She shrugged and took a juddery breath. It struck me that she might be going to cry, which I found repulsive. I cast around for how I could take her from sadness to rage.
“Do you get any bother?” I asked.
When Mam had visited me at Haverleigh she had loved to tell me about the bother she was having. She brought in the notes that had come through the letter box, scrawled and screaming. MURDERER MAMMY OUT. HELL FOR SATAN-MAKER.
She sipped her drink. “Nothing major. Touch wood.” She tapped the table, which was clearly plastic. Neither of us spoke for a while. When I had imagined being with her I hadn’t imagined this: the tight words moored by gaping white silence. I had imagined shouting, tears, thrusting Molly forward. “Look. Look what I did, Mam. I made her. I did something good.” Mam dropping to her knees on the floor, pushing the hair away from Molly’s face. “Yeah. You did. Well done. She’s beautiful, Chrissie. She’s beautiful.” I hated myself for having believed it might happen, and more for still wanting it to happen.
“Have you got a job now?” I asked.
“Cleaning,” she said. “The offices in town.”
“Okay.”
“It’s early in the morning. Get there at four, five. Come back midday to sleep. That’s why I was asleep. When you arrived. I don’t normally just—you know. I only sleep in the day if I’ve worked the morning.”
“Okay.”
A tic nibbled at the corner of her eye. She dipped her finger into her drink and pressed the wet tip to where she was twitching. It didn’t stop. She ran the droplet around the rim of her glass. I remembered Da doing it—the fine hum that had throbbed the air.
“Do you know where Da is?” I asked.
“Lost touch. Could be anywhere,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Good riddance,” she said, coming alive at the edges. “He was a bastard.”
Da hadn’t been to visit me at Haverleigh until I was sixteen. He had turned up three days after my birthday, lumbered into the visiting room with a bag of wrapped sweets the keepers had had to open and check for drugs or razor blades. When he got to the table he dropped them in front of me. Most of them spilled onto the floor. Neither of us picked them up.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Grown up now,” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Bigger,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“All all right here?” he asked, waving his hand at the window. Outside you could see the ten-foot perimeter fence.
“Great,” I said. He flicked his thumbnail against his teeth and we watched the telly mounted in the corner of the room. Inside, I felt warmed by a small, defiant flame. He had come. He had come to see me. He had come to see me and bring me sweets. He had come to see me and bring me sweets for my birthday. He looked and sounded the same as I remembered, and I wanted to lunge across the table and put my face in the crook of his neck, in the place where the skin was cool and clammy.
When the telly program finished Da cleared his throat. “Suppose I’ll head off, then,” he said.
“But you only just got here,” I said.
“Been half an hour almost,” he said.
“No it hasn’t.”
“I’ve got things to be getting on with.”
“But I want you to stay.”
He sat down, picked up a sweet, unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth. I heard it rattle against his teeth. We watched another telly program. When it finished he laid his palms flat on the table.
“See you soon, then,” he said.
“Are you going to come back?”
“Yeah. Expect so.”
“I’ve only got two more years here. I have to leave after that. Will you come back before I leave?”
“Sure I will. Sure.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I knew he wouldn’t, but I still felt grateful for the almost-hour with a grown-up who hadn’t been paid to be with me. He pushed his chair back and I walked round the table and pressed myself against him. When I had hugged him as a kid my face had pushed into the soft dome of his belly, but now the bone of my nose braced the bones of his chest. I turned my head so my cheek was flush with his shirt. He patted my back, then pushed me away by the shoulders, but not like he wanted me to fall backward, like he just needed there to be space between us. Sometimes you have to have space between you and someone else, even when you really like them, even when you love them, like because you’re too hot or because you need to breathe. That wasn’t why Da pushed me back: he did it because he didn’t want my body pressed against his. Because I had grown and strained and sprouted, but I was still the bad seed.
“He came to see me a few times,” I said to Mam. “He wasn’t that bad.”
“He was,” said Mam.
“He was better than you,” I said.
“When? When was he better? He was never there.”
“He was. Sometimes he was.”
“Once in a blue moon.”
“Well it wasn’t his fault. He had other stuff on. It was your job to look after me, not his.”
“Why?”
“Because you were the mam.” She didn’t retort, and the silence left me space to hear myself in my head—deluded, whingeing—which made me angrier than anything she could have said. “He didn’t need to be there to be better than you. At least when I saw him he was nice to me.”
She made a snorting sound at the back of her throat. “Yeah,” she said. “Nice to you.”
Another memory, grayly translucent, like a photo negative. Seven years old, seeing Da from my bedroom window, running out of the door and into his arms. Mam at the door, Mam on the path, calling as we walked down the street hand in hand. “Da, she wants you.” “Keep walking.” Mam in the house when we got back that night,
