The Shouting in the Dark by Elleke Boehmer

hoping to drop to sleep but failing, till at last she must give up, signal for her pill, invite in another dazed day.
    Three nights out of four she settles for Valium around midnight. Now and again, if she’s very wide-awake, there’s also temazepam, a new kind of pill Dr Fry gives her mother to alternate with the Valium, for her more agitated nights.
    â€˜There,’ her mother says, lightly touching her shoulder as she swallows her pill, ‘Sleep now, you will go to sleep.’
    And so Ella does, each and every time. Her mother can spend all the hours she likes with the portrait and she’d be none the wiser. Her father can shout and cry on the verandah and there’ll be no one at all to watch him.
    The temazepam however is a different story. The temazepam brings waking dreams etched in silver. On mornings after a temazepam, impish creatures with elongated faces dance in the corners of Ella’s eyes, but, when she turns to look at them face-on, they break up like mercury droplets and dissolve away.
    Ella learns to manage the new regime of pills. Some nights she pretends to swallow her pill but instead saves it under her tongue till her mother has left the room. She stores the pill in her pencil case for another night, a worse night, when she might need two pills. Other times she succeeds in lying awake till three or four in the morning, without inviting a visit. She falls asleep just as dawn is breaking. To her surprise she can better cope on two hours of unassisted sleep than after six hours on Valium.
    But the regime lasts a month or so only. One night the Valiums she stored in her pencil case have gone. The pill she once slipped into her tissue box has disappeared also. It’s as if a giant fist has punched the air from her lungs. Till daybreak she lies staring dry-eyed at the ceiling.
    At breakfast, the mother stares dumbly at her empty plate. The father is seized by an unusual lightness. Browning the toast well on both sides with the carousel toaster, he raises an eyebrow at Ella, glances in the mother’s direction. ‘No one at home, it looks like?’
    Ella drops her eyes, won’t rise to the invitation.
    But she cannot look at her mother either. She knows that mask-like expression too well, the hanging jaw, the sudden jerks of the neck. She, too, has performed those whiplash head-turns following the impish temazepam ghost.
    Now Ella discovers that, if her brain felt crushed before, it was a dummy run only. This dull-red pain that throbs all day inside her head, breaks up her thoughts, forces her to speak slowly – this is the real thing. She thinks about taking a day off school – but no, it’s beyond imagining. She must not be weak, she must not give way.
    In bed she contrives a way of binding her arms to her sides with her skipping rope to give the old feeling of being strapped down. Getting this right requires a bout of wriggling and rope winding, for which she uses her elbows and teeth. At the end of the process she’s tired enough at least to want to lie still. She stuffs tissue into her ears so as not to hear her mother’s creaking. Well swaddled, she runs through her list of star names till, suddenly, it’s morning, she has slept. She sleeps four hours at a stretch, then five, six, seven. She no longer nods off in class.
    One effect that doesn’t wear off is that the world seems louder than it was before. Sounds have a sharper edge. An unexpected noise slices like a razor blade into her ear. For the first time she’s aware of how loud they are together, their small family of three, how big their voices, especially the father’s. The tidy streets of Braemar feel too puny to contain his loudness. No matter how hard her father tries to sound English and soft-spoken, he booms like a Dutchman. Every word he says sounds furious. The librarians at the town library hear his voice coming from a distance and disappear up ladders to re-shelve