Up all night with ravers, nuns and shiftworkers

Times

6 days ago

Arifa Akbar is scared of the dark. Her British-Pakistani parents told her horrifying tales of creatures that appeared at night, stories 'of djinns capable of immense violence, of daayans with feet on backwards, disembowelling their victims with their bare hands'. She sleeps with a curtain open to let the light of the street lamps stream through the window and travels with a plug-in nightlight.
As the Guardian's chief theatre critic Akbar often has to work late into the night. In Wolf Moon, her lyrical examination of the world between dusk and dawn, she acknowledges the ridiculousness of her night-time anxieties. 'But if there really is nothing to fear, why do I feel so viscerally afraid as the dark levitates towards me, everything and nothing thrumming inside it?'
The book is part reporting, part memoir. Akbar writes about her father, who was a security guard, first on the railways and then at the Courtauld gallery in London, working night shifts in both jobs. Akbar observed how his work seemed to change him, 'his skin growing sallower by the day as if he were jaundiced, his thinking confused. He was always on the brink of an unarticulated panic.'
He now lives in a care home and has dementia, a health risk linked to nocturnal working. At night he can be distressed — a phenomenon called sundowning when those with dementia begin to hallucinate as the day darkens. 'There are times when he holds on to my hand tightly as if he fears being sucked under by quicksand, and tells me the sky is spinning.'
There are about nine million night shift workers in Britain. As well as causing dementia, working at night can cause cardiovascular disease, obesity and depression. The work is also more likely to be low-paid and insecure.
Akbar speaks to some of these late-night workers. At a care home in Hertfordshire the carers describe how after their night shift they take their children to school, then pick them up later with barely time to sleep during the day. At New Spitalfields Market in Leyton, east London, she watches hundreds of HGVs queue at midnight to unload fruit and vegetables — 'a lush, vegetative oasis within the city'. She spends the night at the Convent of Poor Clares in Ellesmere, Shropshire, rising with the nuns at midnight to sing matins and again for lauds at 6:30am.
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However, some people come alive at night. Akbar goes to Berghain, an LGBT nightclub in Berlin, and dances with a Brazilian trans woman who has been attending for 13 years and an Austrian postman who often stays in the club from Saturday through to Monday. Akbar feels transfigured in the club's darkness. 'I am no longer a responsible homeowner, journalist and carer of elderly parents,' she writes. 'I am no more or less than my silver-black dress and gold eyelashes.'
She meets the poet and playwright Debris Stevenson who has been a raver for decades. 'You're less self-conscious in the dark, more embodied and there's a wildness to dancing outside,' Stevenson says. Yet at raves she has been catcalled and filmed without permission and has had to intervene in dangerous situations. She says the sight of men forcing kisses on unconscious women is commonplace.
In Lahore, where Akbar spent some of her childhood, she watches a late-night comedy show. After the performance some of the female dancers sell sex to the audience members. An elderly sex worker describes how the work has become more dangerous as stricter laws force them to travel to meet clients in unknown locations.
While djinns and daayans may be imagined, the threat of violence at night is real. Sarah Everard's twilight abduction, rape and murder sparked a wave of protests about the risk of walking the streets at night as a woman. But it was hardly a new danger. Akbar attends one of the popular Jack the Ripper tours that trace the murder spots of east London. I went on one of these tours once and a man in my group commented on which of the murdered women was the most attractive.
These threats aren't just abstract to Akbar. Her sister Fauzia, whose death was the subject of her first book, Consumed, struggled as a teenager with compulsive eating. She would bribe Akbar and her brother to go to a supermarket at night to buy her food. In her twenties she fell into a depression and became homeless.
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At her hungriest Fauzia would go through bins on the streets. After her death by undiagnosed tuberculosis Akbar's family agonised over how she had contracted the disease. They wondered if it happened in this dark and desperate time of her life.
What might otherwise feel like a random collection of vignettes is threaded together by Akbar's grief for her sister and her anxiety for her father. Wolf Moon is a celebration of the exuberance of night-time and a moving portrait of the dangers of the dark.
Wolf Moon: A Woman's Journey into the Night by Arifa Akbar (Sceptre £16.99 pp256). To order a copy go to timesbookshop.co.uk. Free UK standard P&P on orders over £25. Special discount available for Times+ members