by R.M. Graves

Tonight I ate the kids’ leftover fusilli-con-ketchup right from their plates and sent myself to bed early. So now I’m sat, still dressed, on our duvet in the dark. I still have my shoes on, too. And my coat. I’m a splinter chipped off the world. We’re all splinters. No change there.

But today, and I can’t explain why, it’s been a pregnant kind of day. Not smiling strangers pregnant. Weeks overdue, get-this-thing-out-of-me pregnant. Sweaty and leaden and tick, tick, tick. Everyone was prenatally furious. From barking cyclists to hysterical sirens. From the twitchy smiles at the school gates to the wrist checks when I arrived at, and when I left, work. Every headline from dodgy politics to climate crises was a variation on “Just you wait.”

This evening, Charlotte swung between a mania usually reserved for Christmas Eve and a knowing smile that would be creepy on an adult, let alone a three-year-old. Meanwhile, Shrugging-Johnny, my boy, regarded his mum and his sister like the unfunny ad before a video starts.

Of course, Tom delivered. You can always rely on disappointment. As ever, he yelled his excuses for being late in a wind-blasted phone call that cut out whenever I opened my mouth. I’ve decided he plans these signal lapses to trap the irritation in my head for later like a wasp in a Coke can.

Still. It’s night at last. I’m alone with the stomachy gurgle of unbled radiators, and the sigh of cars passing my window. I scroll my phone until it lulls me, and I droop into it. My Googled: What’s happening? presses back into my head as if to undo a moment of weakness. My edges blur. Into the mattress, into the headboard, into the empty room.

“La! La! La-la!” Out on the street, a man shouts a song.

It’s a familiar tune that I can’t quite recall, or rather like I never really knew it at all, like my father sang it to me in my mother’s belly. It draws a wheezy hum from someone. She’s got cobwebs in her throat, that one. Goodness, I think she might be me.

Then there’s a rapid thumping, quick and insistent, at the bedroom door.

“Mummy, I can’t sleep!” Charlotte’s voice comes from another world. A world where little ducks talk. “That noisy man is making my ears blink!”

I bite my lips. Some hush, that’s all I ask. Let me crawl into my hole. Let me sleep.

The handle rattles.

A growl escapes me, and I unlock my door. Would it be wrong to put a bolt on a three-year-old’s bedroom?

“Sweetness.” I square myself in the opening. “It’s the middle of the night. And ears can’t blink.”

Charlotte – Charlie when she’s cute – folds over the tops of her ears with her fingertips, frowning when she lets go and they flip back up. “Why, Mummy? Why don’t ears blink?”

“So we can always listen out.”

“Listen for wha-at?”

God but those questions. The whining ones, accompanied by a swinging-knee? Fledgling passive-aggression. “Go back to bed, Charlotte.”

“Listen for, like, all the Mummy’s and Daddy’s fighting?”

Really? I might not have shared a smile with Tom for a while, but that doesn’t count as fighting, surely. I know couples that never stop slugging, even if they’re not talking to each other: Kids, tell Daddy I put the house on the market.

I wait for my girl to elaborate, but the unfathomable creature rubs her nose vigorously with a flat hand. She doesn’t pick up on the drawn-out pause. Then, she is only three.

I scoop her up and drift back to her room.

For reasons only Charlie would understand, she has pulled her Superman outfit over her nightdress. Way too big, with thick, padded muscles. She feels armoured. I put her back into bed, but she won’t let me take the costume off her, so I just pull the covers over, nostalgic for the days she’d sleep naked on my stomach. I suppose I’m still dressed, too. Perhaps it’s the correct response to a trapped-wasp day; to be ready for anything.

It’s pointless, this charade of putting her to bed. Outside, the midnight singer’s gravelly, wordless tune attracts the howls of a local dog and now they’re both off. Top of their lungs.

But I like it. The unlikely duet is plaintive and earthy, like the street giving up its woes. Its strangeness tugs at me like sleep.

Pretending that Charlie hasn’t already climbed out of bed, I pick my way across her toy-mined floor to peek out through her curtains.

Magnificat claws at the glass, howling to be let in. All needle-teeth and spook-eye. It can’t take the noise at this time of night, either. I heave the old sash up by degrees because naturally my carpenter husband won’t ever. Fix. Anything.

The open window doesn’t tempt the cat in, either. The animal still shrieks for something I don’t have and seems to have freaked all the local birds awake in the process. Now the night’s full of tweeting.

“Oh, silly cat.” Charlie grabs at the mewling creature and it slinks out of her grip. “What’re you doing?”

“Magnificat’s telling that bloke to go to bed,” I say.

Charlie cackles and no matter that she never laughs where you might expect, the sound is all I live for. “The man won’t understand meows!”

She headbutts my leg, but leaves her head resting there. I seize the advantage and stroke her hair, hoping to lull her. “Cats only meow to people, did you know that?” It’s too late to settle her with a story. I have to make do. “Imagine, sweetheart. The first brave cat to meow to a person. It made a new noise it never made before, when it could have run up a tree.” I tickle her plastic six-pack. It has no effect on her at all. “That worked out well for the cat didn’t it? We didn’t eat it like we ate the bunnies and the lambs. We took it home and made it queen of the house. And all its kittens. Happy ever after.”

