Mam called for me to get a move on, and I pushed back my blanket thinking about how not going to school would mean no milk, and no school dinner either. It was going to be a very empty day, but that was just the way life was sometimes. You had to keep your chin up.
When I got out of bed I looked at my sheets, which were patterned with overlapping yellow stains. They were the same as the circles I had had on my arms when the ringworms had been eating my insides: dark at the edges and all different sizes. In the middle of the bed the sheets were wet, and I was cold and sticky under my nightie. Mam had left her perfume bottle on the windowsill, and I squirted some onto the worst bed stains. It didn’t make the smell much better. It actually made it a bit worse. I covered up the sheets with a blanket and hoped they would be dry by nighttime.
In the kitchen Mam pulled my hair into tight plaits. Her fingers were rough and the pulling made it feel like my head skin was going to split, but I didn’t make a fuss because that would have made her pull harder. When she finished she put a hand on my head and whispered, “Father, protect me. God, keep me safe.” Her hand was cold and we smelled the same: flowers on top and dirt underneath. After the prayer she wiped her palm on her hip, like she was wiping me away.
We left the house and walked down the street together. Her shoes made a clip-clop-clip-clop pony sound and her fingers dug dents in my wrist. We walked past a few boys on the corner playing with an old bike tire, but most people were at school. I was disappointed about that. I wanted them to see me and Mam, walking through the streets in our church clothes, almost holding hands. By the time we were close to town my church shoes were digging into my heels, but when I slowed down Mam yanked my arm to make me go faster. We got to the high street and walked past the greengrocer’s and the butcher’s and Woolworth’s. I asked Mam where we were going but she didn’t hear, or pretended she didn’t hear, and when we were almost at the end of the street she pulled me through a shop doorway so fast I didn’t have time to read the sign above it.
On the inside, the shop wasn’t a shop at all. It was a waiting room, the same as the waiting rooms at the doctor’s and the dentist’s. I had seen those waiting rooms in the videos they showed us at school. One of them was called “Going to the Doctor” and the other was called “Going to the Dentist.” Everything in this waiting room was a soft, washed-out color, and on the walls there were pictures of families with wide white smiles, so I thought perhaps it was a dentist’s, and perhaps Mam had brought me there to get my rotten tooth fixed. She pulled me up to a desk where a woman was talking on a telephone. When the woman saw us she put the phone down and smiled the same smile as the people on the walls, except her teeth were like wonky yellow paving stones crunched up against each other. I didn’t think people with teeth like that should be allowed to work at the dentist’s. I didn’t really think people with teeth like that should be allowed to leave their houses.
“This is my daughter,” said Mam. “Her name’s Christine. I need to have her adopted.”
“Um,” said the woman at the desk.
“Adopted,” said Mam.
“Er,” said the woman at the desk.
“I need to have Christine adopted,” said Mam.
“You’ve said that lots of times now,” I said.
“Shut up,” she said.
I traced a pattern on the carpet with the toe of my church shoe. My face was hot. Mam didn’t understand what adopted meant. Adopted was when you got to keep a kid that wasn’t yours, like Michelle’s mammy adopted her from cruel people in London and got to keep her even though she wasn’t her real kid. I was Mam’s kid to begin with. She got to keep me without having to make me adopted. I hated when Mam made mistakes like that. It made my face so hot. When I looked up I saw the woman at the desk licking her lips, and I thought she was going to explain about adopted to Mam, but she turned to me instead.
“Hello, pet,” she said. “Christine’s a pretty name. My name’s Ann. Would you like to sit down while I have a little chat with your mammy? I can get you some orange squash if you like?”
I sat in one of the scratchy blue chairs by the window and Ann brought me the squash in a plastic cup. It was so weak I thought it must actually be the water she had rinsed out of a plastic cup that used to have real squash in it. I used it to wet my finger and draw shapes on the chair arm. Mam didn’t look at me. She stood very straight, with one arm wrapped around her middle and one hand gripping the side of her coat. Her fingers were clawed and white.
Ann went back to the desk and was about to talk to Mam in a voice she didn’t want me to hear when a door opened down the corridor and we all heard somebody crying. They were muffled, snuffly cries, like someone was holding a handkerchief over their mouth, and after a while a woman came down the corridor holding a handkerchief over her mouth. I thought it was probably her who had been doing the crying. The handkerchief was white turned gray
