Molly groaned theatrically when I told her it was time to leave the playground, but I said that the first person to spot five red cars would be the winner, and she relented. As we walked down the street I looked at the front doors and thought of who had lived behind them when I was Chrissie. Donna and William. Betty. Mrs. Harold. Vicky and Harry. I knew most of them would have moved on, but it felt good to imagine they were all still contained within those walls, as if life in the streets had paused when I had left.
It took me a moment to recognize the house, because the door had been painted and the front wall rebuilt. We went up the path and rang the bell and she appeared, a toddler on her hip, “Hello!” on her lips. It died when she saw me.
“Linda,” I said. The toddler burrowed his face into her neck.
“It’s okay,” she said to him.
“Mammy,” he said.
“I know. We thought it was your mammy, didn’t we? Never mind. She’ll be here in a minute.”
“Who dat?” he asked, stabbing a finger at me. She pulled his arm down.
“We don’t point, do we?” she said. “That’s another lady. Someone Linda knows.”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was swaying on the spot, and I didn’t know whether it was to soothe the toddler or herself. Molly started tugging the back of my jacket.
“What is it?” I hissed.
“I need the toilet,” she hissed.
“Can’t you wait?” I hissed.
“I’m bursting,” she hissed.
“You can come in,” said Linda, breaking up our snake talk.
“It’s fine. We don’t have to.”
“Yeah you do. She needs the toilet. Come on, sweetie.”
She backed into the hallway and Molly stepped inside. I shut the door behind us. The house was the same as I remembered, but fresher, cream-painted, and teeming with a small zoo of kids. They seemed to spill out of every cupboard and from behind every door, most of them in a cheerful state of half undress. There were drawings taped to the walls, toys stacked in the corners, and a warm smell of cooked potato.
“It’s the door you can see from here,” Linda said to Molly. “The one at the top of the stairs. It hasn’t got a lock, but don’t worry, no one will come in.”
“That’s my daughter,” I said when Molly went upstairs, as if, up to this point, her identity had been a mystery. I wasn’t sure I had ever called her my daughter before—it was a starchy word, hard-edged in my mouth. Linda would know about her already. They had put it in the papers when they had found us, debated it on the radio. Men whose voices had sounded fat and balding had asked, “Can we really trust a child killer to raise her own child?” It was playing in the corner shop where I was counting change for a box of sanitary towels. When I heard it I wrestled the pram out onto the street. I didn’t work up the courage to go into another shop until I felt blood soak through my underpants and trickle down my leg in a sticky trail.
“Yeah,” said Linda. “It’s Molly, isn’t it? Molly Linda.”
“Oh,” I said. “You got them.”
In all my different lives, I had always written to Linda. From each of my Haverleigh bedrooms, from when I was Lucy. I had told her the things no one was supposed to know—my address, my phone number, each new name they had given me. Black ink filling up white rectangles. The writing was hungriest when I was little. Have you got a new best friend yet? Is it Donna? Has your mammy had another baby? Will you come and visit me? I gave the letters to Matron, asked her if she knew Linda’s address, asked her if she definitely knew her address, heard her say yes, yes, she’ll get it, don’t worry, Christine. She never wrote back. I carried on writing and she carried on not writing back. Sometimes I imagined my letters straining against an elastic band on a shelf in Matron’s office because she hadn’t really known the address but hadn’t wanted to say so. That made me feel better. It wasn’t that Linda didn’t care. It was just that she had never got to know how much I did. I had last written when Molly was a baby, when I had just been made into Julia. You’re probably not even getting these letters. You probably don’t even live at this address anymore. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve had a baby girl. I’ve called her Molly Linda.
As Molly came down the stairs the bell rang again, and Linda touched my arm. “Look,” she said. “It’s going to be chaos here for the next half hour or so. All the childminding kids get picked up at this time.”
“We’ll go,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I mean, not if you don’t want to. If you don’t mind giving me half an hour to get everyone sorted, things will be calmer. Molly can play with the others. They’re—you know—” She gestured vaguely, and I wondered what she meant—that they were running wild, or mostly naked, or multiplying as we spoke? “But you don’t have to stay. Not if you don’t want to. Whatever you want. I’ve got to get this.”
Linda greeted the woman at the door and deposited the toddler in her arms. He started crying immediately. Molly came to stand beside me.
“Would you like to stay here for a bit?” I asked. She looked through to the garden, where assorted kids were playing with balls and hula-hoops in the dying light.
“Yeah,” she said, and led me deeper into the house.
