“Are you ill?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you train sick?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Me either,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
There was a café on the high street, the kind full of sticky plastic tables and lonely old men. I steered Molly inside and ordered a full English breakfast. The plate that arrived was heaving, with grease collected around the sausages and over the phlegmy yolks of the eggs. She tackled it with quiet determination. As soon as she finished eating, I paid the boy behind the counter and bundled her into her coat. I knew I should make the most of this time, when she was content and we were together, but I wanted it all to be over.
As our bus wound its way toward the streets, the names of the stops played a singsong lilt in my head. Donna and Linda had learned the bus route one summer, and they had sung it to the tune of “Ring a Ring o’ Roses.” Morley Park and Morley Shops, Conway Road and Hepton Street, CLOVEdale Way, COPley Close and Sel-ton Green. When the church came into view my mouth filled with thin, penny-tasting saliva, and I pressed the bell on the pole. I pushed Molly through the folding doors and spat at the base of the angel statue.
“You shouldn’t spit there,” she said. “That’s an angel. And that’s a church. This is a Goddish place. You can’t spit in Goddish places.”
“I don’t believe in God,” I said.
“Miss King does,” she said.
“I’m not Miss King,” I said.
“I know,” she sighed. She walked past me, up the path that cut through the graveyard, and threw herself onto the bench at the end. I followed slowly. I couldn’t tell whether the cold on my insides was freezing cold or boiling cold, the kind of cold that made your fingers fall off or the kind you didn’t realize was heat until you saw the blisters bubbling. I only knew it was hurting cold. Splints of pain jolted up my legs as I went to the bench, and I felt a long way away from the ground, as if I were on stilts, as if my feet weren’t really touching the path. There were clusters of daisies growing in the grass. When I sat down I picked two, threaded them together, and held them out to Molly. She looked away. I dropped them onto the ground and crushed them with my toe.
“You know who lives here?” I said. “Not in the church. But in this place. Around here.”
“Who?”
“My mam. Your grandma.”
“You never told me that before.”
“Do you want to meet her?”
She bent down, picked two daisies, and tried to thread them together. She made the split in the stalk too big, and when she realized she couldn’t repair it she started shredding them. I watched her tear the petals from the yellow centers and scatter them across her lap.
“Does she live where you used to live?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”
Mam had had to move out of the house when I had gone to Haverleigh. People had started spray-painting the walls and pelting the windows with rotten food when I was arrested, and during the trial it had got worse. One night somebody put a petrol bomb through the letter box. She told me about it when she came to visit, all glinting eyes and look-what-you-have-done. I didn’t know whether anyone had bought the house since then. It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to. The papers had called it the Satan Pit, and though the estate agents probably hadn’t, they couldn’t change what people knew. Reputation cloaked it in sticky filth.
When Mam came to Haverleigh for the last time, she passed me the first in a procession of slips of white paper.
“That’s my address,” she said. “And my phone number. Just in case. You ought to have them.”
I folded the scrap in half and put it in my pocket. “I don’t think I’ll need it,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t think you would. Didn’t really want to give it to you. But the people here said I should.”
It was the same game we had been playing for eighteen years: seeing how much we could push away while still holding on with our fingernails.
“Coming out, then,” she said. “Coming to live in the real world. Like the rest of us.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Well, bloody cheer up,” she said. “It’s what you wanted. It’s freedom.”
“Mmm,” I said.
On the first night of the first new life, I lay on my bed with my hands between my legs, listening for sounds that weren’t there. There were no footsteps on the floor outside, no rattle of keys as doors were locked and unlocked. No one shouting. No one crying. No keepers keeping me safe. I was used to nights filled with clinks and clanks, screams and sobs, so I couldn’t understand why the apartment seemed too noisy for me to sleep. It was deafening: the hum of the fridge in the kitchen, the purr of the cars in the street outside. I felt as though I had been living in a house for a decade and someone had suddenly taken all the walls away. Cold air and danger whistled around me. I stretched my eyes wide open and said Mam’s address and phone number over and over in my head, like a lullaby, like a string between who I was and who I had been. The words blurred to nonsense and new ones rose up in their place. Why is everything so big? Why is everything so loud? What
