Nightwriter

Rose Malone

The ordinariness of things shuddered to a halt. Janice heard the four-note signal of Fintan’s computer shutting down. The dishwasher said “you’re right, you’re right, you’re right” in a Belfast accent, then lapsed into silence. The blue light on the freezer blinked and it commenced a slow groan. Janice rinsed her coffee cup and listened for a minute to the drumming of water in the shining, stainless steel sink. She set the cup to drain and began her nightly ritual of transformation. Fintan had undressed and was laying out a clean shirt for the morning. He looked up briefly when she opened the bedroom door and made an indeterminate gesture. Her response was not quite a smile. In the vernacular of their marriage, that signified an exchange of affection. She satisfied herself that the children were deeply asleep. Sasha muttered some words and threw her arm across the pillow in a dramatic gesture. Janice held her breath and stood rigid until she was sure that Sasha had not woken up. Cormac had his thumb in his mouth and breathed rhythmically. He smelt of socks and boy. Janice closed his door and went back to her and Fintan’s bedroom. She went into the ensuite bathroom and brushed her teeth, then tied back her hair and smoothed cream into her face and throat. Fintan was almost asleep, lying on his side, facing the wall. She put on warm socks and pulled a dressing gown over the track suit she was wearing and headed downstairs. She checked the windows and doors, then checked the patio door again, before setting the alarm to “at home” and going into the tiny room that she called her workroom, carved out of the space between the garage and the angle of the kitchen. 

In Kilcoyle, the small town where she lived, Janice Dowling was on the board of the local primary school that her children attended, and always volunteered for fund-raising events and after-school activities. She was on the Tidy Towns Committee and the Walking Trails Development Group. She played golf on Tuesday afternoons and bridge on winter evenings. Her husband Fintan Dowling (she had assumed his name on marriage) owned and managed a garden centre on the Dublin Road. She worked there in the mornings, once the children were in school, doing the accounts and sometimes giving advice on possible new stock or on how the merchandise could be arranged to best advantage. She was responsible for the introduction of a garden design service and a small café. 

Her afternoons (apart from Tuesdays) were occupied with the children’s after-school activities. That Monday afternoon, she had sat in on Sasha’s ballet lesson. Sasha had begged and pleaded to do ballet. This was an activity of which Janice had no experience, and in which she had little interest. She had done Irish dancing as a child and had stolidly worked her way through reels and jigs to the more strenuous hornpipes, before giving it up at age twelve when hockey and tennis took over. But she and Fintan had given in to Sasha’s woebegone face and had enrolled her in ballet classes in the nearest large town. The ballet mistress, Madame Nanette, had enviable posture and flexibility of movement. Her hair was drawn into a severe bun away from her gaunt face. Janice almost winced when talking to her, observing the painful pull of stretched skin over her prominent cheekbones. She imagined the agony of releasing that hair at night. Nanette spoke in a strange accent, somewhere between French and filmic Russian, although Janice knew for certain that she was originally Noreen Quinn from Glengad, fifteen miles to the west. Noreen (or Nanette) was extremely strict on her pupils’ appearance and had been known to snip off unruly hairs that protruded from the perfect buns in which their hair had to be worn. Sasha had unfortunately inherited her father’s unruly hair and getting ready for ballet always involved a long session of adding clips and sobbing that her hair was still “bumpy”. As Janice watched the lesson, it became increasingly clear to her that Sasha lacked any talent for ballet, and her heart broke for her the inevitable destruction of her daughter’s dream. 

Few people in Kilcoyle knew that Janice had another persona, that of Venetia Hardacre, writer of dystopian fiction. She had published six novels, described by the critics as “literary dystopia”, and, while not quite a household name, was described by her agent, Sylvia Hammond, as “moderately successful”. Sylvia sometimes proposed that Janice’s books could be adapted for film or television, but the conversations always seemed to drift away, and nothing ever came of these ideas. Janice was just as glad, really. She could preserve the anonymity that seemed essential to her in order to live her double life. By day, Janice Dowling was immersed in the tasks of motherhood and housekeeping, marriage and citizenship, together with her part-time job as an accountant. She liked the outdoors, the smell of greenery and rain on her skin. 

