Basement Lullaby

The baby monitor came from the hospice shop on Albert Street for ten pounds. The transmitter was shaped like an owl, with a green light in its chest, and the parent unit clipped onto a belt or slid into a pocket. The woman at the till said it had hardly been used. I believed her, because the plastic still smelled of the box.

We’d moved into the house on Cutler Street in August, when Rosie was four months old and the asking price had dropped twice. It was a narrow end terrace with a cellar the estate agent called a basement, as if a better word would make it drier. Dan worked nights at the distribution centre. Most nights it was just me and Rosie, with the owl keeping watch over her cot.

The parent unit had a switch on the side marked A and B. I never thought about it until the night it slid to B in my dressing gown pocket. I was on the landing with a cold cup of tea when I heard it. A woman was humming close to the microphone, the way you hum when your mouth is against a baby’s head. Underneath it was the small wet sound of a baby settling. The tune went up and came down again and never quite resolved.

I checked Rosie. She was asleep on her back with her arms thrown over her head, and the owl’s light was green. I switched to A and got her breathing, slow and ticking. On B, the humming carried on. A neighbour’s monitor, I decided. Same model, same frequency, and terraces have thin walls.

I went to bed and let it play for a while because it was a nice sound and I was lonely, and it was better than the silence. The house on the other side was empty, though. It had been empty since before we moved in, with a repossession notice going green in the front window.

By the end of the week B came through clearer than A. I could hear the creak of a chair rocking and the woman swallowing between verses. On Friday she stopped humming and sang words, very low, and I sat down on the bathroom floor with the unit in both hands. Hush now, little magpie, the dark is only deep. The stairs go down to Mummy, and Mummy doesn’t sleep. I wrote that. I made it up at three in the morning in the second week after Rosie was born, walking circles round the kitchen of our old flat in a haze. I had never sung it in front of anyone, including Dan, because the second line came out strange and I was embarrassed by it. Nobody else knew it existed.

Then the woman on B said, “There’s my Rosie,” and I knew the voice. People say you don’t recognise your own voice on a recording. You do, though. You hear it and something in your stomach goes cold, because that is how you sound to everyone else. I didn’t sleep.

At half six Dan came in smelling of cardboard and diesel, and I played it to him. By then B was only static, a long grey hiss. He listened for a minute, kissed my hair and said I should try to nap while Rosie did.

That afternoon I went down to the cellar. The door is under the stairs and the light switch has never worked. There are nine wooden steps, and the fourth gives under your weight with a sound like a knuckle cracking. At the bottom the floor is brick, with an old coal chute bricked over in the corner and a damp smell that belongs to a place that has never once been warm. I took my phone torch and left Rosie strapped into her bouncer at the top, where I could see her.

The owl was in the far corner, on the floor. It was a second owl, the same model, with the same chip in the paint on its beak where ours was chipped. Its light was green. The cable ran along the bricks and disappeared into the wall, low down, at a spot where there was no socket and never had been one. I pulled it. It slid out of the wall with a little dust and nothing on the end, and the light stayed green. Beside it was a pale rectangle on the brick where the dust lay thinner, about the size of a cot. I left the owl where it was. I couldn’t have told you why. Moving it felt like taking a side.

That night I listened to B with the volume right down, holding the unit against my ear like a shell. The hiss ran for a long time. Then I heard the fourth step creak, and Rosie grizzling the particular complaint she makes when she’s been woken and carried, and my own voice saying, “Shh, shh, it’s cooler down here.” I was upstairs in bed. Rosie was asleep across the landing. I checked on her twice. On channel B the chair started rocking. I don’t own a rocking chair.

After that it came every night, and it wasn’t happening now. I don’t know how else to put it. It was a night that hadn’t happened yet, playing a little further each time, the way a song you’re learning comes back longer every time you practise. I sang the magpie song on that recording while Rosie went quiet, and then very quiet, and the chair creaked on for what felt like hours.

Then I heard a key in a lock somewhere far above, and the front door, and Dan calling my name. He called it the normal way first, the way he’d ask where the remote had gone. Then he called from Rosie’s room, and his voice changed. Down in the cellar on channel B, I kept singing. I sang right through him shouting at the top of the stairs and his fists on the cellar door. I never answered him once. The chair kept rocking after the banging stopped. I took the owl from the cellar and pushed it into the wheelie bin under a bag of nappies.

The next morning it was back in its corner with its light on. So I smashed the parent unit with the rolling pin on the kitchen floor until the circuit board was in pieces, and I dropped the pieces into three different bins on three different streets. Then I asked Dan to fit a bolt on the outside of the cellar door. I told him it was for the damp. He fitted it that Sunday and didn’t ask how a bolt would help with damp.

For nine days, nothing happened. I want to be honest about those nine days. I was relieved, and I was also listening. I listened in the shower and while the kettle boiled. Whenever the house went quiet I held still and waited for the hiss to start somewhere inside it. On the tenth night I woke up cold. I was sitting with my back against something hard and my bare feet on something harder, and Rosie was on my chest, warm and heavy and asleep. I could smell brick. I was humming. I stopped as soon as I noticed, and the tune kept going for a second without me, somewhere in the dark below, before it stopped too. I was on the fourth step.

Above me the cellar door stood open. The bolt bracket was off, and Dan’s screwdriver lay on the top stair beside its four screws, set out in a neat row. I don’t remember taking them out. I don’t remember the step creaking, though it must have, because it always does. I carried Rosie upstairs and sat at the kitchen table until it was light. From the top of the cellar stairs I could still see the owl’s green light in the corner. Dan is on nights all this week. He gets back on Friday at half six and lets himself in with his key, because he doesn’t like to ring the bell and wake the baby.

Today is Wednesday. I’ve put the bolt back on and locked the screwdriver in the car. I’ve taped a note to the inside of the cellar door at eye level, where I’ll see it if I go down in my sleep. It says DON’T SING. I haven’t told Dan any of this. I keep thinking about how quiet channel B went after he stopped calling, and how the chair kept rocking. Right at the end, just before the static came back, someone hummed the first line of the magpie song, low and patient, waiting for someone to come in with the second. Then Dan sang the second line back. He sang it perfectly, every word, a song I have never once sung in front of him...