The Night Book

Charlotte Grimshaw is the author of three critically acclaimed novels,
Provocation
, Guilt
and
Foreign City
. In 2000 she was awarded the Buddle Findlay Sargeson Fellowship. In 2006 she won the BNZ Katherine Mansfield Award and in 2007 she won a Book Council Six Pack prize. Her story collection
Opportunity
was short listed for the 2007 Frank O’Connor International Prize, and, in 2008,
Opportunity
won New Zealand’s premier Montana award for fiction, along with the Montana medal. She was also the 2008 Montana Book Reviewer of the year. Her story collection
Singularity
was short listed for the 2009 Frank O’Connor International Prize and the South East Asia and Pacific section of the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. She writes a monthly column in
Metro
magazine, for which she won a 2009 Qantas Media Award. She lives in Auckland.

Provocation
Guilt
Foreign City
Opportunity
Singularity

For Paul

Karen Lampton wanted to have a third child, but after a year had passed and she hadn’t managed to get pregnant, she began to think about trying IVF. She was about to embark on this when she had a chance meeting with a woman whose family ran a foundation for underprivileged children. She came home with the news: she had decided to foster a girl.

Her husband Simon was sitting at his desk. He laid down his pen, and there was a short silence before he said, ‘Why don’t you go back to nursing?’

Karen waved her hand dismissively. She could do that any time. They had money and plenty of space, and she wanted to do something good and worthwhile.

Later, on the phone, Simon mentioned her idea to his brother, Ford.

Ford was dubious. ‘I don’t know. Someone else’s kid in the house. It’s bound to be difficult. High maintenance. But Karen’d do it well. She’s got all that energy.’

The way he said it suggested something negative about Karen’s energy.

Simon told Karen he hoped it wouldn’t upset their own kids,
Marcus and Claire, but he went along with it, signed forms and sat through interviews with social workers. He and Karen were vetted and subjected to police checks, and had to take a special course that went on for days, at an agonisingly slow pace. Simon thought he could have taken the material home and swotted it up in a couple of nights.

He suppressed the fact that he wasn’t all that keen. Karen was seized with the idea; there was no stopping her. He thought, It’s not a permanent thing. If we can’t handle it, we can opt out.

They brought Elke home. She was eight years old, thin, undersized, with freckles and a sharp face. The information on her was straightforward: her mother had been a teenager and her father’s identity was unknown. She’d been adopted at birth by a single woman, a lawyer, who had died when the child was four, and since then she’d been fostered.

She was a quiet and placid girl, not a horror to deal with, but she couldn’t stick to normal sleep patterns. She got up almost every night and prowled around the house. Karen tried hard to get her to break the habit, worried that she would go outside, and once they did find her in the act of opening the back door. She told them she’d been looking for the cat.

When Simon came back late from the obstetric ward at the hospital he often sat at the table and wrote journal notes. One night he became aware there was someone standing right behind him. He turned quickly. It was Elke.

‘What are you doing? You should be in bed.’

She edged along the table. ‘What are
you
doing?’

‘I’m writing in my journal.’

‘What you writing?’

‘Notes. Go to bed. Here, I’ll take you.’

‘I can’t sleep.’

He hesitated. With the other children, he would have insisted, wouldn’t have allowed them to defy him, and he would have made them get a good night’s sleep.

‘Why do you get up all the time? Aren’t you tired the next day?’

‘No.’

He sighed. She’d obviously never had a regular bedtime. No routine laid down. Not habituated.

He made himself a cup of tea and her a hot chocolate. ‘You have to clean your teeth after.’

‘What’s in your notes?’

‘I had a patient who’d had four babies over the years. Big ones.’

‘And what?’

‘She had some damage from the births. So I fixed it. I was there when the last baby was born and as it was being born I saw the damage. Whereas when I’d examined her before, I couldn’t see the problem. I’d thought she didn’t have really have one. It was only when she was giving birth that I saw … You don’t need to know all this.’

She looked at him steadily.

‘Anyway, it was a kind of lesson. That’s the kind of thing I write up in my journal.’

‘I seen someone having a baby.’

‘Have you? When?’

‘I don’t know. We went there.’

‘In a hospital? Did you see the whole thing?’

‘It was horrible.’

He got used to her silent entrances.

