police got to your house, they wouldn’t know,’ said Ellie.
‘Wouldn’t know what?’
‘If it was me or you.’
‘What . . .?’
‘Who pushed Mum. No one saw. Could’ve been you.’
It had the desired effect. Abby was furious, but could do nothing other than continue driving. ‘You want to walk?’ she managed.
Ellie gave a tiny smile. ‘I’m just saying.’ She turned her head and looked out of the window. Didn’t want to rub it in too much.
Sorry, Mum, she offered up in her head. But sometimes she drives me so mad . . .
TWENTY-NINE
1993
The long metal spike glinted in the bright overhead lights and Ellie whimpered as it pierced the tender inside of her elbow, a place that had been punctured so many times she felt the accumulative effect of what seemed like a thousand needle jabs. She knew she wasn’t supposed to cry, she was supposed to be ‘brave’ and ‘not make a fuss,’ but it stung and she could see the blood – her blood – filling the vial, and it made her feel as if something was wrong with her, so very wrong, and the tears were more from fear than pain. She turned her head into her mother’s arm and wept, knowing she had no control over what these people were doing to her body, and then the nurse said it was all finished and she was sticking a plaster over where the needle had been. Ellie watched weakly as the nurse wrote on sticky labels and attached them to several vials of her blood.
‘Mummy?’ she asked, turning to Susanna.
Her mother smiled. ‘Yes?’
‘Am I going to die?’
Ellie saw her mother’s face contract in a strange way, almost as if she had forgotten to breathe or something, and then she smiled her biggest smile and said, ‘Don’t be silly.’ Ellie didn’t know whether to believe her or not. She knew dying was what happened to really ill people and you stopped moving – a bit like the bird that flew into the window a few days ago with a loud bang, even though it was only a tiny little thing. It fell onto the patio on its back with its stick-like legs up in the air. Her mum had put on a pair of rubber gloves and picked it up, holding it at a distance, then she’d put it in the rubbish bin. Ellie had been sad about it lost there in amongst all the stinky rubbish in the dark and hoped that even though it was dead it wasn’t too scared.
They caught the bus home and Ellie found herself alone while her mum went into the kitchen to make some lunch. She sat on the sofa feeling the plaster pull at her skin and hated it because it reminded her of how she was different. The patio doors were open and she got up and stood on the sill, rocking her feet back and forth until a sound drew her into the garden, pulling her like a magnet.
A distant collective laughter: four hundred children in a playground on their lunch break, playing, shouting, screaming. Ellie strained to hear the detail – the rules of the games they were enacting, the chants from the skipping songs – but as with every other time she’d come out here to try and be a part of it, she was just too far away. Usually she liked to stay outside to listen and imagine herself in the playground, running in a game of Tag so fast she’d never get caught, but today it made her feel trapped in her tiny square of a garden where she couldn’t see over the hedge, and she was feeling so angry she went back inside and lay on the floor.
It wasn’t fair. She hated being ill, hated the sickness, the doctors, the needles. She hated being alone at home when all the other children got to go to school and play and have fun. She hated everything.
As she tipped her head listlessly to one side she spied something under the sofa: a pile of books she’d shoved under there the day before, books her mother had made her get from the library. She hadn’t wanted to pick out any but Susanna had got cross and told her to hurry up, so she’d just taken the top four from the pile. Ellie thrust an arm through the dust, retrieved the one nearest to her and pulled it closer. There wasn’t much point really and she didn’t know why