They waited for me to carry on again, but I didn’t again, because I didn’t know what I was going to say next again.
“Who was he with?” he asked.
“His da,” I said. The way they looked at each other and raised their eyebrows made me think that was a very clever thing to have said.
“What time was this?” asked PC Scott.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“What sort of time? Early morning, late morning . . .”
“Afternoon,” I said.
“Afternoon?” he said. “Are you sure? You said it was morning.”
“No, I don’t think it was, actually,” I said. “I think it was afternoon. Nearly teatime.”
They looked at each other again, and PC Woods scribbled something in the corner of his notebook and showed it to PC Scott. They looked so clumsy, stuffed into the little library corner chairs. I felt like they were my very own person-sized dolls.
“Chrissie, what day was it you saw Steven?” asked PC Scott.
“The day he died,” I said.
“Yes, but what day was that? Do you remember?”
“Sunday,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re sure it was Sunday?”
“Yes,” I said. “I wasn’t at school, and there was church in the morning.”
“Ah,” he said again. The air went out of him like a flattened football. I knew why. Steven had died on Saturday, not Sunday. No one had seen him on Sunday, because by Sunday he was buried in the ground. I had got the policemen sniffing and slobbering over nothing, and all without telling them the biggest secret of all. The biggest secret of all was that I was the biggest secret of all. I felt even more like God than ever.
“Well, thanks very much for your help, lass,” said PC Scott.
“You’re very welcome,” I said. He stood up and PC Woods copied. I wasn’t sure PC Woods was a real policeman at all. He seemed more like a secretary. “Are you going to catch the person who killed him?” I asked. PC Scott coughed and looked around at the other kids, who were all staring at him.
“We’re going to find out exactly what happened,” he said loudly. “Don’t you worry.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. I went back to my place. Richard jabbed my arm with his pencil.
“What did you talk about?” he whispered. I watched the policemen speak to Miss White. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I saw PC Woods throw the page of notes he had been writing into the bin by her desk.
“Shhh,” I said. Richard was balanced on the two side legs of his chair, with his arm pressed against mine and our cheeks almost touching. He sniffed three times in a row.
“You smell of pee,” he said. I scooted my chair back from the table so he toppled into my lap, and before he could sit up I slammed my fist down hard on his ear, like my fist was a hammer and his head was the top of a nail. I was holding my pencil. The point went into his ear hole. He wailed. Miss White said good-bye to the policemen looking flustered, and the policemen said good-bye to Miss White looking like they were very glad they were men, not women, because that meant they could be policemen, not teachers. When Miss White came over, Richard was crying too hard to tell her what had happened.
“He just toppled over, miss,” I said. “I think maybe his chair broke. Maybe because he’s quite fat.”
“Christine Banks,” she said. “We don’t make personal remarks.”
“It’s not personal,” I said. “It’s just true.”
When Richard stopped wailing Miss White said we could do coloring until break time, because everyone was overexcited and no one was finishing their worksheets, but then she said actually we couldn’t do coloring after all because someone had broken all the coloring pencils in the coloring pencil tray. She asked if anyone wanted to own up to that. I knew she knew it was me and she knew I knew it was me, and we both knew no one could prove it was me. What an excellent day it was turning out to be.
When we went out to play everyone gathered in a huddle to say what they thought had happened to Steven. Roddy thought there had been baddies in the alleys who had been shooting at each other and one of their bullets had hit Steven by accident. Eve thought he had had a heart attack that made him fall over dead without anyone knowing he was even ill. Some people had such good ideas, I thought they must be right. The thing was, I didn’t always remember I had killed him. It slipped soapily out of my head, and when I went to look for it, there was nothing there. It always slipped back in eventually, and the slipping back in felt different every time. It could be a firework exploding or a block of lead falling or a splash of icy water. It could be a toothache twinge, like when I was watching Steven’s mammy in the playground, or a butter-in-a-pan sizzle, like the night I walked to church in my nightie. But most of the time it just wasn’t there. I liked it that way. It meant I got to be a killer, but I also got days off from being a killer, because a killer was quite a tiring thing to be.
We lined up to go back into the classroom and I saw the policemen through the railings. They were walking to their car and talking to each other. I got a bang of sadness so hard it made me bend over. As they moved away the bubbly power I had felt when I was walking to the library corner got smaller and smaller. I wanted to claw it back. It was the same power I had felt with my hands on Steven’s neck, hearing the spittly wheezing sound, watching the popping eyes. The feeling of my body being made of lectric.
“I need it back,” I thought. “I need
