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started, ‘Daddy said …’ which made my heart thump. We all knew what my uncle said I had to do; I had to stay with Stella, and do whatever she wanted me to do. But this time Marie cut her off.

      ‘She won’t be a minute, okay,’ she said in a firm voice, calling me on with her finger. As I walked up I could feel Stella’s anger behind me.

      ‘You wait till Daddy gets home,’ she shouted after me. ‘I’m telling.’

      My uncle would go mad that I’d defied her. All the way up the stairs and across the landing my heart was thumping.

      Marie took me into her bedroom. Over my shoulder as I looked back from the doorway I could see Mummy in the bright kitchen, peeling potatoes; her hair scraped back, her face tired and lumpy. Her eyes were rimmed with red and her face stained with tears. Something was wrong. Why didn’t she look up at us? The bedroom door clicked shut behind us and I tried to swallow quietly. It felt strange sitting on the bed with Marie. I felt the cold I brought up with me clinging to my jumper, and when Marie smiled at me and started to talk I felt my mouth smile back, but the rest of me checked the door and the windows and thought about Mummy in the kitchen with her strained face and red eyes.

      Marie went on talking to me in a sleepy kind of voice about how grown-up I was getting, and how bad my uncle could be, and how it was nothing to do with me, and did I know that? I nodded that I did, not sure if that was a black lie or a white one, and crossed my fingers in my pocket just in case. But at the back of my head I was still seeing Mummy with all the potato peelings in the colander and her red eyes, and Stella standing in the stairwell yelling, ‘I’m telling,’ wanting me to go back down and play games that I was two years too old for.

      I banged my legs back quietly against the side of the bed and stared at a bottle of pink nail varnish Kathy had left behind last time she visited, sitting on the big, curvy, brown dressing table. I wondered what Marie was saying all this for, and why we were here while Mummy was in the other room with red eyes.

      ‘It’s not nice to be sad, is it?’ Marie said. ‘The boys are horrible sometimes, aren’t they?’ I nodded again, looking down at my grazed knee, twisting the hem of my jumper around my fingers, wondering if this was a trick, even when she said ‘I think so too.’

      Then it came; she told me about schools where girls go to sleep and come back for holidays. But it didn’t mean they were bad and had been sent away, she said. I stopped banging my legs and froze. Before she finished I was already crying and shaking my head and saying I didn’t want to go. She told me it would be a really ‘lucky’ place to go, and that my uncle wouldn’t pick on me or hit me there, and neither would anyone else, and that I could still come back to live with Mummy in the holidays.

      She tried to make me look at some of the brochures she’d taken down from a hiding place on top of the wardrobe. I watched all the furry grey dust falling down with them. I was never disobedient, but I shook my head and folded my arms so she couldn’t make me hold them. She put them down on the pillow instead.

      ‘Does Mummy want me to go?’ I asked.

      ‘Only if you want to.’

      ‘I don’t,’ I said, barely taking a breath in between, and looked straight back at her big blue eyes. ‘I’ve got my own school.’

      She talked more, saying it wasn’t like I thought, that I wasn’t getting sent away because Mummy didn’t want me there, but that Kathy had offered to pay for it, and she and Mummy thought it would be good for me. I shut her voice out, the way I did when the others said Mummy was not my real mum. She asked if I would at least think about it while she went to the toilet, and I shook my head again, kicking my legs harder against the bed.

      ‘Just think about it,’ she said, ‘please, for Mummy.’

      I shrugged and she said to just look at the pictures, please would I, and it was all up to me, I could choose whichever one of the schools I liked to go to, and if I didn’t like it when I got there I could come right back. She promised, on ‘Mummy’s life’, but she knew I’d like it, she said. ‘You’ll have lots of friends of your own age.’

      Marie clicked the door closed behind her as she went out, and I picked my scab, listening to the voices of everyone playing in the square downstairs, all my friends. Through the wall I heard Marie and Mummy talking in the kitchen in low voices, as if my uncle was back. I held my breath and listened harder through the thumping of my heart, and when I was sure he wasn’t there I tried to make my breathing smooth again.

      I tried not to see the glossy white brochures she’d left on the pillow, but there was no one there to see me. Clicking my tongue against the roof of my mouth nervously, I opened the top brochure and looked at the pictures of girls in pleated skirts running in playing fields, carrying sticks with little nets on the end; and sitting at desks, wearing stripy dresses with short sleeves, reading books; and another one of them wearing long white overalls and big plastic glasses, standing at wooden benches in front of metal candles with bright flames. Everyone was laughing or smiling, and I could tell there were no boys around, shouting. But I remembered the brochures had come from Kathy, which gave me another reason for hating these places.

      When I heard the toilet flush I quickly closed the top page and sat up straight, trying to slow my breathing. The door clicked open and Marie asked if I’d thought about it. I nodded.

      ‘What do you think?’

      ‘I think I’m not going. Can I go back downstairs to look after Stella now?’

      She let me go and my eyes clashed with Mummy’s on the way out. I could see she’d been crying more but Marie put her hand on my shoulder and steered me past, without letting me talk to her. I ran along the landing, frowning, trying to loosen the tight feeling in my belly. Marie was out, leaning over the balcony by the time I got down, and I called up.

      ‘Did you tell Mummy I didn’t even look at the pictures?’

      ‘Not yet,’ she said in a tired voice.

      ‘Tell her, don’t forget … Say, “She didn’t even look at one picture.”’

      I ran off proudly, happy that Mummy knew I wanted to stay with her and not go away to live in Ireland or to a ‘sleeping-school’. I could feel Marie watching me from the balcony. There was always someone staring at me these days: Brendan standing outside the school railings looking in at me as I sat reading on the steps in the playground; or Kathy staring in at us through the gap in the half-opened bedroom door as we all lay on the carpet doing the jigsaw puzzles she’d brought us; or looking up in class and seeing Miss’s shaky smile when I stared at her; everyone suddenly looking at me as if I’d done something wrong.

      I didn’t need friends in school anyway. I had lots of brothers and sisters when I came home, and they were enough. People outside our home were ‘nosy parkers’, and I didn’t tell anyone our business. I knew Marie thought I didn’t have any friends anywhere and that was why I should go away to a sleeping-school, but there were loads of children to play with in the flats. I looked up over my shoulder and saw that Mummy was out with Marie on the landing now too. They were turned towards one another talking, with their arms folded up on the landing wall. I watched Mummy’s cigarette smoke stream into Marie’s long blonde hair and thought she was probably telling her that I wasn’t in the way and that she didn’t want me to go anywhere, and that I’d got my own bed to sleep in and didn’t need to go away to a school to sleep.

      In case she looked down I skipped across the square, humming loudly to show her I wasn’t sad on my own. I hoped they weren’t looking down at me, both thinking that I didn’t belong there. I ran over to the bigger girls at the skipping rope queue and stood at the end, looking up at the balcony to see if they were still there watching.

      Jackie, from one of the flats on the top floor, said the rope was too high for me, but I refused to go away and said, ‘I don’t care. I know I can jump it this time. I’m playing anyway.’

      They laughed at me and let me stay and I beamed up at Mummy and Marie, pressing closer to the girl in front of me so they knew

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