the last one awake

I wanted to know what the house sounds like after everyone is asleep.

That is the whole want. I am not going to dress it up. Our house is the loudest house I know, all day, everybody talking at once, the baby, the radio, the kuih trade, Kak Long on her phone, the whole thing going from the morning until late. And every night it all stops, somehow, and goes quiet, and I am asleep before the quiet happens, so I have never once heard it. I wanted to hear it. I wanted to be awake in my own house when the house was not.

The trouble is Nenek goes in at nine, and when Nenek goes in, that is the signal, and the whole house follows her down into the dark like the tide going out. Nine o'clock. The selipar comes off Nenek's foot and the house is over.

So I planned an operation to defeat sleep.

You cannot defeat sleep alone. Sleep is bigger than one person. So I drafted the gang for a sleepover, and I built a system. We would work in shifts. Two awake, the rest resting, then swap, like sailors, so that someone was always on watch and the whole night could be crossed in stages. There would be hiding spots, in case a grown-up came to check. There would be a relay, a tap on the shoulder, to pass the watch along without a sound.

And there would be Pei Pei's rig.

She had heard the words stay awake and gone off and come back with a length of string and a system of small weights, which she tied, one end to each of our big toes, so that if the kid on watch felt themselves going, they could tug the string and wake the next one along the line. An anti-sleep machine. Toe to toe to toe, all of us strung together in the dark.

It did not survive the night.

Sleep came for the gang one by one, exactly the way the tide takes things. Ah Wei went first, mid-snack, with food still in his hand, because a full Ah Wei is a sleepy Ah Wei. Hana fought hardest and lost anyway, sitting bolt upright, fast asleep without ever once lying down. Kavi swore he was not even tired in a voice that woke two houses, and was asleep before the echo came back. Divya had said, at the start, that this would not work, and then had gone to sleep on time like a sensible person, being right even while unconscious.

And then the rig went wrong, the way it was always going to. Somewhere in the dark the baby found the string. The baby is not even supposed to be in the operation. The baby is in every operation. The baby grabbed the string and pulled. The pull ran down the whole line, toe to toe to toe. It woke up every sleeping kid at the exact same moment. Every kid except the one on watch, which was me, because the baby had started at the other end. So for one moment the entire gang sat up in the dark, awake, confused, attached to a baby, and then they all lay back down and went straight to sleep again, leaving me exactly where I started, on watch, alone.

But I did it anyway.

By myself, in the end, when the rig was a tangle and the gang was a row of sleeping logs, I stayed awake. I pinched my own arm. I counted the dark. I did the one thing the whole operation was for, on my own nerve, and very late, much later than nine, much later than I have ever been awake in my life, the house finally went quiet, and I got to hear it.

And it was not quiet.

That is what nobody tells you. The house after everyone is asleep is not silent. It ticks and settles. The fridge hums. The zinc roof clicks as it cools, letting go of the day. A motorbike, far off. And underneath all of it, in our house, there was one more sound that should not have been there at that hour.

Somebody was up.

I went to look, very carefully, on watch to the last.

It was Nenek.

Nenek, who goes in at nine, who is the signal for the whole house to end, was moving through the dark house slow and sure, and she was doing a round. She checked the back gate was on its latch. She put the rice in to soak for the morning. She stood for a moment over the baby, who had finally let go of the string, and she pulled a thin blanket up over it without waking it. She went to Atok's corner, where the radio was still murmuring low to an empty chair, and she turned it off, and the house went one notch quieter. She knew where every quiet thing was. She had done this so many times she did not need a light.

The nine o'clock was never a wall. I had always thought it was the house switching off for the night. It is not. It is the hour Nenek keeps for herself, last of everyone, when she walks through the dark and makes sure every one of us is in and safe before she lets the day be done.

She saw me in the doorway. She was not surprised. Nenek is never surprised by anything, and she was not surprised by a small girl awake at an hour she should not know exists.

She did not send me to bed. She held out the thin blanket.

"The other baby," she said, which is me, and Kak Long, and the gang, all the sleeping ones. She meant help me cover them.

So I did the round with her. I carried the blanket. She showed me which window does not stay shut on its own and how you wedge it. She let me put the cloth over the kuih so the ants do not find it. We went through the whole sleeping house together, the two of us, the last two awake, putting it to bed.

Then, at the end, at her own door, Nenek pointed me down the dark hall to my mat.

I did not argue. You found out the thing you wanted to find out. You do not then argue with the person who keeps the whole house safe at the door of her own sleep.

I lay down. The house ticked and settled around me.

I heard Nenek, last of all, still up, doing the one window I had not been shown.