On the Island

We were playing out, up on the ridge, when the alarm first sounded.  It was the end of the day and the cold was coming in like flying glass, catching in the matted fur around our collars, swooping up our nostrils and digging in around our eyes.

“What’s that?” said Leo, with his mitten in his mouth.

His hair stood up in the wind in stiff electric cables.  He’d never wear a hat, not even when it hailed.  His nose was crusted with old, dried snot like vanilla ice cream.  He would have been just four.

“It’s the alarm,” I said, when nobody else would.  “There’s been a prisoner, escaped.”

Lottie and Christopher wouldn’t look at me.  Lottie had a stick from somewhere.  She whipped it back and forth, drawing patterns in the grey, flattened grass, while Christopher crouched seriously over his bootlaces.  But Leo’s eyes grew suddenly wide and very black.  He was remembering the secret about me that he wasn’t supposed to know.

Far below, beneath the ridge and going on forever, all around us, the sea rocked and rose and burst, the grey waves twisting and fighting like kittens in a box.  The sun was disappearing in a hurry, as it always did beside the island, and the clouds were closing in.  The fading light stuck to their bellies in globs of strawberry jam.

Whoo-eeeee went the siren, growing more insistent with every knotted loop, but the wind was louder.  When Lottie spoke, I saw her mouth move, but that was all.

“We’re to go home,” Christopher said for her.  “Dad said.  When the alarm sounds, we’re to go straight in.” 

We both stared at his boots.  He’d only had them a week and they were as hard and shiny as polished conkers.  He wiped them deliberately, back and forth, in the yellow mud.

“I don’t want to go yet,” Leo whined, but he was only saying it for saying it.  He looked very small and blown and scared.

“Come on, Leo” I said and pounced on him.  I caught his padded, spindly body beneath one arm and started to run.

“Stop it, Jake.  Put me down!” 

But he was laughing as he shouted and his eyes weren’t strange anymore.  They were squinting and glossy.  Like a cat’s eyes, filled with light. 

He knows me I thought.  He knows who I really am.  It will be all right.

I could hear Christopher and Lottie, racing after us, their breath and creaking footfalls through the shouting wind and the Whoo-eeeee of the alarm.  I refused to look back at them.  To see their panting faces. 

We could run forever I thought as Leo gasped and squealed, warm – burning, against my banging chest.  We could just keep going.  Straight out across the brittle corner and beyond.  Over the shattered edges of the ridge.

There’s been a prisoner, escaped –

I couldn’t think about it now.

I had to set Leo down when we reached the stile.  The wood there was streaked black and green.  It felt slimy.  I climbed over first, then waited, ready to catch his trembling hand when he realised, finally, that he couldn’t do it on his own.  A couple of sheep trundled over to watch us with their blinking golden eyes.  They had strands of shit clinging to their frothy tails, like chewing gum.  Their breath hung before their faces, paler and more persistent than our own. 
Lottie and Christopher were still far behind us and I was glad.  We were on their land now and we weren’t supposed to run.  The clouds had sunk until they were almost on top of us.  Whoo-eeeee the siren sounded and Leo’s teeth were shining. Paper squares inside his smile.  I glanced away, determined not to cry.

They were my friends, the Petersons - Christopher, Lottie and little Leo.  I had only been here five months and already I’d made friends.  Mum was so relieved. 

“It’s because they’re not part of the local community,” she’d explained, lighting another Benson.  There were dents below her eyes, beneath the make-up.  Shadows hanging within shadows.  She was having trouble making friends here herself.  “They’re outsiders, just like us” she said, but it wasn’t true.  There was no one quite like us.

The Petersons had moved here only a year ago, to start a small organic meat farm.  Chickens and sheep and cows - though they’d already lost the cows by the time Mum and I arrived.  Nevertheless “We’re living out our dreams” Mrs Peterson told me, as she warmed me by her Aga on that first deadly-bitter night, and I’d nodded very slowly as if I knew exactly what she meant.

Hand in sticky hand now, Leo and I galloped through the field.  We leapt together over milky puddles and spiky nettle nests.  The sheep didn’t scatter as we approached, but stepped back quietly, as curt and disapproving as old ladies at a bus stop.

“Fuck” said Christopher, behind us.  He’d caught something, a sleeve or trouser leg, on the wet splinters of the stile.  He only said “Fuck” because he’d turned fourteen two months ago.  I heard Lottie, who was three years younger, start to giggle.

