---

It creeps up on me that Victoria is crying and she has been for some time. Somewhere along the line it had been going on for so long that the noise bled into the silence. Her cries are a solid wall of sound. My ears are starting to ring from it.

Mum’s collection of snow globes distracted her for a little while, but not for long.

I shake one and let Victoria watch the golden glitter swirl and fall. It’s supposed to be sand. The Prestons brought it back for us from Tenerife one year, when I was about nine, the first in the collection. Everything starts somewhere.

I would spend hours watching it, transfixed. I try it again with a globe with fake snow inside; a New York Christmas scene, although none of us had ever been. Victoria turns her head away. I shake one more; metallic blue sequins to look like water when they settle. Her screaming intensifies. She’s putting extra effort into it, digging deep. I worry she will hurt herself crying too hard. I am getting to know her more now, though – usually understanding what she needs better, but not this time. My temper twangs like an elastic band snapping against my skin.

Sometimes, Victoria will only fall asleep when she is moving around. Nathan or I used to take her out in the car in Glasgow, drive around for hours. I didn’t bring the car here, though, so I’ve been walking around the streets. I’ve found myself needing to clear my head more than ever.

When I was younger I used to dream I could live inside one of the snow globes. It looked like the most perfect place – safe and magical. But now I see it differently. I picture myself trapped under that glass with all these floating things, the air running out.

A knock on the wall from next door again, three hard thuds. I bundle Victoria into her pram and pull on jeans and a jumper over my pyjamas, then put on my coat. Almost as soon as we reach the end of the street, Victoria is asleep, drifting off, fighting it at first but not for long. When Nathan took her out, I would sleep like a stone while they were gone, the bliss of the silence.

Maybe Victoria senses her father’s absence. She was sleeping much better before, at home. But since we got here, since Nathan…she must know that something is off; she might taste it when I feed her.

The streets are almost empty, just the odd car creeping past. A jogger runs by and makes me jump. He looks back and offers an apologetic wave from beneath a woolly hat. My teeth have started to chatter.

Nothing’s open except the big supermarket – it’s twenty-four hours now, apparently. When I lived here, the site was a tinned food factory, bleak and imposing. No one chose to work there; people ended up working there if things went wrong – bombing out of school with no GCSEs or a spell in prison.

Inside, I weave up and down the starkly lit aisles: shiny plastic packages, things floating in jars like eyes, cheap clothes. It seems now that the only time Victoria will sleep is when I don’t.

I was always adamant about not wanting children; I made it part of who I was. I liked to wheel it out at parties, as if it made me different, better than other people somehow. Deep down I felt like I’d escaped where others got tangled and snared. But then, it crept up on me, the odd twinge that I tried to push out and ignore. Then it hit me like a wave. I was gripped by this alien, unwanted desperation to have a child of our own, and the thought of not being able to made me feel desolate.

Nathan was surprised at first, didn’t quite believe me, but then he just said, ‘OK, let’s do it! Let’s baby,’ like I’d asked him if he fancied going to the cinema or if pasta was OK for tea. And that puzzled me.

I thought we’d agreed we both didn’t want children, that we were happy as we were. We didn’t want to share each other. Was he just going along with that? Resenting me the whole time? It annoyed me to think he could be so non-committal, easy-going even, about something like that.

When we couldn’t get pregnant at first, I was afraid I was too old and I hated the blood for coming each month. The doctor said we were both fine, we just had to wait. But it felt like we didn’t have time to do that.

Sex was scheduled in around ovulation whether we felt like it or not, and after I’d lie there with my legs up against the wall, counting down fifteen minutes on my phone. We rowed about IVF. He said what was meant to be would be. That sounded ominous to me, quasi-religious. I’d already booked an appointment anyway. But before it came around, it happened of its own accord. Victoria. Something in me felt different, even when it was too soon to do the test.

