“Whatever.”
“Well, she doesn’t do it anymore anyway.”
“Do you want some milk?” I asked. She took the bottle and swallowed the rest in noisy gulps. When it was all gone she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and rolled the bottle into the gutter. I didn’t tell her about Mrs. Bunty giving you sweets if you took your bottles back to the shop. I was already wishing I hadn’t told Donna.
“Do the police still come to your house a lot?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“What do they do when they come?”
“Ask questions to my mammy and da.”
“What kind of questions?”
“About Steven.”
“Do they not ask questions to you?”
“No.”
“How do you know what they ask, then?”
“Listen through the lounge door.”
“Do they know who killed him yet?”
“No.”
The remembering was warm this time; a tiny fire lit in my belly. “Do you think they’re going to find out?”
“Don’t know.”
“I don’t think they will.”
She just shrugged. She was like a piece of wet lettuce. No fun at all. I raked my fingernails along the insides of my arms and brought away a cloud of white dust, and I thought about the tub of cream that sat on the shelf in the corner of the medical room at school. When my eczema bled at school Miss White sent me to the medical room and Mrs. Bradley smeared cream on my arms in a layer so thick I could write my name in it. Sometimes I scratched myself raw under the desk when Miss White wasn’t looking, just so I could go and sit in medical with my arms wrapped in creamy white sleeves. While Susan pretended to read The Secret Garden I dragged my nails over my skin in a sandpaper scritch-scratch. I imagined jumping into a whole bathtub full of cream, cool on my blistered creases.
“What’s the time?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” said Susan without looking at her watch.
“Give it,” I said, and pulled her wrist toward me.
“Doesn’t work. It’s stopped,” she said.
“You should get your mammy to take you to Woolworth’s. They put batteries in watches. She could probably get a new comb too,” I said.
She moved her head forward and backward in the same robot nod, and as she nodded she started to cry. She didn’t make any noise. The tears just came out of her eyeballs. She let them run down her face and fall off her chin. I had never seen anyone cry that way before. I watched and watched. It was such an odd way to cry.
“That’s a really boring book, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to The Secret Garden. She sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her face.
“Have you read it?” she asked.
“Miss White reads us some if we finish our worksheets early. I hate it. It’s really boring,” I said.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s got a nice garden in.”
“It’s got loads of miserable people in too. You’re never going to stop being miserable if you read books like that. You should read a joke book. That would make you laugh.”
“Not allowed,” she said.
“You are,” I said. “You can read anything you want. If it’s not rude. And joke books aren’t rude. They’ve got one in the library at school.”
“I mean I’m not allowed to laugh,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because my little brother died,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I watched her wipe some more tears off her cheeks and some snot off her lip with her sleeve. “You really talk about having a dead brother a lot, you know,” I said.
Being with Susan was the same amount of fun as being with a moldy cauliflower, and I knew I had to go and be somewhere else before I got bored to death. I thought I might go round to Donna’s and pretend I had just fallen over in the street outside, because then her mammy might give me a plaster and some breakfast. Donna was definitely my worst enemy, but at her house there was always lots of food and lots of lectric. I reckoned if I picked the top off one of the sugary scabs on my knee I could get quite a lot of blood out, and her mammy couldn’t tell me to go away if I had blood all over me. I’d do that just as I arrived at their door.
“Bye, then,” I said.
“Bye,” said Susan.
When I got to Donna’s her mammy let me sit on the couch with Donna and her brothers and watch the cartoons on the telly. She gave me a wet cloth to press on my knee and a bowl of Frosties to eat. The flakes swam in thick, cream-globbed milk, and when I ate them I felt my belly burble, “Please, please, not more milk.” I ignored it. I ate until the bowl was empty: chewed and swallowed and clanked my teeth on the cold spoon.
Julia
The café at the train station was called Choo-Choo’s. I could see that before it had been called Choo-Choo’s it had been called Chew-Chew’s—the spikes of the Ws showed through the new paint. I wasn’t sure I would have bothered to change from the first ridiculous name to the second. When I bought Molly’s hot chocolate and package of three custard creams I noticed “Happy Birthday” bunting strung across the counter, and I asked the old woman at the till whose birthday it was. I was surprised to be asking. I couldn’t remember the last time I had talked to a stranger. The old woman looked surprised to be asked.
“No one’s,” she said.
“Why does it say it on that?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s been up since last summer,” she said. “It was the café’s birthday. We’d been open ten years. Then we never got round to taking it down. And every day’s someone’s birthday, isn’t it?”
I counted out the money with my hands in my bag. I didn’t want her to see my purse,
