Chapter 6
Crying.
I jerk awake, heart thudding painfully in my chest, and for a moment I have absolutely no idea what time it is or where I am.
A hotel? I pull the duvet off and swing my legs out of bed, cursing silently as I collide with something in the dark, hard wooden furniture that’s not where it should be.
Blinking in the blackness, raising my hands to the left and right, my brain still stuck in neutral.
Then I remember: not our old bedroom. A new bedroom, in our new house.
The crying comes again, a single word getting louder and more urgent with every repetition. “Daddee! Daddee!”
Still disoriented in the dark, I feel my way around the king-sized bed and out onto the landing. It is pitch black.
Along the landing, I blink for a minute, trying to get my bearings, waiting for my eyes to adjust. This house—in the dark, in the dead of night—is a strange new landscape I’ve never had to navigate before.
The cries come again, dissolving into sobs.
In the little box room, I stub my toe on a cardboard box full of soft toys.
By the pale blue glow of the mushroom night light, I can see the small single bed pushed against the far wall.
My youngest daughter is sitting up, covers bunched around her waist, her blonde hair a bird’s-nest tangle around her head.
She reaches her arms up to me and clamps on like a limpet, her cheek damp with tears against my shoulder.
She clings to me, crying, shaking, and I know what’s happened even before the sharp smell of urine reaches my nostrils.
The sheet is wet beneath her. She’s always been a good sleeper and hasn’t wet the bed for at least a couple of years.
But I guess the disruption of a new bedroom in a new house must have triggered something.
It might even be the novelty of not sharing with her brother anymore, the sense of being alone in an unfamiliar place.
Now that I’m here, she’s repeating something over and over again in between her sobs. It takes a moment before I can make out her words and I shush her gently.
“It’s all right,” I say. “There’s no one else. Just me. It was just a bad dream, that’s all. You’re OK. Let’s get you some dry jim-jams and get you sorted out.”
I carry her into the bathroom, clicking the landing night light on with my toe as we pass.
“Cover your eyes for a minute, Daisy.”
She does as she’s told, burying her face in her muslin cloth, and I snap on the bathroom light.
Squinting against the glare from the bare bulb, I put her down carefully, wet a flannel, and clean her up a little, wrapping a towel around her waist to dry her before fetching fresh pajamas from the wardrobe in her bedroom.
While I’m there, I strip the duvet cover off, ball up the sheet and the mattress protector, and bring it all back to dump into the shower cubicle. It can wait until the morning.
She’s still crying softly to herself, face still buried in the soft cotton of her muslin against the brightness of the bathroom light.
In the middle of the high-ceilinged room she looks tiny, like a baby bird that has fallen from the nest, and I kneel down to help her with the new pajamas.
Groggily, she puts them on, her little shoulders still hitching with each sob.
“It’s OK,” I say, shushing her. “It doesn’t matter. It’s all OK now—I’m here.”
“Don’t like the new house,” she mumbles as she pulls the T-shirt top over her head. “Want to go back to the old house.”
“Do you want to sleep in the big bed with me and Mummy?”
She nods enthusiastically, eyes peeking out from behind her cloth. I pick her up and she clings on like a monkey, skinny arms and legs wrapping around me, head on my shoulder as I make my way carefully across the dimly lit landing.
“Want to go in the middle,” she mumbles into my neck.
Back in the master bedroom, I lift the duvet and let her climb in. Wordlessly, my wife lifts a sleepy arm and Daisy curls into her like a kitten, thumb in her mouth, and cloth still gripped in her little fist.
Within minutes, my youngest is fast asleep, the soft purr of her breathing slow and regular again.
But despite the hour, I can’t drift off.
The strange noises of a new house, the soft creaking of old wood, the cadence of air moving through unfamiliar rooms. The question I’d been asking myself for the last two weeks: whether we had bitten off more than we could chew.
The biggest mortgage we’ve ever had. The biggest debt, biggest commitment, biggest step we’d ever taken.
And the other thing—the piece of bad news—that I still hadn’t shared with my wife. Hadn’t shared with anyone.
Don’t think about it. Everything always seems twice as bad in the dark, in the silence, in the middle of the night.
Daisy’s words are still catching in my thoughts too, snagging, like wool pulling on barbed wire. The words she’d been repeating over and over when I first went into her room.
“Don’t let him get me, Daddy.” Her voice had been a trembling whisper. “Don’t let him get me.”
Don’t let him get me.