One Thing: the mystery of the "Night Mother"

Who is this mysterious jogging woman and what's in her pram?

If you spend long enough around a neighbourhood, you begin to identify the suburban cryptids that inhabitate it: we’ve got various loudly yelling men, one who often tries to drunkenly ride a very tiny bike down the street, screaming the whole time. We have an old guy and his off-leash chihuahua who will chase you. And most intriguing and mysterious of all, the Night Mother.

The Night Mother is a woman who I’ve only seen relatively late at night (always past 10pm, which is very late for me), and only on very rare occasions. She is always dressed in head to toe running gear, and runs very fast. She also has a pram. At first, she only stuck out because my suburb is quiet enough that I take note of pretty much anyone I see, usually because I’m taking Basil out for a wee, or coming home from somewhere. But the next time I clocked her, I realised that she was running VERY fast for someone with a pram. I admit, I don’t know much about babies, but it seemed kinda dangerous to move at that incredible speed over pretty bumpy footpaths. I don’t know if I could run that fast, even without the desire to protect a baby and its weird soft head. But maybe it’s fine! Maybe babies are like ants, and because they are so small they don’t really get hurt from being dropped, because the air cushions them?

The first three times I saw the Night Mother, I scrupulously chose not to look into the pram. I’ve read enough Wikipedia pages about horror films to know that if I look INTO something, I run the risk of something looking back. It could be anything - a baby with my own face, for example. An octopus with knives for arms. A huge sinister gourd.

But every time I’ve mentioned the Night Mother, people have told me, condescendingly, that it’s just a baby, that she’s trying to get the baby to sleep, that there’s nothing malevolent about her high-speed nocturnal perambulations. You IDIOT, don’t you know about all the mother’s running around with their insomniacal children??? Don’t you even CARE? You disgusting BOY!

So the next time I saw her running, I deliberately didn’t scurry across the road with Basil like I usually do, and instead just stood to the side, and friends, I looked inside

It was a tiny white dog.

Which I guess leaves us with more questions than we started with.

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I’ve recently been reading about the newspaper/ magazine booms of New York in the 60s and 70s, because I’m that kind of nerd, and one of the things I was feeling sad about was that I never got to write cute little “slice of life” columns. And then I remembered I have my own publication where I make all the rules and questionable decisions, so ONE THING is gonna be that.

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