The Night Following by Morag Joss Page B

riddance,”Evelyn muttered through her tears. She went upstairs to her room. Stan knew tonight was her last evening off before next week when she changed shifts. He knew they needed to set the date.
    But she wasn’t one to mope. Once she’d washed her face she came back downstairs. Mam had dozed off in her chair, her knitting on her lap. Evelyn took it up and finished the row, then worked one or two more. She was in no mood tonight to get on with her own knitting, which was a pullover for Stan in the same red as the scarf. Mam was making socks in dark green and the light was poor but the needles flew swiftly and smoothly in Evelyn’s hands. She didn’t need to see what she was doing, only to count the stitches. They were all good knitters on Mam’s side, and they all had the same dimples, too. Knitting came as easy as smiling to the Leigh girls, people said.
    Later, she washed through some stockings in the scullery and then she got Mam up to bed with a cup of tea. Afterward she sat on in front of the fire. Some evening out, she thought. I should go to bed myself.
    But then, she reflected, Stan might just call in late on his way back from the meeting if he saw a light on. So Evelyn waited, yawning from time to time and half-listening to the voice on the wireless introducing a dance band from somewhere or other. The rain came on again, harder than ever. She went to the window and pulled the curtain aside. Even the lamp right in front of number 58 on the other side of the street was hard to make out. Surely it was unusual for it to rain so hard you couldn’t even see a street lamp? Raining ink, she thought. Evelyn watched it pour down the window till the glass looked as if it were melting. Then she drew the curtain back, put out the light, and returned to her chair, thinking of Stan pushing his bike past, glancing at the window, and thinking she’d gone to bed. In the dark, she began to cry again.
    He’d be out there, caught in the rain. He could catch his death, and serve him right. But then her baby would never know its father. So in that respect the little mite would be like her, although not quite; Evelyn had been twelve years old when the telegram had come about her Da, “Missing in action, presumed killed,”so she always felt that she should have kept hold of something more of her father to remember than the slow-moving, silent figure she hardly dared speak to. Over the years she tried to forget how the rasp of his boots in the yard and the click of the back door latch struck terror into her. She tried to forget his cruelties, a savage clip round the head or a snarled remark, and also his drunken rages when it was positively dangerous to be around him. She preferred to imagine that he might have come back from the War changed somehow, kind and smiling. She was careful to remember him only from the telegram, a few photos, and four postcards sent from the Belgian front.
    She leaned back in her chair with her eyes closed. Suppose Stan did die and their baby grew up without him. There wouldn’t be much difference, in the end. It didn’t matter whether your Da got a chill on the lungs after a soaking, or laid down his life in the Great War, he was dead and gone just the same. You wouldn’t know his voice. You wouldn’t be able to tell the back of his head in a crowd. You’d never know if he might have been the best father in the world. Whether his name was among The Fallen on the War Memorial or not, you’d just go without.
    I should go to bed, Evelyn thought, blinking. Sometimes it felt as if her eyelids didn’t keep the light out anymore. When she closed them, fireworks started going off across the insides, dots bursting in the blackness. It sounded pretty put like that, colored stars on the insides of your eyes, but it wasn’t. It could be hard to get to sleep with lights pricking away all the time, popping off like at work, fancy lights flashing all night long. Some of the other girls at Brightaglow said