She was beautiful. Her face was blotchy from crying and her makeup had smudged around her eyes, but she was still beautiful. She had yellow hair and powder on her cheeks. I looked at her legs, which were wrapped in skin-colored stockings, making her as smooth as a doll. Mam’s legs were covered in nicks and scaly patches of dry skin, same as mine. Mam was ugly, same as me. This woman wasn’t ugly. She was like an angel.
When she had managed to stop crying she went to the desk and said to Ann, “It’s fallen through. They’re letting his mother keep him. After all that. It’s not right. They can’t do this to people.”
Ann wrinkled her forehead and started to say, “Oh, I’m so—” but Mam interrupted. “You wanting to adopt a kid?” she asked. The beautiful woman nodded tightly while she took clean tissues from the box on Ann’s desk. Mam walked over very fast and pulled me up by the elbow so hard I spilled watery orange squash all over myself. She pushed me in front of her, toward the beautiful woman, and said, “This is Chrissie. She’s mine. But she’s being adopted. You can have her.”
Ann said “but” and “wait” and “no” and the beautiful woman said “but” and “I” and “oh.” Mam put her hand on my back and took it away again, like she was touching something very hot, or very sharp, or very horrible. Like she was putting her hand on someone made of broken glass. Then she walked out. The waiting room was quiet. I heard Mam in my ears, saying, “She’s mine.” She hadn’t ever said that about me before.
I looked down at my church dress, wet with squash and coming down at the hem. I wondered whether the beautiful woman would buy me a beautiful new dress when she took me to her house. Michelle was just a fat little baby when her mammy adopted her from the cruel people in London, but she still got bought dresses and toys and pretty soft-soled shoes. I hoped that was what the beautiful woman was planning for me.
“I’d like a new dress,” I told her, in case she was feeling too shy to offer. “We can get it on the way back to your house.”
Her tongue licked at her bottom lip in a lizardy way, and she turned and pressed herself up against the desk to speak to Ann. I heard “go after her” and “clearly not well” and “afraid I can’t help” and “wanted a baby” and “far too old, yes far too old.” By the time she turned back around I had sat back down. She walked toward me, stopped, flicked her eyes and licked her lips. She said, “I . . .” then did a silly little giggle and a sillier little wave, and rushed through the door in a cloud of powder and yellow hair.
Ann put on her coat and gathered up her bag and chattered in the gabbling way grown-ups chatter when they think they can keep you from crying by blocking your ears with noise. I wanted to tell her she didn’t need to do that because I never cried, but I had a funny bubbling feeling in the back of my nose and throat that made it hard to talk. I thought perhaps I was getting a cold. Ann tried to take my hand but I shoved it into my coat pocket so hard it went right through the lining. I hung behind her as we walked down the street, scuffing the toes of my church shoes on the pavement. It was raining, and people were walking with their bodies bent in half. Ann kept stopping and nagging me to keep up, but that just made me walk even slower. An old woman was hobbling beside me, and the fourth time Ann stopped and nagged she said, “You want to keep up with your mammy. Enough of this silly dawdling, eh?” I stuck my tongue out at her. “Well that’s not very nice, is it, young lady?” she said.
“I’m not very nice,” I said. “And I’m not a lady.”
“Humph. Well. No. Quite,” she said.
Once we were away from town I had to lead the way back to the streets, because Ann didn’t know where I lived. It was stupid that she was there at all, bobbing half a stupid step behind me with her stupid wonky teeth. We walked past the alleys and she looked at the blue house and I knew what she was thinking.
“I was there when he died, you know,” I said.
Her eyebrows went up into her stupid fringe. “There when he died?” she said.
“Well. I was there when they found him, which is almost as good,” I said. “I saw the man find him in the house and carry him down to his mammy. He was covered in blood. It was coming out of his mouth and ears and everywhere. His mammy was crying like this.” I howled and heaved like a dying fox to show her how Steven’s mammy had sounded. Her face went a bit gray.
“It must be very scary for you to think about what happened to that little boy,” she said in her stupid icing-sugar voice. “It’s a terrible thing to have happened to a kid. But you know you’re safe, don’t you? The police will catch whoever hurt him, and they won’t be able to hurt any more kids.”
The sherbet feeling started inside me. “They might,” I said.
“What?” she said.
“They might hurt more kids. The one who killed Steven. They
