“No,” I said, crossing the room. “Don’t,” I said, pushing her hand away. We stared at each other until the sound stopped.
“Why didn’t you answer it?” she asked, stroking her cast.
“Didn’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Finish your programs. It’s ten o’clock. We’ll go to the park soon.”
When she wasn’t looking, I took the receiver out of the cradle and let it hang, disconnected.
On Sunday it rang later, when she was in bed. I came out of her room and stood next to it.
“I’m not going to answer, so you might as well give up,” I thought. “You can call and call but I’m never going to answer.”
I looked at myself in the mirror next to the coat hooks. My eyes were bucketed by bruise-colored rings, the whites webbed with threads of scarlet vein. I dug my nails into my arm and felt sticky half-moons spring up where I broke the skin. When the ringing stopped, the silence was like cool water closing over my head. I made myself count my breaths, the way they had taught me to count my breaths when I was teetering on the edge of a rage, but the noise started again before I got to ten. It seemed even louder, even more insistent. I pushed my belly with my fingers and felt the hard pouch of an organ, and I kept one hand there—on the liver or spleen or whatever else lived in the dark inside swamp—as I picked up the phone. The voice that spoke was tight, like a can peeling open.
“Hello?” they said. They were breathing heavily. I imagined I could smell them through the holes in the receiver, the mustard-colored smell of unbrushed teeth.
“Chrissie?” they said.
I pushed the button to disengage with my fingernail. The dialing tone was a dull cry.
“Right,” I thought. “So that’s that.”
Chrissie
At school on Monday they made us sit in rows in the hall, like for Friday assembly, except it wasn’t Friday, it was Monday. The hall smelled of mince and pencil sharpenings and the sun lit up the dust in the air, made it dance in sparkling columns. My class came in when Class Six was already sitting down, and I looked in the rows for Susan. You could always spot Susan because she had the longest hair of any girl in the school. It went all the way down to her bottom. In the summer she sat on a cushion in the front garden after her bath, and her mammy sat on a stool behind her and chatted to Karen’s mammy in the garden next door while she combed her hair, and Steven toddled up and down the path and every time he came up to his mammy she kissed him. Sometimes I leaned on the wall to watch. By the time the hair was all combed through, the sun had dried it to a yellow-white sheet, and Susan’s mammy ran her fingers through it like warm sand. Then she put the comb in her pocket and patted the top of Susan’s head. Susan didn’t often join in when we were playing out, even when it was something really fun, like the game where we snuck into Mrs. Rowley’s house through her broken back door and pinched her things, or Sardines. She mainly sat in the playground with the other Class Six girls, letting them take turns stroking her hair.
I could only really remember Susan talking to me one time, when I was in Class Two and she was in Class Four. I had been in the playground by myself, trying to walk all the way round the edge with my feet on the bottom bar of the fence, and she had come down the street with a woman who wasn’t her mammy.
“Chrissie!” she shouted when she saw me. I felt quite special, because kids in Class Four didn’t usually talk to kids in Class Two. When she got to the fence she held it and bounced on her tiptoes. “Guess what?” she said. The not-mammy woman came up behind her.
“Susie’s got some exciting news,” she said. “Go on. Tell your friend, duck.”
“I got a baby brother,” said Susan. She said it with her shoulders up to her ears and her eyes shining. I didn’t actually think it was very exciting news at all. People got baby brothers and sisters all the time. I felt pretty cross with her, because she had made me think something actually exciting had happened. Like the vicar had died or something.
“He’s a right little sweetie, isn’t he, duck?” said the not-mammy woman.
“She’s actually a girl,” I said. “Not a duck.”
“He’s called Steven,” said Susan. “Mammy and Da had two names, Stewart and Steven, and they told them both to me and let me choose. I chose Steven.”
“Who’s that woman?” I asked. The not-mammy woman laughed.
“I’m Susie’s Auntie Joan,” she said. “I’ve come to lend her mammy and da a hand while they get to know the little one. What’s your name, pet?”
“Chrissie,” I said.
“That’s a nice name,” she said. “Well, we’d best be getting to the shop.”
“Bye, Chrissie!” called Susan as they walked away. “We’ve got to get the things for Mammy and Da and Steven now!”
“Nice to meet you, duck!” called Auntie Joan.
“I’m a girl!” I called, but I didn’t think they heard me. I watched them until all I could see were Susan’s long white plaits, hanging down her back like two bits of rope. When they were gone I spent a lot of time thinking about how different things would be if I had hair like Susan’s—like how I would be very rich, because I would make people pay me for letting them touch my hair, and how everyone would like me. Probably even Mam.
I met Steven two weeks later, on a Friday. When I came out of my classroom there was a
