by David Waine
*
Marie Kelly lay on her bed, London Poverty discarded on the floor. She had just given up on her fourth successive attempt to reach the end of chapter one, the first two while Joe was still present.
He had gone earlier than normal and her own miserable mood was to blame for it. Ever since that poor girl in Whitechapel had been killed, a clinging blackness had engulfed her soul. She knew that she was very poor company these days, that she gave him a hard time and that he did not deserve to be treated like that. In her heart she knew that she was very lucky to have a friend like him at all and reminded herself constantly to be nicer to him, only to forget it when he appeared. Her greatest fear was that he would finally take her advice and find another girl. Then she would have to face her unknown terror alone. She cuffed herself for her stupidity. She knew perfectly well that her depressed state was making her irrational, yet she was powerless to stop it.
With her mind so stressed, was it any wonder that she couldn’t concentrate on such a badly written book? How had a distinguished academic managed to fill his pages with such turgid doggerel and still reap royalties from books sold, she asked herself? It wasn’t even that the subject, itself, was intrinsically boring. He had made it so.
She had left History to one side for the first few days of her enforced exile from school, concentrating on her other ‘A’ Level subjects in the hope that the distraction might restore some of her lost sleep. Another forlorn hope. Instead of her usual eight or nine hours per night, she was down to three at best, when her mind and body finally surrendered to absolute exhaustion. Even then she would wake much too soon, having reaped little of its benefit. It could not be put off forever, though, and this was the night that she simply had to return to the task in hand. Consequently, London Poverty was picked up, dusted off, browsed through, browsed through again and finally cast aside in glum resignation as its plodding lists of facts and figures stubbornly refused to lodge themselves in her head.
Dimly she heard the grandmother clock in the hallway at the bottom of the stairs chime nine. Mum and Dad would be watching the News with their traditional mugs of hot chocolate, making critical comments on whichever idiot of a politician had latched onto some current news item and was exploiting it to make a name for himself, or making sympathetic noises to each other over the poor souls across the globe whose lives had just ended violently. Why did they always report that sort of thing? Why did you never hear about Mrs. Smith of Islington who had enjoyed a wonderful day? Then it occurred to her that you did hear such stories. They were tacked onto the end of each bulletin so that the newsreader could sign off with a smile after treating everyone to half an hour of undiluted devastation.
Her mind turned to her parents. Mr. Wilkes had returned to school after dropping her off, whereupon she had been marched straight to the doctor, who gave her a thorough examination and confirmed the headmaster’s opinion. Physically, there was nothing wrong with her, but she was obviously suffering from stress and depressed. The cure lay in rest. He also prescribed a mild sedative to help her sleep. So far she had not taken any of the tablets.
Turning her head, her eyes fell on her television set. Realising that she really ought to keep up with the news for her own good, she reached out and turned it on.
The screen filled with the solemn face of that newsreader. “Mrs. Henderson was a popular figure in the neighbourhood, with three grandchildren and five great grandchildren. She was also looked upon as an honorary granny by many of the local toddlers. A war widow, she had been in the habit of chatting with passers-by on the doorstep to her flat on Hanbury Street for many years. She was a tireless supporter of charities and, in her younger days, had worked as a nurse. Neighbours became concerned when she failed to appear at her front door over the weekend.”
Marie’s eyes went wide with horror as the clinging blackness tore into her soul again. Hanbury Street!