“He’s beautiful!”
“Making me want another . . .”
“You’re looking so well!”
“How’s he feeding?”
When I got to the middle of the crowd I saw Steven’s mammy holding the handles of a pram. Her face seemed bigger and brighter than usual, like she had swallowed a bit of the sun, and she was smiling such a big smile it looked like her mouth was going to break. I peered inside the pram to see what was making her so happy. A baby poked out from a white blanket, screwed up and cross-looking. It was quite a disappointment. I had hoped it might be something really interesting, like a badger.
Susan pushed through the crowd to stand on the other side of the pram, put her hand in, and stroked her finger across the baby’s cheek. “Hello, little brother,” she said. “Hello, little Steven. I missed you, I really missed you.” I wanted to see what his skin felt like, so I reached in and started stroking the other cheek. It just felt like skin, really, like my skin or Susan’s skin or any old skin. Another disappointment. I really didn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss of him. Susan and her mammy were sicking up love all over him, covering him in fat globs of it. It was such a lot of fuss for someone so tiny, who wasn’t a badger or any other interesting animal.
He wriggled and rubbed his fists across his face. I ran my hand over his head and found a funny spongy part. I was seeing how far down I could press it when his mammy pulled me back. “Careful, Chrissie,” she said. “He’s very delicate. You don’t want to hurt him.”
• • •
Susan wasn’t in the Class Six row that Monday, which meant she wasn’t at school at all. When all the classes were sitting in rows, Mr. Michaels told us we might have heard that something sad had happened at the weekend, that a little boy who lived in the streets had had an accident while he was playing and got killed dead. I was sitting next to Donna, who I didn’t like because she was a goody-goody and she was also fat. I counted the dimples in her puddingy knees while Mr. Michaels talked, and I wanted to put my finger inside one, just to see how it would feel, but she shoved my hand away when I tried.
“Get off,” she whispered.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and pressed them against her ear. “I was there,” I whispered. “When they found him. I was there.”
She flicked her head round to look at me. Our mouths were very close together, close enough that I could have kissed her, except obviously I was never ever going to do that because she was a fat goody-goody. Her breath smelled of jam.
“What did he look like?” she whispered.
“There was loads of blood everywhere,” I whispered. “It was spraying out all over everywhere. Some of it even got on me.” I showed her a reddish-brown circle on the hem of my dress. “See? That’s a bit of his blood,” I whispered. She touched the ketchup stain with one finger and said, “Wow,” then Miss White tapped our shoulders and told us to listen to Mr. Michaels. On the way back to the classroom Donna walked ahead, talking to Betty, and Betty said, “Really?” and turned to look at me. It gave me a hot, humming feeling at the bottom of my belly.
Things were strange that week. Susan didn’t come to school, not on Tuesday or Wednesday or any day. At home time the mammies waited in the playground and when their kids came out they scooped them up and clutched them to soft chests. People weren’t allowed out to play like normal. In the afternoons I walked through the streets with a long stick, dragging it across bricks and gates with a scrape-scrape-clang. Sometimes I stopped and watched telly through a lounge window. When I knocked on doors mammies said their kids weren’t coming out, and told me I shouldn’t be out either. “But I am out,” I said. They sighed and shooed me away. Most days I ended up sitting with my back against Mrs. Whitworth’s front wall, watching mammies go in and out of Steven’s house with loaf cakes and pots of stew. I thought having a kid die wasn’t too bad, really. It got you a lot of cake and stew.
Whenever I looked at the upstairs window of the house I saw Susan. She was always there, always with her hands pressed against the glass. It wasn’t like she was trying to get out, just like she wanted to feel the cold on her skin. I could never see her face properly, but I could see the white of her hair, hanging down past her bottom. I guessed Steven hadn’t come back alive, because I watched and watched the house and I never saw him.
At school on Thursday we started making Easter bonnets and Easter baskets and learning Easter songs because it was nearly Easter. We were supposed to have brought in a cereal box but I hadn’t.
“Where’s your cereal box, Chrissie?” asked Miss White.
“Don’t got one,” I said.
“You haven’t got one,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t got one.”
She folded her arms. “Why not?” she asked. “I reminded you before you went home yesterday.”
“Don’t got no cereal,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Chrissie,” she said. “Everyone has cereal.”
“I don’t,” I said. She gave me a piece of corrugated cardboard, which was the wrong sort of cardboard for an Easter bonnet, and she should have known that except obviously she didn’t because I was the only person in the whole school who really knew anything. My scissors didn’t cut through it, just chewed it like a baby chewing toast. I gave up and cut the end off Donna’s