I was twelve at the time and Leo only four, but we ran together because it was Leo, alone, who really knew me.  And he was fast for his age too, a natural, like a hunted, zigzagging hare.

The shudder of propellers joined the bleating siren and the exhausted wailing of the wind, as a helicopter swung briefly into sight above the distant, melting trees.  A light flared in our faces and disappeared, leaving us stunned and blinking for a moment, like the first breathless discovery of snow.

The island had been covered in snow when Mum and I arrived.  A meringue dropped thoughtlessly into the middle of the dirty sea.  I thought it would melt immediately with all that salt about, but the island was tougher than it looked.  That’s probably why they built the prison here, why they sent Dad here after his fourth conviction.

“We’ve got to stay together, the three of us,” Mum said.  “This love - there’s nothing like it.”  She ripped the foil from her cigarettes and slapped her breasts, her stomach, searching for the pocket with the lighter.

Gran had wanted me to stay in the city with her, but Mum was having none of it.  “Bitch,” she said.  “She doesn’t understand.  It’s us.  Our love.  We’re the only things keeping him together.”  Her fingernails cut into my shoulders.

“Don’t worry, Mum.”  I reached up to brush the streaked blonde strands out of her eyes.  “It will be all right.” 

But secretly, I’d begged Gran.  More than anything, I had wanted to stay exactly where I was.

The farmhouse loomed ahead, windows twinkling like Christmas lights, though it’s thatch had been stripped away, replaced with gleaming red tiles like the roof of Lottie’s glorious bubble-wrapped doll’s house, abandoned half-unpacked, inside.  Leo slowed.  He doesn’t want to leave me I thought, but then “Listen,” he said. 

There was the sound of police cars, like in a Hollywood film - and I’d thought that there was only the two of them for the whole island.  I looked away from his excited grin.  I was doing my absolute best, trying not to panic.

The night was everywhere now.  Beside the farmhouse, I could just make out the skewed, chopped angles of the barns - the one for the sheep and the one for the chickens, the ghostly, dusty one for all the non-existent cows, and the one for the equipment and Mr Peterson’s shiny new truck.  There was the other one too.  The one where they killed their organic, blinking, golden-eyed sheep.  I’d peered inside it once.  There were chains hanging from the ceiling and a smell like dirty underwear, left in a wadded pile to rot.  There were pens and pens, one after the other, and though they were all empty at the time, I felt their waiting. 

“The walls” Mum said, “have eyes.”

“I can’t live without you,” said Dad the last time that we visited.  “This place,” he murmured.  “You don’t understand.  It’s killing me.”

Mum’s fingertips trembled against his upon the table.  I’d looked away, worried about what the guard might say if he spotted them.  The pair of them huddled there, crying like babies.

“We love you” Mum said.  “Whatever happens, whatever you decide, there’s always us.”

Outside, through the grille, the sun was a hard, bright pebble in the sky, searing (I knew) at the edges of the snow, turning the perfect meringue coating of my crisp new world into pools of heartbreaking grey slush.

Lottie and Christopher caught up with us as we neared their back door.  I saw the shadow of Mrs Peterson behind the blind.  She was moving through the kitchen, her hair flashing the same silver as the polished pans hanging proudly from the beams.

Leo battered in to her, through the open door.  I knew she'd lock it up tight once her children are inside.  Out here, the sirens pressed in closer.

“Hey Mum!” I heard Leo call.  “Mum - did you see the helicopters?”

He had forgotten me already.

“You can come in if you like” Christopher said, but he didn’t mean it.

“Nah,” I shrugged back at him.  “What for?”

“Oh, go on,” Lottie whispered.  She still had her branch and she was leaning on it, like a dancer’s cane.

“Christopher!” Mrs Peterson called. 

Leo had left the door wide open and the step was gleaming, a perfect square of buttery light.

“We’d better go,” said Christopher.  His long fingers tugged at one other.  Somehow I heard his bones popping softly, over everything. 

They’re sorry for me I realised.  I felt like snatching Lottie’s stick and breaking it neatly - snap, snap - in their gazing, sorrowful faces.

“Whatever,” I said.  “See ya.”  And I turned and ran, back across the black fields, into the rising, salty night.  The alarm, like a spirit’s song, went reeling up around me.

I glanced back once and there was Leo at his bedroom window.  He was jumping about and waving at me and probably poking out his tongue.  “I’ll see you too, Leo,” I whispered, the ground skidding and spraying beneath my thumping feet.

