After school I went to Linda’s. Her cousin had given her a new Mirabelle magazine at the weekend, and we lay side by side on her bed to read it. Most of the pages were called things like “How to Live Through Love and Stay Smiling.” Mirabelle clearly wasn’t a very good magazine, because Linda’s cousin had been reading it since forever and I had never once seen her smile.
When I was so bored I thought my brain was going to slither out through my nose like snot, I got off the bed and pulled my dress out of my underpants.
“Linda,” I said. “Enough is enough.”
“What’s enough?”
“Enough is. Enough is enough.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yes it does. It means we’re going to play out now.”
She rolled onto her back and stretched her legs up in the air like a fly. “No we’re not. It’s not safe. We’ll die like Steven.”
“No we won’t.”
“We might.”
“Well if we don’t play out we’ll die from being bored. And I’d rather die from playing out than from being bored. So I’m going. You do what you want.”
“Shhh. Mammy will hear you.”
When I was at Linda’s house I had to spend a lot of time making sure her mammy didn’t hear me. Linda’s mammy wasn’t a very cuddly sort of mammy. She was the sort of mammy who smelled of church and ironing, and who sometimes went months without saying any words except “Be careful” and “Stop that” and “It’s time for tea.” If you fell over in front of Linda’s mammy she plonked you straight back onto your feet and rubbed your knees like she was scrubbing away dirt, muttering, “No harm done, no harm done.” Except if it was me who fell over. Then she didn’t do any picking up or rub-scrubbing. I knew why she didn’t like me: because when I was seven I told her she had more gray hair than any of the other mammies (which was true) and that that must mean she was older than any of the other mammies (which was also true). That was why whenever she opened the door and found me on the doorstep she folded her arms tight across her chest, like she had to stop me leaking onto her.
I went down the stairs and out of the front door, treading lightly so I hardly made a sound. I didn’t need to look behind me to see if Linda was following. She always followed. That was the whole point of Linda. I said we should call for Donna, even though I didn’t like her, because she was the only person I could think of who might be allowed out. She had so many brothers that her mammy never noticed if one kid was missing. There were lots of reasons I didn’t like Donna, apart from her being fat and a goody-goody, but the main one was that in the Christmas holidays she bit me on the arm just because I said she had a face like a potato (which was also also true). I had a purple tooth-mark bruise for a week. So she was fat, she was a goody-goody, and she looked like a potato, but beggars don’t get to choose who’s allowed out to play. When we first rang Donna’s bell her mammy tried to send us away, but then one of her other kids was sick on the floor in the kitchen and she changed her mind. She said Donna could come but only if William came too, because he was twelve and a big strong boy and he could look after Donna if there was any bother. Really and truly, William was a weedy, skinny boy who would have been no use at all if there had been any bother, unless the thing doing the bothering was a very tiny baby or a very tiny baby mouse, and even then he would have been no use at all because he was scared of tails. I bit my mouth shut to stop myself saying that. Donna had a pink bike with blue handles. If she came out I could make her give me a turn on it.
“Where are we going?” William asked when we passed the playground.
“Alleys,” I said.
“Nuh-uh. Not allowed. Our mammy won’t let us,” said Donna.
“Your mammy’s not here,” I said.
“She wouldn’t let us if she was here,” she said.
“Well she’s not here.”
“Well I’m not coming.”
“Well I never wanted you to come.”
“Fine. I’ll come then.”
The alleys used to be places for people to live, the same as our houses in the streets. The poorest families lived there, in slummy rooms with black mold on the walls. The alley kids got bad crackles in their chests from breathing dirty air, and scabs on their tummies from being eaten by bedbugs, and scaly rashes round their mouths from the cold drying up their spit. Now the alley houses were being pulled down, and the poor families had nowhere to go. When the houses were gone they were going to build tall, shiny buildings made of boxes stacked on top of each other, and different people were going to live in the different boxes, but the alley families weren’t going to live there because they were going to be expensive. There was a meeting about it at the church hall. Grown-ups took it in turns to stand up and say things like “It is a tragedy that we live in a community that does nothing to protect those most in need.” Me and Linda hung around at the back and ate the biscuits off the trestle table until the vicar told us to scram.
People had started tying white ribbons around the slats of the alley-house fences,
