Everyone wanted to see where he had died, so I took them to the upstairs room. I noticed things about it that I hadn’t noticed when I had been there with Steven, like the couch cushions stacked in a pile by the fireplace and the bits of rubbish at the edges. The paper on the walls was peeling, and where the walls met the floor there were bubbles of rot that foamed in a cream-soda collar. In their corners, the alley houses were mainly liquid.
“How do you know it was here?” asked Donna.
“She was there when the man brought him out of the house,” said Linda. “She ran ahead when I was putting Paula’s nappy back on. She watched through the window. She saw the man pick him up off the floor in this room and take him downstairs to his mammy.” That wasn’t actually true, but I liked how important it made me sound. When Donna looked at me I knew she was having to pretend not to be jealous, and for a moment I wanted to tell her it was me who had done the killing, to make her really properly jealous. I had to bite my mouth again. I was having to bite my mouth a lot since Steven had died.
“Is that really true?” Donna asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw everything.”
I walked to the patch of floor underneath the hole in the roof, where the sun came in and licked yellow light across the boards.
“This is where he died,” I said. “This is exactly where he died.” The others came and stood in a circle. There was enough space in the middle for a little-boy body.
“How did he?” asked William.
“Just did,” I said. I spat on my finger and rubbed it into my cut.
“That’s not how it works,” said Donna. “People don’t just die for no reason.”
“Sometimes they do,” said Linda. “My grandda, he was at our house for fish supper, when I was five, and he died for no reason. He was just sitting in his chair with a fish cake on his knee. Then he died.” She looked around like she thought one of us was going to scream or fall over.
“Your grandda was probably a hundred years old, though,” said Donna. “Steven was just a baby. It’s not the same.”
“It’s quite same,” said Linda.
“No it’s not,” said Donna. “That’s thick.”
Redness rushed up Linda’s neck, into her face, and she took the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth so her mouth was lopsided. Really and truly, Linda was thick. That was why not many people wanted to be her friend. She was thick at reading and writing and telling the time and tying her shoelaces, and sometimes she said things that were so thick you were surprised that she was even walking around, because you wouldn’t have thought you would know how to walk when you were that thick. Her being thick meant she believed everything you told her, and that was fun sometimes. When we were in Class Three she swallowed her tooth in a mouthful of biscuit at playtime and I told her she would grow an extra mouth in her belly, and the new mouth would eat all her food, and she would waste away thinner and thinner until she died, and now that she had swallowed the tooth there was nothing she could do to stop it. She cried hard, her tears mixing with the red worm of blood running down her chin, and Mrs. Oakfield sent her to the medical room. Mrs. Oakfield asked if I knew why she had been so upset but I didn’t answer. I was busy finishing her biscuit.
Linda hated being called thick because she knew deep down it was true, and I hated people calling her thick because she hated it. I pushed Donna in the chest.
“Shut up, potato face,” I said. “He just died. The same as her grandda. The exact same.”
“Bet it wasn’t the exact same,” said William.
“Yeah. Bet it wasn’t,” said Donna.
“Look, everybody,” said Linda. “You have to listen to Chrissie. She’s the cleverest. She knows everything.” Her cheeks went pink, because she didn’t usually say things starting with “Look, everybody,” especially not to Donna. She moved closer to me and I held her hand.
“Yeah,” I said. “You have to listen to me, and you have to not be mean to Linda, because she’s my best friend and if you’re mean to her I’ll get you. But you mainly have to listen to me because I’m the cleverest and I know everything. And I definitely know what happened to Steven.”
It wasn’t just special that I was the one who knew what had happened to Steven. It was special that I was the only one who knew what had happened to him, out of kids and grown-ups and even policemen. At school they told us he had an accident while he was playing in the alleys, fell through the floor when the rotten-soft boards
