The Night Following Read Online Free PDF Page A

boxes she achieved and the supervisor’s beady eye would peruse those sheets at the end of each shift, so it was just as well she had mastered the folding and packing quickly so that she could do it without really looking. Dazzled by each flash, she could see nothing for several moments afterward, except a starry afterimage.
    Not until the end of her shift would Evelyn look up from her work and notice the shimmering, glassy air of the Testing shed and the strange, hard, salty smell of electricity. The space above her head seemed laden with tiny shocks that sparked against the white glazed bricks lining the walls and glanced back like arrows. Like a headache waiting to happen, Evelyn thought. Then she would rub her eyes and long for the fresh air. Every one of the hundreds of bulb flashes would smolder on in her vision for hours afterward, erasing detail as if they had made ragged red and gray holes like cigarette burns across the surface of her eyes.
    Today, out in the freezing rain, she marched on briskly. She had more important things to think about than sore eyes. She would not let even the most dismal January she could remember interfere with her good spirits. After all, it would soon be spring, and she would be getting married. Then there would be the baby and so what if a few people talked? It wasn’t unheard of, a honeymoon baby coming early, most folk wouldn’t probe. The fuss wouldn’t last. It would be a shock for Mam, and Evelyn hated the thought of upsetting her, but she would make her understand and she’d come round in time. Stan would settle down fine and there would be nothing more to worry about.
    As she walked, a voice from behind interrupted her thoughts. “Oy, Evelyn Leigh, hang on, can’t yer!”She turned and waited for her friend, Daphne Baker, to catch up. “Heck, you’re in a hurry!”she puffed. “Where’s the fire?”
    A grinning Daphne came lumbering toward her in her shapeless coat and tight stockings, careless as always of her lack of elegance. She had inherited, as she said herself, “me Dad’s build and me Mam’s legs, worse luck.”It was true that she had his strong, square shoulders and short arms, and her legs were, like her mother’s, almost elephantine below the knee. There was a medical name for it that Daphne had told Evelyn once and she’d forgotten, but a medical name didn’t mean there was a remedy. Daphne laughed it off, as the only girl in a family with three teasing brothers, Paul, Colin, and Jem, had learned to do. “I’m as strong as an ox,”she said. “And who looks at your legs if you’ve got a nice friendly face?”
    The two friends linked arms and made their way to the tram queue where they stood patiently. There was no letup in the weather. The tram came, a dark shape appearing out of grayness, and it struck Evelyn that it too had lost its color, as if the rain had washed off its dark green paint and it had soaked away down the street drains. On board they had to stand as usual for the first few stops, but once past Coronation Mills they found spaces to sit. The motion and noise of the tram made talking difficult. Daphne brought out her cigarettes.
    “Fancy one of mine?”she said, offering the pack to Evelyn.
    “Oh, no, not for me, ta all the same,”she said.
    “Please yourself. Still off the cigs, are you?”Daphne lit one for herself and blew out the match with her first exhalation of smoke.
    Evelyn turned away, trying to take her mind off feeling sick. She knew every bend and halt of the tram route by now and she didn’t need to see through the grimy windows to know where they were. Soon they would be at Canal Street, the stop where occasionally the odd woman got on. Not that she was all that odd, not at first glance, she was just what Evelyn thought of as “different”and what Daphne called “not all there.”She blended in all right as far as clothes and general appearance went but you could tell she wasn’t from Unsworth’s, where the