Read Online Anthem for Jackson Dawes by Celia Bryce - Free Book Online

pulled her dressing gown from the head of the bed and wrapped it around the sleeping girl, who was now lying between them on the bed.
    Blood pumped back down Megan’s arm. She flexed her fingers then eased her head from side to side, realising how much her neck was aching.
    â€˜What time is it?’ she asked.
    â€˜Day staff’re going home soon.’
    So she hadn’t been asleep for very long. Yet it felt like hours.
    Siobhan came in then. ‘Ah. Here she is. Her mammy goes off to the café for a bit of a break and she comes back to an empty bed!’
    â€˜I think she’s missing her kitten. Worried about him,’ Megan explained.
    â€˜Is she?’
    â€˜And I didn’t know what to do. Or if she was allowed or anything. In my room, I mean. But she was too upset to send her away. Then she fell asleep.’
    â€˜Poor wee mite. I’ll take her back.’
    Megan watched Siobhan lift the girl in such a swift yet delicate movement, so carefully, that she might have been something fragile or precious, made out of thin pink glass, something which might shatter if you just breathed the wrong way.
    Kipper, however, still heavily asleep, nestled herself into the nurse’s body, as if she believed that no such disaster could possibly happen to her.
    It was past eleven and she should have been asleep, but Megan’s mind wouldn’t stop working. She tried reading again, she tried drawing, she tried lying as still as possible, hoping that sleep would come, but it didn’t. Eventually she climbed out of bed and headed off down the corridor.
    The visitors’ waiting room was dark, except for adull silver glow from outside, and from the corner table, an anglepoise lamp oozing out a small pool of golden light. Megan was drawn in when she had intended only to take a walk. It seemed cosy, somehow, peaceful.
    Negotiating the chairs and coffee table with her drip stand, Megan made her way to the window and looked out at the river, the roads, the buildings, all alive with light, all so different at night. Everything stretched out from the hospital gates like a glittering blanket, spread over that other world, the one Mum lived in, the one she brought with her in little parcels of information – about next door’s dog, or the church roof being stripped of its lead, or the new ‘Sainsbury’s Express’ opening at last and how she’d gone to have a look. She might have been talking about a trip to Mars. But Megan had listened and tried to look interested, when all she wanted was for Mum to go. Which made her feel bad, ungrateful. Even now.
    Megan switched off the lamp so that the room was almost completely dark. Somehow, that made her feel better, made her forget about Mum, made everything outside shine even brighter.
    It was wide awake, the city. Strings of brightly lit roads lay in all directions, like some kind of strange crop in a black field. They reached far into the distance. Cars moved along in fits and starts. Who were they, all those people driving? Where were they going at this time of night?
    From nearby, street lamps bled a hazy whiteness like netting, which caught the odd shadow; a person, an animal. Mr Henry, perhaps. If he really existed. He might be prowling the city, right now, looking for rats.
    A train trundled across the bridge over the river and away. Megan wished she could be on it. A late-night bus eased along the road past the hospital. That would do, to take her home.
    Above her roared an aeroplane. Whether it was coming in to land or taking off, she couldn’t tell. Nobody on that aeroplane, no one in that world beneath her, in those cars, the train, the buses or the shadows, knew a thing about her. She was as insignificant as an ant, just someone in a window looking out. Someone whose friends hadn’t come.
    Two whole days.
    It was school, Gemma said, when she texted; it was homework, the Twins said. It was all the other stuff they did,