“Whatever it takes.”  My father had promised from his separate side of the table and Mum nodded, her teary eyes hard suddenly.  Like tarnished metal.

By the time I reached our house the police cars seemed to have vanished, and the helicopter had faded, ticking gently in the distance.  I was hardly hearing the alarm anymore; it had been going on so long.

Quietly, I turned my key in the lock and went in.  The hall cupboard was open and there were shoes scattered across the peeling lino.  I climbed over them on my way into the kitchen.  The air looked hung with cobwebs, from the smoke.  Mum’s head snapped up, her face stretched long and tired with waiting. 

“It’s you.” she said, and remembered to smile. 

The fridge stood open.  There was a tower of bread beside her elbow.  I watched her bracelets shiver as she flicked a pink-stained knife back and forth.  And back, and forth.

“What’s that you’re making?”  I asked her.

A canvas shopping bag bulged beneath the table.  I saw some clothes inside it and two of my books, a graphic novel and some babyish one I’d grown out of long ago – it had a man with an apple for a head on the front cover.  The bag could have been just jumble, except that Mum’s beaded sandals lay across the top, one three-inch heel poking out, like a witch’s bony finger.  They were her very best shoes, the ones she used to always wear when she and Dad would go out dancing.  

“Just a few sandwiches -” Mum said and then the room exploded with a great bright nothingness.  The prison alarm, we both realised, had come to a stop.

I saw myself inside Mum’s eyes, a small wet shape beneath the glitter. 

“Shit,” she murmured and then there was a shot, and then silence, and then two more.

“Mum” I said, but she wasn’t looking at me now.

The jam jar went flying from her fist, the light sliding over it as it rolled gracefully mid-air.  When it landed the glass opened as neatly as a windowpane.  I thought of Leo at his window, jumping and waving and probably poking out his tongue.  Saying goodbye after all, I thought - and then the whole world shattered.

____________________

"So - Tim’s decided he’s gay!" says Heather.

She’s breathless; her cheeks pink, her eyes flashing silver, but she winces when her desert spoon scrapes across the bowl.

It’s the end of the meal. We’ve dispensed with her Thai chicken and the seasonal small talk and general gossip. We’ve downed two bottles of Pinot and it’s that time of the evening, the time for flushed skin and glittering eyes. For revelations, truth and ice cream.

It’s the moment when we connect, when we reconnect, at last. It always happens and though we never say it, I think we both understand that this is why we still go on meeting the way we do, why we continue the ritual of a meal in her big, warm family kitchen when I’m back in town each Christmas. It’s why we still describe one another as best friends, though we rarely meet for the rest of the whole long year.

"Tim!" I say, though it takes me a moment to remember who he is. He’s her son of course. Her son, how could I have forgotten? It’s the wine, I think, making me drift. I’m too easily distracted by my thoughts, too busy looking at Heather’s things, at all the greetings cards and tinsel, at the new cracks spreading around her eyes and the way her lipstick has worn off . . .

And, through the window, snow is falling the way it does in films and dreams, a steady heartbreaking dance of night and light. I lift my fingers to my own lips to check that my similar rosy smile is still in place.

"How old is Tim now?" I ask.

"Sixteen!" she says and lifts her hands, her eyebrows.

"Sixteen," I echo. "Christ."

And I know that she thinks I’m exclaiming over the way the years have rushed by, how it only seems like yesterday that I was a bridesmaid at her wedding, that she was matron of honour at mine . . . but what I’m actually thinking is sixteen.

It’s the age we were when we went on our school skiing trip to France. When she was the pretty one, the graceful one, the girl who flew down the slopes and skated perfect figure-of-eights on the sparkling rink. While I spent much of that week flat on my back, against the ice.

More snow, I think, my eyes moving between the window and her talking, eating, lipstick-less mouth. Her teeth part, and I watch the ice-cream slipping slowly between them, but I’m the one shivers. I’m suddenly remembering how freezing it was in those chalets, so cold that even after she climbed into my bunk, we couldn’t get warm enough. We were never warm enough. Her hands on my back - I can feel them still - were as cool and smooth as metal . . .

"We thought it was just a phase," she’s saying. "But then I caught them! Actually kissing! And under the mistletoe of all places!"

She laughs, perhaps a little too loudly, with her head thrown back, showing me the pale curve of her throat, the point of her chin. And though her hair has a lot of grey in it, even some white, I think how it still falls in exactly the same heavy way. Like cloth, I think. Like winter water.

