The Darkest Hour by Katherine Howell Read Free Book Online

highlight the differences in her mind: that had been night and this was day; there she’d been alone and here she’d had Joe. But it was at a deeper level that it was hurting her; the level where the feel of fear and adrenaline dumps were stored. Physical memory. Even standing there now, she could almost feel where Thomas’s fist had been, up under her chin. She touched the skin there and shivered. ‘Actually I think I’ll just go to bed.’ She pushed the dusty bottle to the back of the top shelf with her fingertips.
    ‘Spleen,’ Kristi said.
    Lauren turned off the kitchen light and walked past her. ‘Goodnight.’
    She woke at four from a nightmare. She’d been at the car crash again, finding Kristi drunk, pregnant and sobbing behind the wheel of one car, the dying boy at the wheel of the other. With it came the stale taste of her old life: the silence of her cramped flat broken only by the dull clink of the bottle against the glass, the desolation of Jeffrey leaving her for his panto career in the UK, the inability to get out and meet new people like magazines and work colleagues and her GP said she should.
    She got out of bed and went into Felise’s room. The child was an active sleeper, and while Lauren stood there she rolled from her left side to her right, onto her stomach, then thrashed the covers off before curling up into a shivering ball. Lauren lifted the covers over her and tucked them down behind her back, then with one finger smoothed a lank ringlet behind her ear.
    She turned to go and found Kristi in the doorway. She put out a hand and felt the sweat-soaked back of Lauren’s pyjama shirt.
    ‘Don’t say it.’ Lauren kissed her on the cheek as she passed. Kristi sighed.
    Back in bed Lauren couldn’t sleep. When she finally pulled the covers close behind her as she’d done for Felise, the contact reminded her of Joe’s back against hers. With that in her mind, she settled.
    ‘Not working today?’ Aunt Adelina said.
    ‘Afternoon shift.’ Ella was perched on the seat of her mother’s wheely-walker, the only place left by the time she’d arrived. The ward was stuffy, the air full of chatter in English, Vietnamese, Lebanese and Italian. Her mother, Netta, was sitting up in the bed, Ella on one side, her father, Franco, and Adelina in plastic chairs on the other. A child in a nappy and singlet made his way around the room from bed to bed, holding onto chairs as he went. A woman in a headscarf saw Ella watching him and they exchanged smiles.
    Voices grew louder across the room. Her father tilted his head. ‘You hear that, Netta?’
    ‘Dad, don’t eavesdrop.’
    ‘How can you not, when they talk so loud?’ Her mother shifted position gingerly in the bed. Her steel-grey hair lay tangled on the pillow. Her nightie was buttoned to the neck.
    ‘The Italian just goes straight in.’ Her father jabbed his index fingers at his ears. ‘I can’t help that.’
    ‘You turn your head off,’ Adelina said. ‘That’s what I do.’
    ‘Easy for you.’ Franco grinned. Adelina slapped him on the arm.
    Ella wondered sometimes what it would be like to have a brother, who’d stir you up like that, who would still be joking with you at age seventy. Adelina had never married, and Ella’s father was staying at her house in Sutherland while Netta was in hospital. Franco had wanted to stay home, but he’d grown frail in the last year, was on a wheely-walker of his own now, and couldn’t cook more than Cup-a-Soup.
    Adelina was looking at the bedside table. Next second she hopped to her feet, pulled a handkerchief out of her handbag and started wiping the surface. ‘Don’t they dust?’
    ‘This is what I’m saying,’ Netta said. ‘It’s no good for me here.’
    Ella nodded at the intravenous line feeding her antibiotics. ‘You can’t get that anywhere else.’
    ‘She wouldn’t have got the infection if she was somewhere else.’ Her aunt reached across to dust the nameboard fixed to the wall above