I never thought of where I came from as anything other than normal, living in those Lego towers with all of us stacked on top of one another. The walls in those flats were so thin you could hear the flushing of every bog, the whine of every telly, the tremor of every slammed door. Chrissy used to say that was its beauty and its curse. You never had to explain anything, never needed to say what had happened to that fella you’d been seeing, or why her down the way wasn’t speaking to you, or who’d made your face swell and burst like a bag of jewels. I only realized later what other people thought of it, when I’d tell them where I’d spent the first twelve-and-a-bit years of my life and I’d see the kids’ eyes shine with awe and the grown-ups’ fill with pity.
We never had a family before we left the flats. I don’t know that I ever craved one especially. We weren’t any different from any of the other kids I used to knock about with. But I reckon Chrissy wanted one. To be part of one, somehow. Plenty of people would disagree with that. They’d say Chrissy never gave a shit about anyone or anything other than herself, and maybe they’d be right in a way. But there’s a difference between wanting to be my mam and wanting to belong somewhere.
Chrissy barely spoke about anything to do with her life before I came along. She’d been in care since she was a little kid, I knew that. Passed and parceled from one foster family to the next until social services decided she was old enough to stand on her own two feet. Some were better than others, she told me, although that was as far as she ever got. There was one lady that had been the nicest of the lot, Margaret or Marsha or something along those lines. We went to her house a few times. I remember Chrissy sipping tea awkwardly on the sofa, and me playing with a box of old toys on the floor while the lady fussed around us, trying to make small talk, passing me little bags of dried apricots and raisins that made me retch when I tried to swallow them. I’d spend the whole time burying the bits of chewed-up fruit in among the toys when she wasn’t watching, so that on each visit I’d unearth more of it than on the last, molding and rotting between the joints of a Barbie doll’s legs or inside the wheel of a Fisher-Price car. One day there was a row about something, an envelope that had been on the side ready for the cleaner to pick up. Chrissy lost her temper and ended up smashing her teacup against the living-room wall. The visits stopped after that.
Chrissy was smarter than a lot of people gave her credit for. Book-smart, the type that would have done well at school, given half a chance. She never had boyfriends when I was really little. We didn’t even have a telly, she used to read all the time instead. Tattered paperbacks from the charity shop, newspapers, magazines. Anything she could get her hands on. For a while she had a library card, we both did. It was only round the corner from us but to me it felt like another world. The building had a graceful type of beauty, all ornate sandstone and red brick, with a great big clock on the tower. I used to pretend we were royalty when she took me, climbing up the steps to our castle, our own private fortress of books. Most days it was only the two of us in there and we’d stagger up to the counter with our arms full, before loading our finds into an Asda carrier bag for the walk home. If Chrissy was still in a good mood by the time we got back to the flat we’d sit on the bed together and she’d read aloud to me, encourage me to do it myself, sounding out the big words, holding my hand in hers to trace the shapes with the tip of my finger. We had the letters of the alphabet stuck up all over the flat, written out on scraps of paper in fat black marker. F for Fridge. B for Bed. M for Microwave. Chrissy would set me spelling challenges that she’d mark out of ten, rewarding me with a Push-Pop or maybe a bag of Wotsits if I did well.
By the time I was five or six I knew my way around words better than most grown-ups. Chrissy was proud of that, she was always getting me to read stuff out loud if she knew we had an audience. Now and again we’d make up stories together, put ourselves in the middle of the books we loved. Annie, the Little Princess, Pippi Longstocking. It was our favorite game, to imagine ourselves in a different life.
When I was seven, Chrissy got a boyfriend. I don’t remember all that much about him, only that he used to take the piss out of her always having her head in a book. What you wastin yer time fer? he’d gripe. D’yer reckon it meks you look clever? Reckon knowin a few big words meks you better’n anyone else?
The fella didn’t last long, but his words did. Up until him, my mam had dreams. She wanted a job, wanted to do one of them courses. She might like to be a teacher, she thought. He laughed so hard when she told him that I hoped he would choke and pass out. For a moment Chrissy stayed silent, but then she started laughing too, pretended she was having him on. I don’t know what happened between them, only that by the time he was gone she’d lost interest in books, started putting all her efforts into men instead. I missed our stories, tried my best to bring her back, but when I’d start on telling our tales in front of one of her fellas she’d shush me like she was embarrassed, like it might put them off if they got an inkling that either of us was smart. Stop showin off, Jen, she’d hiss. No one likes a cleverdick.
