“No.”
“It’s very important that—”
“She’s not here.”
“Oh. Where is she?”
“Her mam’s taken her away.”
“Taken her away? Is this permanent?”
“Don’t know. Could be a week, could be a year. You never know with Chrissie’s mam.”
“Oh.”
The policeman took his notebook out of his pocket and wrote something down. I thought it was probably “Chrissie is not here.”
“Do you know whether Christine was here on the twentieth of March, Mr. Banks? Around that time?”
“Don’t know. I was inside.”
“Oh.”
“I shouldn’t think she was. Chrissie and her mam don’t spend much time here. Was it a school holiday?”
“No, but it was a weekend. A Saturday.”
“Won’t have been here, then. They’ll have been with her sister.”
“Is that your other sister?”
“Her mam’s other sister. She’s my brother’s kid.”
“I see. Could I take the name of your sister-in-law?”
A very noisy car went down the street just then, so I didn’t hear what Da said. I thought it could have been “Alison” or “Abigail” or “Annabel” or “Angela.” One of those names.
“And where does she live?” asked the policeman.
“Don’t know. Never asked.”
“Is it local?”
“Don’t think so. Think it’s on the coast. By the sea somewhere.”
“And you think Christine was staying with her aunt on the twentieth of March?”
“Don’t think nothing. But she could have been.”
“Right. I see. Well, thanks for your help. I’ll come back another day. Try to catch her.”
The policeman went down the garden path and out of the gate. Da stuck his middle finger up as soon as his back was turned. By the time I got downstairs, he was already outside, leaning against the garden wall. Smoke bloomed around him in a cloud.
“Why did you tell that policeman I wasn’t here?” I asked, hoisting myself onto the wall next to him.
“They’re pigs, they are, Chris. The lot of them. Fucking pigs. It’s all our fucking jobs to keep them from getting what they want.”
“Did you mean you were inside heaven?” I asked.
“Eh?”
“When they asked if I was here when Steven died. You said you were inside. Did you mean inside heaven?”
He cleared his throat and spat onto the ground. His spit was made of tiny white bubbles. “Yep,” he said. “That’s what I meant. Did you know that little lad what died, then?”
“Yeah. He lived on Marner Street,” I said.
“Did you play with him?”
“Sometimes.”
I felt see-through then, like anyone could look past my clothes and skin and see my heart ticking and my lungs puffing. The policeman had turned my day off to a day on, and remembering was a narrow blade slid into my neck. I was sure Da could see I had killed Steven, and I wondered whether that was why he had told the policeman those lies. A part of me hoped he did know, hoped he’d told the lies to stop the policeman finding me out. You have to care about things to want to keep them safe.
“Sick old world, eh?” said Da, and blew out a thin gray stream.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sick old world.”
Chrissie
In the Easter holidays time lost its size and shape. Da stayed for a couple of weeks. He sat at the bar in the Bull’s Head most days, came back most evenings to shout at Mam and sleep. The shouting kept me awake. I heard it through the walls and floor—not the words, just an underwater burble of grown-up hate. It usually finished with a slam, of Mam or the door. Once, after the slam, there were creaks on the stairs and she slid into bed behind me. I pretended to be asleep, but she started crying, so I had to turn around and wipe her tears away. I licked them off my fingers. In the morning she was gone and my pillow was dry. My mouth still tasted thinly of salt.
The holidays finished and I went back to school, which meant school dinners as well as worksheets, so it was good as well as bad. Nothing very interesting happened at school, and I wouldn’t have known that time was even passing at all if the classroom hadn’t got hotter and the milk hadn’t got lumpier. The police didn’t come back. I still saw them in the streets sometimes, and Linda said one day they had knocked on her door to speak to her. She said they had asked the same questions they’d asked at school, about whether she ever played with Steven and whether she had been playing with him the day he died. I wished Da hadn’t made them think I didn’t live in the streets anymore. I really wanted to talk to them again. I decided that if they did come and talk to me, I would tell them I saw Steven going toward the alleys with Donna the day he died. That would get her back properly for biting my arm.
Linda’s birthday came on a Sunday, which was bad luck because it meant she had to go to church in the morning. I went round to her house after church and gave her a Beano comic as a present. It was actually her Beano comic that I had taken from her room when I had been there on Thursday, hidden between my vest and jersey. I’d finishing reading it, so I didn’t need it anymore. When she opened it she frowned.
“Haven’t I already got this one?” she said.
“No,” I said. “Don’t be stupid.”
“Oh,” she said. “Sorry. Thank you.”
After tea we sat in the lounge with all her new toys and I asked her if her mammy and da had fights when she was in bed at night.
“Don’t know,” she said. She was trying to get her new doll out of its plastic box, but it was held inside with wire twists.
“But do they, though?” I asked.
“Yeah. Maybe sometimes,” she said. She tried to bite through the wire. I could hear it scrape her teeth.
“What kind of things do they fight
