Julia
In the six months Molly had been at school, I had never been late to collect her. The closest I had come was the day she had broken up for Christmas, when I had been stuck in a queue in the toy shop. I had paid, raced back to the apartment, and hidden the marble run in my wardrobe, next to a box of stocking toys I had been squirreling since August. I had slipped through the school gates at three thirty, just as Miss King had led out the crocodile of four- and-five-year-olds. Molly had scampered over with holly painted on her cheeks and a chocolate Father Christmas in her fist.
“We had a party and there was missing-toe, you kiss people under it, me and Abigail didn’t kiss, we just rubbed our noses together, can I eat this now?”
I had been so blind and so lucky back then. I hadn’t even been properly late. This time the gates were swung wide and the tide of other-mothers and other-kids was working against me. I stood still, waiting for them to pass. I felt I was an outline with nothing inside. Being bumped by the crowd would have made me crumple.
Molly was standing by the water fountains with Miss King, who saw me and launched her my way.
“You were late,” Molly said when she reached me.
“I was on the phone,” I said.
We got to the seafront and she pointed to the skeleton of the funfair, which was open but empty, with frozen rides and men smoking roll-ups in control booths.
“Can we go there?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?” she asked.
“Because it’s just a normal day. The fair isn’t for normal days.”
“What days is it for?”
“Special days.”
“Like the first day of spring?”
“No. Not like that at all.”
I tried pressing the skin around my eyes again, but I couldn’t squash the pain cloyed in the sockets. Molly kicked a pebble onto the grass and made a noise that was halfway between a groan and a whine. “You never let me do anything fun,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said.
A woman and little girl joined the path in front of us. The girl was wearing a flouncy dress and slip-on shoes that gapped from her heels when she walked. Before I could stop it, the tally machine in my head whirred to life.
It’s cold. She should be wearing tights. Molly is wearing tights. Molly’s legs aren’t cold. One point.
Those shoes are too big, and they don’t have any support. Her feet won’t grow properly. Molly’s shoes are the right ones for growing feet. The woman in the shoe shop told me. Two points.
That’s not a sensible dress. She won’t be able to run around in it. She’ll have to worry about getting it dirty. Her mam shouldn’t use her like a doll. Molly’s clothes are made for living, not for show. Three points.
The woman bent and lifted the girl onto her hip. The girl wrapped her legs around her waist and dropped her head onto her shoulder.
She has a proper mother. Molly doesn’t. Soon, Molly won’t have a mother at all. Minus points. Minus all the points you ever earned.
I looked at Molly hopping over cracks in the path. The wind had whipped color into her cheeks, and it made her prettier, because it made her less like me. That was where the best bits of Molly lived—in the gaps between her and Chrissie, in her soft mouth and clear eyes. I sometimes felt there was a template kid, a pale, dark-haired little girl, and Molly and Chrissie were there to show what happened when she was was fed or starved, clean or grimy. Since I had been in the real world I had washed every day and eaten away the sharpest of my edges, and it gave me a warm thrill to know how much Molly looked like me. It stopped me having to think about the genes that weren’t mine.
The man who had given me Molly had been less a man than a boy, and less a boy than a gangling mesh of limbs and bravado. He was called Nathan; it said so on his badge. My badge said Lucy, because that was the first new name they gave me when they let me out, the first new life I slipped into. Nathan and Lucy stacked shelves at the hardware store where probation officer Jan had found me a job. Jan always talked about how good it was that I was out in the real world, because life in the real world was so much better than life in prison. At the hardware store interview they laid out a selection of screws and bolts and doorknobs and asked us to choose the item we were most like, ready to “present” to the group. People clamored at the table until the only thing left was a packet of iron nails. I pressed one into the pad of my finger as I waited for my turn to say how strong and sharp I was, and I thought of Haverleigh. It had been a kind of prison. It hadn’t been nearly as bad as this.
Nathan liked to tell me which pub he had been to at the weekend, who he had been with, and which football match they had watched. He stammered, but only on words beginning with t. His local pub was the Tavern, his football team was Tottenham, and all his friends seemed to be called either Tom or Tony. One of the checkout girls told me he
