The light at two in the morning

There is a house I pass on the walk back from the harbour, the last house before the road gives up and turns into a track, and for three nights running last week there was a light on in an upstairs room at an hour when no light has any business being on.

I should explain that I notice this sort of thing the way other people notice their own name said across a room. It is an occupational condition. I have spent sixteen books training myself to see the one detail that is slightly wrong, and the trouble with training yourself to see it is that you cannot then unsee it in your own street.

So. A light, in a room that is dark every other night of the year, coming on at around two and gone again before the sky had changed. I know the house, in the loose way you know your neighbours in a small town, which is to say I know who lives there: an elderly man I would have said kept farmer's hours and had done since long before I arrived. A light at two in the morning did not fit the man I thought I knew, and a detail that does not fit is, professionally speaking, the whole of my livelihood.

By the second night I had a story. I am not proud of this. The story had a visitor in it, and a reason the visitor came only after dark, and it was a good story, tidy and quietly awful, exactly the kind I would happily sell you for the price of a paperback. By the third night the story had grown a second chapter. I walked past slowly. I may have walked past twice.

On the fourth day I met the man himself at the stall by the jetty, buying bread, entirely alive and wholly untroubled, and because I am incapable of leaving a loose thread I asked him, in the roundabout way you ask a thing you have no real right to ask, whether he had been sleeping badly.

He had a new grandson, he said. Three weeks old, staying in the house with his parents while they found their feet. The light at two was the light you put on for a bottle, and the reason it went off before dawn was that, with a bit of luck, the baby went back down. He told me all this with the particular worn out joy of a man who has been up at two in the morning for the best possible reason, and he seemed faintly amused that anyone had noticed at all.

I walked home taking my elaborate, awful little story apart, chapter by chapter, and putting nothing in its place, because nothing needed to be in its place. A light. A baby. A grandfather learning the old shift over again.

Here is the thing I keep, though, and the reason I am telling you at all. The story I built was better than the truth, more shapely, more satisfying, and completely false, and it took me three nights to build and one honest question to pull down. That is my whole trade in miniature. A small town does keep exactly one secret too many, but the secret is almost never the one you have so carefully imagined, and the light on at two is, far more often than we storytellers would prefer, simply someone doing the loving, tiring, unremarkable work the rest of the street is sleeping through.

Lit windows in the small hours are the territory of The Night Shift Almanac, Vol. 3: ten stories from the care shift, when a second city stays awake to look after the first.