My chair screeched as I got up from the table. “I’m going to check on Molly,” I said. She was where I had left her: on the couch, her face lit by a history program.
“Are you all right?” I asked. She didn’t look over when I sat down on the couch arm.
“Why does she say Chrissie?” she asked.
“That’s what I was called when I was little,” I said.
“But not anymore?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Just got changed.”
“Will I get changed from Molly?”
“No,” I said, though it occurred to me that I didn’t know what would happen to her name when she moved to the new parents. A part of me hoped they might change it. I hated the idea of her soft syllables in their mouths. I wondered whether, when I was in prison, I would find I still needed to say her name a certain number of times a day in order to feel whole. I imagined myself chanting it, alone, hunched on my bunk.
On the way back to the kitchen I stopped to look into the room next to the lounge. It was messier than the rest of the apartment, the bed covered in knotted tights and blouses. There was a person-shaped indentation in the middle, and I pictured Mam curled within it, like a mouse burrowed into a nest.
She was still at the kitchen table, her head resting on one hand. As I walked past the worktop I ran my fingers along the boxes of cereal stacked against the wall.
“You buy food now,” I said as I sat down.
“Why do you keep saying that?” she asked.
“Because you didn’t bother when I lived with you.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No. I never had enough to eat. I was starving. I stuffed my bedsheets in my mouth at night just so I had something to chew.”
“But I remember buying you things. Sweets and things. I remember it.”
“That was—what—once a month? The rest of the time there was nothing.”
“Well I didn’t know that. I don’t remember being hungry.”
“You weren’t.”
It was true: even when the cupboards had been bare, Mam had had enough to eat. Sometimes when she had come back at night I had waited until she was quiet in her room, then gone downstairs and pawed through the handbag she had dropped in the hallway. There had always been something coiled at the bottom, a crisp packet or rustle of chip paper. I had always hoped it was chip paper. When it had been chip paper I had sucked off the ketchup. We had been like a gone-wrong bird family, me and Mam: her out scavenging, me in the nest. She had only sometimes hacked up half-chewed worm parts for me, and whatever scraps she had given me I had swallowed down. I thought of it now and felt coldly degraded.
“I was hungry,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. But, come on. It was only food.”
The snag of anger caught me in the soft place where my jaw met my neck. I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t. I couldn’t think how to explain the hunger, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in trying. You couldn’t understand hunger like that unless you had felt it. I wanted to tell her how it had shaped me, made me, because it had been huge and I had been tiny and it had always been there, a gnawing, nagging constant. It would have been mad to say I had killed because I was hungry, but the hunger had been a form of madness. It had driven so much of what I had done back then. Sometimes I wondered if the hunger could have stopped my brain growing the way normal brains grew, because I had never had any sustenance to make into new cells.
At Haverleigh we had all eaten together, sitting on long benches either side of the dining table. The table was wide enough that we couldn’t kick the people opposite us when we were sitting down, so we had to kick the people next to us instead. They tried to sit us next to people we liked so we wouldn’t kick them, but no one liked me and I kicked everyone. I always stopped kicking when the food arrived. The keepers put plates of sandwiches in the middle and I grabbed as many as I could fit in my hands, piled them onto my plate, grabbed more, piled them higher, made a shield with my arm as I pushed them into my mouth. I didn’t taste food at Haverleigh; tasting wasn’t the point. Eating wasn’t the point. The point was having, and keeping, and filling. Sometimes, when we were doing cooking with the keepers in the kitchen, I snuck away to the larder. My feet made soft slapping sounds on the lino floor, and I peeled open the door with a quiet sigh. It wasn’t about being caught or