She’s still the pretty one.

"They just looked so funny," she says. "So strange. Two boys, holding one another like that, hardly more than children. And they looked so alike! It was as if Tim was kissing himself, his own reflection . . ."

I down my wine quickly and lean across, trying my best to keep hold of her tin-foil eyes.

"Have you ever . . ." I begin, "would you ever . . ."

But I can’t do it. Whatever I was going to say, I can’t say it. It’s too hot in here suddenly; it’s suffocating. I glance down at my bowl instead, at the peaks and spreading pools of untouched vanilla, and at my own spoon, turning over in my hand. The silver jumps as it catches the light. For a second it’s blinding, and in that second, she reaches over and takes it from me.

And I feel the creak, and then the avalanche, as she lifts it to her mouth.

________________________________________________________________

School Run

There are voices in my head.

"Watch out," they say as I turn the corner, as the wind rushes towards me, tasting of diesel and dead leaves.
"There they are" the voices tell me.
"Who?" I ask, but of course I know exactly who they mean.

There’s a gang of them, standing at the school gates. Some have blond hair with black roots, others are streaked red, or striped grey. There’s one who rattles brightly with rainbow beads. They wear boots with heels, or without heels, or they wear trainers. A tall leather coat leans comfortably against a dumpy fake fur. They’re talking together. Their words huff and twine towards me with their woolly cigarette smoke breath.

As I approach they turn then turn away in turn. Peachy lipstick mouths on jolting clockwork heads - I try to change my own face. I’m searching for a smile.

"Don’t listen to them," the voices say.
"Stop it," I mutter, "be still."
"Just walk past. That’s good. Good . . ."

I feel myself growing bigger, and then bigger. Their eyes blink at me too fast, so that all I see for a moment, is a whir of lashes – gleaming eyes, thick lashes, like eyes in silent movies. Soon I’ll be on top of them.

"Don’t let them touch you."
"Be quiet," I say, but it’s hopeless. I’m helpless. The voices never listen back.

I’ve nearly reached the gate. The gang leans closer, a watching knot. From a distance, it might look as though I’m standing among them quite deliberately. I mustn’t stare, but I can’t help it. I’m right in the middle of their mass. At the very heart of them.

"Keep going."

I see their shiny hands, their tight-tight gloves and a flash of vinyl nails. My own fists are clenched deep inside my pockets. The starch of their perfume makes me wince. They shake back their hair and stamp like horses. Steam pours out of them, between their noses and their flapping mouths.

"Excuse me," I say, inching past a padded elbow and two staring, nylon breasts. "Excuse me please, I must get by."

"What’s that, Love?" says one.
The words puff out, then burst against the sharp winter air. I picture them, like broken glass between us. I can’t answer. Instead I focus on the playground, rolling out beyond them. And beyond.

"Don’t talk to them," the voices tell me.
"Be quiet," I hiss. "Shut up."

One of their babies gazes up at me from a pram. It has the knowing, watery eyes of a gorilla-baby in a zoo. A tragic and resigned expression, framed by a soft green blanket. There’s a dummy in its mouth, pinning it still.

"Don’t look," the voices say and I don’t, but the baby’s eyes skip after me. Two cold pebbles catch my neck.

But it’s all right; the women are falling back now like heavy curtains, their bags and sleeves and coattails swinging wearily apart. And I’ve made it. I’m in; I’m through. At last.

I take the playground in slowly, as I always do, in cautious pieces. I see the monkey bars and benches, still dark and glistening from the rain at lunch. I see the rusted drinking taps and the netball hoop. The grey ground with its painted snake and numbers, half-worn away. I can smell the wet still, rising up from the bricks and wood and concrete, a dense, bloodlike odour that I can taste as well; it catches in the chinks between my teeth. I move on quickly, before the voices grab their chance. Directly ahead, there’s a single, leafless, fenced-in tree.

I blink up at the criss-cross of bare branches, stretched like fishnet tights across the sky. A sky that’s already sorry-looking, sallow and stretch-marked and bruised. There’s a skipping rope hanging from the highest branches. As I watch, it starts to spin. The wind whispers in spirals, circling us both.

And there’s the school, of course. The school, with its brown bricks and silver windows. A row of carefully closed doors.

