Night & Day

She’s running. She’s running so fast that her lungs are burning, but she isn’t running fast at all. She’s running through gardens, over hedges and fences, along streets that are lit eerily by street light that penetrates the dull grey of the morning. She can see her feet moving, she can see her chest heaving, she can hear someone behind her, breathing deeply. It feels as though the person is close, as though he (or she, but she knows it’s a he) is breathing down her neck. But at the same time, it feels as though he is lagging far behind her.

She can’t afford to slow her pace. She runs into a display outside a greengrocer’s. For some reason the crates of fruit and vegetables are penned in behind that orange netting you find on building sites. Her feet become tangled in the netting and the crates. The teenage girl who is setting out the crates smiles at her encouragingly, her shalwar kameez rippling in the night breeze.

Is it night, or is it dawn? The sky makes her think that it’s night. She tries to speak to the girl, but her chest is still heaving from having to run, and she can’t get any words out. The girl continues to smile encouragingly. She doesn’t speak either. She merely pushes a crate out of the way and holds back the netting.

Free of the display, she runs on, her breath raw and ragged in her throat, burning and hurting with the coldness of the air she tries to gasp into her lungs.

She hears him drawing closer behind her, but he is still far away. Urgency spurs her on. People appear on the doorsteps of houses, to watch her running along their street. The women stand with arms folded, the men holding steaming mugs of tea. They all look the same.

She longs to stop running, longs to sit down somewhere. She longs for the sun to rise, but time doesn’t seem to be passing, no matter how fast she runs or how far she goes. The sky stays the same, and he is always the same distance behind her.

She wakes up. The room is dark. She feels hot. She puts a hand to her own forehead. It is cold and clammy.

She sits up slightly and takes a drink from the glass of water beside the bed. He stirs in his sleep.

A dream, then. She wonders what it is about. She hasn’t dreamt of being chased in a long time. Her last dream was about choosing beans in a supermarket and having her legs stroked by Niall. She tries not to think about Niall. It isn’t fair to Ray, who sleeps heavily beside her, his dark curls against the pillow, his strong body an arm-stretch away.

She looks at the clock. It’s 3.38 in the morning. She thinks of Niall. It’s inevitable. You tell yourself not to think of something, and it’s all you can think of.

Niall will be up, drinking, trying to write, trying to be the person he is, not knowing fully what that might be. Her laptop is on the floor beside the bed. She could switch it on. Ray sleeps so deeply that, these kinds of nights, when she is Insomnia’s bitch, she can read, she can surf, she can do a fucking dance on top of the wardrobe, and he sleeps through it all.

She loves Niall, but not in a way that anyone else understands. It isn’t a heart-pounding, palm-sweating, voice-trembling love. It isn’t giggles, and coy looks, and birds flying off into sunsets. She loves him, and she hates him.

She pulls the pillows up against the headboard, so that her shoulders are supported, and she thinks about that other dream. She remembers the way it felt, in dreamland, to have him stroke the length of her legs. The way he had smiled his usual smile, his eyes narrowed, and told her that he liked how smooth they were.

She closes her eyes. ‘Just zizzing’ her mother calls it. But suddenly it is morning and she is awoken by the smoke alarm’s shriek.

He is in the kitchen, cooking sausages. The grill pan is a deadly vat of animal fat that smokes and threatens to burn each time he uses it. He never cleans it, and she refuses to wash away his pig grease. The price she pays for this is wafting a towel underneath the smoke alarm, while he cooks on oblivious.

The benefits of being deaf. She knows he feels the vibrations of sound, because when she plays the piano at her parents’ house, he likes to stand with one hand on it, smiling at her. Night & Day is his favourite.

“Go on, mum,” he says with his grin. “Go on.”

Her boy, her man, her eight-year-old hero. Abandoned, along with her, by his dad the instant he realised his son wasn’t perfect. Abandoned to a one bedroomed flat and a shared bed. Soon she’ll have to think about making him a room of his own, sacrificing a share of the living room, perhaps.

