I didn’t roar. I didn’t even speak. The sound of women wailing exploded around me, and I looked around just long enough to find Mam, alone on her bench. She wasn’t wailing. She wasn’t crying. She had her lips pressed together in a thin, dark line. I let the guards lead me out of the room. I didn’t kick or bite. Deep down I knew people couldn’t go back in time. Deep down I knew people couldn’t come back alive again once they were dead. There were lots of things I didn’t know about dying—how it felt, how it worked, almost everything, really—but the one thing I had learned was that it lasted forever. When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t real dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.
I was quiet as we walked to the cells and quiet as they locked me in. I lay on the bed, put my fingers on my throat, and counted my heartbeats—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Sometimes when I turned a new age I used it as my lucky number, so my lucky number was my age number and I could be lucky without even having to try. I decided I wouldn’t have nine as my new lucky number.
• • •
I dragged my finger along the train window and left a greasy smear. When I thought of the old life I remembered the misery, but also the giddy, euphoric freedom, and that freedom was what I wanted for Molly. Freedom from the apartment and from snooty school receptionists and from the routine I strapped around her, like a straitjacket, because it was the only way I could trust myself to keep her safe. I could have told her I had been sad all the time, and it would have made me more comfortable and more of a coward. I had been happy as well as sad, because it had been heaven as well as hell. And I had taken it, chewed it, digested it, and done things that had left two families with no heaven, only hell. That was the truth. Every time, every day. It would always be the truth.
“I was sad a lot. But not all the time,” I said. “Sometimes I was happy. And sometimes I was angry. Angry enough to hurt people.”
I had laid a path for questions—“How did you hurt them? Did you push them? Did you hit them? Who were they? Did they hurt you back?”—but they didn’t come. Molly had gone back to sleep. Her mouth was open and a clear stream of dribble ran down her chin. I didn’t have a tissue. It collected in dark drips on her T-shirt.
I thought of taking Molly to school and struggling for breath in the crowd of other-mothers, watching her disappear into the building and wondering if this would be the day the head teacher phoned to tell me she had attacked another kid, the day I discovered that despite everything I had done, I hadn’t stopped her turning into me. I thought of the seize of panic when I looked at the clock and realized we were five minutes late for dinner, tea, bath, bed, the torturous reading-book ritual, the way each missed moment felt like a failing, the way I struggled to hear my thoughts above the jabber of kids’ telly. I thought of sitting on my mattress and watching her sleeping face, yellowed by the yolky chink of bulb light coming through the door. Holding her clothes to my nose to see whether they needed washing, breathing in the smell of crayons and school dinners. Carrying her back from the playground the time she grazed her knee, her arms a warm chain around my neck. It had been hell and it had been heaven, and now it was over. She would forget me.
I reached around in my bag for a pen. Molly’s bad arm was laid across the table, and I moved it gently, without waking her. There wasn’t much white space left, but I found a patch big enough for my name.
Mum.
Chrissie
I walked back from the alleys stooped over, like an old person. I knew my insides would fall out if I stood up straight. I had to go the long way round, because I didn’t want to pass the beautiful woman’s house and have her nag me about where Ruthie was. I really wasn’t in the mood to be nagged. The long way round took me past the church and the church clock, and I saw it was getting toward ten o’clock. I had only been with Ruthie for half an hour. It felt like half a year.
When I knocked on Linda’s door her da answered, and he smiled in a way her mammy definitely wouldn’t have smiled.
“All right, our Chrissie?” he said through a mouthful of toast. Butter and marmalade gathered at the corners of his lips in glistening pockets. “You’ll be wanting Linda.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and transferred the oily orange jelly to his shirt in a snail trail. He didn’t seem to have been told about the new Linda-not-playing-with-Chrissie rule.
“Look at that sky,” he said, pointing above my head. I looked up. My eyes ached with the blue of it. “Perfect. Proper spring day.” He looked back
