Often, in the middle of the night, at two or three in the morning, as a child inside the white walls of my home at 42 New Road Dudley, I’d knock on my elder sister's bedroom door.
I'd enter slowly into her room, waking her up from her slumber, so that she could repeatedly hit me on my back to bring up the fluid which had settled on my lungs during the night.
The more times I'd wake her, in the space of one night, the firmer and more determined the pats on my back would become. Less therapeutic and more of an aggressive deterrent to the irritant who called in the night and stole her sleep.
I'd return to my room, guilt-laden, in the still wee small hours of those early mornings, and lay awake. Listening to the world outside, that revealed itself in the sound of the wind blowing through the trees, and in the sounds of occasional cars that faded into the night to reveal the insect-like hum of electricity. Heard when the day falls silent during that time when most succumb to sleep and forget that they are alive.
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