Charlie blinks up at me. Not, as I hoped, the enraptured blinks that might lead to another giggle, or better, to dreams. Wide-to-the-whites blinking. “I don’t want to make a new noise and be took, Mummy.”

I sigh raggedly out the window. I have some cigarettes hidden under our bed.

“La! La! La-La!”

No sign of the blasted singer. Just that disembodied, musical yowl and rows of dead-eyed houses asleep on their feet. They prop each other up behind trees that sway as if they might collapse any second, too. The stars are wide-awake, though, and dazzling. Brighter than streetlights and fatter than they’ve ever been. Or are they just moving closer?

“Shut! Up!” My screech sounds unhinged even to me. It only jolts Charlie and the cat, and still gets lost in the midnight chorus.

I try to lower the window again – shut out the noise – but it’s jammed. The cat’s fur is up, its back arched and ears flat, and it will not stop its frantic meowing. Perhaps it’s intimidated by that cloud of birds. Filling half the sky, seagulls, crows, magpies and pigeons loop over the rooftops. The flock has a nebulous, contorting life of its own. Likewise their individual keen, caw, chatter and coo is a manic, avian calypso.

I should never have opened this window. Not tonight. I lean out to check for blockages in the frame. The light of gunfire flickers in the next window along, Johnny’s room. He’s still playing games, the cheeky sod.

That’s the thing. His dad caves in to work all the time so I have to do everything else, like I don’t have a career of my own. Attentions slip. And the last thing we need is even less contact with Planet Teen. I dig out my phone and message the boy:

Shut it down! SLEEP!!!

An almost instant response: <rage emoji> SLEEP!!! <laughing emoji>

I don’t know what to threaten my son with anymore. You can hardly ground someone who’s gone to ground. I’ll make more effort. Learn about the other things he loves. Take them.

A wind picks up, rustling leaves into a “Shh …” that soon gives up and joins the drunk, the dog, the cat and every kind of bird on their mission to wake the world. However, the combined effect is still less cacophonous than you’d expect. Heavenly, even. Earth melded into drunkard melded into sky through the canine and feline, bird and tree— Oh my, what nonsense.

I’m actually stoned on sleepiness.

But if I’m off my head, then so are the foxes. They’ve crept from dustbin shadows and sit along garden walls, sharp muzzles tipped to the sky to add their raw-throated screeches to the melodious din.

Thunder cracks like a slap in the face. Yet the sky is clear. Is it an earthquake? I clutch Charlie but she writhes free. Thousands of squeaking rats erupt from the drains and swirl intricate patterns on the pavement. Frogs hop onto car bonnets to emit long, gas-bag squeals. The stars, if that’s what they even are, swell to balls of light. They no longer twinkle. They crackle.

“Are we asleep, Charlie?”

Charlie claps like an overwound toy. My scalp crawls. I reach for her wrist to pull her away, but the girl slaps both her palms to her mouth. Her eyes bulge at me. She thrusts her head out of the window.

What new hell is this? A stomach bug, now? But Charlotte doesn’t vomit; she flings back her head and screams.

No, not a scream. The noise is desperate, but tuneful. A long, high, “La!” then a deep breath and another, and another. Pure and bright as a violin. An ascending scale. It erupts from her tiny frame, hollowing her mouth and making a quivering, fleshy spike of her tongue.

“Charlotte, darling. Stop.” I try to pull my girl’s shuddering little body back into the house, but she’s got a death grip on the frame. Her eyes are wet and blank. She’s singing for her life. The cat wails with her, in time, a soft syncopation of sucked breath and long notes overlapping into a relentless, warbling chord. My boy’s window opens.

“Johnny,” I yell. “Come here, quick.”

His just-broken voice is the breathy blare of a church organ. “La! La! La!”

Curtains open along the road. Grinning faces appear at windows. My husband’s van slides around the corner and pulls up. At last. He jumps out, grinning at the unusual welcome.

“Tom, help!” I shout.

Tom throws his arms wide. “La!” he sings in a bellowed tenor. “La! La!”

The world wobbles. I lock jelly legs. I blink and jerk my head, but the nightmare won’t shift. This bilious urge to scream fills my mouth. I bite my tongue and it wriggles, alive between my teeth.

Tom, Johnny, Charlie, and Magnificat are lost. Their separate voices are one sound, dissolved into the street chorus. The choir expands, too. Houses awake. Windows slide open and doors gape exposing soft insides. My neighbours’ songs pour out. Every face shines and every soft grub of tongue rootles past sharp teeth to strain at the glittering sky. It’s like the song pulls them inside out, and now – through matched breath and synchronized heartbeats – they’re no longer alien to each other. They sing, “La!” with arms open to the sky, as if to long-lost loved ones.

I wrap my coat tight, and lock my arms around it. I want to stay in one piece, but my innards want out. I clamp my jaw. I hold my breath. The night fizzes and stars beam, full as moons now. Fat as flying saucers.

And as complete as the song seems, I catch a gap in it; my cue, rolling toward me on a beat caught in the rock of treetops.

Charlotte smiles, as does Tom, then Johnny, then Magnificat.

How delicious they all are like this, together, singing.

Then the beat’s on me.

My bones are struck and hum.

My head snaps back.

I draw one more breath … in … and release

and we fly

out of our skins

into the delighted stars

 

La!