The Overnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

past the front of Texts she glimpses a blurred shape wandering among the shelves—Ray, presumably. No doubt he's checking they're tidy for a while. She can't help wondering until she stops herself how long hers will remain that way. She drives up out of the fog that lies in the retail park and sees clear tail-lights flying like sparks along the motorway. She oughtn't to feel as if she's dredging herself and her mind out of the murk. Now it's home to St Helens and her first little flat on her own, and her bed her parents bought her to take to university, and if she's lucky nine glorious hours of not having to think about work.

Nigel
    How late is it now? Twelve minutes later than last time Nigel looked: close enough to five o'clock that he should turn off the alarm in case it wakens Laura. Reaching for the clock feels like plunging his bare arm into water that has had all night to gather ice. As soon as he has found the switch with a fingernail he shelters in the tropics of the quilt, but he mustn't risk going back to sleep. He inches across the warm mattress and settles a light but lingering kiss on Laura's shoulder blade, which is as naked as the rest of her. He's easing himself away when she mumbles a sleepy protest that isn't exactly "Night" or "No" either and reaches back to take hold of his stub.
    Her hand feels like all the soft heat of the bed turned into flesh. At once he's much less stubby and yearning to kiss her awake as slowly as he can bear. What with his shifts at Texts and hers at the hospital, where he sometimes thinks she's too ready to accommodate colleagues with young children, he and Laura have had few occasions recently when neither of them is too tired. But she needs her sleep, and if he succumbs now he'll end up late. He can't have the staff on his shift waiting to be let into the shop. He prises Laura's fingers gently off himself and lifts them up to kiss them before he slips from under the quilt and pads out of the room.
    Even the carpet is cold as snow. No wonder his stub tries to hide like a snail. He rushes downstairs as fast as he quietly can and through the mahogany kitchen to rouse the central heating. By the time he has used the toilet and shower beyond the kitchen and donned the clothes he took downstairs last night, the chill has been driven out of the building. He tiptoes upstairs to leave a morning kiss on Laura's forehead. "Dry carely," she mumbles. "See you night." Once she's asleep again he lets himself mousily out of the house.
    A milk float is humming its fitful crescendo through the village as he hooks the gates at the end of the drive open and unlocks the double garage. While West Derby has been a Liverpool suburb for most of a century, it's quiet enough to be a village still. He backs his Primera out past Laura's Micra and closes the garage and the gates. Three minutes within the speed limit bring Nigel to the dual carriageway of Queen's Drive, and he's at the motorway in less than ten.
    For most of half an hour his smoky cones are the only headlights. Signs like promises of blue sky—St Helens, Newton-le-Willows, Warrington—swell up and then expose their spotlit backsides in the mirror. The sign for Fenny Meadows seems paler than its relatives; in the distance it looks white with mould. It recovers its colour as the fog drains down the slip road, to stand more of its ground in the retail park.
    Fog flaps around the spotlight above an X like an illiterate giant's signature on the rear wall of the bookshop. As he leaves the car a patch of moisture wells up beneath it and subsides, but it's a befogged shadow. He hurries along the alley the colour of fog and past the window, into which an assortment of books have escaped from the vacant aisles. Typing most of Woody's surname on the keypad releases the glass doors, and his first two letters reduced to numbers quell the alarm.
    As soon as Nigel is locked in he begins to shiver. The heating won't have been on long, and some fog may