The Pre-War House and Other Stories

The Machines

There is a factory behind Christine’s house going twenty-four hours a day. In the middle of the night, when she is awake in the otherwise silent house, she can hear the rhythmic clanking of the machines. At other times, she might think that she can’t hear them, but this is only because she is getting used to it. At the back of everything, the noise is still there; it is constant.

She worked in the factory when she was eighteen, in between school and university. There were three shifts a day, and it was not uncommon to work a double. All summer, she heard the machines in her sleep. She still dreams about the factory sometimes.

The machines were alarming — these rows of huge steel contraptions with parts banging up and down and other bits zipping left and right, this going underneath that, and that slamming down. Some sections of the production line were less clankingly noisy but perhaps all the more disquieting, components shooting smoothly down and then up again, leaving behind perfect holes. It was one of these machines which once took a woman’s fingers off. So you had to be careful.

Her dad used to work there as well, and when he retired he found the world too quiet and still. Her parents lived where they had always lived, some miles out of town, just where the farms started. Sometimes you could only hear birds, maybe something in the distance, the buzz of a lawnmower, the bleating of sheep. The sheep made a racket during lambing, and again when the lambs were taken away a few months later. Their bleating then was like the sounding of klaxons. Afterwards, there was hush.

Even the machines in the house, said her father to her mother without having to raise his voice above the sound of the vacuum cleaner, made very little noise. He helped with the housework, loading the dishwasher and the washing machine and setting both running at the same time, but still there was only a gentle background hum which did not even necessitate turning up Classic FM. When it was too quiet, he talked to himself, or to his mother, who was no longer alive. He rediscovered heavy metal, getting out all his old tapes, and he got into Robot Wars, which filled the silence.

He died while Christine was at university, knocked down by rush-hour traffic in the nearest town. She got the train home on a Sunday and her mother picked her up from the station. The town centre, as they drove through it, was deserted. Christine put the radio on.

She laid claim to her dad’s tapes. She found a Walkman and listened to her dad’s heavy metal in bed and on the train on the return journey.

After university, she moved back home and got a job in a call centre. She started dating someone who worked in the cubicle next to hers. They ate their lunch together and talked about going to China before everything changed, or getting a couple of round-the-world tickets and just taking off, escaping. Instead, they got married and got a mortgage on a small house on the outskirts of town.

The only grass near this house is at the cemetery. They have a concrete backyard, and empty pots in which Christine might grow tomatoes. The front door opens right onto the street. The traffic is nonstop during the day, dirtying the brickwork and the white plastic door and the front windows, which Christine has to keep closed so that the net curtains don’t get filthy. It is a far cry from the peace of her childhood home.

Christine had always been a good sleeper, but after she got pregnant she began to wake in the middle of the night for no apparent reason, or with cramps in her legs, or with hunger pangs, cravings, at three or four or five o’clock in the morning. She would have to get up and go down to the kitchen, through whose window she could see the factory which never slept. People had all sorts of advice for remedying the insomnia and the cramps — warm baths, milk with honey, yoga — but at the same time, people were inclined to say, ‘Get used to it. You’ll never again sleep the way you used to.’

Even so, when the baby was born, the sleep deprivation came as a shock. He wanted her breast almost constantly and woke every two hours during the night until four or five in the morning when he was ready to get up. This was in the winter, when it was still dark, with hours of darkness to come. She tried taking him into her bed but he did not like it. She tried walking around with him, singing to him, rocking him, all of which he liked but he did not go back to sleep. So then she put a light on, made a cup of tea and half-listened to the World Service programmes which come on before the shipping forecast. But even after a cup of tea, and even with the radio on, her eyes kept closing. Reading to him, she would blink and slip into sleep, having micro-dreams between one sentence and the next.

In the spring, she found that she was waking to that beautiful blue the still-starry sky turns just before dawn. By the end of May and well into July, the sun had already risen when the baby got her up.

After feeding him, she began to take him out in the pram, wheeling him along the canal towpath until the sound of the factory’s midnight to eight am shift was almost too far away to hear. On the road, the first buses went past, empty. She did not go anywhere in particular — the park did not open until seven and none of the cafés opened before eight — but she enjoyed the walk and the fresh air.

When the summer came to an end, she was once again waking up in the dark. But she began to appreciate the fact that she had not missed the sunrise, and that she could feed the baby and then dawn would arrive and she still had time to walk somewhere and see the sun come up.

She had a few favourite places. Sometimes she went no further than the canal, stopping on the bridge — putting the brakes on the pram — and sitting on the wall to watch the dingy water’s transformation at sunrise. Sometimes she wheeled him up to the monument and sat on its steps. But this morning, she headed for the new supermarket. Overlooked on one side by old office blocks, the area itself was unattractive, but on a clear day there was a good view to the east.

The twenty-four-hour supermarket looked abandoned when she went in. There was no one on the tills. When she got further into the store, she saw a few people stacking the shelves. She found herself tailed by a security guard, who kept an eye on her the whole time she was in there. She picked up a pack of nappies and then went to the fridge and got herself a drink, an iced coffee to keep herself awake. The security guard watched her even while she was paying for her things at the self-service checkout. When she put the nappies under the pram she felt guilty, as if she were doing something wrong, stashing these goods and wheeling them out of his shop.

Back outside, she parked the pram beside a bench and sat down with her coffee. She could not hear the factories now. She wanted to listen to one of her dad’s old heavy metal compilations — she had the Walkman in her bag with a tape already inside it. Digging out the headphones and putting them on, she pressed ‘play’ and waited for the sun to rise.

She opens her eyes. There is no sound coming from her headphones. Lifting her chin from her chest, she looks at the Walkman and sees that the tape has played out. It was probably the music ending, the silence and then the Walkman switching itself off, which disturbed her.

She turns to look at the baby, looking at the place where the baby should be. There is nothing there but slabs. She turns to look at the other side of the bench even though she knows she did not put the pram there. She stands. Her bag drops quietly to the floor and the plug is pulled from the Walkman so that the headphones remain on her head but with nothing at the end of the dangling lead.

When the woman in the factory lost her fingers, somebody stopped the machines. The production line came to a halt but there was all this yelling which filled the silence, and there was a frenzy of activity, people all trying to do something which would help. Christine remembers someone bringing lumps of ice for the woman’s hand, for the woman’s fingers.

But more than the accident and all the hysteria which followed it, what she mostly remembers is how it was afterwards, when the woman had been taken away and all the shouting and screaming had stopped and everyone was beginning to go back to whatever they had been doing before.