Angels of Mourning. John Pritchard

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СКАЧАТЬ Chapter 31

       Chapter 32

       Chapter 33

       Chapter 34

       Chapter 35

       Chapter 36

       Chapter 37

       Chapter 38

       Keep Reading

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Other Books By

       About the Publisher

PART 1

       The Mercy of Angels

Chapter 1

      I remember waking up on that first, awful Friday, and thinking how good it felt to be alive.

      I’d come to the surface in my own sweet time. No need to grope for my alarm clock through the darkness – nor meet my pasty-faced reflection in the bathroom mirror, the window beside it still black from the night outside. No call to venture out into the pre-dawn city chill.

      No more Earlies for me this week. I wasn’t on until one.

      So I just lay where I was, content and clear-headed from a full eight hours, and soaked up the duvet’s warmth. With bed and bedclothes all to myself, I’d snuggled deep into a cosy little nest: the hardest sort of all to quit. And maybe I’d started building it when I should have still been sharing – at least if Nick’s usual complaints were anything to go by.

      But Nick was long gone now; out before six to catch his shift-change. His turn to tiptoe to the bathroom, and dress in the dimness, and let himself out into the darkest hour.

      I hadn’t woken.

      Sleep – at long, long last – was somewhere I felt safe.

      The light through the curtains was pale and flat; they were going on about snow on the radio news. But it didn’t really register until I’d gone through, yawning, to open the front door – and couldn’t find the milk bottles.

      The doorstep was a shapeless heap; our street was blanketed. I started delving – then stopped again to listen to the hush. It seemed unreal: like the sallow, sick-rose pink of the sky above the rooftops. For a moment I just knelt there, not feeling the chill that came gnawing through my nightshirt. Knelt, and stared in wide-eyed wonder, and couldn’t stop the grin spreading over my face. Because I’ve always loved the early-morning snow: loved the way it can turn a dreary winter city to another world. From back when I was a girl growing up in the Midlands, to now, in drab North London, the magic hadn’t changed. It still made me want to play snowballs.

      Even the prospect of the chaos I’d face getting in to work didn’t dampen my mood.

      A note on the cork board caught my eye as I came back in with the bottles. Raitch. I’ll get some more bread on the way home. Love, Nick. Which probably meant he’d finished the loaf; no wonder there were all those kisses at the end. I blew him one back, and carried the chilled milk through into the kitchen.

      After breakfast, with a couple of hours left to kill, I wandered round the house for a while. Some stray bits of dirty washing to be rounded up (Nick!); a few fastidious flicks of the duster. But it had been a lived-in sort of place from day one, which was what I really liked about it. Overlooking Clissold Park: two bedrooms – one damp – and it had cost us. But it was ours now. A place of our own. A place we’d begun to call home.

      Ours. Something special: something shared. Something to make the past seem very far away.

      Sometimes.

      And sometimes it seemed like yesterday. Three crowded years just fled away, and the dark was so close it made me catch my breath. But such moments were more fleeting now; much fewer. I might still dream the dreams, but I couldn’t recall them. And they didn’t wake me, sobbing, in the night.

      Ready to go – bag packed, and travelcard ready in my purse – I wrapped up warm, and picked my way out into the silent street. The snow was slick and icy underfoot – I almost slipped – but there was a narrow, gritted gap down the middle, like the safe path through a minefield, and I followed it carefully towards the main road. This was busier, and already mostly slush. A queue of people were waiting by the bus-stop, and I’d joined them just long enough for my cheeks to start stinging when the number 73 came rumbling into view.

      I rode the bus as far as King’s Cross, then changed to the tube for the rest of the journey; watching the snow melting off my boots as we banged and rattled southward, from tunnels into canyons open to the slaty sky.

      Someone was waiting for me at the other end.

      Coming up out of the station, I found him right in my path – huddling on the stairs like a survivor of Stalingrad. A beggar wrapped up in a hospital blanket, his stubbled face pinched tight with the cold. His grey eyes hungry.

      And survivor he was, I thought numbly: straggling in retreat from an undeclared war. A man defeated. But I was the one who spread my mittened hands, as if in surrender.

      ‘Sorry, mate … No change …’

      He’d asked as I said it; the appeal stayed frozen to his face. And all I could do was pass him by, my helpless hands still empty; giving him a small, regretful smile.

      Big help, of course. But with shock still thumping dully in my chest, it was as much as I could manage. Hardly his fault, poor bloke – but some things still brought the worst of it back. And try as I might, I couldn’t keep my nerves from reacting.

      After a moment I raised my face again – and the hospital was there before me, looming up like a tenement block; sombre as stone. But its windows leaked light and warmth from the world within: a place protected from this bitter day. A refuge in refugee city.

      I waited for a gap and crossed the road: hunching my shoulders against the cold.

      Finished scribbling the last detail, I looked up from my notebook. ‘That it?’

      Sue nodded, and I glanced quickly back over what I’d written. Six patients handed over, in СКАЧАТЬ