When I had asked, Mam had said that she wanted to be young, with a whole new life ahead of her. She hadn’t said what that really meant: that she wanted to be me. I was the one who had been given the new life. I didn’t know if that was right or wrong. I hadn’t been the one to decide what would happen to me, so it wasn’t my job to know whether it was right or wrong. But even if it was wrong—a travesty, an abomination, the wrongest decision that could have been made—my wasting the new life wouldn’t make it right. It wouldn’t make things right for Steven and Ruthie. It wouldn’t make things right for Molly and me.
I put my head on my arms. Sasha was close beside me, warming my side like the heater warmed my legs. I remembered my conviction that she had called the journalists to rat me out. It seemed garishly unlikely, and faraway, like a fever dream. I screwed my eyes shut so I didn’t have to see her kind face.
“I didn’t tell you that to upset you,” she said softly. “I thought you’d want to know how impressed I’ve been.”
“Am I going to go to prison?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Your probation officer’s coming, but she just wants to make sure you’re okay. Maybe give you a bit of a lecture about not worrying everyone again. Those things I was going to say at the meeting yesterday—they’re still true. You shouldn’t have run away, but you know that. It doesn’t change everything. Not nearly. As far as I can tell, you’re still the same mum you were three days ago.”
“Am I good?”
“Good?”
“Do you think I’m a good mum?”
“Yeah. I do. Definitely.”
I sat up and rocked my head from side to side. My neck was stiff. I could feel it click. “What happens now?” I asked.
“Well, I expect the people from the police will be here soon. You can wait for them here or in the family room with Molly. While you’re with them I’ll have a chat with my team manager.”
“About what happens to us?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I want to wait with Molly. Can we go down there now?”
“Of course. Is there anything else you want to ask before we go? Or tell me?”
I gathered my tissues into a sticky ball. I was grindingly tired, but the desperation to be freed of responsibility for two people had lifted. I didn’t know how. Perhaps it had been helter-skeltered out of me. I was back to the woman who had woken in the apartment the morning before and dozed next to Molly, listening to the tick and creak of the pipes in the walls. I had opened my eyes and looked at the radiator under the window. The curtains had fluttered in the rising air. It had been so warm in the room, and had smelled so gently of carpets and boiling water, and at the back of my throat there had been a bubble of something like pride.
“We have enough lectric for the lights and the telly,” I had thought. “We have cereal in the cupboard and milk in the fridge. We have clothes that haven’t had to be cleaned and pressed and passed on in a carrier bag. I have done badly at so many things in my life. But I have done well at being this little girl’s mum.” I had wanted so desperately to stay there forever, tucked behind my daughter, watching the radiators breathe heat around us.
If I could have got the words out, I would have told Sasha that I loved Molly. “I love her because she grew inside me, because she kept me company and saved my life, and because when she came out she liked me straightaway,” I would have said. “She stopped me having to be Chrissie or Lucy or Julia, made me Mum instead. She’s my friend and my girl and my funny, stubborn, constant companion. I love her down to the dark space around her bones, and I want to keep her, to have her with me, to smell her on my clothes. I want to tie tinsel in her hair at Christmas and put a new height mark on the door on her sixth birthday and slip into bed beside her before I go to sleep tonight. I want to carry on being her world.”
I couldn’t say it. It would have left me too bare.
“Not really,” I said. “I suppose I just. I just want to carry on being her mum, you know.”
“I do know,” said Sasha. “I do.”
Molly
When Mum had finished talking to the police she took me into the garden. Edie came out with us but she just sat on the bench by the door, so it was like me and Mum were by ourselves. I asked Mum what the police had wanted to speak to her about and she said they just wanted to make sure we were both okay. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t say that. Her face was pink, a bit like she had been crying, but she never cried, so I thought perhaps something else was wrong, like maybe she’d got stung by some bees.
The climbing frame in the garden was really for babies but I still went on it. I went down the slide three times and Mum pushed me on the swing.
“This is a bit babyish, isn’t it?” Mum said