But at night, Venetia Hardacre wrote fevered stories in her tiny, heated room. She consorted with vampires, werewolves, witches and assorted hobgoblins that she conjured out of the air of the sleeping house. Critics described her work as “literary dystopia”. It obeyed the basic rules of grammar and usage, her characters were well-developed, her plots were cleverly constructed and believable once you suspended disbelief in the special powers of the protagonists. The books contained a lot of sex, explicit but not lurid. The horror was the kind that disturbed your sleep rather than inducing nausea. She did not indulge in extended descriptions of blood and other bodily fluids. 

Sometimes the veil between her two worlds – her day-to-day reality and the world of her imagination – was permeable. That afternoon, she had watched Sasha’s ballet lesson and listened to the strange accent of Madame Nanette, as poor Sasha had landed with an audible thump.

‘Lightly, Sasha, lightly’, the ballet mistress had cried in her strange accent. ‘Imagine you are flying! All my little girls must be able to FLY!’ Her voice became guttural, and she rolled the “r” in “girls”. Her Russian accent was in the ascendant today. Janice’s imagination immediately conjured up a Russian ballerina who could actually fly, because she was, in reality, a vampire. Now, in her night-time persona, Venetia began to work out the basic narrative of her vampire ballerina story. She tried to hear the ballerina’s voice. Anoushka. The name came to her out of the darkness. Anoushka’s eyes were deep and dark, lightless as the coalmines of Perm. Venetia wished that she could draw fluently. It would have helped her greatly if she had been able actually to sketch a character. She tried to get in touch with Anoushka, to feel her emotions from within her skin. She pictured the ballerina’s naked body, bluish white like an ancient iceberg, her rib-cage like a musical instrument, her cheek bones sharp as scalpels. This was good, she thought. Keep this. As well as typing the words, she wrote them on a post-it note, and stuck it to her noticeboard. Tomorrow night, she knew, it might seem overblown or cliched. 

Anoushka would arrive one day at a theatre, she decided, apparently out of nowhere, swathed in magnificent furs. Where would this theatre be? Not Russia. It would have to be an imaginary place, maybe in England. Venetia found that she was growing cold and stiff as the heating faded. She massaged her hands and looked at the time. Only 12.30. She had very little done and that might be all deleted tomorrow. But she reminded herself that this stage in writing a new book was always slow. The character had to grow in her mind. She reluctantly saved her work and shut down the computer. It was better to stop now. 

Back in the kitchen, she became Janice again. The mysterious creaks and shufflings of the sleeping house were loud against her eardrums. The room was lit only by tiny lights on electrical appliances - the kitchen clock, the stand-by light on the dishwasher, the pilot light on the freezer. She switched on an under-cupboard light, then poured some water into a glass and watched patterns the light made against the pale tiles. An unearthly sound brought her to the window, and she raised the blind cautiously. A terrifying screech echoed through the yard. Janice’s heart was thumping, and she gasped when she saw a white shape cross the sky on silent wings. The barn owls were back. Their cries were nothing like the hoo-hoo-hoo of movie owls. This was something predatory and primaeval. But a great image for a vampire ballerina, much better than a bat, now forever to be associated with corona virus. She considered going back and making some notes on her laptop. But it was too late, and she was too tired to shapeshift into Venetia.

Janice started and turned from the window when she heard a sound behind her, and her hand went to her throat when she saw a small, white figure in the dim light of the doorway to the hall. Of course, it was Sasha, in her white nightdress, sobbing in fear, having been wakened by the screech of the barn owl. Janice put her arms around her and cuddled her, reassuring her that it was “only a bird” and an endangered species that they should be glad to welcome. Sasha’s sobs diminished and stopped, and Janice wiped her hot, wet face and prepared to carry her back to bed. Another noise made them both start as Cormac came down the stairs. He ran to his mother and buried his head in her stomach. She attempted to soothe him, hoping that the combined noises would not waken Fintan.

‘Shh, shh’, she said. ‘It’s only a bird. Why don’t I make hot chocolate for us all?’ 

She poured some milk into a pan and put it on the stove to heat. The three of them sat around the kitchen table, cradling mugs of hot chocolate. The shadowed kitchen reverted to the domestic and ordinary. There was a slightly transgressive thrill in being awake in the early hours. The children’s heads began to droop, and Janice managed to lift Cormac and take Sasha by the hand. She struggled up the stairs, placed them into their beds and tucked them in. She undressed and slipped into bed beside Fintan, who barely stirred, but cupped her cold breast in his warm hand.

