“No they won’t,” she said. She tried to pat my shoulder but I jerked away, so she patted the space where I wasn’t. “No more kids are going to get hurt. I promise.”
People were always promising things, like promise was anything more than a stupid word.
“You can’t promise that,” I said. “You can’t stop it happening. No one can.”
She loosened the collar of her stupid coat around her stupid neck. Pinpricks of sweat had started bubbling out of the skin on her nose, even though it was cold. “Well,” she said. “I think the police will keep all the kids safe. So that’s the important thing. The important thing is that you’re safe.”
“I never said I wasn’t,” I said. I wanted to tell her that since I had killed Steven I had felt safer than ever before, because I was the one people needed to watch out for, and being the one people needed to watch out for was the safest way to be. I decided she wasn’t the right person to tell. She was too stupid.
When we got to the house she started coming up the path behind me. I turned round and stood still, blocking the door.
“I’m just going to pop in and have a word with your mammy, Christine,” she said.
“No you’re not,” I said.
“There’s nothing for you to worry about,” she said. She tried to get past me. “I just want to have a very quick chat with your mammy. Just to make sure everything’s okay with both of you.”
“Everything is okay with both of us,” I said. “But you can’t speak to her. She’s busy. She’s working.”
“In the house?”
“Yeah.”
“What work is it your mammy does?”
An upstairs window was cracked open, and the sound of Mam crying came through it. Ann looked up at the window, then down at me, then up at the window again.
“She’s a painter,” I said. Mam cried out a big, loud wail. Ann raised her eyebrows. “Sometimes her paintings don’t go how she wants them to go,” I said.
I thought Ann would leave me alone then, but she barged forward and pressed her stupid finger against the doorbell. She had to press it three times before Mam came to the door, wearing a dressing gown that showed too much of her legs. I didn’t want to hear any more of Ann’s stupid talking or Mam’s stupid crying, so I pushed past them both, up the stairs, along the landing, into my room. It still stank of pee and perfume. I pulled the sheets off the bed and stuffed them in the wardrobe. The mattress underneath was just as stained and rotten, but I stretched the blanket over it and pretended it was clean. After a few minutes I heard the front door close, heard Mam come back up the stairs and go back into her bedroom. She didn’t start crying again. We both sat in our rooms, listening to each other listening to each other.
When I realized Mam wasn’t going to come and see me, not even to shout, I went to the window and watched the fists of rain beating down outside. It had only just gone dinnertime, but I couldn’t knock for anyone because they were all at school. Mam’s perfume bottle was still in my room, sitting on the windowsill, and I took out the stopper, opened the window, and poured it into the rain. When the bottle was empty I dropped it. I wanted it to shatter into a million glittering pieces that would cut up Mam’s feet next time she went out barefoot, but it hit the path with a dull crack and bounced into the grass.
Hunger had started to sluice through me, but the kitchen cupboards had nothing inside except sugar and moths. I opened and closed them, thinking about the milk bottles clustered in the crate at school. It was cold that day, and it was Friday, and that meant the milk would have been fresh and the school dinner would have been fish and chips. That was my favorite. I kicked the metal base of the cooker hard, and a packet of Angel Delight slipped out from behind it. The powder made a thick paste on my tongue. Upstairs, Mam started crying again: a mewing, kittenish kind of cry. I tried not to listen, but it stuffed itself into my head, snaked around inside me like ivy growing round the bars of a gate. When I went back up the stairs I kept my eyes down, staring at the hair and ash and caked-in dirt on the floor, but outside Mam’s room I looked up without meaning to. The door was open. It hadn’t been open when I had gone to the kitchen, which meant Mam had heard me go down the stairs, scuttled to the door, opened it, scuttled back. She was sitting on her bed with her back against the headboard, moaning. I looked for the tears to go with the noise but there weren’t any. Her cheeks were dry. She was forcing out the sound in a long ribbon, and every few seconds she flicked her eyes to the side to make sure I was watching.
“What you crying for?” I asked. “Is it because I came back?”
She didn’t answer. I pulled the door shut, because it seemed like I was making things worse, not better. There was a shriek, then the sound of something hard and heavy thrown against the wall.
“You don’t understand,” she shrieked. “You don’t even care. You don’t even care, Chrissie.”
She stopped crying quite quickly after that, probably because I couldn’t see her and she realized I wasn’t coming in to tell her I did care. If she wasn’t going to get me to do anything by crying, she wasn’t going to get much from crying at all, except sore eyes and a scratchy throat. I squeezed the muscles in my belly, bent over, and sicked Angel Delight onto the floor. It dripped through the
