“Yes,” said Jan. “You’re her world.”
“I want to keep her,” I said.
“Okay,” said Jan. “Well then. That’s that.”
• • •
Molly lifted her head, squinting. The sandwich wrapper was stuck to her cheek, and when she peeled it away it left creasy marks on her skin. “My neck hurts,” she said.
I took off my jacket and gave it to her. “Here. Fold this up and put it against the window. See if you can sleep like that. Your neck’s just been in the same position for too long.”
Her eyes didn’t close straightaway. She looked out of the window, head shuddering when the train went over bumps in the track.
“Was Grandma a nice mum?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Did she not know how to be a mum?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but as I turned it over in my head I decided to make it true. Mam had been useless; she hadn’t been evil. She hadn’t wanted me, so she had tried to give me away. She had found out that I had killed Steven, so she had tried to kill me. It could have been to punish me, or protect me, or neither. It could have been because she was tired of trying and failing to love a kid who felt like a stranger. I wouldn’t see her again, and I could choose how to remember her. I chose for her to be someone who didn’t know how to be a mam. I chose for her to be hopeless and clumsy and carelessly cruel, and to care about me just enough for it to mean something. Enough to remember my age. Enough to keep our first-day-of-school photograph. I chose for her not to be evil.
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”
“So were you sad all the time?”
I tipped my head from side to side and felt my neck creak. I didn’t know the right answer. It would have been easiest to say, “Yes, I was sad all the time, Molly. I was horribly, terribly sad, from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, every day, every week, every year. I was so sad, I had to kill people. That was the only reason I did it, Molly. Because I was so sad.”
It wouldn’t have been an out-and-out lie. When I remembered being eight years old I remembered the hunger that had twisted my brain into sharp shapes, and the shame of waking between wet sheets, and the feeling of having no one in the whole world who wanted me. No one in the whole world who even really liked me. But I also remembered chasing William and Donna down Copley Street and feeling so light I was sure I would soar into the sky. Stealing sweets behind Mrs. Bunty’s back and whooping a long, loud siren as I ran away. Walking along the garden walls from Mr. Jenks’s to the haunted house on strong skinny legs. The tight itch of sunburn and the smell of crayons in the classroom and the marzipan taste of apple pips. Playing telly with Linda. Learning clapping games with Linda. Doing handstands with Linda.
I remembered the day they took me to the police station, away from the blue house and the hole in the sky. When they finished asking me questions they left me in a bare room. A woman policeman sat on a plastic chair in the corner. She didn’t look at me. I swung my legs and drummed my hands and made a loud clicking noise with my tongue against my teeth. She didn’t look at me. In the end I gave up trying to make her look at me. I put my cheek on the table and closed my eyes. The room was cold, and when I dragged my mouth across my arm the hairs were spiky on my lips.
“Can I have a blanket?” I asked the woman policeman. She didn’t answer. She didn’t look at me.
In the police station there was no way of knowing whether it was day or night, because there were no windows and the lights were on all the time. After a while they put me in a cell with a bunk and a toilet and a cheese sandwich on a plate. A bit later they came back, took away the plate, gave me a pillow. I thought that must mean it was bedtime, so I kicked off my shoes and lay down. The bunk was twice as long as me, because the cells weren’t meant for kids. If you were younger than ten you didn’t usually go to a cell or have a trial, because whatever bad thing you had done, you were just a kid and it wasn’t your fault. I was only eight, but I still got a cell and a trial. Some things were so bad they stopped you being a kid.
My eyes were starting to droop shut when I heard the cell door unlock and swing open. I sat up. Mam was there. She walked in and the guard shut the door.
“I’ll just be out here,” he called. “Knock when you need.”
Mam went and stood with her back against the far wall, so we were opposite each other. We looked at each other for a long time, and then I put my arms out straight in front of me and lifted them up. It was something I had seen little kids do: Steven reaching up to his mammy, Ruthie reaching up to the beautiful woman. I didn’t know why I was doing it.
Mam folded her arms across her chest. “Stop it, Christine,” she said. “You look like a kid.” Then she went to the door and knocked, and the guard let her out. I kept my arms in the air. I kept them there until all the blood had drained away, until they felt like two lead poles stretching away from my body. Then I lay down and went to sleep.
In the weeks of the
