She walked out of the room, down the hallway, stepping on my paper chain and leaving it flat. I felt like it was my head she had stepped on, like she had put her foot on my cheek and trodden down until she felt the bones splinter into shards. I pulled my cracker with my two hands. The right hand won: a blue paper hat and a baby set of cards. The joke fluttered under the table. When Mam’s bedroom door closed I took my bowl out of the kitchen, opened the front door, went down the garden path, and put it outside the front gate. I hoped a dog might come and eat the horrid gray soup. I stood on the garden path for a long time, leaning on the gate. I could see the colored lights on Betty’s Christmas tree, winking through the net curtains in her lounge window. Then I went inside and watched telly until the lectric ran out.
The things Mam got me to eat were usually much better than the rotten turkey, because she usually didn’t cook them, usually just bought them, so it usually wasn’t too hard to eat them all up. When I had eaten all the chocolates, I left the empty tin on the kitchen table and went back to lie on the couch. After that, there was no food for a week. I tried to stay at other people’s houses long enough that they gave me tea, or I ate what I could find in the kitchen cupboards. Tins of sardines with fingernail bones that clawed my throat, spoonfuls of milk powder from the big red tub. One day I got sent to Mr. Michaels for taking Donna’s biscuit at break time, but I didn’t care because by then I had already eaten it, so he couldn’t make me give it back.
I started to think Mam must have moved away, because I hadn’t seen her for days and days, not even on Sunday for church. I wandered through the rooms of the house, running my fingers along the walls, wondering if I was an orphan. I had only ever read about orphans. I didn’t know if they were real like God or pretend like witches.
I had just got used to the idea of being an orphan, a real live orphan, when I went downstairs on Saturday and found Mam at the kitchen table.
“Did you like the chocolates?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Did you eat them all?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good. I got you them special,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
I didn’t really know what to do. I pushed my feet into my shoes and did the laces in tight knots, pulling until all the blood was squeezed out of my feet.
“I’m going out now,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Mam. “Go off and leave me. Go off and leave me right after I got you them chocolates, right after I spent my own money getting you them chocolates. Leave me all by myself.”
“Do you want me to stay?” I asked.
“Get lost, Chrissie,” she said. “I want you to get lost and never get found. That’s what I want.”
“Okay,” I said. I left the front door open behind me. I’d preferred being an orphan.
I knocked for Linda and we walked up the hill on only the front-garden walls. I was brilliant at wall walking. William timed me once, before his wristwatch got stolen: all the way from Mr. Jenks’s to the haunted house in four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I wanted him to time me again so I could get faster and faster, and he said he would if I helped him find out who had stolen his wristwatch. Unfortunately it was me who had stolen his wristwatch, so I had to say I actually didn’t want to be timed again, but four minutes and thirty-three seconds was still faster than any other kid in the whole of the streets.
When we got to Steven’s house I saw that the front room curtains were closed. It was the only house in the street with its curtains closed, and that made the inside of the hidden room so much more exciting than it ever could have been with the curtains open. Steven’s tricycle was in the front garden. The yellow paint on the seat was peeling. I jumped down from the wall.
“Let’s knock,” I said.
“We can’t,” said Linda. “My mammy says she has to be left.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. But Donna’s mammy was going to take her flowers and she asked if my mammy wanted to go too and my mammy said no. She doesn’t think it’s right that so many mammies are taking her so many things all the time.”
She wiped a scrape on her leg with her cardigan sleeve before blood wormed into her white sock.
“My mammy said it’s brutal,” she said. “She said, ‘It’s brutal, what that woman’s going through. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.’ That’s what she said.”
I thought Steven’s mammy probably would wish someone else’s kid had died, especially if it could have been someone else’s kid instead of Steven. She probably wished it could have been any other kid in the whole wide world, even her best friend’s kid. Usually when people said you wouldn’t wish something on your worst enemy it meant you probably would wish it on your worst enemy, and in fact you’d find it quite fun to watch it happen to them. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t wish on Donna.
Linda was still talking without really saying anything new, which was unfortunately something that she did a lot.
“She says it’s worse because he was the apple of their eye,” she said. “I asked her what that meant and she said it’s that he was the one they all loved the most. I said we knew that already. You and me did know that, didn’t we? We did, didn’t we, Chrissie? We knew they made a
