and I see it occasionally now, in other people, when I tell the story of my nights; their primitive desire for my harshness, for me to break the hold and hence the hopes, the optimism, the clamouring innocence of the very young. Perhaps children expect what we ourselves no longer dare to; or perhaps we feel sure in some deep and unprovable way that our own long and lonely nights were never so lovingly attended; that we were left, as the literature of the time advised, to cry.

I remember the night sleep left me. It happened in hospital. I had suspected nothing. Several hours earlier I had had a baby; people had come and gone, flowers had been brought. Darkness fell. Presently it was half past ten or so, time to go to sleep. I wrapped the baby up in blankets like a new purchase, a present that I would unwrap and look at again in the morning. I slept. When I woke again some time later, it was to realise with real surprise that the terrible, persistent wailing racketing through the ward was ‘me', as people now say of their mobile phones. My new purchase had gone off in the dead of night like some alarm I didn't know how to disconnect. The penumbral bodies of the other women began to roll in their beds, like tethered boats in a sleeping harbour stirred by waves of noise. Presently someone tutted. In the same ward the night before, under similar circumstances, I too had tutted. I wasn't tutting now. I felt for the first time the discomfiting spotlight of responsibility, its glare rude in the darkness, and since then I have not closed my eyes without the expectation of opening them again to that light which is not the blessed light of day but is rather a visitation, a spectre, a summons to the secret, lawless world of night. Sleep, like a great bear, a soft, warm, vigilant guardian of unconsciousness, had rolled away with a yawn and padded off elsewhere, never, it seems, to return. I have put bears in my daughter's crib, amongst other things, as if to suggest that I know something she doesn't about comfort and safety and sleep, but their glassy, affectless eyes are blind to our nightly dramas. Without the consecration of sleep, darkness is rearmed with all its mythical terror. I can't pretend that I don't feel it too, that by now I would be amazed if she
did
sleep through these sinister gulfs between the days, my childish fear of which has been re-ignited by hers. Repose has left our house, and I don't know how or from where to summon it back.

In the early months of my daughter's life I felt my own tiredness as a physical shock. The spring of activity, given no chance by night to uncoil, felt as if it were being wound tighter and tighter in my chest, derailing all my natural tensions and corralling them into one, great, explosive point of fatigue. In the morning I would sit up in bed, the room listing drunkenly about me, and would put a hand to my face, checking for some evidence of disfigurement: an eyebrow, perhaps, slipped down to my cheek, a deranged ear cluttering my forehead, a seam at the back of my skull gaping open. The day was sometimes a sticky mire to be laboriously crossed, the air unbreathable glue; and sometimes a frantic, untethered cloud speeding across the sky, upon which I could never gain a foothold. Once or twice the baby slept for a stretch of five or six hours, and I would wake feeling as if I had been punched. I began to speak with a curious lisp, and would put a hand to my mouth several times a day to check that my tongue was not lolling out of it.

Gradually the distinction between day and night dissolved entirely, and I became prey to daydreams and hallucinations, remembering conversations that had not occurred, glimpsing strange creatures through windows and in corners, a continual buzz of activity in my head both infernal and remote, as if a television had been left on in a next-door room. At night I began to experience a particularly sinister visitation: a second baby came to inhabit my dreams, one for whom my ministrations were so exacting that I could not attend to the first. This second baby would cry and I would feed it, informing the world thickly through the darkness when the first baby too started to cry that I could not feed that one as I was busy with this. I would wake with a start, convinced that I had rolled over and smothered it, or sweep the floor beside my bed with a frenzied hand, sure that it had fallen out, while the real baby slept on in her cradle.

As more time passed this elaborate spectre faded, and the muddled nights began to attain an insomniac clarity. My insides grew gritty, my nerves sharp. The baby continued to wake three or four times each night, and each time I was ready for her, trained and vigilant as a soldier. I no longer, it seemed, slept at all in the intervals, but merely rested silently like some legendary figure, itinerant, doughty and far from home. The reservoir of sleep I had accumulated through my life had run dry. I was living off air and adrenalin. Mercury ran through my veins. I wondered if this parched and dogged wraithe long since severed from its human past was in fact that dark stranger who walks the world of childhood wreathed in mystery: a parent.

