Free The Hiding Place by Trezza Azzopardi Page B

silence is broken by a rattle of china. My father stares down into his cup, grateful for something to look at, blowing on the surface until a scum forms, then
blowing on this until it breaks like muddy ice.
    The nurse stands by and fidgets with her clipboard, stuck between these two men in their suits. She takes a sly look at her watch.
    Your wife has gone home, she says, her eyes moving quickly from Frankie to Salvatore: they both look so distraught, she can’t tell who the father is. She gets no response from this, and
tries a sterner tack.
    You’d be best coming back in the morning. The child needs her sleep. She bends across my bed and pulls the light cord.
    It’s not entirely dark in the ward, but it feels hotter under gauze, a swarm from deep inside me, and with it a noise which comes and goes. At first it’s hard to place, it sounds so
much like a sigh. It’s the wind, swishing the last leaves on the tree outside; but to me it’s like the hiss of bubbling varnish. My father reaches over now, wanting to touch me but not
knowing how, and the hover of his hand above the ghost of mine is the deepest, blackest heat. The ward fills with a scream like a siren.
    ~  ~  ~
    The bus takes a different route at this time of night; ‘the chuck-out run’ the conductor calls it. My mother twitches with impatience; she feels the need to count
all her children now. After three stops, the bus is full, and my mother and Luca are squashed up against the silvered window by a white-haired man with beer on his breath. He eases himself along
the vinyl seat, grips the handrail in front, and launches into song.
    A – You’re Adorable! B – You’re so Beautiful! C – you’re a Cutie and a Charm!
    pushing his red nose close to Luca, who swerves her head deep into my mother’s cardigan.
    My mother rests her head on Luca’s hair, breathes into it. The ‘Alphabet Song’, that’s it. Funny it should come back to haunt her now. She looks out past her reflection
and into the night, beyond the oily rooftops of the city, to a dark hill and a clear dawn.
    ~
    Mary had to walk the two miles from her village to Hirwaun, where Clifford said he would pick her up in his van. She’d planned it well; in her shopping bag she put her
purse, her hairbrush, her polkadot dress, her shoes. She clumps along now in her father’s old work-boots, the toes stuffed with pages torn from the Echo . He’ll be mad, she
thinks, but he’ll be mad anyway, whether I’m there or not. It makes no difference; he’s always the same in the morning.
    Mary looks at the boots, the tongues flapping up and down as she negotiates the steep path with its slipping stones and frosted gorse. It doesn’t bother her that they’ve got no
laces: when she gets to Cardiff, she’ll send the buggers back, stuffed toes and all.
    She sees her route unfolding like a map; down the curving hillside beside their house, along the back of the Chapel and Coots’ Farm, skirting the river-path to the foot of Mynydd Fawr. All
she has to do when she gets there is stand at the lip of the mountain and wait. In daylight, the lane is dogged with craters of mud, but at this hour of the morning, before the sun has got to it,
the ground rings clear as glass. She stamps along, scuffing at the frozen edges of a puddle, chipping up a lump of ice which she kicks ahead of her. Mary is nineteen, and she’s leaving her
father and the slate hills behind her and she’s going with Clifford to The City.
    She wanders up and down the lane. She must be early. Mary looks at the sky falling into blue beyond the ragged fringe of oaks; she’d get a better sighting of Clifford’s van if she
were higher up. She climbs the shoulder of the mountain, her eyes tracing the curve of the lane as it disappears then comes back to run like a skid mark down into the town. Mary watches the mist
unwrap itself from the valley, watches the specks move and come to life, making noises too loud for the size they