They could live with her parents. The invitation is there. His parents feel so guilty about their son’s behaviour that they have offered to pay for a larger place for them. But she wants to be independent. She doesn’t want to be beholden to anyone. Having Ray, knowing Jimmy was unreliable, knowing he would have scarpered anyway eventually, Ray’s deafness just a convenient excuse, was her choice.

She has let the alarm shriek this morning. She doesn’t want to move from the bed.

Ray comes up the stairs with a fully laden tray. Breakfast. It must be Saturday, then. He grins at her as he comes into the room.

She pulls herself up enough to sign to him, “You set the smoke alarm off, Ray.”

“Sorry,” he says. Beautiful sound when he speaks. She is so proud of him that he can do that. Form the words with his mouth and make his voice work to fill the shapes with sound. She knows it makes other people uncomfortable, so that they laugh or they look away, but she thinks his voice is the most beautiful sound on the planet.

He puts the tray onto the bed, and she sits up properly. He gives her the cup of tea he has made for her, and the plate of toast with silver shred marmalade. They smile at each other. He sits on the edge of the bed, eating his sausage butty, drinking his glass of milk, looking at her and grinning every now and then.

Sure that he is looking at her properly, she says, “Come here.”

He grins and shakes his head. He knows what mum is up to. He wants to finish his breakfast and get ready. In half an hour, Paul and his son will ring the doorbell, and she’ll nod to Ray. Off he’ll go for a morning of playing football, leaving the house to her. Perhaps this morning she’ll clean out that filthy grill pan. Even though he claims that it makes the sausages and the bacon taste better, having all that molten fat spitting up at it from beneath.

She says again, "Come here.”

He grins again; shakes his head again. He doesn’t want to be hugged or have his curly mop untangled by her fingers. He doesn’t want to be groomed like he’s a monkey.

She gives in and drinks her tea.

“Mum,” he says.

“What?” she answers.

“This afternoon. Is it okay if I stay out and go back to Jaden’s after football?”

“Yeah,” she says. “What new playstation game has he got now?”

Ray grins, and names the latest game. It means nothing to her. He explains its rules and the tricks for bypassing them to her in intricate detail, half speaking, half signing when he can’t get the words out. She loves her boy, her man.

She looks at the clock. He needs to be getting ready to go.

“Are you ready?” she asks him.

He isn’t looking, so she hits the flat of her hand against the bed. The breakfast tray jumps slightly. He looks at her.

“Ready? It’s time to get ready,” she says.

He wolfs the last of his sandwich and drinks up his milk, then goes into the bathroom. She listens to him wash his face, clean his teeth. She wishes he would let her untangle his hair.

He reappears in the bedroom doorway. The doorbell rings, and she nods in its direction.

“Go on,” she says. “Have a good day. Tell Jaden’s dad to ring me if he wants me to pick you up.”

“See you, mum,” he says, and is off.

She closes her eyes again and waits for the flat door to open and bang closed again. She thinks about ringing Niall. She has the day to herself, after all. But 8 a.m. is an uncivilised hour to be ringing people on a Saturday.

She wishes that Ray liked Niall. She doesn’t think to wonder why he doesn’t. She doesn’t want to know why he doesn’t. Acknowledging his dislike will mean acknowledging why Niall isn’t right for her. It will mean telling herself why she hates him as much as loves him.

Ray has only met Niall once.

“He’s a prick, mum,” was what he’d said. She hadn’t even thought to ask him where he learned the word prick.

Ray liked Paul. He talked about him all the time. How cool he was. How he got Jaden all the stuff he wanted. How he treated Ray to stuff as well. Nothing major, nothing for her to feel she had to break Ray’s heart over by giving it back. Just enough for her to feel grateful that there was some man in the world who cared for her son.

She thought about Niall, and she picked up the phone. She rang his number. The answering service clicked in. She left him a message.

“Hi, it’s me. Ring me when you get up. I’ve got the day to myself.”

He knew what that meant. She knew that he probably wouldn’t call back, that he would tell her later that he’d been too busy. But she’d remembered the dream now, and she wanted to feel his hand against her skin.

© J R Hargreaves May 2006