Bet you can’t see me, bet you can’t find me, bet you can’t catch me.
• • •
That night I woke up when everything else was asleep. I lay still on my back. I thought Mam must have slammed the front door, because that was usually what woke me up in the night, or sometimes I woke myself by peeing the bed, but my sheets were dry and I couldn’t hear anyone downstairs. There were no growing pains in my legs. I touched my belly, my chest, my throat. I stopped at my throat. Remembering was butter hitting a hot pan. Foam and sizzle.
I killed a little boy today. I took him to the alleys and held my hands around his throat in the blue house. I kept on pressing even when our skins were slippy with sweat. He died underneath me and a hundred million people watched him be carried down to his mammy by a tall, strong man.
I had the belly-fizzing feeling I got whenever I remembered a delicious secret, like sherbet exploding in my guts. Underneath it there was something else, something tighter and more like metal. I ignored it. I concentrated on the fizzing. Whoosh and whirr.
Once I had remembered about killing Steven I was too excited to go back to sleep, so I tiptoed out of bed and onto the landing. Outside Mam’s room I stopped and held my breath, but her door was shut and I couldn’t hear anything through it. The floorboards were cold on the bottoms of my feet, and I felt hollow, pale-colored. The biscuits seemed a long time ago. There was never any food in the kitchen, even though the whole point of a kitchen was to have food in it, but I looked anyway. I climbed onto the worktop and opened all the cupboards, and in the one by the cooker I found a paper bag of sugar. I tucked it under my arm.
When I turned the front door handle I had to be extra careful, because it made a loud clicking sound if you moved it too fast, and if Mam was asleep in her room I didn’t want to wake her. I slid the mat over the front step and pulled the door tight against it, so it stuck but didn’t close. That was what Mam did to stop me knocking when I came back from school. The outside air gave me goose bumps where I was bare under my nightie, wind whistling up inside me. I stood at the front gate for a long time, looking up and down the empty street, feeling like I was the only person in the world.
Before, outside the blue house, I had heard one of the mammies say the streets would never be the same again. She had had her head on another mammy’s shoulder, and had been making a wet patch on her cardigan with tears. “It’ll never be the same again,” she had said. “Not after this. Not after someone’s gone and done something like this. How can we feel safe when we know there’s evil like that in the streets? How can we ever trust the kids are safe when we’ve got the devil here? The devil among us?” Remembering it made me glow. The streets were never going to be the same again. They used to be safe and now they weren’t, and all of it because of one person, one morning, one moment. All of it because of me.
The pavement was gritty and scrubbed at my feet, but I didn’t care. I decided to walk to church, because church was at the top of the hill and from outside church you could see all the streets in the grid. I kept my eyes on the steeple as I walked: spiked in the sky like a winter tree. When I got to the top I climbed onto the wall next to the angel statue and looked back at the warren of matchbox houses. My belly squeezed and I licked my finger and stuck it into the bag of sugar and sucked it clean. I did that again and again, until my rotten tooth hummed, until prickly crystals sanded the insides of my lips. I felt like a ghost or an angel, standing on the wall in my white nightie, eating sugar from a paper bag. No one saw me but I was still there. I was basically God.
“So that was all it took,” I thought. “That was all it took for me to feel like I had all the power in the world. One morning, one moment, one yellow-haired boy. It wasn’t so much after all.”
The wind picked up my nightie, and I felt like it would have lifted me into the sky if there hadn’t been something heavy holding me down.
“Soon I won’t feel this way anymore,” I thought. That was what was holding me on the ground. “Soon everything will be back to normal. I’ll forget how it felt to have hands strong enough to squeeze all the life out of someone. I’ll forget how it felt to be God.”
The next thought came as a voice, dropped into my head.
“I need to feel it again. I need to do it again.”
The time between doing it once and doing it again was suddenly mapped onto a clockface, with hands that ticked the seconds away. I watched it tick, heard it tick, felt it tick. The clock was a special secret just for me. People would sit next to me in the classroom and walk past me in the street and play with me in the playground and they wouldn’t know who I really was, but
