“Come here, Stevie,” we heard her say. “I knew I’d find you.”
The boys ran away crying, and we ran too, out of the playground and up the street. Before we went round the corner I looked over my shoulder. Steven’s mammy was sitting on the ground under the swing poles. She was making that sound like a fox with a thorn, the same sound she had made when the man had carried Steven out of the blue house. I tried to find my inside-fizzing but it wasn’t there. Remembering was a blunt, twisty ache, like someone was doing a Chinese burn on my guts.
“She’s crazy,” said Linda when I caught her up. She kept looking back to see if Steven’s mammy was following us, but I knew she wouldn’t be. “Who do you think killed Steven?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t even matter anyway. He’ll be back soon. Like my da.”
“Your da hasn’t been back for ages,” she said.
“Not that ages,” I said.
“I don’t think Steven will come back,” she said. “My grandda never did.”
I didn’t feel like explaining to Linda about people dying and coming back, so I stuffed the rest of the licorice allsorts into my mouth to make my teeth too gummed up to talk. She shoved me.
“Oi! Pig,” she said. Brown dribble oozed down my chin. When Linda went into her house I spat the sweets into the gutter. I ran my tongue around my mouth to see if I had spat the rotten tooth out too, but it was still there, creaking in the gum.
• • •
On Wednesday I forgot about trying to get sent home sick with mumps because the police came back to school, and this time they talked to all the classes, not just the babies. I saw them through the glass in the door, all polished shoes and shiny buttons. I got a feeling in my belly like an elastic band pulled to nearly snapping or a handful of sherbet dropped in a cup of Coca-Cola. Miss White let them in and said we all had to listen very carefully, so I turned round to face the front. Richard kicked me and I smacked his bare leg. Miss White told us to calm down and stop being silly, and one of the policemen looked at me and smiled with half his mouth. The elastic band snapped. The sherbet foamed up. I felt like God again.
The policemen said all the same things Mr. Michaels had said right after Steven died: that we might have heard a very sad thing happened to a little boy who lived in the streets and we mustn’t go playing in the alleys anymore and some of us might have known the little boy and if any of us had seen him the day he died we had to go and talk to them. I put my hand up as soon as they finished speaking, and Miss White said, “Chrissie, the policemen are very busy and they need to speak to Class Five and Class Six too; we don’t have time for silliness.”
“I saw him,” I said. I looked her straight in the eye.
“Did you?” she said. She looked me straight back.
“Yes,” I said.
“You saw him that day?” asked one of the policemen.
“Yes,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Would you like to come over here with us for a moment, lass?”
I stood up and walked to the front. I could feel everyone’s eyes on my back, and I bubbled with the power of it. The policeman put his hand on my shoulder and we went and sat on the chairs in the library corner. In the background I could hear whispering and Miss White telling everyone to finish their worksheets, but more than that I could hear fizzing and popping and whooshing. When Steven’s mammy had come to the playground I had been scared my fizzing might be gone for good, because I had felt so cold and quiet inside, but now it was back and better than ever. No one was really finishing their worksheets. They were watching me.
“What’s your name, lass?” asked one of the policemen when we had sat down. They were too big for the little chairs in the library corner. They spilled over the sides.
“Chrissie Banks,” I said. The other policeman wrote it down in a notebook.
“Hiya, Chrissie. My name’s PC Scott and this is PC Woods,” he said. “So, you think you saw Steven the day he passed away?”
“What does PC stand for?” I asked. “Is it police copper?”
“Close. Police constable,” he said. “You think you saw Steven, do you?”
“I know I did,” I said. I realized my head was completely empty, with nothing in it that I could say next. The policemen were looking at me hard, and I could tell they wanted me to carry on, but I just looked at them hard back.
“Could you tell us a bit more about that?” asked PC Scott.
“I saw him in the morning,” I said.
“All right,” he said, and PC Woods wrote something else in his notebook. I thought it was probably “She saw him in the morning.”
“Whereabouts did you see him?” asked PC Scott.
“At the shop,” I said.
“The shop at the end of Madeley Street?” he asked. “The newsagent’s?”
“I don’t know if it sells any news,” I said. “We just go there for sweets.”
He turned his mouth in at the corners the way people do when they are trying not to laugh. “Right,” he said. “And