She looked at him levelly, boldly, as though there were an agreement between them. She sat down and watched him write. He was aware of differences: if it had been Marcus or Claire, he
couldn’t have tolerated the sitting and watching; parental irritation and dutifulness would have had him shooing them back to their bedrooms. He didn’t love this child, hadn’t spent years watching her grow up. Karen would have sent her to bed, but Karen was deeply, exhaustedly asleep, as were Marcus and Claire. Elke sat and watched him and he let her.

Sometimes they talked, quietly, so as not to wake anyone.

She said, ‘If you make me go to bed I won’t sleep.’ She said, ‘I always wake up in the night. My night’s two halves, first and last, and there’s a waking bit in the middle.’

All through the winter she sat next to him while he wrote in his journal, and when he’d finished he saw her to her room and assumed she slept after that. She never seemed tired — not that he saw much of the kids during the day. He worked long hours. He felt guilty that he didn’t try harder to get her to sleep, and he knew it was because he didn’t care enough. He had so much to think about already — he worried about all the things that were really his.

She was less childlike than Marcus and Claire; she didn’t climb on him or touch him, except sometimes to lean lightly on his arm. With these nights, he was spending more time with her than he did with his own boy and girl. Because of not loving her, he’d allowed her into his night hours and now they shared something. He felt faintly disturbed by this, and worried about his own children, but they didn’t seem bothered.

Simon was offered a place at University College Hospital in London. They made enquiries with the agency and were told they couldn’t take Elke overseas. If they went they would have to give her back, and she would be placed with another foster family.

They faced up to the prospect. There was no question of not going to London. The agency suggested they hold a small farewell
celebration to soften the blow, giving the child a present of a memory book and photographs. Simon and Karen whispered about this after the children were in bed at night, wondering what present they should give her. Karen decided she would bake a chocolate cake.

Simon said, ‘Last requests. Like the last meal on death row.’

Elke wrote a list of presents she wanted for Christmas. She mentioned how much she liked her new class; she invited friends home, put up pictures in her room, and she’d brought home a swan plant from school, planted it in the garden and stocked it with yellow and black caterpillars, in the hope that they would turn into monarch butterflies.

They gathered photographs and souvenirs into a file for her to keep, gearing themselves up to tell her that she would be moving on. It started to seem obscene.

It was Simon who suggested that they apply legally to adopt her.

They arrived in London in the middle of a very cold winter, and rented a flat that looked out over an old graveyard. It was a silent place between the buildings, surrounded by brick walls, with wooden seats set among the oak trees and a path winding through the plots. The gravestones were a jumble of crooked and cracked slabs, blurred statues fallen over sideways, rusted railings. It was a peaceful place. During the day people used it as a short cut between the streets. Squirrels ran up and down the trees and sometimes a couple of drunks bickered on the seats in the winter sunshine.    

Simon woke up one night at 3 a.m. There was something different about the atmosphere. He went to the sitting room, looked out and saw that snow was falling thickly. The graveyard was covered with white, and the hum of the city was muffled by the thick whirling flakes.

Elke came in and they stood together looking out at the silent snow falling and the old gravestones sticking up, black against the icy ground.

‘You ever seen snow before?’ he whispered.

She shook her head.

‘It’s not often this thick in London. It doesn’t usually settle.’

She clutched his arm and pointed. There was a man walking along the path beside the graves, wrapped in a heavy coat and carrying a suitcase. He stopped and looked about him, seeming to search for something; finally he leaned down and stashed the suitcase behind a grave. He got up, wiped his hands on his coat, glanced around furtively and hurried on. They watched him disappear through the gate, into the street.

‘What’s he hidden? Let’s go and see,’ Elke said.

‘Not now. In the morning.’

‘Now, now,’ she pleaded. ‘It might be gone in the morning.’

‘We can’t go down there. It’s freezing. What if he comes back?’

‘Please. I’ve got my boots and my coat in the hall.’

‘Shhh,’ he said, glancing at the closed bedroom doors.

‘I’ll go down really quick. You watch from up here.’

He was alarmed. ‘No. Absolutely not. Don’t you think of going out in the night by yourself. Ever. You wouldn’t, would you?’

She shrugged.

He held her shoulders. ‘Tell me you wouldn’t. You don’t know what’s out there.’

She didn’t say anything, and he wondered whether she was capable of sneaking out by herself. He wouldn’t be able to sleep now, listening out for her.

