“Lucky you,” I replied, brightly, more brightly than I felt. I’d been outside, too, but I’d been outside to sell stolen goods. I’d rather have been playing with my son.
I dropped my glance to Simon’s hands. In his right was his beloved lightsabre, its green plastic telescopic beam retracted. I’d taken him to see the latest movie, and despite being years too young for it and not understanding more than one word in every three, he’d fallen in love, and his passion showed no sign of abating. If the lightsabre wasn’t in his hand it was usually tucked into the elasticated belt he’d insisted on wearing, even with jogging bottoms, once he realised it could be employed as a holster.
In his left hand was the fish.
2: 1995 (1)
I FEEL HER warmth against my back. We are in the cupboard, the two of us, my face turned to one side so that my nose isn’t squashed against the inside of the door. She stands behind me, leaning into me. We are on the inside. They are on the outside.
The cupboard stands at the turn in the stairs. Four steps below it, eleven above, and Dad always grunts when he squeezes past, aims a kick too, when he thinks no one’s watching or he’s had a drink. There isn’t really room for a cupboard this big on the stairs, but there isn’t really room for it anywhere else, either.
It’s been here as long as I can remember, this cupboard, probably longer than me, and I celebrated my tenth birthday last week, as far as we celebrate round here. There was no cake, no new bike or games console. There was a card, though, and fish and chips for tea, and I had Coke, real Coke, not the cheap stuff they keep in the kitchen which is too sticky and on whose fading label the numbers “1987” can be made out, if you stare at it hard enough. It was all shaping up to be the best evening in ages, and then Donna got ketchup on her dress and Dad said it didn’t matter but Mum got that look in her face, the cider-look, not the whisky-look, and I knew we were for it.
That was last week. We’ve been for it five times since then. Six, if they figure out where we are before they get bored or forget what it is we’ve done wrong. What it is I’ve done wrong. It’ll be my fault, and I won’t know why, but that won’t stop it being me that screwed things up again. And then there will be the slammed doors and the eerie silences between the shouts and the shoves and the slaps. At least there won’t be any closed fists or broken bones. At least they won’t hit Donna. I’m grateful for that.
Donna snakes an arm between my legs, pulls at my knee and giggles. “Shhh!” I whisper, but I find it hard not to laugh myself. They can’t hear us. My ear is pressed against the door and I can hear them, stomping about the place, pulling doors open and slamming them shut, shouting into the darkness. I think Dad might have gone outside, and the cold day has turned into a brutal icy night.
I hope he fucking freezes.
Footsteps approach. It’s Mum, I can tell from the tread and the little bounce she gives against the wall before she starts up the stairs. I want to say something, to warn Donna to be quiet, now isn’t the time for giggling, but there’s no need: I can feel her body tense behind me, and the hand that was tickling at my knee a moment ago now grips it tightly. I hold my breath as Mum passes and don’t let it go until I hear her open a door upstairs and fall heavily onto the bed.
Dad comes back a few minutes later, shouts for us, for Mum, forces himself up the stairs – grunting as he passes – and follows Mum into the bedroom. I really don’t know what we were in trouble for tonight, but by tomorrow they won’t remember either.
His snores begin a few minutes later. I count to six hundred, softly, under my breath, feeling Donna relax as the numbers lull her into sleep. I envy her that. I spend the first three hundred wondering whether they’ve left the gas running with the fire out, and the next three hundred fearing the cupboard door has jammed shut, which has never happened before, but that doesn’t mean it won’t. I breathe deeply as I push, and it opens, responding to my touch. And then I turn and step outside, quietly – not for fear of waking them, because I could hardly wake them now if I tried, but because my sister needs her sleep. A normal, undisturbed, happy night of sleep. She is two years old.
She is my responsibility.
I pick her up – she weighs nothing, thin as a flagpole and as light as she looks – and carry her up the stairs. I place her in her bed, right next to mine. She moans softly, longing for the warmth of my body, but settles into her pillow after a moment. Her right hand – the one that held my knee like a drowning man clinging to driftwood – hangs out of the bed and down.
In her left hand is the thing she picked up this morning and hasn’t let go since then. Just like yesterday, and the day before that, and almost every day since Dad gave it to her.
A small blue plastic fish.
3: 14:20-17:20
SPENDING TIME WITH Simon was fun, but it was more than that. It was everything I’d built my life around. Me and Simon. Simon and me. No one to get in the way. No one to ask questions I didn’t want to answer. No one to hurt him or let him hurt himself while my back was turned. No one to screw things up. I got him downstairs and turned the heating on – it was cooler in here than in Lena’s flat – and I read him a book based on a cartoon spin-off from the Star Wars franchise. It was a book I’d read him a hundred times in the last few months, but that didn’t matter. Simon loved it. When I read it to him, when I saw him smile and touch the pages, the little burst of joy so sharp it was almost pain that I felt when he remembered what was coming next and said it before I did, all that meant I loved it too. His smile hadn’t changed, the same one he’d flashed as a baby, and the hair was still blonde and the face rarely anything other than pale, but he was beginning to acquire a quiet solidity. The ethereal, translucent quality that had so worried me at first, that had made him a fugitive child, barely there at all, had passed into memory.
When he’d tired of the book he asked if we could work on the Project. He pronounced the word carefully, trilling the “r”, curling himself around the “c”, imbuing the final “t” with its own syllable. The Project was the construction of the Millennium Falcon in Lego. It took up most of the top of his bookcase, with the books it had displaced relegated to the floor, and three weeks into it I was coming to the conclusion that it consumed even more time than it did space. It wasn’t, however, something to be tackled in small bites.
I suggested the figures instead. He approved and ran to his toy box, returning with his hands full of them. I had become a Star Wars expert by osmosis. The movies were on constant rotation, with occasional breaks for various related cartoons. Brandishing a Storm Trooper in one hand, he began to quiz me in a now-familiar manner. Who would win a duel between Kylo Ren and the young Obi Wan? Who was the worst baddie in the galaxy? Which was the fastest ship?
Spending time with Simon was the point of everything. Making him happy. Keeping him safe.
But I had work to do. I waited until he was absorbed in a subplot of his own creation, the rescue of a mutinous Storm Trooper by his rebel sister. He’d even given them names, Jorlon, who refused to buckle under the most hideous tortures, and Flinka, the bravest fighter in the galaxy. I listened to him play for a minute, to Jorlon’s screams and Flinka’s defiant quips, and headed for my laptop.