Heaven Eyes Read Free Page A

ended up in Whitegates! If you’d had a daughter, you wouldn’t have been useless and gone and died like my mum did! Say it. Go on, say it! You’d have been better than my mum!”
    I ran out of the room. I found January in the poolroom.
    “This afternoon,” I whispered.
    He grinned like a devil.
    “This afternoon.”

I WENT UPSTAIRS AND STARTED TO PACK . I pulled the little backpack from under my bed. I stuffed in some clothes and some food I’d saved for this: cans of Coke, bags of chips, a packet of cookies. I put in the knife and flashlight I’d bought last time we’d run off. I put in some soap and shampoo and a little towel. I counted my money, three pounds twenty-seven. I reached into the back of a drawer and took out my cardboard treasure box.
    I loosened the ribbon that was fastened around it and I lifted off the lid. I took out the lock of Mum’s hair, her parrot earring, the creased photograph of us in the garden of our little house, the photograph from the hospital that showed me growing inside her, her lipstick, her nail polish, her final bottle of perfume. I laid thesethings on my pillow. I put a thin layer of her Sunset lipstick on. I touched the nail polish—Black Tulip—onto my little fingernail. I tipped up her bottle of Dark Velvet perfume onto my fingertip, then pressed my fingertip to my throat. I lay on my bed in the shadows. A gentle breeze flowed in from an open window. I closed my eyes.
    “Mum,” I whispered. “Mum.”
    Nothing.
    I breathed deeply, drawing her scent into me.
    “Mum!”
    I thought of the little house where we’d lived together so happily. I thought of the way she used to laugh, the way we used to play. I remembered how fierce her eyes were when they faced the world and how they filled with tenderness when they turned to me. She’d known so much grief and trouble in her life, but she used to say it didn’t matter what had happened in the past and it didn’t matter what might happen in the future. Our time together in St. Gabriel’s would always be her Paradise.
    “Mum,” I whispered. “Mum! Mum!”
    I thought of all her stories. The story of how she met my father. She was just a few years older than I am now. He was some bum from a foreign trawler that had come upriver to shelter from a storm at sea. He enticed her with a seaman’s tales of adventure and charmed her with lies about love. They spent a night together in acheap bed-and-breakfast place above the quay. She woke next morning all alone. She looked out of the window to see his boat dancing daintily back toward the sea. She said that as she stood there at the window she already felt the new creature—me—trembling and burning with life inside her.
    “Mum,” I whispered. “Mum!”
    I breathed deeply. I opened my eyes. I gazed at the photograph they took at the hospital of me growing inside her. There I was, a tiny thing, swimming, floating in her, waving my arms and kicking my legs. There was the cord that joined me to her. Her food was my food, her blood was my blood. I remembered her stories of how she prepared for me, how she bought my crib from the Salvation Army, how she stuck pictures of angels and fairies on the wall of the bedroom we were to share, how her excitement grew as I grew inside her, as her Paradise approached. She used to hold her belly gently. She already whispered my name: Erin, Erin. She already sang songs to me, and told me how wonderful it would be when I was born and we were together in the world.
    “Mum,” I whispered. “Mum.”
    I pictured her brilliant green eyes, her red hair that grew like fire around her pretty face. I saw her parrot earrings dangling. I saw her brightly colored lips, her glistening dark fingernails. I imagined her touch, her voice. I remembered the days in St. Gabriel’s, how wewere as much like best friends as like mother and daughter. We were so happy. We needed no one else. But sometimes we did talk of what might happen if she met a good man. We