TWELVE DAYS UNTIL MY BIRTHDAY
There’s someone in the house.
It’s not a complete thought, but something feral, more instinctive, and I sit up, suddenly awake, my heart racing. The clock clicks to 1:13 A.M. and I stay very still, listening hard, sure I’m going to hear a creak from the hallway or see a threatening shadow emerge from a dark corner of the room. But there’s nothing. Just the patter of rain on the windows and the hum of night quiet.
My skin has prickled. Something woke me. Not a dream. Something else. Something in the house. I can’t shake the feeling, like when I was small and the nightmares would grip me so hard I would be sure I was back in that night and my foster mother would run in to calm me down before I woke the whole house.
Robert is fast asleep, on his side facing away from me. I don’t wake him. It’s probably nothing, but still, I’m alert with worry. The children.
I won’t be able to get back to sleep until I’ve checked on them and so I get up, shivers trembling up my body from my bare feet on the carpet, and I creep out onto the landing.
I feel very small as I look along the central corridor, the gloom making it appear endless, a monster’s yawning mouth ahead of me. I walk forward—I am a mother and a wife. A career woman. This is my house. My safe place—and wish I’d brought my phone with me to use as a flashlight. I peer over the landing
banisters. Nothing moves in the dark shadows below. No thump of burglars shifting possessions in the night. No menace.
A flurry of wind drives the rain hard into our cathedral feature window, startling me. I go to the end of the corridor, where it cuts into the wall, a perfect arch of black. I cup my hands around my eyes and press my face against the cold glass, but all I can make out is the vague shape of trees. No light. No activity. Still, I shiver again as I turn back and head down the L bend ahead to the kids’ rooms. Footsteps dancing on my grave.
I feel better once I’ve pushed open Will’s door. My little boy, five years old and at big school now, is asleep on his back, the dinosaur duvet kicked away, and his dark hair, so like mine, is mussed up from sweat. Maybe he’s been having a bad night too. I carefully cover him up, but gentle as I’m trying to be, he stirs and his eyes open.
“Mummy?” He’s blurry, confused, but when I smile, he does too, and wriggles onto his side. His sketchbook is under his pillow and I slide it out.
“No wonder you woke up,” I whisper. “Sleeping on this.” It’s open on his most recent enthusiastic crayon drawing and I turn it this way and that in the gloom, trying to make out what it is. If I’m honest, it looks like a dog that’s been run over. Twice.
“It’s a dinosaur,” Will says, and laughs and then yawns, as if even he knows drawing may not be his finest skill and he’s cool with that.
“Of course it is.” I put the notebook on the table by his bed and kiss him good night. He’s almost asleep again already and probably won’t even remember this in the morning.
I go to Chloe’s room next and she too is lost to the world, blond hair fanned out on the pillow, a sleeping princess straight from a fairy tale, even though, at seventeen and a staunch modern feminist, she’d be quick to tell me that fairy tales
are misogynistic rubbish. I go back to my own room, ridiculing myself for having been so afraid.
I get back into bed and curl up, Robert barely stirring. It’s only one thirty. If I fall asleep now, then I can get another four hours in before I have to get up. Sleep should come easily—it always has in this busy, exhausting, exhilarating life I lead, so I snuggle down and wait to drift. It doesn’t happen.
At three A.M. I check my emails—a midnight congratulations from Angus Buckley, my boss, for my result in court yesterday with the Stockwell divorce custody hearing—and then scan the news on my phone and go to the loo. Robert almost wakes then, but only enough to mutter something unintelligible and fling one heavy arm over me as I get back into bed. After that I lie there, my head whirring with my schedule for the fast-approaching day, becoming more and more frustrated that I’m going to be facing it tired. I’ve got to be at the office at seven-thirty and it’s rare for me to get
home before twelve hours later and that’s only if I can get away without going for the obligatory drinks. There’s no room for slacking. Especially not now. I’m in line to be the youngest partner in the firm. But I love my work, I really do.
I practice some yoga breathing, trying to relax every muscle in my body and empty my mind, which sounds so easy but normally results in my pondering stupid things like whether there’s enough milk in the fridge or if we should change our gas supplier, and although my heart rate slows I still don’t sleep.
It’s going to be a long day.
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