by Nancy Tucker
I was looking at a vegetarian cookery book when an other-mother and two other-kids came into the café. The boy and girl sat at a table and wriggled out of their puffer jackets while the woman bought them drinks and bacon rolls. She was older than me, a proper grown-up. When she had settled the kids with their breakfast she took a hardback book from her handbag and opened it to a marked page. I watched them while pretending not to watch them.
“Now, where were we . . . ? Ah, yes. We’d just had the chapter about the dragon, hadn’t we? Do you remember?”
The girl nodded and moved her chair so she could lean into the woman’s side. Every so often she pointed to a picture, and the woman angled the book to show the boy. I saw Molly peer round the edge of the bookshelf so she could see the pictures too.
Look at her, reading to her kids. Look at the way her daughter leans against her. You haven’t brought anything to keep Molly entertained. Your body isn’t a pillow to Molly. You have too many sharp corners, hard edges. Minus one point. Minus two points. Minus three.
“Molly,” I said, louder than I meant to. The girl looked round, eyed us, and snuggled back into the other-mother. “Do you want to choose a book?”
“From here?”
“Yes. Choose one with pictures. And chapters. A long one.”
“Why?”
“I want to read it to you.”
She gave the other-mother and other-kids a long look, stepped toward me, and lowered her voice. “Why are you copying?” she asked. Heat spread across my cheeks.
“Get your coat,” I said. “We’ll miss the train.”
* * *
• • •
Molly spent the first hour of the train ride sulking, and I spent it trying to hold myself together. I listed what I saw around me and went to the toilet to run cold water on my wrists and concentrated on my breathing so hard I felt I wasn’t a person at all anymore, just a long-limbed iron lung.
Ten o’clock came when we had been on the train for an hour and a half, and a restless thrum set up in my head. My time with Molly didn’t stretch into the distance like a spool of ribbon anymore; it had a hard end, the ground swooping up to meet our de-wheeled carriage. Miles away, in the Children’s Services building, Sasha would be walking into reception. She would be looking around. She would be waiting for me. In half an hour she might realize I wasn’t coming, and in an hour she might call the police. The beat in my ears was a countdown.
Molly breathed a cloud onto the window and drew a sad face in it. “That’s how I felt when you said I couldn’t get a book. Even though first you said I could get one. By the way.”
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
“To where I used to live,” I said.
She tipped her head to one side. “The school?”
“No,” I said. “Not there. That place doesn’t exist anymore. It’s gone.”
I had lost Haverleigh in fast slashes. The first came the Christmas I was eighteen. I was lying under the tree in the lounge, slitting my eyes until the lights blended into a rainbow. The Wizard of Oz was playing on the telly. When it finished I sat up and saw Mr. Hayworth standing in the doorway. He flapped his hand for me to come. Colored lights still danced in front of my eyes. He took me into the meeting room, where I sat at the big oval table and listened to the grown-ups explain what was going to happen to me.
“We’re all confident this is the right decision—to let you out, I mean,” said the warden. “We’re all completely sure of that. But we can’t guarantee that others will feel the same. Some people believe children who commit crimes should be kept in custody just as long as adults, and those people won’t be pleased that you’ve been let out. If your identity wasn’t changed, there would be a lot of people who would make it their mission to find out where you were living, and . . .”
“We’d be sending you off to be killed, love,” said Matron.
“So I have to pretend I’m not me?” I said.
“It’s a new identity,” said the warden. “We’ll give you all the documents you need for claiming benefits, applying for jobs. All of it. We’ll help you find somewhere to live, get you set up with a probation officer you can check in with regularly. And then—yes. Effectively, you’ll be living as a new person. Fresh start.”
“But when people say the new name I won’t know they’re talking to me,” I said. “I won’t turn around. I’ll think they mean someone else.”
“It’ll take a bit of getting used to,” he said, “but I think you might be surprised by how quickly it starts to feel normal.”
“When am I going?” I asked.
“Wednesday,” said Mr. Hayworth.
“What if I wanted to be here for Christmas?” I asked.
“Wednesday,” he said.
“What if I wanted to stay Chrissie?” I asked. No one answered. They started shuffling papers and standing up, and I stayed hunched over in my chair, feeling like a person-shaped secret.
When Molly was born my body was with her, feeding and changing and putting down and picking up, but my mind was wandering Haverleigh’s rooms. Remembering Haverleigh warmed the space Molly had left in my belly when she had moved out. I held on to it like the key to an escape hatch, told myself that if things got bad, really bad, we could turn up on the doorstep and ask the keepers to take us in. “I can work,” I imagined myself saying. “I can do anything. Cooking. Cleaning. Molly can go to the school here, and you can look after her, but I can still see her.” It would be best for both of us, I thought: the keepers would look after her the way she ought to be looked after, and I would still get to sit by her bed at night. “We only need one room,” I imagined myself saying. “We’re used to sharing.”
When Molly was a few months old, I sat in Jan’s office at the police station and listened to her say, “The secure center’s closing. The one you were at. Haverleigh.” I felt the words hit my gut, the whomp and wheeze as my lungs flattened and refilled.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It was a good place for you, wasn’t it? You felt safe there.”