I tried to resist it; it seemed so obvious, so clichéd. But meeting Nathan, getting our flat and then a child, it was the first time I felt truly contented since before Victoria and Dad died. Before that summer. The first time that I actually allowed myself to be happy too. It felt too good to be true. And you know what people say about that.

The white brightness of the supermarket lighting against my eyes makes me overwhelmed with tiredness. I can almost feel the softness of the pillow against my head, the deep comfort. My skull is starting to thud, pain by my temples. There isn’t really anything I need to buy so I just glide up and down the aisles.

I hardly pass anyone else in the shop. Another man with a baby strapped to his chest in one of those contraptions. I’m too scared Victoria would fall out, that I wouldn’t have fastened it up properly. Sometimes I get so frightened that something will happen to her, that she’ll become ill because of something I do or don’t do properly, or I’ll drop her. I try to drive it out of my brain, head it off at the pass, because I’m scared, too, that merely thinking about it might conjure it somehow.

Step on a crack… break your mother’s back.

‘They’re a hell of a lot tougher than you think,’ a nurse said to me at the hospital.

But everyone’s more fragile than you think, too. Something bad can happen at any time, out of nowhere. The floor can drop from underneath you. I’ve seen that for myself.

The man scours the drug aisle, scratching his head before scrolling through his phone again, cross-referencing against what’s on the screen. He gives me a nod and a knowing smile as we go past.

The same woman passes me a couple of times. I try not to look up or catch her eye. I’m not in the mood for someone cooing over the baby at this time of night. But in my peripheral field of vision, I can tell she is slowing down, peering into the pram.

I stare at the shelves for a while, not taking in what I am looking at. As I turn into the nappy aisle, my chin tucked to my chest, the pram hits something, soft but solid. It’s the woman again, rubbing at her shin.

‘Shit, sorry,’ comes out of my mouth before I have chance to register what’s happened.

She leans onto the pram, clutching her leg. ‘It was me,’ she says. ‘I wasn’t looking where I was going.’ She checks around her, then looks up at the big clock in the aisle. The pain is easing out of her face now. ‘I was focused on home time,’ she says, and smiles at me.

And I see a flash of someone else in her then. I’m transported into another lifetime. It’s Michelle from school. As it dawns on me, she does a double take, too.

‘Is it… is it you, Sylvie? Sylvie Armstrong! Oh my God! I nearly walked right past you.’

‘Well, it is the middle of the night. Hi, Michelle. How are you?’

She takes her hand off the pram now and steps back a little. ‘Tell me about it.’ She rubs her eyes.

I nod at Victoria. ‘I’ve got an excuse for not being asleep at this ungodly hour. What’s with you? Do you work nights or something?’

‘Yeah, for my sins.’ She must be a security guard, judging by the outfit.

We’re standing against some cheap, own-brand make-up, the colours of the plasticky nail varnish catching my eye. Hot pink, blue and yellow.

‘What are you doing round here? Not seen you since… since forever. It’s been far too long,’ Michelle says.

‘My mum died.’ It feels as if it echoes round the empty supermarket. ‘I’m clearing out the house.’

‘Shit, sorry. We’re getting to that age, eh?’

‘Guess so… So, what are you up to now?’ I ask her.

She throws her arms out to the side: You’re looking at it.

‘Cool.’ I haven’t used that word since school, but it just sneaks out and makes me squirm. ‘Well, it was good to see you, Michelle.’

I wheel Victoria away, pretending to look at tights on the shelves.

‘Hey, Sylvie!’ she shouts after us, coming back along the aisle towards me. Her voice sounds even louder in the emptiness of the supermarket.

‘Don’t suppose you… Well, I’ve not seen any of the old gang for years and… I finish in…’ She checks the clock again. ‘I get off in twenty minutes. I sometimes go for a coffee or some food when I finish here. I can’t get straight to sleep. Don’t suppose you fancy it, if you’re about anyway? Don’t worry if not. If you want to try and get some sleep, I don’t blame you.’