And my daughter’s behind one of them. That one, with the peeling paint. She’s sealed up tight. It’s the end of the day, so it’ll be all crossed legs and hands-in-laps and no one really listening to the story. You can’t wait to leave, you’re desperate to leave, to break outside, to run . . . And the girl behind you is leaning closer, a pointed compass or twisted paperclip, something small and sharp and shiny, hidden in her fist.

But whatever happens, you will try not to move. You’ll set your face and go on staring at the teacher. You can’t afford to let anything slip.

Though: "Freak" the girl might say, unless it’s the boy sitting next to her. Either way, the word will emerge hot and sugary, smelling thickly of the round yellow biscuits they gave everyone at lunch.

And I’m not listening you will all think together, because you and the voices were on the same side back then.
But now . . .

With a series of dull thuds, the heavy doors fall open and out the children run. A single, solid rush of hair and hoods and bags and feet. Laughter and outrage whirling up into the mottled sky. A tornado of sound - high-pitched and clamouring, only frayed and stuttering about its edges.

My daughter appears. She slouches before me, with one hip hanging much higher than the other. She stands as though she is broken. But her hair glows. It’s a pale blond colour and gorgeous, like the dense, creamy fur on a cat’s belly. For a moment, I have to fight the urge to bury my face in it. To hide there.

But "M-mum," she’s saying. "Mum. Mrs Sawyer wants to see you."

Mrs Sawyer is the teacher. She is waiting in the doorway. The classroom is a warm yellow square against her back.
"Ms Watts? Ms Watts?" she calls.
Her voice is light and sweet and sticky, like the paper you can hang up in the summer, to catch flies. Her eyes are wide and blue and careful. I can tell that she knows all about me, about who I am. Of course, people will have told her. Chat, chat, chat . . . They just can’t help it.

My own voices have fallen quiet, but I can feel them in me all the same. Hunched together, waiting.

"Go on, Mum," Anna says.

She’s sounding calm. And clear. "A big slow voice", the elocution teacher told her. She holds her hands together, fingers wrapped in fingers.

"Mum," she says. "Mum, please."

I go over to the teacher with the big blue eyes and she nods and smiles a creeping smile. She starts talking almost immediately. Blah, blah, blah. Of course I don’t hear her, but I smile and nod right back at her. We’re twin, bobbing puppets, opposite ends of some ticking pendulum. Nod and smile. Nod and smile.

It’ll be something about a P.E. kit or no dinner money or a trip somewhere, in a coach. It doesn’t matter. Anna will explain her to me later.

I watch Anna pulling up her hood, blocking off her ears.

When she was little and used to fall asleep inside my lap, I would count her freckles to keep us safe. There were seventy-one freckles on her face and neck. I used to think that if I joined them up with a felt-tip pen, I might reveal a secret picture. She’s full of secrets, my Anna, but she’s reliable too. Her name’s the same whichever way you look at it.

I can’t see her freckles now. She’s looking at my shoes.

And: "Anna!" someone calls. "An-na."
I still like the way it sounds.

There are two of them. They have long, glossy, brown hair with fuzzy clips and bands and sparkles in. Smoke curls out of their mouths as they bounce across the grey, but it’s only from the cold.

"Anna," they say, "come here a minute. Come with us."

My hand goes out and clamps down hard on my daughter’s shoulder. She’s quiet beneath it, warm and still. The teacher carries on talking, but I’m not looking at her. I’m looking at these girls. They have broad, clean smiles that could swallow you up - shiny-sharp teeth, whiter than whiter than white. Snapping bright.

"It’s ok," Anna says, in her big slow voice. "They’re my friends."

What can I do? I let her go. And the teacher goes on talking. She rubs one long hand across her throat as she speaks, back and forth, back and forth. She leaves a crimson stripe behind, but I don’t look at her for long. My eyes are on Anna as the three of them stride away, to some precious, private corner of their playground.
Seventy-one freckles, I think. Please be safe.

"But you know what little girls are like," the voices say, all too happy to be back.

I shake my head as if I can knock them down, as if I’m the one in charge. I gaze past the teacher’s bony shoulder, into the yellow square of her world. It’s just as I have pictured it. For weeks, I think. For years.

The plastic chairs with their cold metal legs are stacked haphazardly up on the tables. There are picture books contained in a wire rack, their pages bent and tattered where they’ve been rammed back in too quickly. There is already an old woman in the corner quietly unloading a mop and bucket from her trolley. She wears a thin blue overall and tangerine lipstick. Nothing much has changed.

