Julia
By the time I got up the stairs the phone had stopped ringing. I washed the speckled milk out of Molly’s cereal bowl and went back to the door. I stopped before unlocking it. My thoughts were wrapped around the phone, and when my thoughts were elsewhere I still forgot I could unlock doors for myself. I thought perhaps by the time I was thirty I would have unlearned the instinct to wait for a grown-up to come with a key. When I was thirty I would have lived outside Haverleigh’s walls for longer than I had lived within them.
Haverleigh was a Home, but the sort with a capital letter at the beginning and a fence around the edge, a place for kids too bad for their small-letter homes. They had taken me there from prison, in a car with grayed-out windows. Before I left my cell I ate the plate of food the guard brought up from the canteen: sausages with split brown skins, a dark circle of black pudding like the soil at the bottom of a plant pot. I ate it quickly, using my fingers, swallowing lumps and feeling them land like pebbles in my belly. I didn’t know if I’d ever be fed again. When I finished they put me in the car with two policemen and we drove for hours, down winding, twisting roads that made my breakfast wind and twist around inside. A thin film of grease settled over my gums, across my tongue, crouched in my lost-tooth gaps. It tasted of meat and something bitter, like petrol, washing up from my guts.
“I feel a bit sick,” I said.
“Take deep breaths,” said the woman policeman.
“Can I roll down the window?” I asked.
“No,” she said. She opened the glove compartment and passed me a paper bag. “Here you go. You can be sick in there.”
I spent the rest of the journey trying to get the sick to come up my throat, because I wanted to spit it all over the backseat. They’d have to let me roll down the window if I did that. It didn’t come until the car pulled to a stop in the Haverleigh drive and the woman policeman came round to open my door. The rush of cool air hit me in the face. I leaned out and threw up on her shoes.
“Oh, God,” she said.
“Told you I felt sick,” I said, wiping my mouth with my hand and wiping my hand on the seat. She pulled me out by the elbow and I saw a squat, square collection of buildings. It didn’t look like a prison at all. I twinged with disappointment. I had imagined barbed wire and bars on windows. I knew that would have impressed Donna when she came to visit.
The people who patrolled the Haverleigh corridors were less parents than zookeepers. They woke me at the same time each morning, took me to the bathroom, watched me shower, took me back to my bedroom, watched me dress, took me to the dining room, watched me eat, took me to school, watched me rip up my exercise book and hide under my desk. Most of them were kind. They called me things like “mate” and “pal” and “kid,” and taught me ways to pull myself back from the brink of a rage—breathing, counting, listing the objects I saw around me. During the days, the keepers were with me all the time, making me think they were there because they liked me, but in the evenings they started looking at their watches and saying, “Are night staff here yet?” Whatever we were doing together, when the night keepers arrived the day keepers got up and said, “Bye, kid, see you tomorrow.” That was when I remembered they didn’t really like me at all. They were just being paid to be with me. That was when I threw the game board across the room, or ripped up my homework book, or slammed another kid’s head into the wall. When you did bad things like that the keepers descended, one for each limb, held you so tight you couldn’t move. I did lots of bad things. It felt nice to be held. I liked going limp in their arms and hearing them say, “There. Well done for calming down. Good girl, Chrissie. Good girl.” It was almost like I wasn’t bad at all.
Haverleigh buzzed with rhythms and noises all its own—alarms that screamed down the corridors, kids who screamed in their rooms—but most of all its sound was the rattle of the keys the keepers wore in fat bunches on their belts. When I started the new life I stood at every closed door I came to, waiting for a keeper to unlock it and let me through. Every time I realized I could open it myself I felt an urgent need to scream. People said it wasn’t fair that I had been let out when I turned eighteen, said I should have been locked up forever. I agreed: it wasn’t fair. The people in charge had hidden me away, then thrown me into a life I hadn’t expected to have to live, in a world I hadn’t expected to have to understand. I missed the clanks and clinks of Haverleigh’s halls, the big metal locks on its doors.
“That was my home,” I wanted to say, “my small-letter home. It wasn’t fair to make me leave.”
• • •
The cold weather brought a gust of workmen
