Watching Molly eat, I felt a dull, itchy panic. It was four o’clock. Four wasn’t teatime. Four was snack time, ready for four thirty reading time, ready for five o’clock Blue Peter time. If Molly had tea at four we would have an empty slot at five thirty—half an hour of blank time I wouldn’t know how to fill—and then she might be hungry again by bedtime, and I wouldn’t know whether or not to feed her, what to feed her, whether to brush her teeth again, how long she should wait between eating and sleeping.
The phone began to ring, and I pushed my head out of the window. The air was cool and slightly sweet, and I sipped it through clenched teeth. Outside, a man was trying to get into the house next to the souvenir shop. He banged on the door with the flat of his hand, forced it with his shoulder. It was like watching a lump of unproved bread dough thrown against a wall: bluntly, yeastily ineffective. He slithered down to the ground, tried to drink from a glass bottle, missed his mouth. Started to cry. The trill of the phone seemed to grow with each ring—louder, more insistent—and I imagined the journalist on the other end of the line. I felt her perfume, the tip-tap of her nails on the typewriter.
“Why have you got the window open?” Molly called. “It’s cold.”
“Just getting some air,” I said. The phone stopped ringing, and I ducked back in to lean against the glass. The explanation had solidified in my mind on the walk back from school: the doctor had called Sasha, and Sasha had called the papers. I rummaged around inside myself for panic or betrayal, but it wasn’t there. Sasha would have been paid a lot of money for my phone number, more money than she’d earn in a year of work. It was horrid to be poor. I felt numb.
“I really need a party dress, you know,” Molly said.
“What?” I said.
“I need a party dress. For Alice’s party.”
I touched my forehead: chilled, spongy, like the skin on a dead person. I went to the bathroom and spread the mat on the floor. Molly maintained a stream of vague dress-based grumbling, which blended with the grumble of water into the tub. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter whether I kept her clean anymore, because keeping her clean was part of keeping her, and I wasn’t getting to keep her. It occurred to me that if I didn’t give her a bath, there would be more unstructured time to fill before she went to sleep. The taps stayed on. I tried not to picture her trussed in puff sleeves and a sash. I knelt next to the tub, rested my head on the side, and watched the water rise.
When Molly had been growing inside me, I had spent most of my life looking at bathrooms side-on. I was sick in a way I had never been sick before, in a way I thought, surely, no one had ever been sick before. At night I would wake with bladed fingers squeezing my stomach, and crawl to press my cheek to the cold lip of the tub. My sweat was so salty it felt like granules pushing out of my skin, milled crystals running down my neck. My belly would cramp and then it would come, a retch that sent me choking into the toilet bowl, so violent I expected to throw up the baby in a swish of bile.
Since they had let me out, I had been doing my best to disappear, but Molly made me neon. Strange women beamed at me, asked if it was a boy or a girl, asked when it was due, asked if I was tired, tried to give me their seat on the bus. I felt like a con artist. If they had known who I was, they would have kicked me under the bus’s wheels. As I got bigger—comically big, unnecessarily big, surely the biggest anyone had ever been—I left the flat less and less. I looked down at the foreign mass stuck to the front of my body and thought, “Please get out, please get out, please, somebody, get it out of me.” And then night would come, and I would be back on the bathroom floor. I would hold my hands to my belly, feeling the knobs of knee and elbow through my skin. She didn’t feel foreign. She felt like a friend. I had been so lonely before.
At Haverleigh we had planted sunflower seeds, and I had told the keepers mine would grow shriveled, because I was the bad seed and any seed I planted was bad too. My flower grew yellow and strong. You wouldn’t have known it had come from a seed at all. That was what I thought of as I knelt on the bathroom floor at night: the bright, soft petals. Babies grew from seeds. Matron had said so. I clenched my teeth in prayer. “Please stay inside. Please stay inside. Please, whoever you are, stay inside me.”
Chrissie
When Steven had been dead for a while, most mammies stopped keeping their kids at home with them after school, because it got warmer and they got sick of having their kids at home with them after school. Mam was still sick of me, but she didn’t try to give me away again. She was usually out when I got back from school or from playing, or else she was in her room with the door closed and the light off. We still went to church every Sunday. Mam always liked God, even when she didn’t like me. We had to get there late and leave early because Mam didn’t like other people, and if we got there late and left early
