Alison Moore - The Pre-War House and Other Stories

He died while Christine was at university, knocked down by rush-hour traffic in the nearest town. She got the train home on a Sunday and her mother picked her up from the station. The town centre, as they drove through it, was deserted. Christine put the radio on.

She laid claim to her dad’s tapes. She found a Walkman and listened to her dad’s heavy metal in bed and on the train on the return journey.

After university, she moved back home and got a job in a call centre. She started dating someone who worked in the cubicle next to hers. They ate their lunch together and talked about going to China before everything changed, or getting a couple of round-the-world tickets and just taking off, escaping. Instead, they got married and got a mortgage on a small house on the outskirts of town.

The only grass near this house is at the cemetery. They have a concrete backyard, and empty pots in which Christine might grow tomatoes. The front door opens right onto the street. The traffic is nonstop during the day, dirtying the brickwork and the white plastic door and the front windows, which Christine has to keep closed so that the net curtains don’t get filthy. It is a far cry from the peace of her childhood home.

Christine had always been a good sleeper, but after she got pregnant she began to wake in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, or with cramps in her legs, or with hunger pangs, cravings, at three or four or five o’clock in the morning. She would have to get up and go down to the kitchen, through whose window she could see the factory which never slept. People had all sorts of advice for remedying the insomnia and the cramps — warm baths, milk with honey, yoga — but at the same time, people were inclined to say, ‘Get used to it. You’ll never again sleep the way you used to.’

Even so, when the baby was born, the sleep deprivation came as a shock. He wanted her breast almost constantly and woke every two hours during the night until four or five in the morning when he was ready to get up. This was in the winter, when it was still dark, with hours of darkness to come. She tried taking him into her bed but he did not like it. She tried walking around with him, singing to him, rocking him, all of which he liked but he did not go back to sleep. So then she put a light on, made a cup of tea and half-listened to the World Service programmes which come on before the shipping forecast. But even after a cup of tea, and even with the radio on, her eyes kept closing. Reading to him, she would blink and slip into sleep, having micro-dreams between one sentence and the next.

In the spring, she found that she was waking to that beautiful blue the still-starry sky turns just before dawn. By the end of May and well into July, the sun had already risen when the baby got her up.

After feeding him, she began to take him out in the pram, wheeling him along the canal towpath until the sound of the factory’s midnight to eight am shift was almost too far away to hear. On the road, the first buses went past, empty. She did not go anywhere in particular — the park did not open until seven and none of the cafés opened before eight — but she enjoyed the walk and the fresh air.

When the summer came to an end, she was once again waking up in the dark. But she began to appreciate the fact that she had not missed the sunrise, and that she could feed the baby and then dawn would arrive and she still had time to walk somewhere and see the sun come up.

She had a few favourite places. Sometimes she went no further than the canal, stopping on the bridge — putting the brakes on the pram — and sitting on the wall to watch the dingy water’s transformation at sunrise. Sometimes she wheeled him up to the monument and sat on its steps. But this morning, she headed for the new supermarket. Overlooked on one side by old office blocks, the area itself was unattractive, but on a clear day there was a good view to the east.

The twenty-four-hour supermarket looked abandoned when she went in. There was no one on the tills. When she got further into the store, she saw a few people stacking the shelves. She found herself tailed by a security guard, who kept an eye on her the whole time she was in there. She picked up a pack of nappies and then went to the fridge and got herself a drink, an iced coffee to keep herself awake. The security guard watched her even while she was paying for her things at the self-service checkout. When she put the nappies under the pram she felt guilty, as if she were doing something wrong, stashing these goods and wheeling them out of his shop.

Back outside, she parked the pram beside a bench and sat down with her coffee. She could not hear the factories now. She wanted to listen to one of her dad’s old heavy metal compilations — she had the Walkman in her bag with a tape already inside it. Digging out the headphones and putting them on, she pressed ‘play’ and waited for the sun to rise.

She opens her eyes. There is no sound coming from her headphones. Lifting her chin from her chest, she looks at the Walkman and sees that the tape has played out. It was probably the music ending, the silence and then the Walkman switching itself off, which disturbed her.

She turns to look at the baby, looking at the place where the baby should be. There is nothing there but slabs. She turns to look at the other side of the bench even though she knows she did not put the pram there. She stands. Her bag drops quietly to the floor and the plug is pulled from the Walkman so that the headphones remain on her head but with nothing at the end of the dangling lead.

When the woman in the factory lost her fingers, somebody stopped the machines. The production line came to a halt but there was all this yelling which filled the silence, and there was a frenzy of activity, people all trying to do something which would help. Christine remembers someone bringing lumps of ice for the woman’s hand, for the woman’s fingers.

But more than the accident and all the hysteria which followed it, what she mostly remembers is how it was afterwards, when the woman had been taken away and all the shouting and screaming had stopped and everyone was beginning to go back to whatever they had been doing before.

My father meets me off the train, takes my bag and guides me to the car.

‘How long have we got you for?’ he asks.

‘A couple of weeks,’ I say. ‘Then I have to get back.’

‘How’s everything?’ he asks. ‘How’s the new house?’

‘Oh fine,’ I say, ‘except for the window. We’ve boarded it up for now.’

‘The window?’ he says. ‘What happened?’

‘Oh,’ I say, ‘we just had a bit of trouble. Some lads on their way back from the pub broke a window. I told Mum on the phone last night — did she not tell you?’

Of course my mother has not told him. She even said, ‘I don’t think I’ll tell your father. It would upset him, to think of you having trouble like that.’

It is like they are playing a game, seeing how many secrets they can stack up against one another. They both do it: Don’t tell your father, it will only worry him. Your mother doesn’t need to know; it’s our little secret.

One Saturday afternoon when my mother was at work and my father was looking after me, he drove me to the cinema and bought me a ticket to see Grease , a film my mother did not want me to see. He gave me money for sweets, counting the coins into my hand, just as he used to give me a little bit extra when the fair was on, putting it into my pocket as I headed out of the back door. ‘Don’t tell your mother,’ he said, and went wink wink . After the film, he collected me from the foyer and we went home. He looked a bit guilty — worried, I assumed, that I would tell my mother about his treat, but I didn’t.