Cross Her Heart(50)

‘And I’ll kill all the rest and we’ll sail away!’

They swirl around for a while, the bus stop now the pirate ship and the estate an ocean full of monsters and other ships to raid. Afterwards they fall into each other, all breathless joy, slowly quieting as the real world settles in around them.

‘I have to go in a minute,’ Katie says. Her music lessons are only an hour and a half long and Charlotte isn’t quite sure how she gets out of them without her ma knowing, but she does and it doesn’t surprise her. Katie can do pretty much anything.

‘Me too.’ She drinks more Thunderbird, acid in her hungry stomach to burn away the sadness of Katie leaving for two weeks. ‘Daniel’s birthday party. I should be there now.’ Her face darkens and so does Katie’s. Katie hates her ma and Charlotte hates Daniel. Perfect Daniel. The little shite who’s made everything worse. Two today. ‘I wish you didn’t have to go away,’ she blurts out and although she doesn’t cry, her face contorts into anger and sadness and she punches the wall of the bus shelter three times, hard. She feels strong with Katie. All the rest of it doesn’t matter when Katie’s here. When she’s with Katie she thinks she could go robbing from one of the empty houses like the men do and steal an iron bar or something and bash Tony and her ma and stupid Daniel in with it. Sometimes she sees it in her head. Her doing just that. Katie watching and laughing and clapping.

‘Me too, me too,’ Katie says and wraps her arms tight around her. ‘I hate not seeing you.’ She breaks away and rummages in her bag. ‘But it’s only two weeks. It feels like forever but it’s only fourteen days.’

‘One dole cheque,’ I say.

‘Exactly.’ Charlotte knows Katie doesn’t understand dole cheques any more than Charlotte understands music lessons, but she loves her for pretending.

‘Oh!’ Katie exclaims. ‘I almost forgot. I brought you something.’ She pulls it out with a flourish and thrusts it into Charlotte’s hands. A Walkman. A good one. Small and metal, not some shite plastic thing. It’s wonderful.

‘Pirate treasure,’ Charlotte says, because her emotions always get choked up in her throat and she never has the words for them, but the black clouds in her head disperse and the sun shines through and it’s a better warmth than any amount of cheap booze can provide.

‘For me?’

Katie nods. ‘I’ll say I lost it or broke it. They’ll get me another one.’ They sit close, side by side, and sniff in the cold as Katie shows her how to work it. ‘There’s a tape in there. A mix tape. I made it for you. Fourteen songs. One for every day I’m away. I’ve got one the same at home. See? We won’t really be apart at all.’

‘So there you are! Finally decided to show your face, did you? About bloody time.’

The party’s in full swing when Charlotte gets home, and her ma is drunk and out of it on those pills she gets from the doctor for her back pain or whatever excuse she comes up with for the scrip. She glares at her from the doorway to the sitting room, and Charlotte barges through her, saying nothing. There’s no bairns there but every seat is taken by someone off the estate. Jack from number 5 who spends all his time with those stupid pigeons, Mary who hasn’t had a job in a year and got no fella so will go the way of Ma soon enough and be in one of the rooms over the chippie opening up her legs, and a few others all clutching cans or paper cups of booze. No cups of tea. That’s what Katie’s ma would have, Charlotte reckons, for a birthday party. Cups of tea and jelly and ice cream. She doesn’t look at Tony, holding forth from his armchair. He calls himself her dad. He’s not her dad. He’s part of the black angry storm clouds in her head.

Daniel sits in the middle of the carpet, and there’s obviously been some cake because he’s got a plate in front of him with icing and some crisps still on it, and as he looks up at her she can see chocolate crumbs around his mouth. He smiles and holds something up. ‘Charrot!’ he says, unable yet to pronounce her name properly. ‘A rabbit, Charrot! Charrot!’

‘It’s Peter Rabbit, isn’t it?’ Tony’s sister, Jean, is crouched on the floor beside him. ‘Like from those books.’ The rabbit’s got dungarees on, and Charlotte knows right there that Jean made them. It’s what she’s like. She should probably live a life like Katie’s. Probably would if she wasn’t on the estate. But her husband is the foreman down at the factory and they’re doing all right. Jean doesn’t like Ma, that much is obvious, and she doesn’t much like Tony, but she loves Daniel, just like everyone else.

‘Charrot!’ he says again, and his high-pitched voice, all sugar and innocence, makes her teeth grit.

‘What’s that you got?’ Tony asks. He leans forward. ‘You been on the rob again?’ His eyes have narrowed. Tony’s not clever, not like school clever, or Katie clever, but there’s something feral about him. He’s clever like a hyena. He can sniff stuff out of you. She’s still holding the Walkman, and her grip tightens on it.

‘Found it,’ she mumbles.

‘You can give it to your brother then, for a present.’

‘He’s bloody two years old, what does he need a Walkman for?’ She goes from a mumble to a raging shout, and anywhere else the room would fall quiet, but Charlotte’s anger is nothing new. Letters from school, concern from the social, her mother swearing at her, they’re all tired of Charlotte and her outbursts.