Free Alone Beneath The Heaven by Rita Bradshaw Page B

returning more strongly, and then sank down to the floor to pull on the boots, her teeth chattering uncontrollably with a mixture of fear and cold. Everywhere looked so different compared to the daytime.
     
    She sat there for some time. Her arms and legs seemed to have lead weights attached to them and her head was aching badly; the bed she had just left took on the form of heaven. She must have fallen asleep for a few minutes because she suddenly jerked awake with a panic-stricken start as an owl called out into the charcoal-streaked sky, and then she remembered, and rose slowly to her feet.
     
    She had to get out onto the road beyond, that was the first thing, and then . . . then everything would work out.
     
    The gate was locked, the seven-foot wrought-iron fence either side of it equally unscalable with vicious points to deter even the most intrepid climber - which Sarah wasn’t.
     
    ‘ Oh .’ She gazed up at the gate, and then her eyes went higher still as she muttered, ‘Please, God, do something, will you? Please?’ There was no answer, no sudden creaking of the gate swinging open, but there suddenly popped into her mind a conversation she had overheard when working in the vegetable garden a few weeks before. Two of the older boys had been congratulating themselves on finding a gap in the fence, through which they had been able to squeeze and undertake a raid on a farmer’s orchard some way down the lane. They had been tall boys, too; broad-shouldered. If they could get through . . .
     
    It took Sarah some time to find the gap, which was nothing more than a slight bending of two of the iron poles, but she was through in a trice and out onto the grass verge beyond, where she stood for a moment looking from right to left. The sky was patchily moonlit but still overwhelmingly dark, the rain of the afternoon making the ground stick to her feet. She pulled the blanket round her shoulders in the form of a shawl, and began to trudge along the verge, feeling very tiny and very alone.
     
    She didn’t have anyone who loved her. There was a cold wind blowing against her face, and it was only when it stung her cheeks that she realized she was crying. Her mam hadn’t loved her, there hadn’t been a pink pram and a silver rattle, it was a story, just a story. The pain in her chest was making it tight and she pushed her small fists, in which the edges of the blanket were clasped, into her breastbone.
     
    Mary Owen said you didn’t have to have a da to be born, just a mam. She didn’t know if she believed that, she admitted to herself, but any road everyone was agreed you had to have a mam, and hers hadn’t wanted her. Why? She stopped suddenly, the dizziness intensifying. Her mam was somewhere, somewhere , and she didn’t know where. And she wanted her mam. She did, she wanted her. She didn’t care what she looked like - she could look like Mary Owen’s mam even, she didn’t care, she just wanted her mam. But her mam didn’t want her. She didn’t know where she was, what she was doing; she could have died and her mam wouldn’t have known.
     
    It was becoming increasingly difficult to walk; the nausea was strong now but it was her legs that were all wobbly. She set her face and continued to plod on. The boots were rubbing painfully when she’d covered no more than a few hundred yards, and after hobbling along and twice sprawling on the ground when she tripped over her own feet she decided to take them off and carry them round her neck for a while. She sat down on the verge, but once the boots were off and hung round her neck by the laces she found to her amazement she couldn’t get up, an exhaustion so severe as to be paralysing weighting her down. The vomiting took her by surprise, but once it was over the dizziness felt slightly better, although the will to move was quite gone. She curled up into a little ball in the damp grass, pulled the blanket around her and over her head, and shut her eyes as it