The lesson of sleep is a lesson in loneliness. In Charlotte Bronte's
Jane Eyre
, the child Jane's cruel Aunt Reed locks her in the Red Room for the night with just such a lesson in mind, keen to instruct her in her orphaned state, to remind her not to presume that she is loved. Left without a candle in the ghostly chamber, Jane learns quickly enough that she is not; but her terror soon exceeds this sorry fact. Alone in the dark, she begins to dwell upon death. She suspects that her Uncle Reed died in that very room. In a frenzy of terror, she has a hallucinatory, or actual, encounter with a ghost. She begins to scream and cry and beat at the door to be let out, and eventually the servants come.

Aunt Reed demands that Jane is returned to the room and locked in.

Jane faints with fear; when she is finally retrieved, she is delerious and violently ill.

Much later, when Jane returns to attend Aunt Reed's deathbed, this experience is still in her mind. In the intervening years she has learned to understand night as the place in which truth is revealed; as the opposite to day, the dissimulator. Night is when young girls die of starvation and neglect in boarding schools; it is when mad secret wives prowl the corridors; it is when the homeless and friendless plead in vain for human clemency. Jane has reckoned with the night, and emerged formidable.

‘I felt a determination to subdue her,' she says of her dying aunt, as she sits at her bedside one night, ‘to be her mistress in spite both of her nature and her will.' Aunt Reed begins to ramble. She asks whatever happened to Jane Eyre.

Aunt Reed replies that it was jealousy. Her late husband loved the orphaned baby Jane, in spite of the fact that ‘it would wail in its cradle all night long – not screaming heartily like any other child, but whimpering and moaning.' He made her promise, when he died, to look after the child, a promise she broke. Jane mightily confers her forgiveness on her aunt, but the woman hates her too much to accept it. She dies later that night. The next morning Jane and Aunt Reed's daughter Eliza come to pay their respects to the body. ‘Neither of us,' Jane observes as they leave, ‘had dropped a tear.'

I wonder whether I am constructing a fortress against notions of helplessness and abandonment. These notions are entertained, as they are refuted, by myself alone. At night I am plagued by the fact of my child's physical separateness from me, a fact I am at one minute tempted to conceal, the next to promulgate. My uncertainty about our mutual distinctness breeds in this division between day and night. I wonder whether my daughter has noticed that in one half of her life she is fed, admired, served, delighted in, played with and lavished with care, while in the other she is left on her own in the dark. By day her cries are met with brisk, even anxious service. By night, even if she manages to make a noise that sounds exactly like she has pushed her head through the bars of her cot and is being slowly strangled, they are increasingly ignored.

The secret life of parents, like that of lovers, is nocturnal and effervescent, full of strange pacts and compromises, of fallings-out and reconciliations both violent and meaningless. The search for the limits of love, it rapidly becomes clear, is indistinguishable from the search for the limits of our isolation. In this sense the night lies before the fact of being alone like a swathe of green-belt before the developer's eye, its pristine emptiness an invitation to fill, to despoil. The child quickly comes to question the orthodoxy of darkness, to express affront at the idea that emotion should be confined to the hours of daylight. I try to remember when and how I myself came to accept this convention, and suspect that it was very recently, perhaps only when it fell to me to pass it on, amidst so many other slightly unauthentic representations of the world, to my daughter. Restless nights stretch back through my recollection like an eerie avenue populated by myself alone: nights when I was afraid and dared not disturb my parents, and later, when I was unhappy and dared not disturb the cause of my unhappiness; or dared, and discovered that the end of love is the refusal to let the loved one sleep. It is also a method used in torture camps, as new parents will eagerly be told, usually by other parents; a piece of apocrypha frequently recounted in the manner of an SOS, an urgent call for rescue from a domestic torture camp to whose existence the free world displays a profound indifference. I want my daughter to find out how people cool and turn away when you won't let them alone, how assurance is destroyed where it is most desperately sought; and yet at the same time I want to recast this awful truth for her, to make it untrue. Sometimes the power I have to love her seems like the power to transform wrong into right, to turn night into day.