“Not that good of a place,” I said.
Stay with us, Chrissie. What can you see?
Desk. Carpet. Cabinet. Police file.
“I don’t think you wanted to leave,” said Jan.
“They didn’t want me to leave,” I said. “They made me a cake with pink icing on it and the icing spelled out ‘Good-bye Chrissie,’ and when I cut it they all sang ‘For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow’ and everyone cheered. And when we were driving away in the car you could still hear them from all the way inside. They were all still cheering and shouting good-bye, and some of them were crying.”
“That’s quite a send-off,” she said.
“I’m not lying,” I said.
“I didn’t say you were,” she said. “It sounds as though you did well there. It must be tough to know it’s going.”
“I really don’t care,” I said. “Can I go now? I need to get to the shops.”
When she let me go I wheeled Molly into the lift, through the foyer, out onto the pavement. She was starting to arch her back and rub her fists across her face. I tried not to think of baby Steven, squirming in his pram in the playground, but the door was open to the fragments I usually kept locked away. Steven toddling in the street. Susan’s face, pale behind her window. The smell of the Haverleigh corridors—play dough and polish and damp winter coats—the way I had breathed in grateful lungs of it whenever we had got back from a trip out.
The day I had left Haverleigh we had eaten sausages and potatoes for dinner, and afterward the cook had brought out a Swiss roll cake cut into thick chunks. It was the sort you got at a corner shop: sponge that tasted dryly of cocoa, grains of sugar on the outside. She put it in the middle of the table and said, “Right, everyone, now this is Chrissie’s
cake so she’s to be the first to choose a slice. Got it?” Everyone groaned and watched me, hawk-eyed, as I slid a piece onto my plate. I didn’t check it was the biggest piece. It tasted like leather.
After dinner I took my suitcase out onto the drive, and Mr. Hayworth lifted it into the car. He put one of his big hands on my shoulder. “See you, kid,” he said. The others were having a snowball fight in the garden. They didn’t stop to say good-bye.
* * *
• • •
The air outside the train station was different to the air by the sea—denser, dirtier—and muggy enough that the atmosphere felt paused in the moment before a thunderclap. Everything was gray. We were used to the gray of the waves, of the clouds above them and the stones beside them, but our gray was a hundred different shades and shapes, changing with every swipe of the wind. The gray outside the station was the color of dead things and never-alive things.
It was noon. By now, Sasha would have worked out that I wasn’t just late. She would have called the shop and heard I wasn’t at work, called the school and heard Molly wasn’t sitting on the carpet listening to Miss King tell her she was the best in the class. The police would be looking for us. An itch began at the back of my jaw and spread to my teeth, my gums, my lips. My tongue was suddenly slick and swollen, like a slug or a slice of uncooked fish. I bent and retched under a Pay and Display machine. It made my eyes stream. When I straightened I saw pinpricks of light dancing in arcs, and I felt light and fragile, as if I had become old on the train, the insides of my bones wasted to honeycomb. Molly stood with her back against the wall, watching.
“Are you ill?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Are you train sick?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Me either,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
There was a café on the high street, the kind full of sticky plastic tables and lonely old men. I steered Molly inside and ordered a full English breakfast. The plate that arrived was heaving, with grease collected around the sausages and over the phlegmy yolks of the eggs. She tackled it with quiet determination. As soon as she finished eating, I paid the boy behind the counter and bundled her into her coat. I knew I should make the most of this time, when she was content and we were together, but I wanted it all to be over.
As our bus wound its way toward the streets, the names of the stops played a singsong lilt in my head. Donna and Linda had learned the bus route one summer, and they had sung it to the tune of “Ring a Ring o’ Roses.” Morley Park and Morley Shops, Conway Road and Hepton Street, CLOVEdale Way, COPley Close and Sel-ton Green. When the church came into view my mouth filled with thin, penny-tasting saliva, and I pressed the bell on the pole. I pushed Molly through the folding doors and spat at the base of the angel statue.
“You shouldn’t spit there,” she said. “That’s an angel. And that’s a church. This is a Goddish place. You can’t spit in Goddish places.”
“I don’t believe in God,” I said.
“Miss King does,” she said.
“I’m not Miss King,” I said.
“I know,” she sighed. She walked past me, up the path that cut through the graveyard, and threw herself onto the bench at the end. I followed slowly. I couldn’t tell whether the cold on my insides was freezing cold or boiling cold, the kind of cold that made your fingers fall off or the kind you didn’t realize was heat until you saw the blisters bubbling. I only knew it was hurting cold. Splints of pain jolted up my legs as I went to the bench, and I felt a long way away from the ground, as if I were on stilts, as if my feet weren’t really touching the path. There were clusters of daisies growing in the grass. When I sat down I picked two, threaded them together, and held them out to Molly. She looked away. I dropped them onto the ground and crushed them with my toe.
“You know who lives here?” I said. “Not in the church. But in this place. Around here.”
