Everyone Has to Sleep, She Said
Sometime Justice Comes in Unexpected Packages
Julie was my friend, but she was also a coward. We had both experienced similar threats, beatings and attacks. But her way was to cower and cry and keep tolerating. Mine was to get out when I could and never return.
But wait, I’m ahead of myself. Really, it began with my mother.
Mother had a number of cherished phrases. There’s another of your mum’s precious precepts, dad would say — though not usually within her hearing. One of her most favoured was “Everyone has to sleep.”
With a sharp gleam of warning in her eyes.
She put up with a lot from my father, though not without robust protest. But she protected us as best she could. When she was physically present he’d never dare lay a hand on us, and was held back from worse excesses by the knowledge of her imminent wrath.
And sometimes, in conversation over endless cups of tea — conversation was the stock in trade back before the internet dissolved our human ties so effectively — there’d be discussion of a man in the news, or some local gossip about a man who had assaulted…
