“Mam will probably come looking for me soon,” I thought. “I’ll probably hear her going up and down all the streets and calling for me. Probably any minute now. Probably.”
Julia
When we came out of the graveyard I turned toward town. I knew Mam lived in a block of apartments, and there weren’t any apartments in the streets, just matchbox houses. I couldn’t risk telling Molly I didn’t know exactly where we were going. I was already on thin ice.
“Does Grandma live in a house or an apartment?” she asked.
“Apartment.”
“Like ours?”
“It’s not above a shop. I think it’s in a block. It’ll be a tall building. It’s called Parkhill. Keep an eye out.”
“I thought you knew where it was.”
“I do. But just keep an eye out anyway.”
We started up the steep bit of hill that branched at the end, to town in one direction and the alleys in the other.
“Is she nice?” Molly asked.
“Mam?”
“Grandma.”
“I haven’t seen her for a long time.”
“Was she nice when you did see her?”
I thought of Mam, sitting in the Haverleigh visiting room. She had liked me better as a killer. None of the psychologists or psychiatrists or psychotherapists had told me that. I had worked it out for myself. Before I was a killer, I was good and she was bad, because I was her kid and she should have liked me but she didn’t. When I killed, the balance shifted. I was a kid no one should like, and she was the person who’d known it all along. I made her into a psychic, and she repaid me by visiting in messy gluts. Sometimes she was at Haverleigh every day, sitting in the foyer on the dot of six o’clock visiting hour. She would keep it up for a week or two, then I wouldn’t see her for months. In another phase she arrived each day at six forty-five and made a scene when they asked her to leave after fifteen minutes. Sometimes she only visited on weekdays, sometimes only on Saturdays, sometimes only when it was sunny.
When she was there, she spent most of our time together telling me all the things that were wrong in her life. The new apartment had damp in the bathroom. Her throat hurt. She had an ulcer on her lip. A neighbor had spray-painted a pitchfork on her garden wall. If I did or said something she didn’t like she stormed out, shouting, “I’m never coming to visit you again,” and stayed away for so long I believed her. But it was never forever. She always came back. We were bonded by something thicker than water, thicker than blood: a tar-dark soup of hate-want-need.
“Was she nice?” Molly asked.
“She was just like other people,” I said. “Nice sometimes and not-nice other times.”
“Will she be nice to me?” she asked.
“I expect so,” I said. “And if she’s not we’ll leave.”
At the top of the hill I learned two things: that they had made the land that used to be the alleys into the Parkhill development, and that Mam was living on the land that used to be the alleys. Walking onto the estate, I could almost forget that the same path used to take me to the blue house. The apartments were split into two tower blocks, and the ground between them had been made into a basketball court. Three skinny boys were riding bikes around the edge, demonstrably not at school. They looked at us with hooded, wary eyes.
The lift was out of order, and when I opened the door to the stairwell the smell of dirt and pee was like a plastic bag clamped over my head. Molly pressed her fingers to her nose.
“Ewwww,” she said. “It stinks.”
“Breathe through your mouth,” I said.
“I don’t want to go in there. It really smells,” she said.
“I know. But we have to,” I said.
“Why can’t we go in the lift?” she asked.
“It’s broken.”
“Isn’t there another lift?”
“No, that’s the only one. Come on.”
“Can’t we go and see if there’s another lift?”
“There won’t be. And even if there was one it would probably smell just as bad as this.”
“But I don’t want to—”
“Molly!”
It wasn’t a loud shout, but I was standing in the stairwell, surrounded by hard surfaces. A hundred half-formed echoes of Molly’s name came back to meet us. I walked past her, all the way up to the sixth floor, without stopping to catch my breath. By the time I reached the balcony I was dizzy. Molly was still only halfway up the steps, taking the time to ensure each stomp conveyed sufficient rage.
“Come on,” I said, holding open the door at the top. “Hurry up.” I felt my voice fit the words like a foot slipped into a second-day sock, and wondered how many times I had said them before. “Hurry up, we’ll be late for school,” “Hurry up, it’s nearly bedtime,” “Hurry up, this is taking too long.” It seemed suddenly, explosively cruel that I had spent so much time rushing Molly away.
“It’s number sixty-six,” I said as she emerged from the stairwell. She looked at the numbers on the doors beside us.
“That’ll be further down,” she said.
“I know,” I said. I sounded petty, as if I was becoming younger as I drew closer to Mam.
Molly ran ahead, counting off the numbers aloud: “Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five—this one, it’s this one, sixty-six. Can I knock?”
“Wait,” I said. I knelt down in front of her, licked my thumb, and rubbed away the food marks around her mouth. A porthole in