“Who?”
“My mam. Your grandma.”
“You never told me that before.”
“Do you want to meet her?”
She bent down, picked two daisies, and tried to thread them together. She made the split in the stalk too big, and when she realized she couldn’t repair it she started shredding them. I watched her tear the petals from the yellow centers and scatter them across her lap.
“Does she live where you used to live?” she asked.
“No,” I said. “Not anymore.”
Mam had had to move out of the house when I had gone to Haverleigh. People had started spray-painting the walls and pelting the windows with rotten food when I was arrested, and during the trial it had got worse. One night somebody put a petrol bomb through the letter box. She told me about it when she came to visit, all glinting eyes and look-what-you-have-done. I didn’t know whether anyone had bought the house since then. It was hard to imagine anyone wanting to. The papers had called it the Satan Pit, and though the estate agents probably hadn’t, they couldn’t change what people knew. Reputation cloaked it in sticky filth.
When Mam came to Haverleigh for the last time, she passed me the first in a procession of slips of white paper.
“That’s my address,” she said. “And my phone number. Just in case. You ought to have them.”
I folded the scrap in half and put it in my pocket. “I don’t think I’ll need it,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I didn’t think you would. Didn’t really want to give it to you. But the people here said I should.”
It was the same game we had been playing for eighteen years: seeing how much we could push away while still holding on with our fingernails.
“Coming out, then,” she said. “Coming to live in the real world. Like the rest of us.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Well, bloody cheer up,” she said. “It’s what you wanted. It’s freedom.”
“Mmm,” I said.
On the first night of the first new life, I lay on my bed with my hands between my legs, listening for sounds that weren’t there. There were no footsteps on the floor outside, no rattle of keys as doors were locked and unlocked. No one shouting. No one crying. No keepers keeping me safe. I was used to nights filled with clinks and clanks, screams and sobs, so I couldn’t understand why the apartment seemed too noisy for me to sleep. It was deafening: the hum of the fridge in the kitchen, the purr of the cars in the street outside. I felt as though I had been living in a house for a decade and someone had suddenly taken all the walls away. Cold air and danger whistled around me. I stretched my eyes wide open and said Mam’s address and phone number over and over in my head, like a lullaby, like a string between who I was and who I had been. The words blurred to nonsense and new ones rose up in their place. Why is everything so big? Why is everything so loud? What do I do now? I tried counting, breathing, listing the things I saw around me. In the end I went to the bathroom and sat on the toilet with my head in my hands. That made me feel better. There was a lock on the bathroom door.
At Haverleigh everyone had known me and there had been nothing to hide. My insides cramped as I thought of the cage of high fences within which I had walked without stooping, stood without hunching, because freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.
* * *
• • •
Molly threw her daisy heads onto the grass and brushed the petals off her hands. “Is there a telly at Grandma’s house?” she asked.
“Expect so,” I said.
“Okay, then,” she said. “Let’s go there.”
Chrissie
Steven had been dead for so long, I had lost count of all the days, but the number of policemen in the streets was getting bigger, not smaller. I had started sitting on the flat roof of the church hall, which you could get to by sneaking up the fire escape at the back of the building. The policemen always parked their cars outside the church hall, and they came ba
ck to their cars to talk and drink flasks of tea, and when I was sitting on the roof I could see and hear them but they couldn’t see or hear me. That was how I felt all the time, really: like a ghost.
I was sitting on the roof one afternoon when I saw my da come round the corner and up the street with a big gray bag slung over his shoulder. Mam had told me I wasn’t to call him Da, told me if anyone asked he was my uncle Jim, her brother who sometimes stayed with us.
“But he’s not my uncle,” I had said.
“No. But if they think you’ve not got a da then I get money for looking after you by myself,” she had said.
“But you don’t look after me,” I had said.
“Fuck off, Chrissie,” she had said.
When I saw him coming up the street I climbed down the fire escape, ran onto the pavement, and shouted, “Da!” He turned, and for a second he looked confused, almost like he didn’t know who I was, but then he remembered I was me, remembered how much he loved me, and he smiled. He would have done a bigger smile if he could have. Sometimes when you smile too big it hurts your cheeks, so he just smiled in a little way, just so it didn’t hurt him. If it hadn’t been for the cheek thing he would have smiled big enough to break his face in half, because he loved me big enough to burst. He held out his arms. He looked very different to how Mam looked when she held out her arms to me, which she sometimes did if there were people watching and she needed to make them think she liked me. Her hands stuck out in front like scissor points, and she stiffened herself like someone reaching into fire. Da’s arms were soft, his hands strong in my armpits, and he lifted me up so easily I felt made of feathers. I pressed my face into his neck, where the skin was cold and damp. I wanted to sink my teeth in.
When he put me down he pushed the hair away from my face and held my chin in his hand. He was so tall his head was halfway to the sky. “What you doing all the way out here?” he asked, because the church hall was right on the edge of the streets. I wrapped my arms around his middle so I didn’t have to answer. He unhooked my hands and we walked side by side with our fingers knotted together.