Having It All by Maeve Haran

Author:Maeve Haran [Haran, Maeve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781447260950
Publisher: Pan Macmillan UK

CHAPTER 23

Britt had always been blessed with the gift, useful to herself but irritating to others, of getting to sleep the moment her head hit the pillow, but on the night before Christmas for once it deserted her.

The four walls, so close together after the huge airy spaces of her warehouse flat, seemed to close in on her, and the nylon sheets felt sticky and unpleasant. Used to the starched crispness of laundered cotton, every little snag in the fabric felt huge and itchy, and like the princess and the pea she found they stopped her falling comfortably into sleep.

On the few occasions her eyes closed, she found herself on the motorway again, only this time the other car didn’t regain control but spun crazily like a top and careered off the road and down the bank into a pylon where it burst into flames, showering Christmas presents on the rubbish-strewn field below.

At six-thirty Britt woke up in a pool of sweat that the nylon sheets had failed to absorb. She had had the worst night she could ever remember. Retching slightly as she tried to sit up she realized that morning sickness had arrived and she ran for the bathroom.

But by the time she was leaning over the toilet, the sickness had passed. Shivering in the unaccustomed cold she cursed her parents for not having central heating. She could see her breath, for God’s sake, and when she leaned in to the mirror it frosted up before she could see whether she looked as bad as she felt.

For a second it all came back to her. How numbingly cold it had been growing up in this house. She smiled, remembering how she had developed a technique for survival. Before she went to bed, she had laid out all her school clothes and then, when her mother knocked on her door to wake her, she would reach out for them and dress in bed, eyes closed, pretending to be a poor little blind girl, only emerging from the warmth of the bedclothes when she was fully dressed, at which point her sight would be miraculously restored to her and she was able to put on her heavy black school lace-ups unaided and rush downstairs for her morning Ready Brek, noticing bitterly that the tasteless sludge didn’t ring her body with a visible glow of warmth as the TV advert proclaimed.

In Yorkshire the answer to every problem was a cup of tea and Britt decided to go down to the kitchen and make herself one. It was only when she got to the bottom of the stairs and saw the small tree, its fairy lights flashing a weird pink and red like the neon Motel-sign in a hammy Hollywood movie, that she remembered that it was Christmas morning and she saw that Christmas or not her mother was already up and kneeling in her old quilted nylon dressing gown, laying a fire.

‘Hello, love, did you sleep well?’

On the point of confessing that she had had the worst night of her life, something stopped her and she smiled back.

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