I had a pencil in my pocket, and while Linda ate the toffees I used it to scribble on the white-painted walls. Scribbling on walls was one of my favorite things to do, because it was never, ever allowed and it always, always made someone cross. I wasn’t sure who would get cross with me for scribbling on the walls of the blue house, but I knew someone would, in the end. I started out with lines, then pictures, then words. I wrote them as big as I could, swooping my arm like an eagle wing. I wrote until the pencil was completely flat at the end, then stood back and looked at the wall. Read the words. Fizzed.
“You shouldn’t say that,” said Linda from behind me.
“What?”
“That.” She got up and pointed.
“Why not?”
“It’s really rude.”
“That’s not rude. This one’s rude.” I went to the other end of the wall and pointed to a shorter word, scrawled sideways in letters that got bigger as it went on. She tipped her head to see, her plaits falling in straight lines toward the floor.
“Oh yeah. That’s really rude,” she said. She couldn’t read it.
The fizzing made me feel like a can of paint, like my insides were squeezed into a tight metal case. I knew if someone had pressed down on my head my guts would have sprayed out and coated the walls in words and shapes. I jumped up and down and then I yelled, a bird squawk shaped by a grinning mouth. It bounced around the room and came back as an answer. I was beating with energy, pulsing in places I didn’t know I could pulse, hunger and excitement and red-hot fury, lava in my belly, straining against my skin. I ran to the end of the room, pushed myself off the wall with my hands and feet, ran to the other end, pushed myself off, back and forth and forth and back, and every time I got to a wall I thought, “I can run up this wall, run onto the ceiling, run right round the room with my feet on the walls.” Da’s marble banged against my leg through the fabric of my pocket. My breath was coming in gasps and my feet were getting lazy, throbbing from bouncing me off the walls, so I wound to a stop in the middle of the room like a wind-up car all out of wind. My legs quivered and my chest ached and still I seethed in my belly. I pulled up my dress, squatted, and peed. The seething hissed out of me and trickled toward the rotten patch in the middle of the floor. It smelled stale and secret.
When I finished peeing I stood up with my legs apart like a toddler. I hadn’t pulled down my underpants. They were soaked. I felt softer. Warmer. Linda’s face was whiter than the walls underneath my scribbles. I went out of the room, and she followed without speaking. We crunched through the glass on the downstairs floor and out onto the scrubby patch of earth where Steven had been handed to his mammy. I turned back to look at the upstairs room. I couldn’t see my wall writing from outside, but I knew it was there.
I am here, I am here, I am here. You will not forget me.
There was a rumbling noise coming from the streets that got louder as we got closer, the noise of shoes on pavement and voices chanting. At the top of Marner Street we saw them, a crowd of mammies and das and kids, walking with signs held high above their heads. The signs said things like MAKE THE STREETS SAFE AGAIN, SAVE OUR TOWN AND SAVE OUR BAIRNS. They were painted in big letters on bedsheets and folded-out cereal boxes. When the crowd got really close I saw Steven’s mammy at the front. She had her arm linked through Betty’s mammy’s arm and was holding a picture of Steven against her chest. I could tell Betty’s mammy was pleased she was the one standing at the front with Steven’s mammy. She was crying the sort of tears you only cry because there are people watching and you want them to see you crying. Steven’s mammy wasn’t crying. She did have shoes on. I wondered whether there was still meat rotting in her kitchen.
The crowd reached the top of the street and me and Linda were swallowed into its middle. They were chanting, “Find the killer, lock him up, make him pay for Steven’s blood.” I joined in. I shouted until my throat hurt. The man beside me gave me his sign, written in big letters on an opened-out cornflakes box. He was going to lift me onto his shoulders, and I wanted that, because I wanted to be high up, like a bird or a star, but when my body was in front of his face he made an “ugh” noise and put me back down. He wiped his hands on his trousers. My face burned. I felt cold between my legs. I pushed through the crowd, away from the man. I held the sign high above my head and screamed into the wind. Find the killer, lock him up, make him pay for Steven’s blood. My sign said, AN EYE FOR AN EYE AND A TOOTH FOR A TOOTH.
When we got to Vicky’s house everyone went inside. Me and Linda had got to the back of the crowd, and we didn’t catch up quick enough to get swept inside with the others. By the time we were at the garden gate the front door had closed. I went up the path to knock it but Linda pulled me back.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Knocking,” I said.
“Why?” she asked.
“Because I want to go in,” I said.
“You can’t. We haven’t been invited.”
“Don’t
