Mam’s fingers closed hard on a fold of skin above my elbow. I clenched my teeth. “I can’t remember,” I said. “I think I just found them. I really can’t remember.” Mam patted my knee.
“Well, nurse, like I said. She’ll put anything in her mouth. There are some nasty types round where we live, nurse. I’m sure you heard about the business with the little boy. I try my best to keep Chrissie safe, but sometimes I have to work away from home, and her da’s not around as much as I’d like. There’s always someone watching her, but you never know how careful they’re going to be, do you? I told my sister, ‘Look after her proper, she’s very precious.’ I can’t do more than that, can I? Not my fault if she doesn’t take good care of her, not when I’m away working.”
I could see that Nurse Howard wasn’t listening to much of what Mam was saying. She was looking at her all over, from the knots in her hair to the rips in her stockings. I didn’t know if she could tell she was saying lies, lies, lies. I didn’t know if I wanted her to be able to tell. When Mam ran out of words Nurse Howard smiled a tight smile and click-clacked off. Mam turned to me and tucked the hair behind my ears. She didn’t look at my eyes. She spoke in a high, humming voice.
“Oh, my poor little Chrissie. Poor, unlucky Chrissie. Terrible luck for a kid, to have a packet of sweeties turn out to be tablets. Terrible bad luck for a kid. Such a shame she can’t remember where she found them.” She grabbed my face in her hand and squeezed my cheeks so my mouth popped open. “But she can’t remember. Can she?” I shook my head.
“Good,” she said. She let go of my face, but I could still feel her fingers there, pressing my cheeks into my teeth. “Good. Because if Chrissie ever remembered how she came by them tablets, she might find that other things started getting remembered. Things she doesn’t want anyone to know.”
She put her mouth by my ear. I could smell her stronger than ever. Stale. Bloody. “About Steven,” she whispered.
When she sat back she did look at my eyes. We stared at each other until the air between us had a heartbeat. Her hands were on the bed, and I broke out of the staring match to look down at them. I turned one over, so it was palm up, and lifted it back to my face. She let me lift her, made her arm loose like a puppet’s. I put her hand on my cheek and pressed both my hands over it, then tipped myself forward until the top of my head was on her chest. She knew what I had done. She was the only other person in the world who knew what I had done. I wanted to crawl back inside her belly, because that was how close I felt we were, both of us together, knotted inside the secret.
She let me sit with my head against her chest for a while, rising and falling as she breathed in and out. Then she stood. I kept my head down. I didn’t watch her gather her bag and walk down the aisle between the beds. I only knew she was gone because I heard the door at the end of the room open and close.
The little girl in the bed next to mine was sitting up and crying, and I lay down with my back to her, curled in the shape of a question mark. There was a small warmth at the bottom of my belly, like the glow of a blown-out candle. Mam knew what had happened with Steven. She knew and she hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t told anyone because she didn’t want me to go to prison, wanted to keep me with her, wanted to keep me safe. You have to care about things to want to keep them safe.
Julia
By the time I went back to the lounge, Molly had lost interest in the telly. She was headstanding on the couch. I wasn’t sure headstands were the best thing for a broken wrist, but I felt too heavy to care. Mam leaned against the wall, watching me thread Molly’s cast through the sleeve of her coat. Our last visit had ended in shouting—“Get out of my house!” “I’m never coming back!”—and it had been safe, because it had happened on the surface. We had been able to scream at each other and still hold on to the nub of feeling underneath, the nub that said, “I’ll be back. I need you and you need me.” There were no fireworks this time. There was nothing to shout. We both knew I wouldn’t be back. She followed us to the door, and I stepped through it feeling like a blister: thin-skinned, tight with oozings. I walked along the balcony without looking back.
“Are we going home now?” Molly asked when we got to the stairwell.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Promise?” she said.
“Promise,” I said. Like promise was anything more than a stupid word.
We had to go back through the streets to get to the bus stop. When we passed the playground Molly trailed her fingers along the railings. “Looks like a good playground,” she said, to no one but also to me. I looked over the fence. The concrete had been covered in the same springy surface that covered the ground under Molly’s school climbing frame,
