I nod when the feds ask me if I’m Charlene Yewless. When they’re happy they’ve got my details, they make me give them my phone and the two-pound coin that had fallen through the hole in my jacket pocket into the lining.

The feds check I don’t need to see no one about my toe, then I’m taken down to the cell. Again. Maybe after a while you get used to it,
but, man. I just want to puke again. I just want to lie on my face and pull the blanket over my head. I just sit there, pressing my fingers together and trying to empty my head of everything.

*

When they take me out of the cell it’s to ask me more questions. They take more photos, more swabs, more fingerprints. Now they’ve got me twice.

It’s a different appropriate adult, a different lawyer, a different fed interviewing me.

I nod and I say yes and no. I tell the fed that I just wanted to see my sister. I don’t know why I kicked the car or the policeman. They say that the police officer I kicked has to have medical attention. Am I sorry about it? I know that kick hurt me more than him. My toe was already screaming at me after kicking the car. Trainers don’t provide much barrier. The kick barely dented his trousers. But I don’t answer the fed because I don’t want to answer no more questions at all. I sit there with my arms crossed and let them all talk around me.

The policewoman leans forward so she knows I’m looking at her.

She says, “Are you close to your sister, Charlene?”

I almost tell her about the good times, when Mum was feeling all right. She’d let me and Kandi make play dough out of flour and food colouring, and hats out of cornflakes boxes, and paint a purple Kandisoraus on our bedroom wall. I taught Kandi how to play the Lion King’s “Circle of Life” on her recorder, though I reckon only I would have recognised Kandi’s version. When Kandi laughed, it made me laugh too. I don’t laugh in the same way now.

I just say to the policewoman, “Yeah. I suppose so.”

I make a decision then. I’m not gonna talk about Kandi to no one else. I’m gonna keep all of her to myself because every time someone else mentions her name, it’s like Kandi starts to disappear. I assaulted a police officer. I stabbed Blake with the knitting needle. It’s gonna be a long time until I see Kandi again. I need to cling on to as much of her as I can.

*