Veil of Darkness Read Free Page A

love, toffee apples, cake mix and cuddles. Kirsty is not to worry. Maddy is merely a phone call away; she will write at least twice a week, and at the first sign of the slightest trouble she will let Kirsty know. Trevor will not pose a problem. No leads will take him to Maddy. But four months is so long.
    ‘Four months can be a very long time in the life of a child, Lord knows,’ Maddy agreed, nodding so her two chins met. ‘But not in my home,’ she purred. ‘Not with my old dogs, bless ’em. Not with my ducks and my chickens. You go on, my poor Kirsty. I know it’s hard, but you’re doing the right thing. Their four months with me will be one long, happy holiday. Now don’t your kids deserve that much after all they’ve been through?’
    And Kirsty, only dimly aware that there was a world like this with such people in it, burst into tears.
    He wears the spiky crucifix he was given at his First Holy Communion. Sometimes the silver chain causes a rash on the back of his neck.
    Kirsty had expected to feel triumphant by now, so what is this sense of anticlimax? The suitcase rumbles around in the bus. She steadies it with a sweating hand which she wipes on her rain-soaked jacket. Is that his walk? She presses her face against the glass when, with sudden terror, she thinks she sees him hurrying along because of the rain. No, no, it can’t have been him. By now he will be at home in the dry, ringing his mother to ask if she’s there. Hah. Why would she go there? She had gone there once in the early days, hoping for sanctuary, sympathy, advice and understanding. After all, Edna had given birth to eight children; she should have some answers worth hearing. Had she known that her son was an animal? Was his condition genetic? Kirsty would have liked to ask Edna something about her own married life. She didn’t get the chance. She had struggled to Edna’s with a broken arm and a push chair and a child with mumps. Some hope of help from a woman with ‘I beheld Satan like lightning fall from Heaven,’ embroidered on a plaque on the wall. Beside her small coal fire, in a house that smelled of Sundays and sprouts, Edna raised her head and closed her eyes tight. ‘There is nothing more pleasing to God than suffering bravely borne,’ she had said in a voice divinely inspired. Then she rang for the ambulance. The following Christmas she gave Kirsty the text that assured her Jesus would carry her.
    Kirsty didn’t want the doctor to know. He must have suspected something, of course, with all those hospital visits—accident prone, she laughed it off. She dreaded the kids being on some register, social workers nosing about and the threat of having them taken away. She was a bad and ineffective mother because she allowed herself to be abused, and Jake and Gemma saw the violence. They felt the violence, they ate, drank and slept the violence, although Trev never touched them—not yet—although there were threats. She kept them out of the house as long as she could at weekends in the park, by the river. On weekdays they went to bed early.
    And there was nobody else to help her. When Kirsty first craved tea and sympathy she found this fact quite astonishing. How had this happened, her gradual and almost unnoticed alienation from the world? Since her marriage and the children she’d had little time to keep up with friends, and Trev was so disapproving, so rude to the few that were left, that it was easier not to bother. In some appalling and inexplicable way there was a comfortable justification in bowing down and submitting to him. After all, he loved her. He never meant to hurt her, to wrong her. He said he hated his own blind fury. Slowly but surely the Christmas-card list grew shorter and petered out, save for Trev’s scattered relations. Kirsty has no family to speak of—just a brother somewhere in Australia, and he hasn’t written in years, not since he married. She doesn’t even know Ralph’s address any more. They