When we had handstood so much our faces were pink, we played telly. It wasn’t much fun playing telly with Linda. She kept asking me what to say next, and when she said it she didn’t sound anything like anyone on the real telly. The only person who was even nearly as good as me at playing telly was Donna, which was annoying because people who look like potatoes are never actually on telly.
“If you could be anyone famous, who would you be?” I asked Linda.
“Probably just you,” she said.
“I’m not famous,” I said.
“But you’re the best at nearly everything,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I’ll probably be famous one day.”
We couldn’t think of anything else to play outside, so we went back to Linda’s house. When her mammy had finished huffing and puffing about me being there for tea she gave us soup with bread and margarine. I ate the soup while it was still too hot, and it burned the inside of my mouth to sandpaper. I didn’t talk much. I had Steven’s mammy’s gray face in front of my eyes and it wouldn’t go away, even when I shook my head.
I stayed at Linda’s until her mammy took her upstairs for a bath. Then I stayed a bit longer, sitting on my own in the lounge. I looked at the pictures on the mantelpiece, the ones of Christmas and holidays and Linda’s First Holy Communion. Upstairs, I heard Linda’s mammy hissing at Linda’s da. I heard “still here” and “get her to go” and “how long’s it been” and “you’d know if you came out of your precious shed once in a blue moon.” Linda’s da came down the stairs and into the lounge and said, “Hiya, our Chrissie. Want me to walk you home?” I didn’t want him to walk me so I had to say I would go by myself, though actually what I really wanted was to stay.
I wasn’t surprised that the front door of the house was locked. Mam always locked it after she shouted at me. I had to go round the back and climb through the kitchen window, which was broken and never closed properly. It was a squeeze to get through, and as I was squeezing I thought maybe that was why Mam didn’t give me much food, because she knew if I got too fat I wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the kitchen window when I needed to. It was just her way of looking out for me, really, I thought, as I stood with my feet in the sink. It just showed how much she cared.
• • •
I went out before school on Monday, when the streets were full of milk-bottle clinks. The milkman saw me and did a little salute, but he didn’t put any bottles on our doorstep because we didn’t get milk delivered. Mrs. Walter did. She lived next door. She kept birds in cages and was so old she had started to grow backward, shrinking down so she was barely taller than me. The milkman put two bottles of milk on her doorstep, got back in his little cart, and drove away. I didn’t take a bottle until he was round the corner. Mrs. Walter once told me off for screaming too loudly in the back garden, and she was also unnecessarily old. She didn’t need that much milk. I took big swigs as I walked, the creamy top clagging in my throat.
When I got to the handstand wall I saw Susan, sitting on the ground with her back against the bricks. Her hair was knotty. I sat down, and she looked at me with her nothing-colored eyes.
“Why has your hair gone so horrible?” I asked. I pressed the milk bottle against my knee. She looked at the rat’s tail of hair hanging over her shoulder.
“Just has,” she said.
“It’s really knotty,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Has your mammy lost the comb?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. She had The Secret Garden open in her lap, and she looked down at the page, but I didn’t think she was really reading. Whenever I had seen Susan recently she had had The Secret Garden with her, and it was always open at about the same place. Before Steven had died she had had a different book every week.
“Why aren’t you at home?” I asked.
“Why aren’t you?” she said. I moved the bottle around my knee to find the coldest bit of glass. Susan looked back at her book, but she never turned any pages. She was wearing a cardigan with sleeves that drooped over her hands, and the sleeves were chewed to strings. As I watched, she took some of the strings in her mouth and chewed them some more. I wasn’t sure she knew she was doing it.
“Your mammy came to the playground the other day,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Vicky’s mammy brought her home. She told my da what happened.”
“Was she crying?”
Susan moved her head forward and backward in a strange, robot nod, and took more of her cardigan sleeve into her mouth.
“Does she do anything else except cry?”
“Sleeps.”
“Did she ever do anything except look after Steven when he was alive? Or was being his mammy her only job?”
“Susan and Steven,” she said. There was something sharp in her voice, like a razor blade in the middle of a cotton wool ball. I didn’t know what she meant.
“What?”
“Susan and Steven. She was both
