Oh Dear Silvia by Dawn French Read Free Book Online Page A

blowing out the candles and clearing up feathers, cursing and putting the lights back on.
    Silvia just lies there. Exactly the same. No perceptible change whatsoever.
    Jo is furious.
    ‘Thanks a lot Archangel Michael, typical man. No bloody show. Prick.’
    She bundles out of the room, too embarrassed and irritated to give so much as a backward glance, intent on devising whatever the next method might be to wake up her frozen sister. She will melt that iceberg, come what may. Yes she will.

Eight
Winnie
    Friday 7pm
    Just before she goes off duty, Winnie pops in to do a few last jobs in Silvia’s room. She rips open a new packet of elastic stockings and, singing little snippets of Calvary Voices repertoire under her breath all the time, she replaces the old ones with these new, tighter fresher ones. It takes some doing. Silvia’s legs are heavy.
    ‘Sorry Silvia, I know dey not de most glamorous tights dem, but hey, wotcha gonna do? Better you don’t get trombosis, darlin. You don’t want dat. Pyainful. Yes. Mi see dat hyappen in here, bwoy, de lady was screamin, den, in ten minutes, she a dead! She say no to dese tights. Big mistake. Yes, sista. But you gonna wear dem, Silvia. Yes.’
    Once the new stockings are on, Winnie glances around the room, checking everything is correct. She notes all the relevant figures from the various machines carefully into theclipboard log at the bottom of the bed. She looks carefully at how Silvia is lying, and she alters the position of her arm and her head which had flopped sideways more than Winnie considers to be comfortable. She wipes the side of Silvia’s mouth where, just today, she has begun to dribble, and she puts a fresh cloth beneath her cheek to deal with it. The room is quiet, save for the constant compressed hiss of the ventilator.
    Winnie likes this gentler part of the day. The light is fading outside, it’s time for her to go home, but it’s only at this twilight time of evening that her motionless patients look right in their beds. It’s bedtime, after all, even if they were well, they might just be in bed now. Somehow it doesn’t feel so massively wrong to be bedbound in the evening. That’s why she elected to do mainly day shifts. She feels that more nursing is required during the day, that this is when she’s genuinely effective. She also needs to be at home at night for her son. Her momma can look after him for a while after school but Winnie knows that the few hours the two of them have alone together each evening is the bedrock on which she is going to build his future.
    It was her mission once to break the cycle of negligent dads she knew so well and saw all around her where she used to live both in Jamaica, where she was born and raised, and in the West Midlands, where she came to live in her teens. They were all around her, the careless fathers. Her own dad wouldn’t recognize her if she bumped into him in the street. Luckily that’sunlikely to happen since he stayed in ‘Birningham’ as her mother refers to it, and anyway, she heard a rumour he’d gone back to Jamaica last year, to spend his last ranting days in the sun and in the rum. Good riddance to him. What had he ever given her except a massive load of stress?
    He upset her momma, coming into church disgracefully drunk and demanding money from her while the pastor was preaching. Everyone was looking at them, feeling sorry for their troubles and pitying them. All those other women in their poshest hats, their finest Sunday crowns, all looking away for shame and feeling so grateful it’s not their turn today. They all sung louder to drown out his boozy ferocious ranting. So he stood in the aisle and roared louder, snarling and snorting and spitting. He frightened her. Her mother held her hand to comfort her, but those images of his rheumy raging eyes still haunt her. This was the man she was supposed to look up to, to admire and respect. The head of the family. The king, the lion. This man? This