Two Sugars

I meet him by the bins, which is not romantic, and I want that on the record. It is the next afternoon. I have got Joel in the sling and a bag of nappies in one hand and the actual rubbish in the other, and I am doing the thing where you try to open the bin store door with your elbow, when the door opens from the inside and there is a man. He is about my age, maybe a bit older. Tired around the eyes in a way I recognise instantly, because I have the same eyes, I see them in the mirror every morning. He has got a recycling box balanced on his hip and he is wearing a jumper that has been washed too many times, and when he sees me he goes still for a second, and then he says: "You're upstairs." "I'm upstairs," I say. "With the light," he says. And then he looks like he wishes he had not said it, like it has come out sounding stranger than it did in his head, and honestly I know that feeling so well that it makes me like him immediately, before I have decided anything else about him at all. "Cara," I say. "And this is Joel, who is the reason for the light." "Sam." He shifts the recycling box. "I'm the reason for mine. I do nights. Call centre, the medical one, people ring up at three in the morning very frightened about things that are usually fine, and I tell them they are usually fine." He looks at Joel, who is staring at him with the flat unimpressed expression babies do. "I didn't mean to — with the lamp. I saw your light and I'd had a rough shift and it just felt like. I don't know. Like knocking on a wall." "It felt like knocking on a wall from this side too," I say. We stand there by the bins. It is not romantic. The bin store smells like a bin store. But there is something happening that I have not felt in a long time, which is the feeling of two tired people recognising each other, and not having to explain the tiredness, because the other person already has it. "I keep meaning to go to bed earlier," Sam says. "On my nights off. And then it gets to three a.m. and I'm just — awake. My body's forgotten how to do the other thing." "Mine too. Although mine has a reason." I jog Joel a bit, automatically. "He's four months. The book says it gets better. The book has said it gets better for four months." "Burn the book." "I'm saving it. For the heating's sake." Sam laughs, properly, and it changes his face, and I notice it changing his face, and I notice myself noticing, and I think: oh. Right. So that is where this is. Good to know. Filed. Joel chooses that moment to be sick down my shoulder, which is the universe's way of keeping me humble, and Sam does not flinch or step back or do the face. He just says, "Hang on," and reaches into his recycling box and somehow produces a packet of tissues, like a man who has learned the hard way that the world requires tissues, and holds them out. "Why do you have tissues in your recycling," I ask, wiping my shoulder. "I have tissues everywhere. Nights make you into a person who has tissues everywhere." He pauses. "I make a flask of tea when I get in. Before bed. Two sugars, I know, I know. If you're — if Joel's got you up anyway, around three. I'm not saying knock. I'm saying. The lamp's a hello. It can carry on being a hello." I look at this tired man holding a recycling box, who works nights telling frightened strangers that things are usually fine, and who keeps tissues everywhere, and who has just, very carefully, not asked me for anything at all. He has only offered. He has left every single door for me to open or not open. "Two sugars," I say. "Noted." And I take Joel back upstairs, and I do not flick my light that night, because I fall asleep too early for once — but the next night I am up at ten past three with the kettle noise on my shoulder, and I look down, and the warm gold light is on, and after a moment, feeling like an idiot, feeling about nineteen, I reach over and flick my lamp. On. Off. On. His goes on, off, on. It is not much. It is the smallest thing in the world, two lamps and a baby and a bin store. But it is the first new thing in my life in a year that is just mine, that is not work and is not Joel, and I lie back down in the cold smiling at the ceiling like the tired fool I apparently now am.