The Light Downstairs

It is ten past three in the morning and I am awake, which is not news, because I am always awake at ten past three in the morning. That is just my life now. Three a.m. used to be a thing that happened to other people, and now it belongs to me and a baby called Joel who is currently making a noise like a small angry kettle. I get him up. I get him fed. This part I can do with my eyes shut and most nights basically do. The flat is cold because the heating clicks off at eleven and there is no point fighting it. I have Joel against my shoulder and I am doing the slow walk, the one every tired parent in the world knows, the kitchen to the window and back, kitchen to the window and back. And that is when I see the light downstairs. I should explain about the flats. There are four of them in this building, which used to be a house before somebody decided it could be money instead. I am on the first floor. My window looks out over the bin store, which is exactly as glamorous as it sounds. And the flat below mine has been empty for two months, since old Mr. Adeyemi went to live with his daughter, and the agency stuck a board up and that was that. Except tonight there is a light on down there. A warm one, a lamp, not the big light. It spills out onto the little bit of concrete by the bins and just sits there, gold on the grey. Someone has moved in. Someone is awake at ten past three in the morning, same as me. I stand at my window with Joel heavy and warm against me, and I look at that light, and I have a feeling I can only describe as the opposite of lonely, which is not the same as not lonely, if that makes sense. It is just nice to know the building has another person awake in it. For two months it has only been me and the kettle noise and the bins. Joel finishes and does his enormous burp, the one that always seems too big for him, and goes loose and floppy the way they do, and I keep standing there. I do not put him down straight away. Sometimes I do not, even when I could. Sometimes I just stand at the window holding my whole entire life against my shoulder and look at the dark, and I let myself have the thirty seconds. The light downstairs goes off. Then, a second later, it comes back on. Then off again. Then on. It takes me an embarrassingly long time to understand that whoever is down there has seen my light too, and is saying hello with theirs. I am twenty-nine years old. I have a baby and a job on the night rota at the hospital and a flat that smells of damp in the hallway no matter what I do, and I have not, if I am honest, had a single thing happen to me in about a year that was not either work or Joel. And now there is a stranger downstairs flicking a lamp on and off at me like we are two kids with torches. I do not have a free hand. I have a baby on one shoulder and the other hand is holding him there. So I do the only thing I can do. I lean my forehead against the cold glass, and I sort of nod down at the light, a stupid little nod that nobody could possibly see in the dark. The light flicks once more. On. Off. On, and stays on. I go and put Joel down in his cot. He goes down without a fight, which is rare enough that I should be grateful and instead I am almost annoyed, because I am suddenly not tired in the way I was ten minutes ago. I am awake in a different way. A way I had genuinely forgotten was one of the options. I lie in my bed in the cold and I think: tomorrow I am going to find out who lives downstairs. And then I think: or I am being completely ridiculous, and it is a man who works nights too, or a student, or somebody perfectly ordinary, and the lamp thing was nothing, and I have built an entire feeling out of a draught moving a curtain. But I do not believe that, even as I think it. You do not flick a lamp three separate times by accident. That was a hello. That was a person, awake at the worst hour of the night, the same as me, deciding to be slightly less alone about it. I fall asleep before I mean to. The last thing I remember thinking is that I never even saw their face, and that for some reason that does not feel like it matters yet.