“Linda,” I said. “You need to stop talking now. You are giving me a headache in my ears.”
“Oh no. Sorry,” she said.
I went up Steven’s garden path and knocked on the door with three hard taps. No one answered for a long time. I thought Steven’s mammy must have got so sad she had just lain down and died too. I would have given up on her ever coming at all, but then Linda would have been right and I couldn’t stand for Linda to be right, so I knocked again and didn’t stop knocking until the door opened.
Steven’s mammy looked a lot worse than she had looked at the playground. Her face was the color of the layer of gray skin on the inside of fish batter and her cheeks were hanging all loose from their bones, slack and swinging under milky pink eyes.
“What you want?” she asked in a gray-sounding voice. I didn’t really know what to say. I hadn’t expected her to look so bad. I couldn’t really remember why I had wanted to knock in the first place.
“Hello,” I said.
“What do you want?” she asked again.
“The police have been at your house a lot,” I said. “Why have they?”
“Go away,” she said. “Stop meddling in things you oughtn’t to be meddling in.”
I was about to tell her that Steven being killed and the police looking for who had done the killing were things I did ought to be meddling in, because it was actually me who had done the killing, but I swallowed it down. I thought it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear right then. She started to close the door but I pushed it back open.
“Is he still dead?” I asked. That wasn’t just talking to fill the time—I wanted to know the answer. It had been so many days since Steven had died that I had lost count, and I thought he must be going to come back soon. He was only little, and I was sure that should mean he came back alive quicker than a grown-up. Steven’s mammy’s face flopped in on itself like a burst balloon, like all the bones had disappeared or turned to water.
“Do you know what you are, Chrissie Banks?” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re a bad seed,” she said.
Bad seed. I liked that.
“Have they found out who killed him yet?” I asked.
“Go away,” she said again. I thought of Steven’s baby-bird body, carried out of the blue house by the great big man. Smooth and still, might have been asleep, in a pair of arms so bubbled with muscle they could have crushed him. Behind Steven’s mammy the lounge door opened and his da came out. I could smell his body from where I was standing. It smelled very strongly of a body, of skin and sweat and stale air. He stopped in the hallway and looked at me over Steven’s mammy’s shoulder.
“Is Susan here?” I asked.
“Susan?” said Steven’s mammy, as if she didn’t know who that was.
“Is she here?” I asked.
Without moving or even breathing in, Steven’s da shouted, “SUSAN!” so loudly I jumped. There was no answer.
“She’s out,” he said.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“She’ll be somewhere,” said Steven’s mammy.
“Well everyone’s somewhere,” I said. Steven’s da went down the hallway and into the kitchen. He pushed the door closed behind him but a sicky smell still slipped out. Steven’s mammy looked like she was going to try to shut the front door again, so I said, “It was a man who killed him, wasn’t it?”
“What?” she said.
“It was a man who killed Steven. The man I saw.” It dribbled out easily. It was just another version of the story I had told the policemen at school.
“What man you saw?”
I could feel her creeping into my palm, so I shrugged and said, “Oh. Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“What man you saw?”
“I saw a man walking away from the alleys that day. The day Steven got killed.”
“That day? Saturday? Are you sure?”
I shrugged again. Since she had opened the door I had been feeling sort of cold, sort of dead, but as her face changed from ghost to person I felt myself come alive again too. “Sort of sure,” I said.
“Did you tell the police? They went to your school, didn’t they? Did you tell them?”
“Maybe. Can’t really remember.”
She stepped forward and stood so close I had to turn my face away. “You’ve got to tell them,” she said. “You’ve got to tell them anything you saw. ’Specially anything you saw that day. Are you listening, Chrissie?”
“I thought I wasn’t to meddle,” I said. At the end of the hallway Steven’s da came back out of the kitchen, and the smell came out after him, strong enough to make me dizzy. I imagined the kitchen humming and dark with flies. I thought of them buzzing around flowers mounded on the table, and buzzing around apples shriveled in the fruit bowl, but most of all buzzing around the stews and hams the mammies had brought, oozing in the glare of the sun.
I ran down the garden path, through the gate, and up the street. Linda ran after me. Steven’s mammy called our names but we didn’t stop running, and when I looked round she wasn’t following, just standing on the pavement. We didn’t slow down until we were at the top of the hill. Linda panted and I dragged my knuckles along the front-garden walls, pressing hard enough to make beads of blood swell up from the skin. I brought my fist to my mouth. The taste was iron and dust. When we got to the handstand wall we dropped down to sit with our backs against it.
“Did you really see a man?” Linda asked once she had her breath back.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Are you going to tell the police?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said, and then I had to do a handstand so she
