Late Night, Early Morning

Midsummer. The clatter of Jean’s key in the top lock carelessly broke the pre-dawn stillness of her living room. Slipping her shoes off, she hummed softly and took in the straightness of her neat, flat fringe in the small mirror above the side table. Dave was at work already, on the driveway a patch of dry concrete in the outline of his absent van was ringed by thin morning dew, but she moved quietly anyway.

The smell of the bread factory lingered, sweet and strange, on her cardigan. She’d started nights six months ago and had still not quite come to terms with the disquieting feeling of working whilst everyone else slept. For no good reason a feeling often overcame her that she’d done something wrong.

Once, in Corton on holiday, some lads that she and her school friend Val had met in the caravan park club house had given them some triangular purple pills shortly before last orders and they’d taken them. In the jittery rush that followed they’d driven around what felt like half of Suffolk, talking and talking and talking, and then sat in the dunes before sunrise without anything left to say,their pulses pounding in their ears, drowning out the waves on the beach before them.

She’d not liked the very late night, or the very early morning, ever since. But then she’d met Dave and they’d got married and the Corporation offered them a council house if they moved out of the city to the relative countryside and so they had. Night shifts were the only shifts she could find.

The downstairs of their terraced house consisted of two small square rooms: a living room with a dining table crammed under the angle of the stairs and off that a small kitchen. They’d furnished the space with cast-offs from her parents. The one thing that was new was a sofa, still encased in its plastic wrapping. She couldn’t bear to take it off, and when they sat on it with their tea cups after dinner the rigid covering would squeak and crack beneath them.

Moving into the kitchen she felt a swelling pride for its size and cleanliness. Dave always left it clean. In fact, it almost pulsated with neatness, like it was skin scrubbed raw. She smiled as she checked the number of bloomer slices left in the bag – three less than when she left, one fewer than she and Dave had agreed. Typical.

She filled the kettle and placed it on the hob. It was always at this moment that her tiredness bit hardest. Her limp arms hung at her sides and she looked out onto their small garden. It had been unthinkable, in their small flat with a shared bathroom in Poplar, that one day they’d have outside space.

They’d not know what to do with it in truth. In their first week Dave had burned a circle in their tiny lawn anxiously trying to eradicate a small ants nest with boiling water from the same kettle she now used to douse the teabag in her mug. It had never grown back and the grass there was yellow and stubbly. She’d snapped at him but her anger had not lasted long. It never did with Dave.

Neither of them had dreamed of leaving London. She realised now how unthinkingly accustomed they were to the sounds of the streets where they had grown up, two tower blocks away from one another but unaware of each other’s existence until they were in their early twenties.

The first night he’d bought her a drink she could barely hear him, his voice was so soft. She’d shouted in his ear over the music and the crush of the pub crowd. Someone was hammering away at the piano, snatches of songs broke out. He’d stammered slightly but his eyes never left hers.

The nights in the suburbs were so quiet. Walking home along the cycle tracks from her shift, it scared her. In the dark underpasses she would lengthen her stride and glance back over her shoulder. At night in the city, where sirens blared and buses rumbled, she’d never once felt fear.

Jean watched the milk she’d poured bloom in her mug and stifled a yawn. As usual she faced the jarring mix of intense physical tiredness and the sense that she couldn’t face going to bed. Her shoulders ached from pushing trolleys full of fresh loaves.

There were women her age at the factory and they would chat over breaks in the cafeteria, but they all had children and sometimes they seemed to look through her when they remembered she didn’t. Once, for lack of anyone else to confess it to, she had told them that even after their busiest shifts she would lie awake on her side staring at the bedroom wall. The conversation had stopped dead like a switch had turned her colleagues off at the mains. Since then she’d either sat on her own and read a book or contented herself with quietly nodding on the peripheries of their conversations.

The thought of an evening with Dave consoled her even against the prospect of another sleepless morning. On Fridays they went to the Twin Foxes, Dave in ironed trousers and Jean with a full face on. There was a corner table adjacent to the end of the bar that was never occupied and there they could pass the evening feeling almost hidden by its barrier. In low voices they imagined where they would go on holiday if they saved hard enough. On returning home they would share a tinned chocolate pudding.

Their cutlery draw was filled with mismatched knives and forks and a packet of cigarettes she pretended were for emergencies. Dave barely smoked them but never begrudged Jean hers. Drawn by the weak early sun Jean took the crumpled packet, fished out one cigarette, and scrabbled in the draw for a lighter. She opened the back door into the garden. Lighting up, she stared at the burnt patch of grass inset into their postage stamp lawn. She could feel her breath in her nostrils. Her watch showed half six. Dave would be home at three. Maybe she’d sleep today. She felt a smile reach her lips and smoked her cigarette in the cool of the morning.