The Silent War Read Online Free

her mum shared with Aunt Louie. Until this moment, she hadn’t noticed that the door was slightly ajar. Oh yes! So the old bag’s having a good listen.
    ‘What about Aunt Louie?’
    Sunday knew she was being mischievous, because her voice was raised. But at least it stopped her mum in her tracks.
    ‘Auntie?’ replied Madge, puzzled by the sudden, unexpected question. ‘What about her?’
    ‘Is
she
coming to hear your band playing tomorrow?’
    The question immediately prompted Madge to swing a nervous glance over her shoulder towards the bedroom door. ‘I don’t know,’ she said, so obviously keeping her voice low. ‘Auntie likes to have her sleep on Sunday afternoons.’
    ‘Wouldn’t do her any harm to give up her precious afternoon sleep just for once,’ quipped Sunday, making quite sure her voice carried across to the bedroom door. ‘She’s got nothing else to do all day!’
    Madge immediately panicked, got up from the table, hurried across to her bedroom door, and closed it.
    ‘You mustn’t be unkind to your auntie,’ said Madge, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. ‘You
know
she’s got a weak heart.’
    ‘Oh come off it, Mum!’ snapped Sunday, getting up from her place at the table, and collecting the plate containing her half-finished bloater. ‘You wait on her hand and foot. She does nothing to help you round here – absolutely nothing! That’s why I blew up at her this morning. I hate the way she just lives off you. It’s time she found a place of her own!’
    Madge was getting more and more flustered. She quickly followed her daughter into the tiny kitchen whilst nervously checking over her shoulder to see if her bedroom door was still closed.
    ‘You mustn’t talk about your auntie like that, Sunday,’ Madge whispered, her carpet-slippers quietly padding on the bare lino floor. ‘I don’t expect her to do things for me. She’s my sister, Sunday, my own flesh and blood. If she left, I – I don’t know what I’d do. Don’t you understand? I love her.’
    ‘Well
I
don’t!’ Sunday’s response was emphatic.
    Madge looked horrified. ‘Sunday! How can you say such a thing?’
    Sunday remained defiant. ‘It’s true, Mum! You know it is!’ And she meant it. She turned to look out through the kitchen window. In the yard way down below, she could see some of the kids from ‘the Buildings’, shouting their heads off as they kicked their football against the bare brick wall. For as long as Sunday could remember her Aunt Louie had been a total pain in the neck, always rabbiting on at her every time she did anything that the old bag didn’t approve of. Sunday knew only too well that ever since her precious aunt had come to live in the flat all those years ago, she had used her sister as a meal ticket. She was sick to death at the way her mum always took Aunt Louie’s part, going on about how sad she was and how the poor woman had never had any love in her life. Surely it was plain as a pikestaff to see why no bloke in his right mind would want even to touch a cold fish like her. Dear Aunt Louie was nothing but a lazy, interfering old bag, whose influence over Sunday’s mum had caused more trouble in their lives than anything or anyone else.
    ‘You shouldn’t’ve talked to her the way you did this morning, Sunday.’
    Sunday swung round to her mum, and was about to answer her, but Madge spoke first.
    ‘When you have a row with her like that, it’s not Auntie you hurt. It’s me.’
    As much as she loved her, this was one of those moments when Sunday wished that she had a robust mum who was twenty years younger, instead of this meek and mild silver-haired woman who had adopted her over seventeen years before.
    Madge stood with her back to the white enamel sink. Close to tears, she seemed a lot older than her seventy-two years. ‘I took Auntie in, because – because when your dad died, I needed someone to talk to – to look after. You were only a little girl. It seemed the