“Shall we go handstand wall?” I asked Linda when we got outside. It wasn’t really properly night yet, and the dark coming down was the summery kind, pale and baggy.
“Can’t,” she said. “It’s nearly dark. Mammy will be waiting for me at home.”
I put my finger and thumb around a pouch of skin on her arm and pinched. “‘Mammy will be waiting for me,’” I said in a making-fun voice.
She carried on walking, rubbing her arm. “You’re sometimes not a very nice best friend, Chrissie,” she said.
I watched the corners of her mouth drag down in sad little pleats. “I am your best friend, though,” I said. She scrubbed her fist across her eyes and looked like she wasn’t very sure. My heart did a little trip. “You’re my best friend,” I said. “You’re always my best friend. And I’m a good best friend, really. Way better than anyone else. I’m always making sure other people aren’t mean to you. And no one else wants to be your best friend anyway. So I am still your best friend, aren’t I?”
“Yeah,” she said. She sounded a bit tired.
When I got back to the house I called for Da. I had hoped he might be on the couch, drinking beer. He wasn’t. I thought he was probably dead again. Missing him was a smoke burn in my middle: a small round hole, black at the edges.
In the bathroom I ran water into the tub. It came out in a hot sputter, brown from the rust inside the taps. Steam rose up and wetted my face, and I peeled off my dress but kept my underpants on. When I climbed in, the heat made my skin sting. I rubbed the sliver of soap across my arms and legs, and the hairs curled like pinworms in milk. I took my underpants off in the water, smeared them with soap, rinsed them and put them over the side of the tub to dry. My hair was getting matted at the ends, so I wetted it and tried to pick apart the worst clumps.
After I had washed my body I sat with my arms wrapped round my legs, pressing my mouth against my knee, harder and harder until I felt my teeth print my lips like plasticine. Just when I thought my teeth were going to come through my lips and clatter my knee bone, I heard a creak on the floorboards outside. I climbed out of the tub and cracked open the bathroom door. Mam was standing on the landing, just outside her bedroom. I opened the door wider, and stood with my feet apart. Her eyes went across the whole of me.
“Where’s Da?” I asked.
“Not here,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Why do you want him?”
I picked up a towel and wrapped it around my shoulders. Sometimes Mam said things just to trick me, just to give her an excuse to shout. I looked at her face to see if that was what she was doing this time. I didn’t think so. When she was tricking, her lip curled up on one side, making a dark wrinkle at the top of one of her nose holes. She wasn’t doing that. Her lips were tight and there was a crease between her eyebrows.
“I just want him,” I said.
“But you’ve got me,” she said.
That didn’t really make any sense. It was like saying I didn’t need a toothbrush because I had a twig, or I didn’t need a blanket because I had a sheet of tinfoil. The two things weren’t the same: the one I wanted was what I needed, and the one I had was much, much worse.
“I don’t want you,” I said. “I want him.”
She swallowed, and the skin between her neck and shoulders went very tight, and for a second I thought she was going to scream.
“Chrissie,” she said. “That little boy.”
My heartbeat thrummed in my throat. It wasn’t ticking. Too fast for ticking. Flap-flap-flap, a moth-wing flutter. My muscles felt like icy poles.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You,” she said. I thought she would carry on—“You knew him” or “You played with him” or even “You killed him”—but she didn’t. She just looked at me. Her teeth clenched and something twitched in her jaw, like an insect trapped under the skin. Then she backed into her bedroom and shut the door.
Julia
Mam was standing by the sink in the kitchen. It was a narrow room, with a small table and two chairs in the space at the end. I opened one of the cupboards above the worktop, expecting empty shelves. Packets of biscuits were stacked as deep as my arm. Three cartons of eggs stood on top of each other.
“So you buy food now,” I said. “Now that it’s just you.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asked. She took a tumbler from a shelf and poured an inch of amber into it.
“I don’t drink.”
She drained the glass in one swallow. “Why not?”
“I’ve got Molly.”
She frowned as though that wasn’t relevant, and took her second drink to the table, where she sat with her back to me. I opened the rest of the cupboards one by one. I didn’t particularly care what was in them, barely looked, barely saw, but I wanted her to hear me opening them. I wanted her to feel I was groping my hands around her insides.
When I sat down opposite her she didn’t look up. She was hunched and small inside the dressing gown.
“Is this where you were moving last time I saw you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Been here five years.”
“Why did you come back?”
“Just wanted to. The other places never felt like home. At least here I know what’s what.”
“Does
