I breastfed until she was two. Steven had been two when he died. I didn’t know whether his mammy had still been breastfeeding, whether she had swelled and leaked and ached without him. It hurt to see Molly drink from a beaker and feel myself desiccate from the inside out, and that was good. I deserved hurt.
I didn’t stop sitting by her bed when she stopped waking at night. At Haverleigh they had closed and locked my door at bedtime, but a keeper had still sat outside the room, flicking open the shutter every ten minutes to peer at me. If I needed the toilet I knocked on the door and they unlocked it, followed me into the bathroom, stood in the corner as I peed. When we got back to my bedroom they locked me back in and wrote in my notes that I had been to the toilet. They wrote in my notes when I turned over in my sleep. They wrote in my notes when I snored. Molly didn’t have notes, but she had me by her side at night, on the mattress I had pulled off my bed. It was how you looked after a kid. It was what Haverleigh had taught me.
That night I waited until she was asleep, then climbed into bed behind her. We didn’t touch, but she was like a tiny radiator, and her warmth made me feel we were fused. I ran my hand across my belly. I missed being curved and hard with her—the unmatchable closeness, the knowledge that no one could take her away. When she had moved in, my body had been like an alley house—dank and grimy and rotten at the edges—but she had still wanted to live there. She had clung on, determined, refusing to evacuate in a shock of blood on porcelain. I didn’t understand why she wanted me—but then, I didn’t understand why I still wanted Mam.
After Haverleigh, I ached for Mam with a hungry intensity. I saw it as the part of me that was animal—soft, hot, made of flesh and fur. Each time I was knocked I found myself scuttling to her, like a badger retreating into a burrow. Each time I left I felt caked in a layer of grime so thick I had to stand under a hot shower and scrub my skin until it smarted, and I told myself I would not see her again. Months passed. Another knock. I scuttled back. The need was always there, like a pickled lemon, yellow flesh perfectly preserved under the rind. I came to think I didn’t want her, not really, not the way she was. I crawled back because I hoped one day I might find her changed to the way she wasn’t.
I had last seen her three weeks before Molly was born, when I was gray with sickness and tired to the cord of marrow inside my bones. She opened the door and licked me up and down with her eyes.
“Fucking hell,” she said. “You got fat.”
“I’m pregnant,” I said. “You know that.”
“There’s big and there’s big,” she said. “I was never fat with you.”
She would have liked to pretend she hadn’t carried me in her body at all, to claim I had grown in a tank on her bedside table. I stayed for two sour, push-and-pull hours, and when I got up to leave she pressed a piece of paper into my hand. It had become ritual.
“Off again?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “This place doesn’t suit me. Neighbors are shits. Council found me somewhere better. New apartments. They’re in a block.”
“Right,” I said. I opened the folded slip and read the address. I recognized the postcode: back in the streets.
“Why are you going back?” I asked.
Her eyes flicked from side to side, as though she was hoping she might find the answer in a corner of the space around her. She shrugged. “Home, isn’t it?” she said.
I didn’t stop wanting her when Molly was born; if anything, I wanted her more. Molly was my second heart for nine months, but when the nurses ripped her out I didn’t think of my body, robbed of its pendulum. I thought, “Twenty years ago, Molly was me. Twenty years ago, I was Mam,” and I felt closer to her than I had ever felt when we had lived in the same house, breathed the same air. When Molly cried I wanted to turn up on Mam’s doorstep with my throbbing head, sore chest, and bundle of baby. “Is this how you felt?” I wanted to ask. “Did you feel this mad? This tired? Did you feel like other people had a secret book you’d never been given? Is this why you were the way you were? Will she turn out like me?”
Beside me in bed, Molly snuffled and started in her sleep. I lifted a piece of her hair off the pillow and ran it around my mouth. It felt like a feather.
“I made this,” I thought. “I made this hair, this skin, the blood in these spiderweb veins. I made it all. It came from me.” I wanted to hear her say it—hear her tell me, “Yes, look at you, look at her, you did it. You did that, Chrissie. You did something good.” It had to be her voice: scratchy, like wire wool. When I closed my eyes I saw her face seared onto the lids.
Mam.
Chrissie
The day after I spoke to the police I came back from school and found a tin on
