Veil of Darkness Read Free Page B

were both brought up by their father, who died the year after her marriage. The girls at the store have their own dramas and Kirsty has never mixed much with them, Trev’s demands being so heavy, his jealousy and distrust so shaming. Because of the loss of her friends, Kirsty realized with a sudden and vast kind of loneliness, she hasn’t laughed properly in years.
    And all in the name of love.
    ‘Nothing’s ever fun with you,’ Trevor said, ‘miserable slut. Forever whining.’
    ‘Laugh, laugh,’ he would goad her, ‘laugh for God’s sake. Stop your bloody lamenting.’
    But sometimes she wondered if he was gay, in spite of his loud masculinity, or whether he hated women, because of the things he did to her, and with such ugly ferocity.
    Kirsty sits on the station concourse, nervously sipping an overstewed coffee, her eyes glued to the noticeboard, her ears straining to catch the announcements. She will board her train the minute it’s in. The ticket in her hand is something to treasure, a jewel that took eight years to possess and which is more priceless than a Pharaoh’s gold.

Two
    T HERE IS STILL A long way to go. Heart pounding, half shambling, Kirsty eventually finds her booked seat and collapses into it, closing her eyes. Then, in panic, she covers her face with her book in case Trev might be raging up and down the platform, peering into the carriages through hooded, angry eyes. There are two spotty guys across the table and a girl with wild black hair sitting next to her; she took this in before she collapsed but not much else about them. Maybe they are going to the Burleston—a block booking, who knows? And that large girl across the aisle; she looks nervous and untravelled. As the train pulls out of Lime Street Station, Kirsty very slowly brings her eyes out of hiding, raises them shyly from her book, over the top of the smell of damp clothes.
    She gives such a sigh of relief when the platform slips past without sight or sound of a rampaging Trevor that she fears everyone must have heard, including the girl across the way. Kirsty gives her a sideways glance. Poor thing. Kirsty might be nervous, but if so she’s not alone. The timid-looking girl sitting opposite is far from happy with her surroundings and her distress reaches Kirsty across the airwaves like the tinny sounds of somebody’s Walkman. Kirsty’s focus dwindles uncomfortably to the three tipsy sailors who share the girl’s table.
    Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.
    A non-smoking carriage, of course, Kirsty muses, summing up the girl. This girl, identified by the labels on her luggage left in the recess next to the door, would not appreciate smoke attaching itself to that cheap new suit. Is that the first suit she has ever had? The first time she has ever left home? Indeed, the first long journey she has ever made without her family, except with the Guides to the Lake District when she was about twelve years old?
    It looks pretty much like it.
    There is such a fresh-faced innocence about her.
    Kirsty deals in fantasy, a subject on which she has expertise. And her fantasy was later confirmed when Avril told her she had bought the suit with her mother’s help and encouragement. ‘Of course it’s a business suit,’ said her mother, insisting on going round George Henry Lees instead of Dorothy Perkins, which she suggested, quite correctly, would probably not stock her daughter’s size. ‘All suits are business suits. You wouldn’t wear something as stiff as this for mucking about at home.’
    Kirsty’s favourite preoccupation is summing up other people. Pity she didn’t work harder on Trev in the months before she married him.
    Avril told Kirsty later how the conversation had gone. ‘But there are other aspects of life, you know, Mother. It’s not just home and work, home and work, with the odd outing to Safeways. Well, not for other people it’s not.’
    ‘Start,’ said her mother, ‘as you mean to go on. If you look businesslike