And then it was just us, Linda and me. It was always us, really.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hate lying. It’s really bad. I just didn’t think you’d want me to tell him about you. I thought it was safest to make something up. And I didn’t know what you’d want to be called. So I panicked and said you were Donna.”
“Well that’s unforgivable,” I said. “My face looks nothing like a potato.”
She laughed. “I was going to ask if you remembered that,” she said.
“I was proud of it,” I said. “It was cutting.”
“It’s Julia, isn’t it?” she said, taking the ice cream bowls to the sink. “Your new name, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t really want you to call me that, though. I’d rather you just called me Chrissie.”
Haverleigh was the last place I was really Chrissie. It was the last place I let myself cling to people with her leechlike suction, the last place I stuck out my chin when they told me off. It was the last place I wet the bed. At Haverleigh they understood: our mattresses were rubber, and we had laundry baskets and extra sheets in our rooms, so if you were wet in the morning you could change your sheets between checks without anyone knowing. When I first got there I didn’t understand about checks, about the clear fifteen-minute windows between them, and a keeper came into my room while I was taking the wet sheet off my bed. I froze, hunched over, thinking of the damp circle on the back of my nightie. The keeper went to the opposite end of the bed and unhooked the corners of the sheet.
“Why are you in my room?” I asked.
“Just checks,” she said. “Thought you could use a hand sorting your bed.”
“I don’t want your hand. I hate you. You’re ugly. I hate the way you look. I don’t want you on my checks anymore. I want someone else. Anyone who’s not you,” I said.
She bundled the sheet into a ball and dropped it into my laundry basket. “I’m afraid it’s me this morning,” she said.
“I spilled some water on my bed,” I said. “I was having a drink in bed and I spilled it on my sheets.”
We didn’t have sinks in our rooms, and we never had drinks in bed, and I couldn’t have spilled a drink on the back of my nightie even if I had tried.
“Oh dear,” she said. “That was bad luck.”
She fetched a clean sheet from the wardrobe and shook it over the mattress. “You know, a lot of kids here spill their drinks in bed,” she said. “That’s why we have extra sheets in the wardrobes. It’s not a problem. Why don’t you choose some clothes? Most of the boys aren’t up yet. I’ll take you for a shower.”
I wet the bed my last night at Haverleigh, then never again. The outside world dried me into a liquidless husk. It was lonely and it was safe. Nothing could hurt me if I had nothing inside. Sometimes I thought what I missed about Haverleigh wasn’t Haverleigh at all, but who I had been there. Sometimes I thought what I missed was Chrissie.
“Does Donna still live here?” I asked.
“No,” said Linda. “She moved into town. Most people our age did. There’s not much here. You start to realize that when you’re not a kid anymore.”
“Where are Steven’s family?” I asked.
“They went to the countryside. After that campaign. Did you know about it? The campaign?”
I had seen it on the telly in the Haverleigh lounge. Steven’s mammy’s face had been big and old-looking on the screen. The hair falling down her back was long and lankly brittle, and her shoulders were dusted with white flecks of dandruff. By then it had been years since Steven had died, but she still looked rotted with grief, like someone who had had their insides pulled out and spread on hot tarmac to fry and stink.
“It’s just not right,” she had said to the reporter. “She’s had—what—nine years? Nine years in a glorified boarding school. She’s never even seen the inside of a cell. And now they want to let her out? Want to let her start again? How is that justice for my son? Steven doesn’t get to start again. I don’t. She deserves a life sentence. No—to hell with it. She deserves the death penalty.”
She had had a photograph of Steven clutched against her, the same as the one on the cover of Susan’s book. She had pushed it at the reporter. “Look at him,” she had said. “Just look at him. Look at him and tell me that monster deserves to be free. He died without his mammy. He died frightened. It’s every mammy’s worst nightmare: for your kid to be without you and frightened. She’s scum.”
That was what happened to kids like Steven: they got frozen in a state of perfection, ever pure, ever wonderful, because they were only ever two years old. Most kids lived long enough to make mistakes and let people down and do bad things, and they weren’t perfect, they were just living. Kids like Steven didn’t get to carry on living, so they got perfection instead. It was a kind of trade. I didn’t much mind the things his mammy said about me. They were just true. Scum was thin and grimy, and it floated on top of liquid, stretched out, diffuse. That was how I felt: as though I was floating on top of the world, waiting to be skimmed off and thrown away.
Linda pulled out a piece of her hair and started tying it in knots. “You get it, don’t you?” she said. “Why she couldn’t forgive you. I mean. Imagine if it was Molly.”
I wanted to scream. “Linda, all I do is imagine it was Molly,” I wanted to howl. “All I’ve ever done, ever since she was born, is imagine
