“That was you? You were calling me?”
“Just a few times. I wasn’t trying to scare you or anything. You gave me your number the last time you wrote.”
“Why were you calling? You didn’t before. You never even replied to my letters.”
“I know. I’m sorry. I felt really bad about it. But—you know—I’m still hopeless, Chrissie. I can barely write, even now. I didn’t want you to know I was still like that. It was easier to call.”
“But why now?”
“Same as for you, I suppose. Just felt like the right time. I’d just found out I was pregnant. I’ve always thought of you when I’ve been pregnant, ever since I knew you had a little girl. I always wondered how you would have coped. This is the last baby we’re having. I won’t be pregnant again. Just made me want to speak to you.”
For a second, a window into a different world cracked open, a world where Linda and I had been pregnant together and Molly had grown up in step with her twins. It hurt in a hot, bright way, like looking straight at the sun.
“I thought it was the papers calling,” I said. “I thought our social worker had told them about me.”
“Why would she have done that?”
“Why wouldn’t she?”
“Because it’s her job to look after you.”
I thought of things to say back—“No one’s ever looked after me” or “It’s no one’s job to look after me” or “It’s not her job to look after me.” I dragged my nail in circles on the tabletop.
“I thought you hated me,” I said.
“Well I don’t,” said Linda.
“That’s just because you’re really Christian, though,” I said.
She smiled with half her mouth. “I am a Christian. But I wouldn’t hate you even if I wasn’t.”
“Did you miss me?” I asked. It came out unbearable—young and needy—and I had to look at the Linda in the window, not the one next to me, while I waited for her to answer.
“Yeah,” she said.
“I was awful to you.”
“Nah. You just teased. And you looked out for me, didn’t you?”
“I was a monster.”
“You were my friend.”
I pulled my legs up onto my chair and pushed my face into my knees, so my lips were pressed flat to my teeth. “Best friend,” I said into my jeans.
It was what I had said in my cell, on the one day of the trial that had made me upset. I hadn’t been upset when Donna’s mammy had stood up and called me “trouble” and “wicked” and “evil.” I hadn’t been upset when Steven’s mammy had stood up and said I deserved to be hung, drawn, and quartered (because I hadn’t really known what that meant). I had been upset when it was Linda’s mammy’s turn.
“How do you know Christine?” asked the man in the white wig.
“She was friends with my daughter, Linda,” said Linda’s mammy.
“Close friends?” said White Wig.
“I think Chrissie would have said so,” said Linda’s mammy. “Chrissie would have said they were best friends. My Linda, she’s friends with everyone, really. I see lots of little girls at the house—more than I can keep track of, sometimes. Chrissie was just one of them.”
I felt a sharp pain in my middle and put my hand on it. I could feel my pulse under my palm. I wondered if my heart had dropped down to my belly.
“But you saw a lot of Christine,” said White Wig. “You’ve told us she spent a good deal of time at your house. More time at your house than at her own.”
Linda’s mammy looked to the side, to where Mam was sitting alone on a bench. She turned her body toward White Wig. “I don’t think there was a lot for her to go home to,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?” asked White Wig.
“Chrissie’s mam. Eleanor. She struggled.”
“Struggled in what way?”
“Just struggled. Ever since Chrissie was small. I remember pushing Linda’s pram past the house and hearing a baby crying, and it wasn’t normal crying, not like they’re meant to. Proper howling. Screaming. It happened over and over, and I walked past over and over, because you don’t want to pry, do you? Then one day I thought, this isn’t right, really, it’s not right, and I went to the door and knocked. Took a while but she came in the end—Eleanor—holding Chrissie. I didn’t even get a chance to say anything before she shoved her at me. ‘She just cries, I can’t do it, you take her,’ she said, and she slammed the door.”
“And what did you do?” asked White Wig.
“What was I supposed to do? She was a scrap. Half Linda’s size, and Linda wasn’t big. I took her home and gave her a bottle. Three bottles, actually—I kept her a couple of hours, and she was starving. And then I went back and Eleanor opened the door and took her from me like it was a completely normal thing. Like it was completely normal to have given your baby to a stranger for the afternoon.”
“And you didn’t think to tell anyone about this? The social services? The police?”
“Of course I thought about it. Didn’t think about much else, for a while. But what would I have said? ‘I know a baby that cries a lot.’ It would have sounded daft. And sometimes I saw Eleanor at church with the pram, and sometimes the da was there, and I thought, ‘Well. They’re coping. They’re fine.’ I couldn’t do it to her. It would have felt like snitching. I couldn’t do it to another mam.”
“The relationship between Christine and her mother. From an outside perspective, what was it like as she got older?”
Linda’s mammy turned herself further round, so she had her back to Mam. “Eleanor did what she could to be rid of Chrissie,” she said. “Like I said, I don’t know what it was—hadn’t wanted a kid, couldn’t cope
