“Don’t do it, don’t do it, I don’t want to be dead,” I screamed.
“No one’s going to be dead, Christine,” said the policeman on my right.
“No one else is going to be dead,” said the one on my left. He was my least favorite. I bit him and he swore.
When we got to my room I saw there was no cross and no guillotine, so I stopped thrashing. They put me on the bed and I lay limp as a slug, looking at the bare white ceiling. There was nothing in the room except the bed and a telly, up on a shelf in the corner.
“You going to stay calm now?” the right-hand policeman asked. “What was all that about, eh? Why did you think we was going to kill you?”
I folded my arms and turned toward the wall. The way he talked made it sound like I had been stupid to think they were going to kill me, but that wasn’t true at all. You never knew when someone was going to kill you. Just ask Steven and Ruthie.
Every morning they covered me with the potato-peel blanket and put me in a cage in the van to drive me to the courtroom. I leaned against the metal mesh and let the rattles bang away my thoughts. I found I felt nothing at all during those journeys, and I knew it was thanks to the rattles. In court I sat in a glass box, looking around the wooden room, and a hundred million pairs of eyes looked back at me. At first I liked it, the feeling of everyone watching me. It made me feel tingly, almost fizzy, almost like God. But the trial went on for days and days, and soon I stopped liking it. People took it in turns to stand up and talk about how bad I was, and I didn’t mind them saying that I was bad, but I minded that there were so many of them, and that they all took such a long time to say what they wanted to say. I got tired and fidgety in my box. Sometimes, when the person standing up had been speaking for a long time, I put my head on the ledge in front of me and closed my eyes. A guard always tapped my shoulder, told me to sit up. I always put my head down again. They always tapped me again. It made the time go faster, because it was almost like a game.
When I got into my cage at the end of the day I always felt tired, so tired my eyes itched and my face ached. Back at the prison they put me in my room and brought me my tea on a plastic tray, and I ate it so quickly I got hiccups. Then I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes and disappeared. It didn’t feel like going to sleep. It felt like dropping out of the world.
Weekends in prison were the worst, because there was no van and no court and no one looking at me except the guard outside my room. The days passed like treacle moving through a sieve: sticky and slow. In the morning they brought my breakfast under a sweating lid. When it was gone I put the tray on the floor and waited for the next meal. The telly chattered in the corner, but it was on the wrong channel for kids’ programs and the buttons were too high for me to reach. Sometimes I counted how many steps it took me to get from one end of the room to the other: twenty-five if I went heel to toe. Sometimes I did handstands against one of the clean white walls. It wasn’t the same as the handstand wall.
The last day of the trial was my ninth birthday. When I got into my box I saw the beautiful woman, sitting next to Steven’s mammy on the long wooden bench. She hadn’t been there before. She looked pale and fat in the way that meant she was going to have a baby. I spent a long time looking at her belly from behind my glass wall. Then I put my head down on the ledge. There really hadn’t been any point in it at all. I had killed Ruthie because if I wasn’t going to be the beautiful woman’s little girl, then no one else was going to be, either. Now she was going to have a baby all of her own. I knew it would be another girl. I just knew. I wouldn’t be able to kill her because I would be in prison, and that meant she would get to live, get to grow up with the beautiful woman as her mammy, get toys and dresses and kisses. The guard tapped my shoulder to get me to sit up, but I didn’t. I was too tired.
I dragged myself up when the judge told me to stand. He looked me in the eye and said I would be going to a Home, and by then I knew Home was just another word for prison, and I wanted to say, “But you can’t. You can’t send me to prison. It’s my birthday. It’s not fair.” He said words like wicked and reckless and evil, and the guard took my elbow and I realized I would never see the handstand wall again. Never see Linda again.