‘Aw, I’d love to,’ I say. ‘But I really need to get back. She’ll need feeding soon.’ Really, I’m hoping she’ll sleep for a while longer yet, but I’m too exhausted to sustain more small talk.

‘OK.’ Michelle tries to put a bright face on it, but I can tell she’s disappointed. ‘No bother,’ she says. ‘Maybe another time.’ She gives me an awkward wave and sets off back down the aisle, her shoulders hunched, ungainly.

I walk around for a while longer, picking things up and looking at them pointlessly. As soon we stop, Victoria starts to stir. I grab a few random things – none of which would combine to make a meal – and balance them on the pram, before paying and heading for the doors.

When I get through the sliding doors at the exit, Michelle is waiting there, changed out of her uniform into her own clothes. I steal a glance at the time. It’s not twenty minutes yet. Sometimes I get so tired I feel like I’ve missed lumps of the day, spaced out somehow, and occasionally I have. But I look again and it confirms that isn’t the case here.

Michelle is wearing a fresh slick of an unflattering brownish lipstick that makes me think of pottery clay, and a white polo shirt, dried out and stiff-looking from many rounds of washing.

A man staggers in through the doors, the smell of fermenting fruit wafting in with him. He looks spaced out and the skin on his face is red and weathered.

Michelle watches him closely as he goes into the supermarket, standing on tiptoes and craning her head as he disappears round one of the aisles. She shakes her head and tuts. ‘He’s not supposed to be in here.’

I think she’s going to go in after him and I’ll make my escape, but something makes her change her mind and she turns back to me then peers into the pram.

‘Come on. Just one quick coffee? You might as well while the little one is sleeping.’

There doesn’t look to be any getting out of it.

We head out across the empty car park. When I look back, the deserted, brightly lit supermarket looks like some kind of weird spacecraft that has landed in Conley. My memory is projecting the old factory.

‘Do you always work nights, then?’ I ask Michelle.

‘Not always, but a lot. I don’t mind. It’s better money and I get a bit of time to do stuff in the day when everyone else is working. You know what they say, don’t you? About night shift. It’s for bats, cats and tw---.’ She mouths the last word silently and I have to laugh then.

‘I can’t say I’ve heard that one, no. But I like it.’

‘I don’t need that much sleep anyway,’ she says.

Just the word sets a fresh wave of tiredness through me.

‘Lucky you. I need eight hours or more to feel human. Well, I did. Who knows any more? You got any? Kids?’ I am annoyed at myself for asking that; it just comes out. A pre-programmed conversation. But I always hated it when people said it to me; it became salt in the wound.

‘No,’ Michelle says, but doesn’t elaborate. ‘Tough going, then?’ She gestures at the pram.

‘Has its moments, yeah.’

We cross over the road, past the train station and down the dark curved street next to it.

‘Erm, where are we going? Isn’t it a bit dodgy round here?’

People used to say this was the red light area. I remember being shocked to hear that. Firstly, when I realised what a red light area was. And later that Conley had one; it seemed like something that would happen in big, filthy cities, something far away.

We’d driven past in the car before, and you’d see women standing around in the icy cold, smoking. I’d expected them to be wearing leopard coats, boots, short leather skirts, like on TV. But it wasn’t like that. They had jeans on, big warm coats. Even woolly hats some of them.

‘It’s fine,’ Michelle says, looping her arm through mine. ‘No one’s going to do owt to us. I come down here all the time. Stick with me.’

The buildings on this side of the street are all imposing: old, darkened stone, almost gothic-looking. On the other side everything looks more modern, but dreary all the same: a repair garage; a small, squat gym; a grubby-looking fried chicken takeaway – still open. In one of the doorways, a woman stands checking her phone, her face lit by the glow.

We continue down the street. Every now and then a car slopes past, slower, quieter than usual. Then, out of nowhere, a horn blares out. My heart jolts. The car slows down.

‘How much for the pair of you? Do you do BOGOF? Jump in, lasses.’

