Read Online The Night Following by Morag Joss - Free Book Online Page B

window with my chin resting on my crossed arms, the coal fire dying and the room dark behind me. I watched until long after he was gone and the silence told me that my mother must have got herself as far as her bedroom and passed out. She would be still in her clothes, grunting softly and curled up across the bed; I pictured her with the eiderdown up around her ears against the drafts. I knew that if the noise had woken her up, my grandmother would simply have turned over in bed, smiled into the dark, and gone back to sleep. I felt like the last person left. I knew I ought to be in bed and because I wasn’t I was deservedly guilty and forsaken, responsible both for the mess out on the street and for my own solitude. I had already let go of any idea that Santa Claus would be coming now—how could he come near a household like ours?—but I scanned the crossroads and the tops of buildings, clinging to a hope for some kind of timely, redemptive magic; I prayed for some power to appear and make everything all right. Then I started to cry.
    Snow came. There was no wind so it floated out of the sky like weightless, frozen rags of wispy white cloth. Some of the school Nativity play propaganda must still have been fresh in my mind; if ever a place was crying out for Peace on Earth Goodwill Toward Men it was here, so I wiped my nose on my sleeve and trusted that someone—if not Santa, then the Baby Jesus or Mary and Joseph or the shepherds, maybe the whole holy caboodle—was watching me from up in the sky, ripping up white tissue paper and dropping the shreds down to cover up the chaos. The amassing snow covered the scars of our disgrace like bandages. The disintegrating red paper and pink ribbons, the dark bulks of my great-uncle’s abandoned things, the glinting javelins of glass lost their edges and grew round and safe. The snow went on falling until the tracks of his exit were swabbed away and I could tell myself that he may not have gone because there was no sign that he had ever been. All the bright broken relics, now vanished under a wrapping of whiteness, began to seem as dreamy as a memory that I held of him reaching out, just once, and stroking my hair.
    As I watched the snow, my loneliness began to feel like safety. Nobody could see me, so I must be invisible. And nobody knew what I had seen so I could make that invisible, too. Not by forgetting, but by keeping it for myself, mine to rehearse in my mind until familiarity rendered its violence innocuous, I would make it disappear. The shock of the fight and my uncle’s desertion would lap its way over and over through my memory until in time its last waves spent themselves and died in the corners and my mother and uncle as they had appeared to me this night would recede, pulling shadows around themselves, the sounds of their departure faint and ghostly, merely sighs and whispers and a faraway door closing.
    And I understood suddenly that I would be able to pretend, and forever if need be, that this night was simply another night separating any two days: neither holy nor enchanted, nor the night my poor uncle left, nor even, necessarily, Christmas Bloody Eve. Another night and then another would come, and another, and each time my memory of this one would lose a little sharpness, and each new night would be its own reliable little spell of quiet between dangers. For a brief time before I fell asleep on the settee, that was nearly enough, to know the glaring colors of our strife were obliterated and to hold in my mind a picture of the street transformed under the black sky and the dense, cleansing whiteness of the snow.
    No, there’s no similarity at all, none to speak of. Jeremy went quietly. And I was very little then, and frightened.
     
27 Cardigan Avenue

Dear Ruth

Time passes. We’re almost into June. I suppose it’s warmed up a bit but by no stretch of the imagination could it be mistaken for warm à la Madeira, which is where we’d be now.

Apologies for