Last One Left

Last One Left

The school gate closed behind her with a sound like a full stop, final and cold.

She was five years old and she knew what it meant.

The other children had gone in ones and twos, pulled into the warm gravity of someone who came for them. She had watched from the wall, not crying, she had learned not to cry where people could see. Counting down until the teacher said off you go then in the voice that meant I have somewhere else to be.

The walk was fourteen minutes. She had counted those too.

She knew which garden had the dog that barked, which pavement was cracked and would catch your shoe, which lamppost was hers, the one with the peeling paint that meant two more minutes, nearly there, nearly there.

She let herself in with the key she wore around her neck like other girls wore lockets.

The smell reached her before anything else. Sweet, stale, and wrong. The curtains still drawn against a Tuesday afternoon.

Her mother was on the kitchen floor.

She stood in the doorway and did what she always did first; watched for the rise and fall of her chest. This was the question that had no name yet, that she would not find words for until she was much older and sitting in a different room with a different kind of professional asking her when did you first feel responsible for her.

The chest rose. Fell.

Something inside her knotted.

She put her school bag down quietly, the way you do in church. She went to the kitchen. There was bread. She made herself a piece with butter and ate it standing at the counter, still in her coat, still in her shoes that bit into her feet like small mean mouths.

She sat and read her book at the kitchen table. She sounded the words out under her breath because her mother didn't like noise.

At some point the light changed.

At some point she heard her mother shift on the floor, and the specific clumsy silence of someone hoping not to be noticed, noticing them.

She closed her reading book.

She did not say I was scared. She did not say I didn't know if you were dead. She did not say no one came again, no one ever comes.

She said: I'm hungry.

Her mother said: You're always hungry. Go to bed.

She took the bread on the way past. She didn't know it was mouldy. She didn't know any of it was wrong.