The Nightwatch

Or: What I'm looking at on eBay at four am

I keep waking up at four am. At some point in the night my youngest child will have padded into our room and burrowed his way into bed, and his feet twitch like a dog dreaming. And what I’ve noticed in these very long white dawns is how every sleepless night that’s come before reappears then as if ghosts of midnights past. It’s funny, kind of, remembering how precious sleep was when my kids were babies, and how I would always wake angry and have to quickly talk myself down from lividity as I fumbled a nipple into somebody’s screaming mouth.

Lying there last night, in my bed in the suburbs, I remembered the impossible tiredness of those four am feeds and wondered, if I could remember myself back there, the sounds, the horrors, maybe I’d fall asleep. In 2015 I was living in Whitechapel with a six month old daughter, and I wrote about the nighttime feeds, which is useful to look back on because my memory is appalling. Like, worryingly so. I blame the lack of sleep. I wrote:

‘At this time of night the baby is made of rocks and china. She is a tiny giant. Feeding her, again, I think occasionally of the things I could be doing instead. The plays and books go unwritten, the banana breads remain unbaked. I keep waiting to have an amazing idea to write down in my notebook, but both idea and notebook are still out of reach and the night just keeps on going. There’s all this new time now, a whole wide vacuum of dawn.

Up until the 1920s, I learned recently, the night was a different thing. Sleep came in two parts. In the 17th century it was understood there was a first part that began when you went to bed, and then a second instalment before you got up in the morning. And in between the two was an interval of an hour or so, a “watch”, they called it. They used it, often, for sex. In my case, the watch is spent listening to my neighbours’ coming-of-age stories and watching car lights strobe. If only people I cared about were awake right now, then maybe I would use my watch differently – if only this hour wasn’t just filled with me and the students, and the pimps driving their slow taxis past the women’s hostel, dropping them home in a high-pitched fight. Everybody in the world is lonely at 4am, even me, a night watchman sitting up between two snoring friends, my new little family.’

It was unnerving to return there, and made me feel maternal towards my mothering self. During night feeds with my second baby, I had left Whitechapel, and cultivated a terrible habit of buying pieces of naive folk art on eBay. Now, with him sleep-kicking my arm, my eBay watchlist is, I believe, more refined.

For over my desk. Once my friend Alice and I went to see Liza Minnelli perform at a theatre in Covent Garden and we were the only women in the audience. Much of her show was chair-based, which I continue to find inspiring. Great night.

Now - wouldn’t this be fab to wallpaper the downstairs loo? Like Warhol’s Factory but only for pissing in.

Very keen on this, but reluctant to buy yet more things that are definitely haunted. Catherine Howard was ‘the Screaming Queen’ - she was a teenager, beheaded in 1542 for adultery and treason after breaking free of her guards and running through Hampton Court screaming out to the King for mercy, which of course she continues to do in death, as you would.

Ok yes, this is slightly of the naive folk art problem, and it’s not as though I have space for yet more tortured pictures or sculptures made of lolly sticks, but look how happy they are! Their little faces painted by perhaps a thumb!

One day I’ll sleep again, and among all these glittering treasures.