There look to be four or five people in the car, shoulders pressed up to the windows. The driver beeps the horn again full volume as they go past, but I can’t see anyone clearly.

The woman in the doorway looks up from her phone and tuts. ‘Wankers,’ she says and then her eyes are down again.

‘Listen, I’m going to get back, Michelle. I’ll get a taxi from the supermarket. Maybe we can have a coffee one afternoon or something.’ I start to disentangle my arm from hers, twisting my elbow round.

‘Give over. We’re there now and she’s still asleep.’ Michelle nods towards Victoria’s pram. ‘It’s just down here, the place. I’ll drop you off at home after. I’ve got my car parked at the train station. They’re just silly little boys; all gob no trousers.’

‘Yeah, it’s just—’

‘We’ll have one quick cuppa and I’ll take you straight home, right? Anyway, I don’t want you walking around by yourself. I’ve got a car seat from looking after my sister’s lot so there’s no need to worry about that.’

I’m ashamed to realise that the car seat hadn’t even crossed my mind. I look back at the dark, deserted street and give in. ‘OK, but just a really quick one.’

‘It’s so nice to see you. Honest,’ Michelle says, her eyes fixed on me.

We turn into a large yard with tyres piled up around the edges. The café is actually a large portacabin.

‘Give it here.’ Michelle grabs the pram and lifts it up the step into the café, like someone who has done it before.

‘You always were a massive wimp, Sylvie.’ There’s something sharper about the way she says it than I had expected.

The image of a speeding car at night flashes into my mind, the sound of the engine getting closer, lights brighter. ‘Go on, you wimp. It’s your turn,’ a girl’s voice says to me. A game of Chicken across the road near the park. We used to play it with the boys from school. You had to stand in the road when cars were coming – the first one to move is the chicken. The memory is dreamlike, translucent overlapping images. Michelle’s face is there. Victoria’s too. She was always the last to move, stepping out of the way at the last split second then screaming up at the sky at the side of the road.

Inside the brightly lit ‘café’ it’s busier than I expected. Three men are playing cards around a small table, with cans of pop beside them and plates smeared with leftover breakfast. They’re all wearing dirty orange jackets and heavy work boots. They look out of proportion with the room, too large for it.

I glance at the clock. It’s 3 a.m. My head feels so light.

‘What do you fancy?’ Michelle says, eyes fixed on the menu.

‘Um, nothing – I’m alright, thanks.’ My stomach is a rumbly mixture of feeling hungry yet nauseous at the same time.

Michelle addresses the woman behind the counter. ‘Mel, I’ll have a large full English, please. And two teas.’ She looks at me for approval and I nod. She points at the buns behind the scratched glass counter, white icing sweating underneath. I shrug my acceptance. ‘And two of these. Ta.’

‘I’ll bring it over, Chelle.’

She hands her some money. I start rooting in my purse for change but Michelle bats me away.

‘Least I can do after all this time,’ she says.

Victoria’s pram is wedged between two tables. I notice a few of the men looking over at us, rare creatures in here. I pray that I won’t need to breastfeed any time soon. Michelle bends down to peer in at Victoria, sticking her head into the hood of the pram as if into the mouth of a picture-book lion.

‘She’s fast asleep. No bother,’ she whispers.

‘Typical,’ I say, rubbing my eyes. The light is making them throb even more. I must look as dreadful as I feel under these harsh lights. There are fine lines around Michelle’s eyes too, tiny veins visible under the thin skin. Only Victoria stays exactly the same, cast in everyone’s mind by the pictures they used in the paper. If she were to magically come back today, you’d expect her to look just like that.

The waitress brings over the buns and two teas, quickly returning with a fried breakfast for Michelle. It’s the size of a tray rather than a dinner plate.

I raise my cup to her. ‘Thanks. Here’s to us: bats, cats and the other lot,’ and we clink.

