“Benny, I think we need to finish the story now and go to sleep.”
“No.”
“Benny, it’s time to put out the light.”
“No. No.”
“Benny. You’ve told us a beautiful story, but it’s time for sleep
now.”
“But, Daddy!”
“No buts, Benny.”
“But daddy, we’re only up to the ending.”

 

We’re late to bed because it’s a Friday night at the end of January and the summer holidays here in Australia are almost over and the peach tree out back is so heavy with fruit that the branches have bowed to the ground and we are wondering if the branches will snap before their load ripens. The passionfruit are ripe and the plums are perfect: the color of night on the outside and of the sunset on the inside. Benny (now four and a half) wants to lead a pirate expedition again; he calls himself Captain Orders, which means Jacob (two and a half) and Clare (still two minutes younger than Jacob) have to do what he says, although Clare wants to take off her clothes and climb the peach tree in the nude and Jacob has gone off to find his telescope, perhaps to check on what’s up in the tree. There’s no reason in the world to go inside except that the longer we put it off, the harder it gets. The students will be back at school on Monday after the long break, and I have to teach a novel I haven’t read yet, so I want the kids in bed. But I also don’t want this moment to end. I am wishing the time away at the same time as hoping it will last forever.

It’s hard work to conjure sleep when the kids’ imaginations are in flood. We manage to find room for them in the bath around a flotilla of pirate ships. Clare decides to give her Dorothy the Dinosaur a bath but then refuses to go to bed without her, so Dorothy has to be wrapped in three diapers so that she won’t soak the bed and this means finding pink safety pins, as nothing else will be acceptable in Clare’s pink princess bed. Two feet away, Jacob won’t go to bed without a treasure map and one of his pirate books. He wants the little book but we can’t find it, so he agrees to have the big one with pop-up pictures.

In the bunk on top of Jacob, Benny is worried. He’s a concentrated version of his old man. I see my own anxiety in my little boy and worry about it. Tomorrow Benny is having a friend stay the night, the first time he has hosted a sleepover. It is a huge thing in his life. For the umpteenth time, we go through the arrangements. Clare will be coming into our room, which we have made to sound like a treat for her despite the fact she always ends up there at some time anyway. She will start the night tomorrow in our room in a special makeshift princess bed, every detail of which she has personally approved, including which side of the pillow will be facing upward, leaving us with the question of where she will go on her nocturnal wanderings when she hasn’t got us as a destination. In the meantime, Benny has rung his friend Bobby to check what pajamas he will be bringing (Lightning McQueen) and to make sure he remembers his toothbrush (Buzz Lightyear) and swimming costume (which has a surfing dog on it). Bobby will be sleeping in Clare’s bed and Benny needs reassurance once again that every trace of princess habitation will be expunged to be replaced by his old Buzz Lightyear pillow case, which won’t match Bobby’s pajamas but will at least match his toothbrush, which, if he wants to, Bobby can put on the window sill.

“How does a star fall softly?” asks Clare out of nowhere.

“That’s a good question,” replies Benny in an adult voice. “It means it lands on soft grass or soft weeds or a pillow someone has put out for it.”

Clare is satisfied with this.

It’s a hot night. Benny wants a fan. Jacob doesn’t. Clare just wants to take off her clothes again and get back up in the peach tree. We whisper to Benny that we will bring in the fan when Jacob has fallen asleep. He likes this idea; it’s a conspiracy. We read Peter Pan’s Snow Adventure, a chastening tale of Captain Hook on ice. Then I tell a made-up story about Captain Hook, Cowboy Benny, and the Pink Princess in which Hook takes his ship up a long river to visit first a castle where he puts up a hook for the princess to hang her gown and then a wild west saloon where he puts up a hook for cowboy Benny to hang his hat when he goes to sleep, which, the storyteller prompts, should be right about now.

Mummy kisses good night. Daddy brings in his sitting chair from the kitchen. The lights go out.

Jacob starts crying.

Benny starts calling for Mummy. There is something else he needs to know about Bobby’s sleeping arrangements for tomorrow.

Clare has tossed Dorothy out of the princess bed for being wet.

Now both boys are crying.

Clare rotates through 180 degrees, then back the other way through 90, then around again another 270. This is how she searches for sleep, turning and turning on the mattress like a ballet dancer until she nods off. The noise of the boys in the room ebbs and flows like waves on the beach; it builds to a crescendo then softens then comes rushing back over the sand. I try not to get cranky and tell them to be quiet because I’m going to write this in a book and I want them to read it later and think I was a gentle daddy who never lost his patience, least of all at ten o’clock when he has a novel to read for school. So I sit there, tense and rigid, as the noise bangs about my head.

Finally, the room is quiet, and I decide that reading the novel can wait. If need be, I can just put a flutter of yellow Post-it notes in it to show that I’m a world expert on the subject and go on the offensive, demanding to know why the students haven’t read it over the holidays.

The Cistercian monk Thomas Merton wrote, “The night, O My Lord, is a time of freedom.”

I remember when I was four and a half myself, trying to find sleep on hot nights. After she turned out the big light, Mum would spray the room with insecticide, which wafted like incense as my brother and I hid beneath the sheets, the last ritual of day. Mum said good night and muttered a blessing for us and a curse on all mosquitoes. When she was gone, I parted my pillow down the middle so my guardian angel could have half. Then I lay still and watched the shadows play over the ceiling until I summoned the courage to ask my angel if we could swap because her side of the bed was cooler. My guardian angel was always a girl, and she always obliged. I fell asleep listening to Mum and Dad say the rosary on the other side of the wall, starting in tired and cranky voices but gradually slowing to a gentle rhythm. Years later, I became superior to this kind of prayer and inwardly scoffed at it, but I have come around in my older age. I can see now that Mum and Dad’s rosary was a kind of lovemaking and that they shared their intimate space with God. My kids have given me a second bite at innocence, and I owe them for that. I gave up on guardian angels as well for a while because I thought I was smart, but then we had three children of our own and I realized how much they need and accept friends of all kinds, angels included. For the freedom to believe without answers, I can thank the nights I have shared with little people and the big Whoever who found me there and reassured me even when I felt hopeless to the task of being a father. Merton says, “You, Who sleep in my breast, are not met with words.”

A room filled with our three sleeping children is such a gift that I can’t move. I mutter again the prayers that have already been answered as, little by little, the noises beyond the room come out of their hiding places. I can hear the fridge humming to itself in the kitchen and the washing machine clunk through another cycle as it deals with the clothes Clare threw out of the peach tree. Outside, a motorbike takes the neighbour off to work and the buses come back to roost in the depot opposite our gate. Gradually, the traffic on the freeway becomes audible and the train line four blocks away also comes back into earshot. Even farther away, noises from the container terminal of the port at the end of our street seep into the room; it sounds like the sugar boat is leaving the dock. We got to know our city better on the day we realized that, most weeks, a shipload of sugar weighs anchor at the bottom of the street next to ours. A horn announces that the town is ready for another sugar hit. There is always something more to know, so I try to stop thinking before thinking robs me of yet another present moment. Finally, I get to hear the noise from farther away than anything. I can hear my heart. It says that it’s home. It says that it wants to sleep.