At Haverleigh everyone had known me and there had been nothing to hide. My insides cramped as I thought of the cage of high fences within which I had walked without stooping, stood without hunching, because freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.
• • •
Molly threw her daisy heads onto the grass and brushed the petals off her hands. “Is there a telly at Grandma’s house?” she asked.
“Expect so,” I said.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go there.”
Chrissie
Steven had been dead for so long, I had lost count of all the days, but the number of policemen in the streets was getting bigger, not smaller. I had started sitting on the flat roof of the church hall, which you could get to by sneaking up the fire escape at the back of the building. The policemen always parked their cars outside the church hall, and they came back to their cars to talk and drink flasks of tea, and when I was sitting on the roof I could see and hear them but they couldn’t see or hear me. That was how I felt all the time, really: like a ghost.
I was sitting on the roof one afternoon when I saw my da come round the corner and up the street with a big gray bag slung over his shoulder. Mam had told me I wasn’t to call him Da, told me if anyone asked he was my uncle Jim, her brother who sometimes stayed with us.
“But he’s not my uncle,” I had said.
“No. But if they think you’ve not got a da then I get money for looking after you by myself,” she had said.
“But you don’t look after me,” I had said.
“Fuck off, Chrissie,” she had said.
When I saw him coming up the street I climbed down the fire escape, ran onto the pavement, and shouted, “Da!” He turned, and for a second he looked confused, almost like he didn’t know who I was, but then he remembered I was me, remembered how much he loved me, and he smiled. He would have done a bigger smile if he could have. Sometimes when you smile too big it hurts your cheeks, so he just smiled in a little way, just so it didn’t hurt him. If it hadn’t been for the cheek thing he would have smiled big enough to break his face in half, because he loved me big enough to burst. He held out his arms. He looked very different to how Mam looked when she held out her arms to me, which she sometimes did if there were people watching and she needed to make them think she liked me. Her hands stuck out in front like scissor points, and she stiffened herself like someone reaching into fire. Da’s arms were soft, his hands strong in my armpits, and he lifted me up so easily I felt made of feathers. I pressed my face into his neck, where the skin was cold and damp. I wanted to sink my teeth in.
When he put me down he pushed the hair away from my face and held my chin in his hand. He was so tall his head was halfway to the sky. “What you doing all the way out here?” he asked, because the church hall was right on the edge of the streets. I wrapped my arms around his middle so I didn’t have to answer. He unhooked my hands and we walked side by side with our fingers knotted together.
“Did you get alive again?” I asked. That was one of the special things about my da: he died and came alive again. The first time it happened I was in Miss Ingham’s class. Da had been living with us for a while, doing normal da things like picking me up from school. He didn’t wait in the playground at the end of the day like the mammies, and he wasn’t always there, but sometimes when Miss Ingham let us out of the classroom he was walking past the railings and I saw him and shouted, “Da! Da!” He pretended to be surprised to see me but that was just his joke. He was really there to pick me up. And even if he didn’t pick me up from school, I always saw him in the evening. Almost every evening. He came through the door and flopped onto the couch and I leaned against his side. He smelled of sweat and something else, something sweet and bready. If there was lectric we watched telly, but if there wasn’t we just sat together. I didn’t really care about telly when Da was there. When he went to sleep I lifted his arm and put it around me. He would have put his arm round me himself if he hadn’t been so tired. I was just helping him.
One day I came back from school and he wasn’t there. I sat on my windowsill looking down at the pavement and every time I saw a man at the top of the street my chest did a little jump, but none of them were Da. It got dark and my eyes got heavy and he didn’t come. The streetlights came on and lit the ground in yellowed pools and he didn’t come. My head tipped forward and I jolted awake just before I fell onto the floor. He didn’t come.
In the end I got off the windowsill and climbed into bed. I was nearly asleep when I heard the front door slam, but I woke up quickly and went out onto the landing. I knew it was Da. There were heavy Da-footsteps