‘I shouldn’t, I know, but balls to it,’ Michelle says, preparing to do battle with the breakfast. ‘They say everything kills you now, don’t they? In fact, I read the other day that one of the most dangerous things you can do now is shift work. Mucks about with all sorts of internal rhythms and stuff, it said. So I feel like I may as well enjoy it in the meantime, right? Anyway, turns out messing about with your body clock and working nights makes you bloody starving,’ she says, knife and fork poised to tuck in.

‘You enjoy it, love. You’ve got to have some pleasures in life, haven’t you?’ Mel from behind the counter is hovering, watching proudly as Michelle shoves a greasy, bean-soaked sausage into her mouth, orange liquid oozing onto her lips.

‘You on nights all week, love?’ she asks Michelle, her hand on her hip.

‘Yeah, till Thursday.’

‘Grand, I’ll catch up with you before then.’

‘She’s a feeder, her,’ Michelle calls after Mel. Mel whips her tea towel out to the side and shakes her backside.

I take a bite of the bun; it’s rubbery, the icing gritty and sickly.

‘I’ve put two stone on since I started nights over there,’ Michelle says, gesturing with her fork.

‘Yeah, know the feeling.’ I nod at Victoria.

‘You used to be dead skinny at school as well,’ she says.

I flinch and put the bun down. Michelle was always a little blunt.

‘So, how you been anyway? God, not seen you in years.’

I look up and she is shoving a piece of bacon in, looks guilty that I caught her, eyes panicked, the meat hanging out of her mouth like a tongue.

‘Sorry,’ she says, covering her mouth, her face flushing.

I feel a twinge for her. Michelle was never popular at school. People called her names and mocked her coarse hair. Her clothes were from charity shops – God knows how they knew. I wouldn’t have, but some people can sniff out any perceived weakness. And if it wasn’t these specific things, it would have been something else. She was just one of those people.

There was an incident at a house party once, and everything got much worse for her after that. It even spread to kids from other schools.

Someone’s parents had gone away for the weekend and about thirty of us went to the house. The memory is fragmented, a damaged video tape. There were people jumping out of windows, the sound of a light fitting smashing. An image of someone with blood on their face breaks in. I hadn’t thought of that night for such a long time until now, even though we talked about it for weeks. Being back here is dislodging things again.

Victoria and I fell asleep on the sofa – we said we were sleeping at each other’s houses. People were laid out everywhere on the floor, under sleeping bags and coats. Then Michelle burst in in the middle of the night, eyes wide and spacey, naked. She’d been taking something – most people had – and she didn’t know where she was. I feel guilty looking at her sitting here now with the image of her that night in my mind.

Everyone laughed when she came into the room. Victoria too. But I felt a sensation like a freezing wire running right up my spine. Someone, one of the lads, shouted, ‘What’s that smell?’

There wasn’t any smell but it just went from there. They said she’d soiled herself. By the end of the next week the story was that she’d come in the room covered in her own faeces. Even I started to remember it like that, as if I’d seen it myself. Michelle looked me right in the eye at the time, as if she needed an anchor to focus on and I was it. There was no shit, there was no smell. Just a naked girl, out of it.

Michelle puts her knife and fork down and flicks her eyes up at me. I feel like she knows what I’m thinking about.

‘Do you mind if I ask you? What happened?’ she says. ‘You just didn’t come back to school.’

I hadn’t been expecting her to just come out and say it.

‘I used to go past your house and look for you,’ she says. ‘I was worried something had happened to you too. Like Victoria. You were just gone. I knocked on your door but no one ever answered. I think your mum was in, though.’ Michelle nibbles on a piece of toast, not blinking. ‘I thought maybe it was me. That I’d done something.’

‘I went to live with my aunty. In Manchester.’

‘What about your mum, though?’ Michelle says.

I stuff the remainder of the bun into my mouth. ‘I thought I’d be coming back,’ I tell her. ‘But… well, I guess it didn’t happen.’