In the morning, the kids were cranky and Fintan was bleary-eyed, claiming that his sleep had been disturbed by nightmares. Cormac had lost a sock and Sasha’s school shirt needed ironing. Janice had hoped to be able to steal a few minutes at her laptop to make notes about the image of the white owl, but this was clearly impossible. Fintan was expecting a delivery of plants from Holland and left early for the garden centre, so Janice had to drive the children to school. 

She hurried on to the garden centre, hoping to pick up a coffee in the café before starting work. But Fintan was overwhelmed because Nick, his assistant had called in sick and he was trying to check the new plants, while a group from the Tidy Towns committee had arrived to pick up daffodil and tulip bulbs to beautify the town square. Janice slipped easily into customer relations mode and dealt with the Tidy Towns group, throwing in some complimentary crocus corms to compensate them for their wait. Then she went into her office to process the invoices from the new delivery. Emer from the café brought her a coffee and she worked through to lunch time. The character of Anoushka, the vampire ballerina was taking shape, somewhere in her subconscious, but her conscious mind was fully occupied with work and domestic planning. She’d forgotten to take mince out of the freezer to make lasagne that night, so she’d need to pick up something in the supermarket later. 

When she got home, she was confronted with the debris of the morning’s chaos. Spilt milk and half-eaten toast had to be cleared and the floor washed. The dishwasher hadn’t been emptied from the night before and someone? Fintan? … had put a used cup in with the clean things. After dealing with all this, she grabbed a sandwich and changed for golf. The smooth greenness of the course usually had the effect of calming her and moving her psyche into a different place. Her full concentration was directed and focused on the smooth movement of muscles and joints and the trajectory of that tiny, white ball. Her golfing partner, Marilyn, was at least a decade older than Janice, but was a formidable and merciless player with a competitive personality. Janice normally found that she could enter into a state of “flow” on the golf course, where all her other concerns were in abeyance and there was only the green distance and the white flight of the ball. But today, she couldn’t seem to shake off the fevered atmosphere of the previous night and the guttural voice of Anoushka muttered somewhere below her consciousness, while the silent wingbeats of the white owl throbbed in her blood. She sliced her first drive, muttered “sorry” and then drove straight into the rough. Marilyn shook her head and tut-tutted. The afternoon was fraught and unsatisfactory. 

She heard her mobile phone ringing in her handbag as she drove homewards and let it go to voicemail. She parked in the driveway and listened to her message. Fintan. He’d collected the kids from school and wondered if they could pick up a pizza for dinner that night. 

‘Brilliant!’ Janice said. The guilt of not providing a nutritious, home-cooked meal was lifted from her. 

When they arrived home, Sasha and Cormac were excited and hyper.

‘I gave in and bought them cokes when we stopped at the pizzeria. Sorry’, he said. Janice shrugged.

During the meal, Cormac suddenly remembered the screech of the owl the night before.

‘Mammy, will that ghost be back tonight?’ he asked.

‘What ghost?’ Fintan said. 

‘There was no ghost’, Janice replied. ‘It was a barn owl. They make this terrible screech. But it’s a beautiful bird, an endangered species. That means there are very few of them. We’re really lucky to have one nearby.’

‘I don’t like it’, Cormac said. His voice quivered. 

‘But we got hot chocolate’, Sasha said. ‘In the middle of the night.’

Fintan said nothing, but his dark eyebrows drew together in a frown. 

Later, she and Fintan worked together to stack the dishwasher and wipe down surfaces. Fintan said he had some work to do and brushed the nape of her neck with his closed lips before going to his home office. Bed and bath time passed without incident and Janice was free to relax for a couple of hours. Normally, she would spend this time on the sofa with Fintan, watching something light and undemanding on the TV, but tonight he didn’t emerge until after eleven, his wiry hair standing on end, making him look like he’d been struck by lightning. He declared himself “knackered” and went straight to bed. 

