Free 0007464355 by Sam Baker

them into separate bins.
    It had to be done. Helen loved her sister but she didn’t trust her. And she was pretty sure the feeling was mutual. All it would take was one moment of weakness or moral rectitude, depending on your perspective. From Fran and Ian’s perspective it would be the latter. It wasn’t until she’d turned the key behind her in the lock and gone through her daily ritual of checking the doors and windows that Helen saw what should have been obvious out on the Dales: a smear, like golden jam, encroaching on her vision. Her fingernails, white earlier, were now turning blue.
    ‘Bugger,’ she muttered under her breath. Usually she had weeks, sometimes more than a month, between bouts of migraine. This time it was barely a week.
    Pills. That was what she needed. If she was quick, she could head off the worst of it. Except the only pills she had were shop-bought and near useless.
    The pills she needed were the ones Dr Harris gave her. (Ms Caroline Harris, she was a consultant now, dropping the Doctor the way consultants do.) Only the last of those was long gone. In the kitchen, the empty packet still lay on the counter where she’d tossed it in frustration days earlier. The pill fairies hadn’t come in the night, it was just as empty as when she’d looked back then.
    Removing her sodden parka, Helen hung it from the corner of the door to the pantry and lit the boiler, holding her hair behind her with her left hand as the match flared in her right. The gas gave a soft boom and at the edges of her vision, lightning crackled.
    After the discoloration in her fingers the lights always came next. Usually she was too busy to notice until worse symptoms forced her to take heed. Her fingers, in the purple glow of the pilot light, looked waxy, a tallow yellow. Helen tried to calculate how long she had before the migraine really kicked in. As much as a day? Not at the rate this was moving in. Hours, more like. For an insane second she considered grabbing her camera and running kit and going back outside while a fraction of light remained. She’d taken some of her best pictures in this dead zone; pre-pain, post-sanity. Blurring vision, nausea and frozen fingers brought with them a remoteness that reversed the emotional binoculars she used to look at the world. What was ordinarily too close, close enough to terrify, became small and distant.
    ‘Don’t be stupid, Helen,’ she muttered, imitating her mother. ‘The last thing you need is to be out on the Dales, in the rain, in the full throes of a migraine without medication.’
    Instead, she filled the kettle and made tea.
    She’d made tea all over the world, usually as a way of thinking about something else. There was a mechanical and ritualised element to the British obsession with tea, Helen thought. It had started, her ‘migraine thinking’. She never had these thoughts unless lights threatened the edge of her vision. Once they started she couldn’t stop them until the full force of her migraine roared in. Then she’d shut her eyes, curl into a ball on her side and wait for the pain to stop.
    She’d said exactly that to Caroline once. Caroline had given Helen one of her looks, before replying that when the time was right Helen might want to think carefully about what she’d just said.
    Last time Helen looked, the time still wasn’t right.
    When the kettle had boiled, Helen took her mug and two pieces of hot buttered toast into the upstairs sitting room, using her laptop as the tray. She perched on a dust-stiff Indian throw on a rancid sofa in the upper drawing room of a decaying Elizabethan mansion and ate. There was a whole world of memories in the hot buttered toast.
    Cut into fingers and then into quarters, with crusts on and crusts cut off. After memories of being given hot buttered toast after coming in from a wet and difficult day at the beach, and sitting next to Fran on the sofa and, for once, the two of them not arguing, and memories of eating