‘Until now,’ she says, doing jazz hands to the side. ‘I used to walk along your street some nights.’ One side of her mouth is full of food, and when she speaks, I get the odd flash of it. ‘I’d be looking out for you. Sometimes I thought you were back because I’d see that lamp going round in your room. You know the one you used to have with the stars? But then you wouldn’t be at school again the next day.’

Michelle had never been in my house; we weren’t that close. Her cheeks flush again and I wonder if she has said more than she intended to.

She adds quickly, ‘I used to walk past sometimes before you went away as well and I’d see you up there with Victoria. Or just see the lamp going round. Sorry, I sound like a right weirdo, don’t I? I was just walking past on the way to mine, though. It’s on the way.’

I’m relieved when she changes the subject. ‘What’s this little one called anyway? Sorry I haven’t asked.’

‘Er… she’s called Victoria.’

Michelle swallows in a hurry, but the lump of food sinks down her throat as if in slow motion. Her eyes look strained and panicked for a moment, as if she’s going to choke, and then it’s gone.

‘Oh right. After…?’

My eyes won’t lift to look at her. ‘Kind of and it’s my…’ I was going to tell her it was Nathan’s grandmother’s name, too, but I drop it again. I don’t want to complicate things by mentioning him. I can’t face that right now. I know Michelle would seize right on it.

‘That’s nice. That’s really nice.’ She emphasises it the second time as if I didn’t believe her the first. ‘You don’t get many baby Victorias now, do you?’

‘No?’

‘It’s all Violets and Emilys and Daisys, isn’t it? Our names are well out of fashion now. I expect she’ll grow into it, though. You here on your own, then?’

‘Yep,’ I say, forcing chirpiness into my voice. ‘Well, me and Victoria. Where are you living now?’ I ask, trying to divert the subject.

‘Back with my mum, funnily enough. Or not as the case may be.’ She leans forwards and pretends to use a magnifying glass. ‘I’m getting tired and over-giddy now. I was seeing someone. But it all went a bit tits up. And, well… I didn’t take it too well, let’s say. So I’m just getting over that, I suppose. Need to sort myself out financially again. And you?’

‘Oh, you know, just getting on with things,’ I say, willing her to move on.

She kind of does but not in the way I’d hoped. ‘Which reminds me,’ she says, wiping her hands with a paper napkin and putting it to one side. ‘I couldn’t find you on Facebook or Twitter or anything. I always look for you, see if you’ve joined the modern age.’

‘Yeah, I’m not really into all that stuff.’

I try not to stare but the grease on the plate is making me feel sick. I feel hung-over, without having enjoyed the fun part first.

Michelle leans back into her chair, tugging at her waistband.

‘All that stuff. Listen to you.’ Michelle laughs at me, as if I’m a child and she’s the adult. ‘I’m ready for that sleep now,’ she says.

---

Eventually, Michelle takes us home. As we pull away from the train station there are three women dotted up the street, walking on the spot, fiddling with phones.

‘Did you ever think Victoria might have been coming down here?’ Michelle says.

At first I think I have misheard, as she says it so casually, checking both ways for oncoming traffic.

‘You know, working down here.’

‘What do you mean?’

She doesn’t look at me, concentrating on the road, the indicator clicking lightly like a metronome. ‘I just always wondered, you know. Because they go up to the lake, don’t they, in cars. With men.’

I look out of the window, my transparent reflection staring back at me.

‘I’m just saying, you know. I mean, who would she have been meeting?’

Being back here, I feel plunged back into my old life, that summer.

‘Can we not talk about this now?’ I say. ‘I’m shattered.’

‘Suit yourself.’ Michelle flicks the radio on and we don’t talk any more. When she drops me at the house, she insists that we swap phone numbers. Next door’s light goes on when I close the car door, a dark silhouette moving behind the glass.

When I look out of the window from the house, being careful not to move the blind so she can’t see me, Michelle is sitting there in the car, looking up towards the house.