“I didn’t do nothing,” she said. “I tried to do something.”
“What?”
“You know what I mean.”
I heard the lounge door open and went to where Molly stood in the hallway. “What’s the matter?” I asked.
“Telly’s gone weird,” she said, pointing to the screen. It was striped with gray bars. I crouched behind the set and looked at the knots of cables until I found which one to push in.
“Better?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said.
I moved to stand up, but stopped when I saw a square metal tin in the space behind the telly table. I eased off the lid and found a thick sheaf of birthday cards inside, splashed with sickly pictures. Teddy bears, love hearts, cakes with yellow candles. My bag was next to the table; I tucked the tin into it, making sure Molly didn’t see. My knees clicked when I straightened.
“We’ll go soon,” I said.
“Okay,” said Molly. She had sunk back into the corner of the couch and refastened her gaze to the screen. Under the bluish light, her cheeks and lips looked smooth, like china-doll features. Reflected pictures danced in her eyes. It was suddenly infuriating to me that she was so perfect—so far removed from the hundreds of thousands of ordinary kids in the world. I was always going to lose her. That was always going to be the end of this story. It seemed vividly unfair for her to be so special.
Mam didn’t look up when I came back.
“She’s fine,” I said. “Just something with the telly. I fixed it.”
“Oh. Yeah. It’s old,” she said.
“You’re not really interested in her, are you?”
“She’s not my kid.”
“No. But I am. And she’s my kid. So you should care.”
She blew air through her teeth, making her lips puff out, and loosened the belt on her dressing gown. “You’re not a kid,” she said. “You’ve not been a kid in years.”
“I meant I’m your kid,” I said. “Not a kid. I’m your kid.”
I remembered this in Mam—the pull and push, cling and reject. She had been the same when we had lived together: crying until I stayed, screaming until I left. It took so little to tip her from one to the other that I rarely knew what I had done to cause the switch. As she had visited me at Haverleigh I had got better at putting my finger on the nothings she turned into everythings. I couldn’t be certain this time, because I was out of practice, but I thought she was probably hurt that I had gone to check on Molly rather than stay with her.
“Did you just come here to show me you’re a better mam than me?” she asked.
“What?” I said. “I never said I was a good mam.”
“Don’t have to say it. You’re fussing over her all the time. It’s to show me, isn’t it?”
“I’m just looking after her. She’s a kid. Kids need looking after.”
“Not as much as everyone thinks.”
“Yes. Just as much as everyone thinks. Probably more,” I said. “I didn’t come to show you anything. I just wanted you to meet her. She’s what I’ve been doing all this time. Probably the only good thing I’ve ever done.”
“Well. That must be nice for you,” she said. “Nice not to have had a kid who made the world worse.”
She had sanded away my top layer with her show of helplessness, leaving me with as much armor as a peeled grape. The jab slid through to my jellied inner tissue. It burned.
“Why did you even have me?” I asked. “You didn’t want a kid. You could have got rid of me. You didn’t want me.”
She made a hopeless noise—a kind of “eh”—as though it was a question she couldn’t be expected to answer. “I don’t know,” she said. “I wanted something. Maybe it was your da. Maybe I thought, ‘I’ll have a kid, he’ll stick around.’ And even if he didn’t, maybe I thought, ‘Well. I’ll still have a kid. It’ll love me.’ And then I had you. And you didn’t.”
“Because you never did anything for me. Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.”
“But I told you. No one ever told me what the work was. I didn’t know what to do.”
“No one told me either. No one ever told me any of it. But if you want to, you figure it out. And then you figure it out a bit better the next day. And you carry on doing that for all the days. Most of the time it’s really hard and boring, but it’s not impossible. You just have to really want to do it.”
“Right,” she said, and it seemed that all the air went out of her. She sank back into the folds of her dressing gown. I noticed an embroidered teddy bear on the pocket. “So you’re saying I didn’t want to. Not enough.”
“What is it you do want?” I asked. “Now, I mean. What is it you want?”
“Oh, you know,” she said. “Lots of things.”
“What are they, though?”
She began biting the dry skin on her lips. I watched a clear graft come away and disappear on her tongue. She lifted it with a finger and wiped it on the table.
“Well. It’d be nice not to be scared of people spitting at me in the street, for starters. And to have a home that felt like home. I suppose I want to be younger. Think everyone wants that. I’d like to be twenty-five, like you. Have everything in front of me. I suppose I just want to start again.”
It was probably the most honest she had ever been with me, and it felt too big to take inside. I stood up, but there still wasn’t room. It all felt too big—Mam’s words, the dingy apartment, the land that pulsed with blue-house memories. My face felt like a balloon full of boiling water, and I went to the fridge, opened
