I nodded but didn’t speak. I took off my apron, pulled on my coat, and walked into the cold afternoon.
It had all been for nothing. The months of sickness and stretching, the years of washing and working and worrying. I had bought Molly trainers with lights in the heels and taken her to church on Christmas Eve and taught her to look both ways before crossing the road, and I might as well have thrown her baby body in a corner and waited for her to cry herself to death. Both versions ended the same way: with me alone again.
The week before she fell off the wall she had stopped chewing in the middle of tea and stared at me, bug-eyed, fingers on her mouth.
“My tooth, my tooth,” she had squeaked.
“Does it hurt?”
“It feels funny.”
“Funny sore?”
“It feels funny.”
That was the worst thing—the fact that Sasha was cruel to take her, and wicked to take her, and right to take her. Because any kid who stayed with me would grow up a jigsaw of rotted, crumbling parts. If Molly stayed with me, she would grow up to be Chrissie.
Halfway down the high street I ducked into an alley and leaned against the wall. I undid the zip on my coat and flapped it open, letting the wind chill the sweat under my arms. I imagined it turning to drifts of frost that crunched when I moved. In my chest, my heart felt small and tinny, like a bell on a cat’s collar. The smell of pee was strong, and it got worse when I crouched on the ground. Worse when I wobbled onto my knees. Worse when I put my forehead on the concrete. Worst when I opened my mouth to scream.
Chrissie
Mam was standing at my wardrobe when I woke up the next morning.
“You’re not going to school today,” she said.
I felt around my chin. “Have I got mumps?” I asked. Lots of people had been off school with mumps.
“No,” she said. She took my church dress out of the wardrobe and sniffed it under the arms, then squirted it with flowery perfume from a pretty glass bottle. I didn’t know why she was getting out my church dress on a Friday. I picked the crust from the corner of my eye.
“Are we going to church?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Course not. It’s Friday. Get dressed.”
“Have you filled up the lectric?” I asked.
“Get dressed,” she said.
She left, but I didn’t get up straightaway. I lay in bed, running my knuckles over the xylophone of ribs that striped me under my nipples.
I didn’t really like going to school, because I didn’t like Miss White and I didn’t like worksheets and I didn’t like sitting next to Richard, but I did like being milk monitor. When you were milk monitor you got to go out of the classroom door at break time, pull in the crate of milk bottles from the playground, and put a bottle and straw on everyone’s desk. When all the milk had been handed out Miss White came round with the biscuit tin and put one next to everyone’s bottle. I had been trying for a long time to get Miss White to let me be biscuit monitor, because that would have been even better than being milk monitor, but she always said no.
“Biscuit monitor has to be a grown-up,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because it’s a grown-up’s job,” she said.
“I think it should be a kid,” I said. “I think it should be me.”
“Chrissie,” she said. “Having you as biscuit monitor would be what we call a recipe for disaster.”
I had no idea what she was on about.
You could tell whether it was going to be a good milk day or a bad milk day by looking at the bottles in the crate. The best was when they were covered in a thin layer of water droplets, like sweat beads, because that meant the milk inside would be fresh and cold. It wasn’t so good when they were frosted, because that meant the milk would be frozen and you would have to thaw it on top of the radiator, and that took a long time. The worst was when the sun had been shining all morning and the white in the bottles had turned butter-colored. That meant the milk would be warm like bathwater, thickened and cheesy.
The best thing about being milk monitor was that once you had given out the milk bottles you took the crate back to the playground, and then you could drink the spares. There were almost always spares, because there were almost always people away. On a good day it could be five or six little bottles. When I had put the crate on the ground under the windowsill I ducked down and pushed my thumb through the bottle tops. It was funner to poke a straw through the foil—that made a lovely popping sound—but you had to be fast-fast-fast when you were drinking spare milk, and straws were slow-slow-slow. I had been milk monitor for the whole of the spring term, and I had got very fast. Bottle, thumb, gulp, done. I could get a bottle down in one swallow. Really and truly, I didn’t like milk very much, but drinking a lot of it made it easier not to mind about getting no food after school. When break was finished I had to sit very still at my desk, because my belly was so swishy I knew I would be sick if I moved too fast. I thought that was probably
