After Lucy, I was Julia, and they promised me no one would ever find out that Julia had once been Chrissie. But they had promised me no one would ever find out that Lucy had once been Chrissie. Promise was just a word and a name was just a name and I wasn’t Chrissie, not inside, not anymore, but the vultures didn’t care about that. Jan found me the apartment above Arun’s shop, which came with a job frying fish and mopping floors.
“Not for now,” she said. “Just for when you’re ready. Maybe not until she starts school. Your benefit money will cover the rent until then, and once you start work they’ll do a reduced rate. They’re kind.”
Nobody asked me if I wanted to fry fish and mop floors. When you used to be Chrissie you didn’t get to choose. Jan thought it was the perfect arrangement, because Arun and Mrs. G were the sort of people who chose not to see things they thought you didn’t want them to see, who twisted facts as much as they needed in order to believe what they had always believed: that people are all, in essence, good.
Jan drove us to the new town and helped carry our boxes up to the apartment. It didn’t take long; we didn’t have much. Mrs. G had left a film-wrapped cake on the kitchen table. It was dark with seeds, and next to it there was a note: “Welcome, Julia.” When the car was empty we stood on the pavement outside the shop. Molly had been crying and I had strapped her to my chest in a sling. I liked having her there, holding my pieces together.
“Right, then,” said Jan. “I’ll say my good-byes.”
It turned out that when the vultures had tracked us down they had taken away more than my apartment and my name, the hours of sleep I had started to piece together at night. They had taken away Jan. I was under a new probation officer now, attached to the police force in the new town. I had just been starting to like Jan.
She stepped forward and put her hand on Molly’s back through the fabric of the sling. “Bye, Molly,” she said. She moved her hand to my elbow and squeezed it tight. “Bye, Lucy.”
I stood on the pavement as she got into her car. I watched her drive down the high street and disappear round the corner. “Bye, Lucy,” I said.
• • •
How long are we going away for?” Molly asked.
“Not sure. A bit.”
“Will we be back on Friday? It’s show-and-tell. I have to be back for that.”
“Mmm.”
I let my eyes tip shut. My brain felt tender in my skull, like a bruised peach, juice seeping through cracks in the skin. Molly followed me to her bedroom and climbed into bed when I turned back the duvet.
“Can I get something for show-and-tell from the place we’re going to?” she asked.
“Good night,” I said, and sat down on the mattress next to her bed.
When she had been a baby, I had sat by her cot until she was asleep every night. Sometimes she had glared at me through the bars and roared, and I had tensed at the indignant fury of it, but the book I had stolen from the library said I shouldn’t pick her up every time she cried. I closed my eyes against the screwed, pink segments of her face, whispered, “Please don’t be sad, please don’t be sad, please don’t be sad.”
By the time she was three months old she never cried at night, and the silence scared me more than the screaming. I counted down the minutes until I was allowed to pick her up and hold her on my chest to feed. I did it sitting on the floor, my shoulder blades digging into the wall behind me. I was allowed to hold her to feed, because that was for her. I wasn’t allowed to hold her for me, for the comfort of feeling her warm weight in my arms. That was the rule I had made when she was born: I would give her everything, and ask nothing in return.
Reading the book chapter on weaning made my throat thicken with cotton-wool dread. There were chirpy pictures of babies gumming plastic spoons and paragraphs headed “Moving On from Milk!” I felt I might as well be reading about putting Molly in a cardboard box outside the front door, waving and trilling, “Time to move on, Molly! Time to move on from me!” Feeding her straight from my body—knowing that even if we had no money and no home and nothing but each other, she still wouldn’t be hungry—had given me a warm nugget of power, held in my rib cage. I bought vegetables that I mashed with a fork and pushed through a sieve, that Molly massaged into her hair and pasted up her nostrils. She eyed the bottle of formula with disgust, and when I put it to her mouth she curled away, pawing at my top. I put her in the cot. I slipped out of the room, shut the door, sat on the floor with my arms crossed over my swollen chest.
“She won’t cry for long,” I thought.
“She’ll go to sleep soon,” I thought.
“She can’t be that hungry,” I thought.
“The book says this is right,” I thought.
I watched the clock on the wall. I listened to Molly cry. Twin wet circles soaked through my clothes, and I smelled rotten-sweet, like rancid melon. I took off my jumper before I opened the door, peeled off my T-shirt as I went to the cot, unhooked my bra and let it fall to the floor, and picked her up. Her eyelashes were spiked into small black triangles
