"The Night-light"

by Eric Carwardine

'His light' was a miners lamp, as big as the head on the plastic figurine. It was for a good reason that the makers had moulded the radiation monitor into a childs night-light. The children were always the first to feel it. They would be the ones who woke in the night, crying.

She had reached-out for one of the pamphlets on his counter, but he had gently stayed her hand.

"I wouldn't" he had said "Too late for that, now. This is all you need. Instructions inside. Just the three of you? What's your daughter's name?"

"Candice" she had replied, blushing slightly at the memory of how they had chosen that name. "She's only two. Will this be alright for her?"

"Yes" he had said "But I'll give you a sedative for her as well. She won't know a thing."

She loved this old man. For as long as she could remember he had been behind the counter in his little chemists shop. It wasn't a bright, shiny dispensary, full of computers, like she had seen in the advertisements for shopping centres. His only concession to modernity was an electronic balance. And he wouldn't have had that if they still made replacement parts for his ancient beam-balance. One day, he had stumbled, and sent his beloved balance crashing to the floor.

It was an old-fashioned shop, and he would happily admit to being an old-fashioned chemist. He still knew where to get the herbs and the barks and the leaves for the old-fashioned remedies. As a small child, she had begged her parents to let her watch him at work. There was stuff from all over the world in his little backroom. And he could tell her about all the places it came from. How they found it. How they gathered it. How they sent it to the rest of the world.

"How much?" she had asked, as he placed the three packs on the counter. The packs were coloured bright red, and each bore a large warning notice in bold yellow.

"Nothing" he had said "Paid in full. For all those years you washed bottles in here. You were the best bottle-washer I ever had. You should have gone on to university. Become a pharmacist. You would have been very good."

"Couldn't afford it" she had said "Mum and dad needed me on the farm "Couldn't afford to live in the city."

"How's your hubby?" he had asked "Terrible about him getting laid-off, after twenty years. He told me you got a big contract. That should make things easier for you" but then instantly regretted his comment "Sorry"

"That's okay" she had smiled "It doesn't matter now. But it was nice to get it."

"Anyway, you're a wonderful couple" he had beamed "And you had your little girl. I know you were both pleased about that. Others are all grown-up, and doing well, I hear. Army looked-after .... Sorry."

They had smiled at each other in embarrassment. She had bitten her lip until it hurt.

"Look, take one of these with you" he had said, as he moved from behind the counter, and took a box off one of his shelves. Opening it, he had withdrawn what appeared to be a childs toy - a plastic figurine, dressed in miners overalls, and with an outsize lamp on its helmet.

"It's a night-light, with a monitor in it. Full of electronics. Marvellous what they can do these days. It'll tell you how things are going out there. I'll put some batteries in it for you. See, it's green now. It'll change to yellow. Then light red. Then bright red. Don't leave it that long, though. Do it before his light turns red. Before you get too sick. And there's no charge for this, either" as he slid the figurine back into its box, and closed the lid on its green light. Later that night she would open the box in the darkened living-room of their farmhouse. The light would be a pale yellow.

"Thankyou. I'll say 'goodbye' now. We won't be coming into town again." And she had turned quickly away, but he had already seen the trickle of blood from her lip.

Her husband was waiting in their car, afraid to kill the motor, even though it meant wasting precious petrol. The ancient battery would never have re-started it. They would watch the fuel gauge all the way home. It was completely dark when the motor had turned its last revolution. He had left the headlights on, as they sat in silence, watching the dust swirl in the dying beams. The battery was doing its best to find a few more electrons to send along the wires. But electrons can be slippery little things, she mused. You could never be quite sure where they were going to be. But they weren't to blame. They didn't have minds of their own. They were equally at home in a child's toy as in the guidance system of a missile. They just went where a magnetic field pulled them. If it said 'Come here' they would go, without question. If things went horribly wrong, they couldn't apologise and say 'Sorry, we were following the wrong field'. They just did their duty, and were press-ganged into a terrible retaliation.

"You go inside. I'll get Candice. I think she's still fast asleep. Better wake her and give her the sedative. Be easier that way"

He had lain down, on the pretence of sleeping, after asking her to rouse him later. But slumber evaded him. He put his arm around her shoulders. Candice was making baby-snores. Clutched in her tiny hands, the night-light coloured her face a bright yellow.

"Remember why we named her 'Candice'?"

"I nearly blurted that out in the chemist shop" she grinned "What a pity we'll never be able to tell her she's a combination of your 'dick' and my 'cane'. That we reckon she started that night, after I told you about the contract, and I was hot for the cane. Think she'd have minded knowing she started that way, as stripes on her mum's bum?"

"I don't think she'd have minded" he grinned back at her. And then, after a very long pause, "Would you get me the packs?"

Suddenly, she turned to face him, her eyes bright with an idea.

"I'll get the cane. Sure it's still in the drawer. Could you fix it so we're all holding it? It kept us together. Reckon it helped get us Candice. Could you?"

"Sure, I can do that for you. For us."

It was September, in the year two-thousand-and-eight. The Olympic Games had just been postponed - indefinitely.

The End