I couldn’t get my head round what had changed and so I’d kick off, cry and shout and make a scene, until in the end she’d drag me out of the room, or sometimes the fella would do it for her. Eventually we stopped going to the library, she said there were better things to be doing with our time, although she never told me what. The books got lost among the chaos of our lives and we racked up so many late fees that I was too embarrassed to show my face in there again.
I never doubted that Chrissy loved me when I was little, but the bigger I got, the less certain of it I became. On some days she’d talk to me about everything, anything that popped into her head, wittering on about an article she’d read in a magazine, or so-and-so down the way, or did I think this pair of jeans looked good on her, that top, this eyeshadow? She’d call me her little marra, her little mate, and I’d bask in those moments, those hours, nodding along, saying the right thing, trying my best to keep it going, keep her happy and talking, knowing that soon things would change.
There’s probably a name for it now. A label, a condition. A name for all those days when she was silent. Cold, long stretches that seemed to last forever, when she’d stay in bed for hours, so still it was as though somebody had switched her off. I’d talk to her, make up stories about the two of us finding a pot of gold buried underneath the flats, a long-lost auntie who’d left us a million quid in her will. I’d grab her shoulders in both my hands and shake her, and still she’d stare at me with such emptiness that I’d convince myself something terrible had happened to her brain, a stroke or a seizure or some other nameless thing that would leave her devoid of personality, a vegetable for the rest of her days.
The thing is, I could take all that. I could handle it just about, because Chrissy was there, she was solid and real. Nothing was as bad as the times when she’d disappear. Really, physically disappear. Often I could sense it coming, as though she were preparing to untether, readying herself to float away. The thought of it happening was almost worse than the event itself, that I might go down the park and, when I’d come back, she’d be gone.
I never knew how long she’d be away for. Sometimes it was only a night, often longer. At the start she’d arrange for someone to take me, one of the neighbors usually, although she never told them she’d be gone for as long as she was, so that in the end she’d burned all her bridges and no offers of help came her way anymore. But by then I was ten or so and I suppose she thought I’d be all right on my own. She’d usually leave me a fiver or a tenner maybe, and a note, always a note, full of long, flourishing words and madcap descriptions. The adventures she was going on, the things she would see. Don’t worry, Little Marra, she’d sign them off, I’ll be back in a bit.
She did come back, in those days at least. Except by then I would be chewed up with nerves, panicking when I didn’t have her within my reach, clinging to her like shit to a shovel. For a while the guilt would soften her and she’d pull me in close, let me crawl onto her lap and press my cheek into the crook of her neck. But within weeks I would sense it coming again, feel the itch of her feet, the need for me to be out of her hair. It would make me physically sick, my stomach hurt and my head pound, and she’d get angry, say I was faking it, attention-seeking, didn’t I get it, couldn’t I see? That she just needed some bloody space?
Often she would turf me out, tell me to go and play, make some mates. I was getting too big to be hanging around her legs all the time, she’d say. I did as I was told but I never made any friends, not really. Not until I met Danny. I could hold my own with the kids from the flats, could give as good as I got, pretend I was like them even if I didn’t feel like I was. I’d taken to carrying a little notebook around with me by then, writing my imaginings down instead of trying to share them with Chrissy. There must have been hundreds of stories and poems in there, all of them different but each of them the same. Me and Chrissy living another life.
Writing wasn’t what kids did round my end, and so I’d shove the notebook in the waistband of my trackies every time I caught sight of them, act the little gobshite, put on a front. The ones my own age never bothered me. It was the big ones that got under my skin, the lads especially. But I learned soon enough that they weren’t interested in my words. All they cared about was winding me up over Chrissy.
Oi, where’s yer mam? Tell her to come down here and open her legs fer us!
Bet she’d do it fer a fiver, but she’s fit though, innit? Tell her I’ll up it to a tenner, the dirty mare.
She’d do it fer nowt, that one. She’d do us all in one go. Not long before you’re old enough to join in, either, eh?
I worked out quickly that what I saw as beautiful in Chrissy was the same thing that men saw as theirs to stamp on, that they took the way she looked as permission to grab and paw and whistle at her, as though she were a stray dog let loose in a park.
It was because of them, the handsy men and boys, that I learned how to fight. A thousand of their leers loaded into each of my fists. I’d knocked a girl in my class clean to the floor when she called Chrissy a prossie, said she’d slept with the fella that was married to her mam’s sister. When I told Chrissy she’d looked puzzled, cocked her head to one side, her thinking face. What’s his name? she’d said, taking a long drag on her cigarette. As though she couldn’t be sure, like one just faded into the next, like yes, maybe she had, but she was buggered if she could remember any of the details.