“Well done, Mum!” said the nurse.
“That’s not my name,” I thought.
“Looks like she’s hungry!” she said.
“What if I’m hungry?” I thought.
She took hold of Molly’s head and clamped her firmly onto my nipple.
“There! You’re a natural!” she said, but that wasn’t what I heard. I heard what I was used to hearing: “You’re unnatural.” “Eight years old and killed a kid? That’s not normal. She’s unnatural.” I looked at the nurse, wondering how she had found out who I was. She touched the back of Molly’s head and nodded. “A natural,” she said. I heard it properly that time. I took hold of it like I had taken hold of “Well done,” stored the compliments in my cheeks like a rodent hoarding food. My gown had fallen down when the nurse had shoved her onto me, so I was bare to my belly button. It was suddenly horrible to be so bare in front of a loud woman I didn’t know. I wanted to cry. I looked at Molly, lying across me. She made me less naked, and I felt she was doing it on purpose. I felt she was feeding not for her but for me, so I could use her body as a blanket over my chest. When she stopped sucking the nurse reached over, hooked a finger between her lips, and unstuck my nipple from her gums.
“Let’s get you cleaned up, little one,” she said, lifting her away from me. I felt untethered without her weight, as if I would float up to the ceiling. When she was in the nurse’s arms she squawked. “You want to go back to Mum, eh, madam?” said the nurse. She returned her and watched as I curled my hand around the back of her head. I thought I was probably doing it wrong. “Has she got a name?” she asked.
“Molly,” I whispered. It was the only name I had picked out, which made me wonder whether I had somehow felt her girlness inside me. I hadn’t known a Molly in any of my lives; it was fresh and untainted. I liked the softness of the letters in my mouth, the way saying it felt like chewing on silk.
“Lovely,” said the nurse, and bustled away.
“Do you like me, then?” I whispered to Molly. She moved her head around as she fell asleep. It was sort of like a nod.
• • •
I lifted Molly out of the bath at five fifteen and dried her with a large blue towel. She wasn’t usually allowed more than an hour of telly each day, because too much telly would turn her brain to soup, but once she was in her pajamas I turned it on, knowing I wouldn’t turn it off until the kids’ programs finished at seven. I sat at the kitchen table, feeding leftover chips into my mouth one after another.
At some point between the start and end of ChuckleVision it came to me that I wouldn’t be going to see Sasha in the morning. It wasn’t a decision I had to make; it arrived in my head fully formed. I wouldn’t be at the Children’s Services building at ten, because to walk into that building would be to hand Molly over, and I would walk into the sea before I gave her away. The prospect of the meeting had been a vise around my chest, and without it my lungs had room to swell. Molly and I were ruled by can’ts, musts, the juddering arc of the hands on the clock, because that was the way I steered our rickety carriage. The wheels had come off now; we had careened away from the tracks and were falling through the air. The crash was inevitable—they would find us, they would take her—but until we hit the ground we were free. I didn’t know how long we had before the vultures came pounding at the door, and I didn’t want Molly’s last memory of me to be of my face turning white as an angry mob wrestled me to the floor. So we wouldn’t stay. We would run. There were things I had sworn I would never do, places I had sworn I would never go, because they couldn’t be allowed to leach into Molly’s bubble. That didn’t matter anymore. I was losing her. Nothing mattered.
At seven I turned off the telly and started brushing her hair.
“I think we might go away tomorrow,” I said, running a finger down her parting.
“Where?” she asked.
“Just away,” I said.
“Somewhere I know?” she asked.
“No,” I said. Molly only knew the seaside. She was too small to remember the first new life, the Lucy/Nathan/hardware-store life. In that life I had existed in the three square rooms of a ground-floor apartment, subsisted on metal-tasting food from cans. When I found out I was pregnant I stopped going to work. Like the decision about the meeting, it wasn’t one I had to make; it came to me as fact. Nathan couldn’t find out I was pregnant. I couldn’t go to work without him finding out I was pregnant. I couldn’t go to work. Jan registered me for benefits, and I spent the next eight months sleeping all day and being sick all night.
They tracked us down when Molly was a small, soft bundle, wrapped in a blanket and draped over my shoulder. They gathered outside with cameras that clicked like an army of crickets. We had to run down the garden path covered in bedsheets, and her head bumped against my chin hard enough to close my teeth around my tongue, and by the time we were in the police car my mouth was full of blood. It tasted of
