Free Fire Song by Libby Hathorn

voice, but as she struggled to sit up further, Ingrid saw the colour rise in her pale face.
    ‘Mum, the doctor said, Mrs Harry Williams, too – I mean, they all said that you should be left to rest.’
    ‘Pah! Left to die, I s’pose they meant,’ she said dramatically. ‘Whereas,’ there was still the glint in her eye that Ingrid didn’t want to see, ‘I’ve been lying here semi-helpless, just waiting for you to come.’
    Ingrid didn’t know whether to be pleased or not.
    ‘Sorry, Mum, but Mrs Harry Williams –’
    ‘Never mind, never mind.’ Mum cut her off crossly. ‘Just pull that curtain to. So many busybodies.’
    Ingrid looked around. There were eight beds in the ward and only two of them with patients far down at the other end. But this was Mum’s way. She pulled the curtain along the track that closed out the world. She was in a pink cocoon that might have been private, but it didn’t feel safe. It was awful, but she didn’t want to be here alone with her mother.
    Now that the curtains were drawn across, Mum allowed her head and shoulders to rest on the pile of pillows. ‘I suppose I look a wreck.’ She started smoothing her hair. ‘I need a mirror, but do you think anyone will fetch one?’
    So she didn’t know about her droopy mouth and her wonky eye.
    ‘You look fine, Mum. A bit –’
    Her mother’s face clouded.
    She
did
know about it, then.
    ‘They said I’ve had a stroke. A mild stroke. One hand’s a bit useless, see. But not the other. I must look a fright. But enough about that at the moment. Here, come closer.’
    She clutched her hand in a way that Ingrid didn’t like – at all. The same as that old man, Joe, who used to sit on the front fence of his mother’s house and tell stories to all the kids who came by. He’d been in the war and they said it was his nerves that made him rave the way he did. And if you got close enough to him, he’d grab you, just as if he was a drowning man, and he was so hard to get away from. Now Mum was holding onto her with her good hand just like that, and trying to sit further up on the pillows.
    ‘Please, Mum, you shouldn’t sit up!’
    ‘I may be down, Ingrid child, but I can tell you one thing. I’m not out! No siree! Come closer. I don’t want any busybody to hear what I got to say.’ Ingrid’s heart sank. Something bad, something maybe worse than Mum’s changed face was about to happen, and there wasn’t a darned thing she could do about it.
    ‘
Youve
got to do it now,’ she hissed. ‘And that’s all there is to it. I hear you’re staying next door with the God-botherers. Well, then, you can get away from Mrs Harry Williams after dark. Out the window if you have to. Might be best, out the window. Easy.’
    Mum, stop. Just stop!
    ‘I’d not filled every bowl like I’d planned to, but there’s one in the lounge room under the curtain, so that’s enough if you light ‘em front and back, and then get the hell out of there, back to your bed. It’s perfect. No one’ll ever know!’
    ‘But, Mum –’ she said, and nothing more.
    There was a terrible silence then as Mum showed the full force of her disapproval, squeezing Ingrid’s hand hard, but then falling back onto the pillow, her face clouded in alook that Ingrid knew could escalate to rage. Yet when she spoke it was softly, her weird eye fixed on Ingrid’s face.
    ‘I’m counting on you, Ingrid, like I never have before. D’you understand?’
    ‘Mum, I –'The word ‘can’t’ just wouldn’t come out.
    ‘Don’t say anything, love; just listen. You know very well we’re at the end of our tether, don’t you?’
    She nodded miserably, thinking of Blackie at the end of his tether, stretched out happily in the shade of the pine tree and not having to listen to the wrack-and-ruin song, the out-on-the-street song. Nothing but the birdsong and the cool mountain breeze music. It was stifling in here.
    ‘Well, then, I’ve explained what that means. It’ll be the