It’s Friday and Mum says I can have the day off school. Outside, the morning is clear. The sky is full of big fuzzy-haired clouds, which remind me of a stage full of clowns. I see a blue car parked outside the hostel. It is a blue I want to hold onto inside my head, a perfect shade of blue that has probably fallen from the sky. I walk with a bounce in my step, excited about what’s happening today. I hear the sound of my shoes on concrete. We’re getting the keys to our own place today. I breathe in the cold air, let it go again. In my mind I can see an orange balloon loop in and out of trees.
When we get the key I ask Mum if I can hold it. Inside my coat pocket I trace the hilly rise of metal with my thumb, feel the ups and downs, like fast waves on the edge of the Mersey.
Sitting on the bus I imagine the new house, my feet on the step, the sound my knuckles will make on the front door. The sound of somebody else’s knock; Nan’s maybe, a snazzy little tap made up to match her mood.
When we get there Nan is waiting on the step. I run to her and hug her. She kisses my cheeks. ‘It’s a straight bus ride from mine to here,’ she tells us.
‘Slow, love. Very, very, slow.’
‘But you like it?’
‘Ah well, I’m trying to. I like you reading better.’
Mum walks on ahead, opens the door and we step inside.
It is a proper house not a flat. Mum says it’s called a two-up-two-down. In my bedroom I look out of the window and see a small back yard. Downstairs I open the back door and sniff up. It smells of bleach. In the small living room Nan tells me I can have the furry rug from beside her bed because it keeps slipping on her floor. Me, Nan and Mum walk in and out of rooms and up and down the stairs and Mum says, ‘I wonder who had this place before us?’
I don’t want to think about who lived here before. I make up my mind to believe this place was built for us and we’re the first people ever to live here.
All three of us end up in the living room. Mum’s over by the window taking out a cigarette.
‘Robyn says you’re courting,’ Mum says.
‘Eddie? He’s a laugh. That’s all I want now, to be able to laugh. Men are useful for that, for wanting to give a girl a good time.’
Nan looks across the room at Mum, who strikes a match. Nan says, ‘Not all of them.’
I know we have left our old life behind, but Mum carries a new sadness with her. She doesn’t suit being on her own. She still has me, but I don’t think I’ll be enough.
Nan says, ‘I got the shock of my life when I opened the door to the Bobbies. They told me what had happened. I knew he had a badness in him. But you know I did …’
Mum looks at Nan then turns away. ‘Here we fucking go,’ she says to herself.
Mum lights her cigarette, shakes the match dead. ‘You must be in your apple cart with all this,’ she says to Nan. ‘Go on then, don’t keep me waiting too long for the I told you sos, I rush into things, give up on things too easily.’
The silence in the room makes my bones feel heavy, like sleep does. I think about how Lizzie had given up the last time I saw her, rushed into throwing me away.
‘I bet you’re glad they’ve put him away,’ Nan says.
Mum doesn’t answer.
‘Eddie saw it in the paper. You’re not the first woman he’s assaulted.’
Her words are like knives poking away at rotten meat. I don’t want these walls to hear them; don’t want the stink to follow us here.
Through the window a child’s face looks straight at us. He doesn’t do anything, just gawps. He must be about six years old, in a grey V-neck jumper over a white shirt, orange hair. One side of the collar hangs behind him, the other too far in front. He tilts his head back, crusty green snot clogs up one of his nostrils.
The three of us stare at him, then stare back at each other, and back at him again. He doesn’t do anything except gawp. And the talk about prison and hate rolls away.
Mum shakes her head at him and says, ‘Beat it, you.’
He doesn’t move, carries on gawping.
‘Can he see us?’ I ask.
‘He can see us all right.’ Nan calls him a cheeky so-and-so. There is something about the way his hair is sticking up. It is Mum who starts the laughing. She looks over at me, shakes her head, laughs louder. Nan starts next, then me. We stare back at this little lad and it’s like he’s made of stone: he doesn’t move, or smile, or speak, or do anything but gawp.
‘Look at him, not a worry in the world,’ Mum says.
If I never had a worry in the world I’d probably worry about that. I wonder if there’s a way to let go of them all.
‘Lucky sod,’ Mum says.
Once the front door is open, I watch the little lad leg it away from the window down the street. I can see the river, feel the breeze on my face. Across the street, people sit on steps and look in our direction. Nan stands on the pavement. Mum’s on the step next to me.
‘He’ll have no visitors while he’s in there,’ Nan says, ‘and nowhere to live once he gets out.’
She looks at Mum. Mum says nothing.
‘Babs?’
Mum’s looking at the ground.
There’s no word answer, not even a look answer.
Nan gives me a hug, tells me to come down to her flat whenever I like, then walks away.
‘Where’s Nan going?’
‘How should I know?’
Mum goes back inside the house to check all the doors are closed. Upstairs, I take another look through my bedroom window. I can see into other yards. Washing lines full of other people’s secrets. I lift the window up easily, stoop down and stick my head out. Behind me Mum strikes a match, lights another cigarette. ‘You ready?’
‘Where are we going?’
‘No more questions. Make sure that window’s locked.’
There’s room in here for a writing desk. Light wood. Carmel says light colours put people in a good mood. I think of the black paint that covers everything inside our old flat. Back in Tommy Whites somebody new will be shown around flat 33B. Somebody I might never meet who will ask why everything is painted black. Somebody I might never meet will hear our story from a stranger.
I don’t want Bernie to hear about it from a stranger. I’d like to tell him myself. I think he’ll be made up when he finds out things have worked out okay for me. I’ll wait for him by the phone box on Monday. Tell him to let Sylvia know I’m all right, and, at last, we’ve got a chance of something better, just me and my mum.
Back at the hostel, I sit on Carmel’s step, bags between my legs, waiting for Mum to fetch her stuff. I can hear the groan of our taxi’s engine beyond the front gate. I show two little lads how to make paper aeroplanes. At first they are excited and keen to have a go. Then they try to copy me but get all muddled up and angry with themselves. I end up doing most of it for them.
When the planes are finished the boys carry them over to the grass. On tiptoes they try to get them to fly over a bush. Knees bent, arms stretched towards the sky, they try again and again but the wind keeps blowing them back to where they started.