Every Day Is Mother's Day Read Online Free PDF

starting and looking in corners. Since last Friday’s discoveries.
    She is fumbling in her purse now. She lays out certain coins on the kitchen table.
    “For your tea and biscuits,” she says.
    Muriel lets them lie for a time. She practises fixing her eyes on Evelyn but looking straight through her to the wood of the cupboard at her back. She practises wiping all thoughts out of her mind. At the same time she must watch Evelyn, to see that she is still mumbling over her own concerns, not looking up with the comprehension she dreads. Finally, when Muriel can bear the suspense no longer, she snatches up the coins and holds them in her hands. Evelyn lays out more on the table. “For the milk-money. Tomorrow.” Evelyn shuffles out of the kitchen, but in a moment she is back. “My envelopes,” she says, her voice querulous. “My white envelopes for putting in the milkbottles. They have torn them all.” She opens the kitchen drawer where she keeps her ration books and ends of string, her paper bags and cotton reels and farthings.
    “Lock and key,” she says. “I shall have to buy more and keep them under lock and key.”
    She tears the corner of a paper bag and puts the money into it. She folds the remainder of the bag and puts it back in the drawer. Once again tomorrow he will take the money and go away, without having to knock at the door; when the price goesup he will put a note through the letterbox. They have teased her so often with their rappings that she tries not to go to the door for any unnecessary reason; tries not to set the precedent of being in a certain place at a certain time, in case they set traps. Suddenly vindictive, she turns to Muriel: “I think of stopping you going to these Handicapped Classes. What good does it do? I think of stopping you.” In a monotone, Muriel begins to repeat her words. “Stop it, stop it,” Evelyn screams at her. There is terror in the girl’s face. Evelyn waddles from the room.
    And once more: the match rasps against the box, the flame wavers up; Muriel watches her flesh shrinking away from the heat, and feels pain. She allows the flame to play over her wrist until it burns out in her fingers. Feels, feels. Taking the scissors, uses the point to draw blood. Again, feels.
    “If you’re going, if you’re going at all, it’s time you got ready. Are you listening to me?”
    Muriel sits with her arms clamped down to her sides, willing her mother to turn. The blisters are forming now on her raw skin, the blood has dried. Evelyn shows no signs of recent pain.
    “Here.” Evelyn goes to the chest of drawers and impatiently wrenches one open, tossing a cardigan and a pair of thick woollen stockings onto the bed. Her water-eyes darting, Muriel sees that Evelyn’s forearms are unmarked. So however it came about that her thoughts were read again (as good as read), even if half an hour ago Evelyn was thinking in her brain, she has not been in all parts of her today. Still, unless…unless the marks will show up later. Evelyn turns, and sees only her daughter’s shuttered face with its habitually blank gaze. She begins again to grumble about the trouble it gives her, getting Muriel ready for the class and setting her going. Only the thought of the Welfare people coming to the house stops her from keeping Muriel at home. “What do you want to go there for anyway? Going on a bus with a lot of other people with things wrong with them, cripples and people not right in the head. One day they’ll put them on that bus and take them andgas them, and then you’ll wish you’d stayed at home with your mother.” She knows Muriel is not listening to her. She is looking sceptically at the clothes on the bed. She goes to her drawers and hunts through for the pink fluffy cardigan.
    “Grey with dirt,” Evelyn says contemptuously. “If you won’t give it to me to wash I won’t let you wear it again after this week. They will suppose I don’t see to your cleanliness.”
    She gapes.