(originally published as “Die Stille zwischen den Tagen” in the Swiss newspaper NZZ.
One late summer’s night in the mid-1990s, unable to sleep, I climbed out of the attic window of the house I was then living in, scrambled up onto the flat dormer roof, and stood looking out across the city of Bradford, West Yorkshire. The air was humid and slow, and the sounds of the night-time drifted up to me in shimmering waves; music from cars and nightclubs and bedroom windows, traffic, footsteps, shrieking, laughter, breaking glass, long moments of quietness punctuated by sirens and sudden shouts. It was late – it was closer to morning than to the day before – but there still seemed to be a lot going on.
That attic room was a good place for an embryonic writer; there was always a lot going on outside. It was a street of once-grand houses near the university which were now occupied by students, immigrant families, transient loners and alcoholics, and every day seemed to bring some drama with it. By day, the street was filled with children, dodging cars to play football and cricket, or to throw stones at their neighbours. By night, drunks careered up and down, singing, and vandalising cars, and arguing in very public detail. And from the back of the house, the attic looked out over the city, which spread down through the bowl-shaped valley below and up over the hills beyond; a seemingly endless landscape of terraced houses, towerblocks, offices, factories, shops, pubs, warehouses, derelict textile mills, museums and nightclubs and churches and mosques, a crowded and sprawling terrain which heaved and flashed with life as it covered the hills and disappeared over the horizon.
For a long time, I had felt alienated by this urban landscape; I had grown up in a small market town in East Anglia, and I missed the open spaces, the flat land, the ability to wander from my front door to the woods and the streams of the countryside close at hand. I resented the noise and the enforced hurry of urban life, the litter, the disregard, the fear of violence. But that night, standing on the roof of my house and hearing the symphony of the city by night, I fell in love. I decided to write a novel about this love, and I decided that it would begin here, in the brief moment of quiet before the dawn, as a city which has never really gone to sleep finds that it is time, already, to wake.
“If you listen, you can hear it”, I began, many years later. “The city, it sings. If you stand quietly, at the foot of a garden, in the middle of a street, on the roof of a house…”
I knew that I wanted to write about this one street – or at least one very much like it – but I also knew that I wanted to set the street in its context, as one of an almost infinite number of others. And so I started with this moment, this image in my memory of standing on the roof and looking out across the city, and I allowed the image to take flight, to swoop around the dark night, to circle out and back again to this one quiet street. I wrote about noise; the traffic, the factories working night-shifts, burglar alarms and police sirens, arguments and fights. And I wrote about silence; empty dancefloors, buses in the depot, night-fishermen down on the canal. I invented the conceit that even in a so-called 24 hour city there will still be a moment of interruption, a silent pause which marks the end of the previous day and the beginning of the next, and then I attempted to bring that conceit to life.
“There is always this moment,” I wrote, “an unexpected pause, a hesitation as one day is left behind and a new one begins. A catch of breath as gasometer lungs begin slow exhalations. A ring of tinnitus as thermostats interrupt air-conditioning fans…”
It was a long time before I wrote any of this down, however. At the time, I just knew that I had the beginnings of an idea; I also knew that I was hungry, so I climbed down from the roof, back through the attic window, and went downstairs to look for some breakfast.
