The Knock After the Kids Are Asleep

The younger one wouldn’t settle. Through the wall I could hear him turning over, the bed creaking, and I kept looking at the clock above the desk: ten past ten. The rule we live by is five years old. Once the children are down, we have twenty minutes. The study door is latched, and three knocks on it mean “both asleep”. If we don’t make it, we don’t make it, and in the morning nobody brings it up. Twenty minutes isn’t a random number: for the first twenty the younger one sleeps like a stone, after that any sound can wake him.

I sat at the laptop answering work emails and waiting for the knock. My husband was in the children’s room reading the little one chapter three of the dragon book. His voice came through the wall, even, pausing in the right places; I recognised the part where the dragon falls asleep in its cave. The older one is twelve and had been asleep for ages.

The key to the cage was in the top drawer of the desk, under a stack of bills. I knew I wouldn’t open the drawer tonight. Twenty minutes is far too little for that, and he knew it too when he took the book in to the children.

At twenty-five to eleven the voice behind the wall stopped. The children’s door closed, and I know that sound: he lets the handle go slowly so it doesn’t click. Footsteps down the hall. Three knocks.

“Come in.”

Twenty minutes

He came in, shut the door and turned the latch. Only the desk lamp was on. He knelt to the left of my chair, where the carpet is worn through to the backing. Five years of evenings he has knelt in the same spot, and the carpet remembers it better than I do.

I didn’t turn to him straight away. I finished the email, pressed send. Then I put my hand on the back of his neck and pressed: five seconds, no more. He lowered his head to my knee and went still.

“Show me.”

He undid his jeans without getting up and pushed them down to his thighs. Cage in place, lock in place. I took the lock between my fingers and turned it, then checked how the ring was sitting. He drew a breath through his teeth: everything in there was tight after an evening of reading aloud about a dragon while thinking about this door. I held the steel in my palm, warm from him, and let go.

“Do yourself up. Here.”

I swung the chair round to face him, lifted the hem of my house dress and opened my knees. He knew what to do. On these evenings his tongue is slow and careful, unhurried, because twenty minutes is plenty if you don’t rush and nothing at all if you start scrambling. I laid my hand on his head, not guiding, just resting there, and looked past him at the clock. Quarter to eleven. Silence behind the wall.

I came quietly, with the back of my hand pressed to my mouth. That, too, is a five-year-old habit: the walls in this flat are thin and the children are asleep. He didn’t lift his head until I let go of his neck. Then he sat back on his heels and looked up at me, and I could see from his face that those twenty minutes had been no worse for him than for me.

A knock that wasn’t in the rules

He was still on his knees, I was still sitting with my hem up, when someone knocked on the study door. Once. Softly, at the height of the handle.

“Mum?”

The younger one. He’s seven. We both froze. Then I pulled my hem down, and he did up his jeans in one movement and got to his feet faster than he has in five years. Ran a hand through his hair. I looked at him: face red, mouth wet. He understood without a word, wiped his mouth on his sleeve and moved over to the bookshelf, his back to the door.

“One second, sweetheart,” I said in my ordinary voice, turned the latch and opened it.

He stood there in his pyjamas, squinting at the lamp.

“I had a dream.”

“Daddy will take you back. Go on.”

My husband took him by the hand and led him to the children’s room. His voice was the same as half an hour earlier, when he was reading about the dragon. I shut the door and sat down in the chair. The clock said five to eleven. By the rule, our twenty minutes were up.

I sat and listened to him putting the little one down a second time: the creak of the bed, a quiet “sleep now”, then footsteps in the hall. He didn’t knock. He knew the rule and walked past the study to the kitchen, and I heard the water go on: he had started on the dinner dishes. It was by the rule, and it made me feel worse than if he had broken it.

I wanted to call him back. I didn’t. A rule holds not on the evenings when everything goes smoothly but on the ones when you want to stretch it by five minutes. Only I know how many of those five minutes we would have racked up by now.

I went out to the kitchen. He stood at the sink with his back to me, sleeves rolled up. I came up and touched his wrist twice, our sign for “that’s all for tonight”. Then I laid my palm between his shoulder blades and held it there. He didn’t turn round, only bowed his head, and I saw that his ears were still red.

“Dry them properly,” I said, about the plates, and went to bed.

Morning

At seven I was hunting for the older one’s second sock, my husband was packing the little one’s school bag, and the little one was telling us his dream: a dragon, but not the one from the book. Nobody asked why the study door had been shut in the night. For them it is shut every evening, as routinely as the hall light goes off.

My husband was zipping up the little one’s jacket and looked up at me. I knocked three times on the table with my knuckles, softly. He dropped his eyes to the zip, and I watched his ears go red.

“What’s that, Mum?” the older one asked.

“Checking the table’s solid.”

That evening the younger one fell asleep first time. The three knocks came at five past ten. I didn’t count twenty minutes. The drawer with the key, I opened.

• Agree the time in advance: so many minutes after the children are asleep. If you don’t make it, move it to tomorrow; don’t steal from their sleep.
• One signal for “yes” and one for “no”, no words. A knock, a touch on the wrist: something only two people can see.
• A door with a latch. A child should have to knock, not walk in.
• If you’re interrupted, stop. Whoever goes to the child is the one with the ordinary voice and the dry face.
• In the morning, not a hint. Children don’t remember a closed door; they remember your strange face at breakfast.