Janice prepared for nightly transformation into Venetia and attempted to pick up the threads of her vampire ballerina story. This was new territory for her. She hadn’t previously written about either female vampires or about ballet. She decided to start with some googling of female vampires. After twenty minutes of google cul-de-sacs and rabbit holes, her eyes were stinging, and her back ached. Her attention was caught by the name “Lilith” on one site.

‘I’ll just google Lilith before I go up’, she said. Ah, this was more like it. Some texts referred to Lilith as a “screech owl”, and she silently cheered – the perfect image. There was a lot of discussion of ancient texts – Gilgamesh, the Bible and other Hebrew texts – which made her brain ache, but she reminded herself that she was writing fiction. It didn’t need to be scholarly, in fact it shouldn’t be. She imagined a scene where the ballet company finished a performance to loud acclaim, largely caused by the superb artistry of the mysterious new prima ballerina. [Check out the names and plots of a few ballets – maybe tomorrow night]. The company would set out for the pub to celebrate, and the enigmatic Anoushka would decline to join them and would fade away into the darkness. On their walk down the narrow road, a white owl would suddenly appear in the starless sky and swoop low over their heads, emitting a blood-curdling shriek as she went. Right on cue, Venetia heard the screech of the hunting owl, followed by a wail from upstairs and the sound of footsteps and doors opening and closing. She was catapulted roughly back into her Janice persona when she emerged into the kitchen and met Fintan coming downstairs with Cormac in his arms, nestled into Fintan’s neck.

‘Don’t worry. That bird will go away soon’, Fintan said, his large hand cradling the back of Cormac’s head. Janice’s sharp intake of breath was audible in the silent house. She caught Fintan’s eye and shook her head vehemently. She held out her arms and Fintan transferred him over to her.

‘It’s just an owl, a beautiful owl’, she said. ‘Remember that book we read? The lovely pictures of owl babies? The Mammy Owl is out hunting for food for her babies. She wants to scare away dangerous things.’

It was Fintan’s turn to shake his head. Janice ignored him and carried Cormac back to bed. She tucked him in and sat on the bed, stroking his forehead and rubbing his back. He began to settle, and his thumb found its way into his mouth. Janice was loth to disturb him, so decided to leave him be. Future work for an orthodontist, she thought wryly. She crept away and went downstairs. Fintan was still in the kitchen. 

‘Jaysus, what are you trying to do?’ he glowered. ‘The child is terrified. I can’t take any more of this middle of the night carry on.’ 

Janice replied in a fierce whisper. ‘What are you saying? You think I brought the owl here?’

Fintan turned his back on her and began to wipe down the already-clean countertop. He didn’t reply.

Janice’s anger threatened to boil over. She managed to keep her voice low.

‘Are you somehow blaming all this on my writing?’

‘Do you have to do it at such an ungodly hour?’

‘What does that have to do with Cormac being frightened by an owl?’

‘He knows people are up. The house is not at rest. It’s too warm for one thing with the heat down here still on. I can tell when there’s activity. So can he.’

‘Bullshit’, Her voice threatened to rise, but she somehow managed to rein it back to a whisper. ‘He’s just going through a bad patch. Sasha had night terrors for a while at that age and there wasn’t any owl around.’ 

‘No, that’s my point. You were writing then. It was around the time your first book came out.’

‘You want me to give up writing?’

‘Can you not do it at a more normal hour?’

‘What would you like me to give up so I could fit writing into my day? Cooking? Cleaning?  The children? The garden centre?’

He reacted as though this was a real question, rather than a rhetorical flourish.

‘I don’t know. But something’s got to give. Maybe golf?’

‘So you want me to give up my one recreation, my one source of physical fitness? It’s that or my creative life, is that what you’re suggesting?’

‘Listen to yourself – creative life! I know it sells fairly well, but it’s hardly Nobel prize winning stuff.’

Janice’s legs gave way, and she sat down at the table and put her face in her hands. Fintan filled a pint glass with water from the tap and left the room. Janice remained sitting at the table until her breathing slowed towards normal. Her eyes were dry. Venetia took her coat from the peg in the hallway and stepped out thorough the back door. It was a calm, dry night without moon or stars. The darkness pressed itself against her head. She groped her way to the gate and walked out on the road towards the town. A white shape materialised out of the darkness and swooped low overhead. The owl passed silently on her way.