Even the radiators are the same. They’re still huge, even though I’m grown now. Still coated in that thick, chipped, creamy paint. It comes back to me how they were always either scalding-hot or freezing – and how the pipes would murmur continually, a stream of nonsense-messages like someone else’s game of Chinese Whispers. At first I had thought that the voices were a part of them.

"Go", they told me, that last afternoon. That first afternoon. "Go on," they said. "Run."

That afternoon when I couldn’t do it anymore, the sitting-still thing, the listening. Not with those kids sitting behind me –

"Freak."

Their sharp words and a sharper pressure, their secret metal digging at my back.

And so I stood up in the middle of carpet time. And they all looked at me, the teacher too. Long, dark eyes and open lips.

"Go" the voices murmured. "Go, now."
And so I did.

I did, although everyone was staring at me, and then grabbing for me. Shouting. There was some laughter too – I remember that, and the teacher roaring, weaving on her feet. So much noise and suddenly someone’s hand beneath my shoe, a quick satisfaction in treading down harder, a soft giving in those folded fingers.

But I couldn’t stop, not for a second. I scrambled away from them, only I didn’t go the way they thought I’d go.

The classroom door was too closed, and too heavy. Besides, I knew that I’d never make it there, between them. They’d never let me through. So I went up instead, up onto a table, and the chairs went tumbling, their metal legs clashing together, landing in an awkward spiky pile far below my feet.

"Run," said the voices. "Fly."

I looked at the windows, clouded white with condensation. A cut-out paper snowflake wilting gently from each pane.

I pulled myself up, I pushed my way out. There must have been that moment – lost to me now – when I managed it. When I smashed through.

Because suddenly there was the sky, mouse-grey and dripping pink and a torn paper snowflake, and the playground stretching out and out, and there was the cold - and for an instant I was safe. I was free. There was broken glass between us. And no way they could drag me back.

Anna’s teacher, I realise, has stopped talking.

She is watching me and waiting and trying not to wonder anything about me at all.

And "Alright then, Mrs Sawyer," I say to fill in the gap she’s left for me.
Her expression barely jumps, but I can tell this wasn’t the required response - what can I do? Her face is so careful it makes me want to laugh out loud. But I mustn’t do that. Anna would kill me.

I look around for my daughter, and I find her. She’s over in the darkest corner of the playground, near the bins.
She’s standing so close to her friends that they could be kissing, and I stiffen. I don’t trust their intimacy. I watch her hard until she turns and trots back to me, as if I’ve shouted. Good girl, I think. I love her. My little girl -

There’s a click. The teacher has slunk back inside. She’s closed her heavy door behind her. She’ll be keeping her yellow classroom to herself from now on. "Good." the voices say. She’s welcome to it.

"Anna," I call as she returns. Just saying it for saying it.

Her cheeks are pink, the colour of steamed rhubarb, but I know that if I touched her, she’d feel like ice. She turns and waves to her brown-haired friends.

"See you, Anna!" they shout.
And one of them sends her purple scarf reeling, out, on to the wind. It’s a final salute, like semaphore, their own particular farewell.

And my daughter is safe, I think. It will be all right for her. She’s not like me -

"She’s like them," the voices say.
"No," I snap. "No, no." I’m not listening to that rubbish - no way.

Anna’s small, cold hand curls around my knuckles. Our fingers tremble together inside my pocket. She rolls her thumb across my scars.

"Hush Mum," she says. "It’s ok."

I nod. Her palm is freezing, like raw chicken pieces left in a bag for too long at the back of the fridge. The other children are wearing gloves and mittens. I should have bought her gloves.

"You’re a bad mother." The voices say and I cannot disagree.

We walk together to the gate. There’s a different crowd waiting there now, I think. It’s hard to tell. Certainly there are more children. They have skin that looks raw and pinched, like Anna’s. The wind marks them with rashes and they're everywhere, these kids, blocking our exit and hanging about, whining, on the pavement outside.

They swing from the blades of their mother’s elbows or hang, as if on strings, from their tightly gloved hands. They run and spin and toss their bags towards the distant, zipping clouds or into each other’s screeching faces. They make so much noise, unleashing words like weaponry.

"Mum," Anna says, as we sidle closer. "Mum. Please. T-take your hands away from your ears."

She won’t look at me. She’s ashamed, but what can I do? I can’t change. And she knows, as well as I do.

There are voices.

____________________

By Megan Taylor