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When you did bad things like that the keepers descended, one for each limb, held you so tight you couldn’t move. I did lots of bad things. It felt nice to be held. I liked going limp in their arms and hearing them say, “There. Well done for calming down. Good girl, Chrissie. Good girl.” It was almost like I wasn’t bad at all.
Anyway, that was how I knew being dead wasn’t forever. Not always. People who talked about dying as if it was forever were either lying or stupid, because I knew two people who definitely, definitely came back from being dead. One was Da and the other was Jesus.
“Because you never did anything for me. Kids aren’t born loving you. Needing you, maybe. But not loving you. You have to put the work in for love.”
For years I had been hung up on Mam, because your mam was the one who was supposed to fill you up when you felt empty, but she had never done that for me. She had given me dregs and scrapings of warmth, and now that I had seen her again, I believed it was all she had been able to give, but it hadn’t been enough. She was never going to give me enough. I knew, because when she had told me what she wanted, she had talked about going back and making things different for her. She hadn’t talked about doing things better for me. Only one person in Chrissie’s life had loved her in an ordinary,
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When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t real dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.
You couldn’t understand about fair and unfair when you had a mammy who made scones and a da who put your name into songs.
