She nodded yes. He skipped across the road to his house. She closed the door, feeling a little sick. Ma’s dead and I’m kissing a boy. Oh no. I’m so sorry, Ma. Oh no. Oh no. She ran up the stairs, tore into her mother’s room, ripped open the wardrobe and grabbed one of her mother’s long-sleeve T-shirts and inhaled it, then she sat on the bed and hugged it as hard as she could. She fell asleep in her mother’s bed, fully dressed except for her socks and shoes, pressing her mother’s balled-up Blondie T-shirt to her face and sucking her thumb for the first time since she was five.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Marjorie

Chapter Twenty-Six

Marjorie

THE APARTMENT WAS COLD. Marjorie took off her high heels at the door and turned on the heating. She grabbed a bottle of wine, a glass and a blanket and sat on the sofa. She turned on the TV – politics, no. Soap, definitely no. A rerun of a procedural crime drama – no, absolutely no. She settled on a wildlife programme focusing on the mating habits of lions. Christ, that’s aggressive. She was about to turn over when her phone rang. The number was unknown and she thought for a moment it could be Juliet – maybe she needed her. She answered with an urgent ‘hello’.

‘Marjorie, it’s your father here.’

Marjorie’s blood ran cold. The last time she’d heard that voice she was sixteen years old and he was telling her he had another family in the UK, a family that he wanted to be with full-time. He spoke about a woman he loved more than her mother and kids he loved more than Marjorie.

‘You are old enough now to understand,’ were his final words to her before he walked out into the night air never to return home. He left her alone with a mother who was hysterical and threatening suicide. Marjorie knew she wouldn’t do it. She knew her mother was too religious to even consider risking hellfire. It didn’t make it any easier. It was still terrifying. He left her to a woman who blamed her for destroying her life. A woman who could be vicious and mean, and said hateful, spiteful things. Just after he’d left and before he’d even made it to the end of the road, she’d screamed that she’d wished Marjorie had never been born. Afterwards she felt bad about wishing her mother would just fuck off and die. Every now and then, and for years after, she’d remind Marjorie that Daddy had left Mammy because Marjorie broke her and she couldn’t give Daddy his son.

‘Well that’s not scarring at all,’ Rabbit said the first time Marjorie confided in her, and it made Marjorie chuckle.