He said, ‘Oh, all right. We’ll have a look. I’ll leave the outside door open so we can run back in.’

They put on coats and boots and went downstairs, to the door
that opened into the graveyard. Simon looked for something to prop it open. If it shut on them they’d have to walk through the streets, all the way round to the front of the building. He jammed it open with the door mat.

He took Elke’s arm and they crunched through the snow.

She said, ‘You can write about this in your night book.’

‘It’s not stories in there, it’s real.’

‘This is real.’

The street lights cast an orange glow across the white ground. Simon looked around carefully, reassuring himself that no one would be lurking out here on such a cold night. They found the gravestone and Simon reached behind it, brought out the suitcase and laid it on top of the grave.

‘Open it,’ she said.

But there could be anything in there, something grisly. He put it back, straightened up and said, ‘This is ridiculous. We’re going back inside.’

She bounced beside him, ‘No, no. We’ve come all this way.’

‘Shut up,’ he hissed. He looked up at the dark windows, expecting to see the curtains twitch aside. He looked at his watch: it was 3.30 a.m.

‘I’ll look first. You stand there.’

She stepped back obediently as he pulled the case out again, laid it on the grave and unzipped it. There was a metallic jumble inside. It was full of cameras, video equipment, CDs still wrapped in their cellophane. There was a stack of magazines. He checked: pornographic, mostly naked women on the covers, some men.

Rapidly he zipped up the bag. What did he think he was doing, out here in the middle of the night with the little girl, the bag full of someone’s illegitimate stash? An icy trickle ran down his neck.

‘It’s bad stuff, it’ll be stolen stuff. We’ll just leave it.’

He threw the case back behind the grave. She argued, but he was beyond all that now, hustling her towards the door, shutting her up. All the windows in the block seemed to lean towards him; he felt eyes staring down from every one.

In the hall they passed a doctor who lived on the next floor, whom Simon knew slightly. The man glanced down at them curiously as he went on up the stairs.

Inside the flat Simon helped Elke out of her coat and boots and hurried her to the bedroom where Marcus and Claire were asleep. He tucked her in, wanting to say, ‘Let’s not tell about this’, but that seemed wrong. He eased himself into bed next to Karen, and lay awake, anxious. Once he heard a noise and got up, worried that Elke was prowling again, but all was quiet in the children’s room. She was asleep and Marcus and Claire were silent in their bunks. He looked at their soft little faces and wanted to kiss them but didn’t, in case they woke. He stood looking down at Elke, exhausted and troubled. Outside, in the dreamy silence, the snow fell.

He slept and dreamed that Elke had grown to adult size. They were in the graveyard and the snow was falling around them. She pointed to the cover of one of the porno magazines and said, ‘That’s my mother.’ There was a picture of a woman posed naked except for a white scarf draped around her.

Elke said, ‘You can’t make things real if they’re not.’

Simon said, ‘But what is real?’

There was snow all around but the dream was full of heat. She was pulling him towards her; they were lying together on the stone slab. He woke in heat and confusion and thought, No. No.

It was Saturday and he didn’t have to work. He put on his robe and walked through the empty flat, hearing voices from below. Karen and the three children were out in the graveyard, rugged up against the cold in woollen hats and mittens. Elke was directing
and pointing, and Karen was reaching down into the space behind the stones. Marcus and Claire capered about throwing snow at each other, then the four of them gathered round the case as Karen unzipped it. She stepped back quickly, zipped it up and shooed the children away. She looked up at the window, seeing him standing there, and he turned away and went to the shower.

They played in the snow for an hour, then came inside, the children flushed and complaining that their hands and feet were numb. Karen’s manner was deliberate; she was set-faced and there was an air of suppressed drama in her tone that he reacted against. She gave the kids breakfast and sent them to play table tennis in the communal games room downstairs.

She stood over him, hands on hips. ‘I get up this morning and Elke tells me about this midnight jaunt. What were you doing?’

‘She was up in the middle of the night, as usual. We were looking out at the snow. We saw the guy put the case there and she wanted to see what it was. I told her no, but she went on and on. I was worried she’d try and go down there by herself. It was the only way to make sure she didn’t go sneaking out there.’

‘But to take her out in the dark. In the
snow
. Anyone could have been down there. The man could have come back.’