Her forehead was crumpled on the pavement.
‘She made a grab for the wire as she fell,’ someone said.
I looked up at the telegraph pole, its wires reaching out in a spiral overhead to all the houses in the street.
Her mother stood crying into a fold of the sari she held across her mouth, to stop the truth leaking out. She was talking in another language. It was grief. She wanted the girl to get up out the puddle of blood. She wanted her to fly up to the hand-hold of the wire. To fly backwards in time, up to the windowsill on the top floor, and press her hands and face against the coldness of the glass. But she wouldn’t. She was out of reach – the girl whose name I didn’t know, who never went to school and never waved back.
The window was open and the curtain was hanging out, like she’d held on to it. I could feel her slipping. I grabbed hold of Manus’s sleeve, but he shook me off. I had to stand on my own. There was the feeling of when the ice-cream van came and I couldn’t walk away, when I’d stood there listening to the hum of the engine take over from the blare of the loudspeaker, and she’d thrown me down a sixpence – out of the blue, a flash of money, an arc of silver rolling in the gutter, just missing the drain. I looked up and caught a glimpse of her through the net curtain, closing in sunlight.
I liked it she’d seen me. She was like me, trying to be invisible and pretending not to look because I didn’t have the money to buy ice cream.
Now she was at my feet. She’d fallen through the air, and the sticky blood had footprints in it running madly around in the street.
‘Get an ambulance.’
‘Call the police.’
‘Get these children away.’
‘She made a grab.’
‘She changed her mind.’
We’d been playing in the street, building the wicket for tin-can-tacky and organising ourselves into runners and finders. Some of the girls were playing feet off London and sitting on Sky’s wall while we sorted it out. I ran inside to get more tin cans out the bins to build up and knock down for the start. Manus and Connor were squabbling over who should get the stone to fling at it and Danny over the road knocked it down with his own stone but everyone shouted they weren’t ready. I was building it up again with Yakubu and Thaddeus, with Paul Mersey standing over it, when someone said, ‘She’s fallen.’
I looked up and couldn’t see what they were talking about. Busola was biting her thumb, all the girls along the wall were looking up the street. No one had fallen – Theresa was it and still trying to get up. I couldn’t see why everyone had stopped, but there was a rush up to that end of the street and I had to stop people kicking over the wicket as they ran.
We were the first ones there, but everyone made a big circle to keep away. I pushed in past Paul Waller and Marcia’s little brother to get next to Manus but had to step back because the pool of blood was still spreading. The edge of it was curved and thick and shiny. It was moving out from her head and underneath her in a splash from her feet towards the kerb. We all watched it happening.
The door burst open and her mum came out. A man was behind her shouting and dragging her back. She was fighting him off, and screaming. A boy with a round face who we didn’t know was behind them. All the grown-ups started looking out their windows, opening doors and running out. Some of them were pulling children away. We hadn’t seen anyone dead before.
‘She jumped,’ Mandy said as her mum picked her up.
Soap suds spilled on to the pavement and ran along the gutter on our way to school. On the way back, the sky was brownish purple as the storm broke. The brick fronts and the windows of the houses shone in the rain. A car went past, lifting a skirt of brown water on to the pavement, rippling all the way along the street. I saw a lady get completely splashed under her umbrella and stop, speechless, as if she’d been crying and there was no way any more to get dry.
‘Clean clothes, everyone! School clothes off.’ My mum looked serious as she dried my hair in the towel, so I knew what was coming.
‘Michael? How was your teacher?’
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘She was sad, she said a man was killed today. She wrote his name out and told us to remember. What happened, Mum?’
‘Sh.’
Our dad called us all into the living room. He was back from Liverpool. ‘Who saw that girl fall?’
No one spoke.
‘Who was there yesterday?’
‘I wasn’t,’ I said.
‘...Anyone else?’
Everyone looked at me. Manus rolled his tongue up under his teeth. Busola pulled at her bottom lip. Connor pressed his lips together into a crooked line. They were all telling me the same thing, ‘Your big mouth.’
It was too late to go back.
‘I didn’t see her fall,’ I said.
A bang of thunder rumbled on the windowpanes. The sky looked bruised and dark over the rooftops. Rain came down again, like an open tap that couldn’t stop flooding.
‘I don’t want to see any of you leaning out of the window,’ he said.
After supper, we all rushed to look out at the storm, pressing our faces to the glass and leaving mist patches. The street was empty – a brown wash, the colour of clothes in the bathtub, the colour of mud. The terrace of houses opposite became a wall of water and brick. All the windows and curtains were closed.
‘Daddy’s going to sleep. Let’s be quiet,’ my mum said.
We switched off the light and sat up on chairs at the window with blankets over our knees, watching the storm change and the streetlights go orange. Gusts were whipping along the street, spreading in ripples where rain was flooding over on to the pavement. There were dark surges of water rushing into the drains. My mum told us a story about all the people who didn’t have a roof over their heads, who were lost and had to be out there in the rain, turning cold.
Manus was yawning and Busola was leaning back on my mum’s lap, her thumb in her mouth and her eyes closing.
‘How could anyone be out in that and not drown?’ Connor said.
My mum was rocking Busola to sleep. ‘Just spare a thought,’ she said. ‘Every one of them had a mother.’
I looked back at the water and imagined the people floating face up along the gutter and folding, like pieces of soggy paper, down into the drains.
The family were loading their things on to a lorry. We could see the women had these dresses Marie said were saris. She said her mum had some because her dad, Jimmy Singh, was West Indian.
‘They float, don’t they?’ Sandra said.
‘Maybe she thought it would work like a parachute,’ Danny said.
‘It didn’t though, did it?’ Connor didn’t even look up, and we all went quiet thinking about it. We were sitting on Sky’s wall after school because the streets felt different after all the rain and our dad was gone again to Liverpool so we could stay out.
Sky’s mum called her in, but she said her name in Portuguese so it sounded like Say Who! We all laughed and pointed at Sky, saying ‘Who? You!’ Her mum was nice and didn’t tell us to get off the wall, but she kept Sky away from us most of the time. ‘Boa noite,’she said firmly, and shut the door.
The only thing we had left to look at was the people moving out. ‘Look, there he is,’ Julie said. The boy with the round face came out with a bird cage and was getting into a car.
‘Why wasn’t he in school?’ Sandra said. We didn’t know. They hadn’t been there very long. Some people moved in and then didn’t feel they were in the right place and moved out again. But there were lots of people living in the houses and even more in the flats around the school, so it was just interesting to watch people come and go and not join in. Only this was different.
The boy turned round and looked up at the house. He saw us looking. For some reason we all waved. There was something wrong in the way he looked back. It was like we weren’t there, or if we were, why hadn’t the rain come and washed us away? He was bossing his mum into the back seat of the car and giving her the cage to hold. Another older woman got in beside her and he slammed the door. It caught on her dress blowing out, so he opened it and slammed it again. He looked up at us like we shouldn’t be watching, and got in the front seat beside a man with a beard we hadn’t seen before. The car started and drove off with his mum putting the bird cage up at the back window.
‘She’s looking at us,’ Danny said.
We watched them go.
‘He’s stuck up,’ said Julie.