There’s a time called 4am and there you will find me feeding a baby by the light of an iPhone 5. Our bedroom window faces the street. At the junction, almost facing each other, is the women’s hostel and a block of student flats. The residents of both often wake with me and roam the pavement, drunk and wearing noisy shoes. When I drag the baby from her bed her little nails claw at my skin like a Bad Sex award, and I’m neither awake nor asleep, or anything really at all.
At 4am there’s a woman who stands underneath our window, and she says: “Nobody will wish me Happy New Year because I’m homeless.” She repeats it again and again, quite Bob Dylan-y, and I think: “It’s not because you’re homeless. It’s because looking at you is difficult and makes people feel scared, because your face has holes in it and because you are very, very high.” And besides, I think, I’ve said it to you twice so. She calls it out to the students, who ignore her because at 4am they are mostly acting as if they are alive for the very first time. They throw their bottles towards the bins and cheer when they smash, and they march, singing, in waves of posh and catchphrases. Often, on our strip of road, because they’re so close to home they cry. Two boys shout over each other as they tumble home from the tube. One is explaining how he dumped someone for having a Hotmail address, while the other recites the location of every Sainsbury’s Local from here to Holborn. A girl is telling her friend about a text message she wasn’t meant to receive. One of their flatmates hates her, she sobs, and weighing up the evidence, I think he has a point. But that’s as far as my thoughts go now. There’s a wall there.
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’ weepy 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.
Outside are novelty ringtones and police sirens. Inside, the baby is clamped to me and I’m an animal, stuck. Until a month ago I’d try and read short stories on my phone, or reply to emails with my thumb. Balancing my inbox on the baby’s shoulder I would admin like hell, deleting with abandon and, with one eye open, click on newspaper links and try and read all the politics, all the essays. But one of these essays talked about boredom as, rather than an anti-state, instead as something vital that teaches us how to pay attention to the world. So now when I’m feeding the baby, I’m trying to let that thick blue boredom wash over and into me. Outside there’s a load of life happening. Inside my bedroom at 4am, I am very quiet, and very still. This is my watch.
