Lifesaving for Beginners

walk up and down the blue stairs that year. The year I had to repeat third year. I spent most of that year in the library, reading Stephen King. It . That was my favourite one. I’ve never been able to go to the circus since. The clowns bring back the dark corners of that book. The dark corners of third year, when you’re supposed to be in fourth year. On the blue stairs. Wearing a blue jumper.
    That’s when I started to write. In the library. I’d forgotten that. Pages and pages of horror. Awful stuff. I don’t know what I did with it. I must have thrown it away. I really can’t remember.
    Minnie says, ‘Yes.’ Her voice is quiet. Much quieter than usual.
    The thing is, we never talked about it, me and Minnie. Not afterwards. Not really. I mean, yes, Minnie called round when I came home, said she was glad she didn’t have to hang around with a fatso anymore and asked me if it was true about hospital doctors being rides? We talked about school and the Inter. Cert. and what she thought she got, which had no bearing on what she actually got (it was an easy result to remember because she got As in every subject), and the fact that I would have to repeat the year and how I was going to manage without her (badly, as it turned out), and how she was going to manage without me (very well, as it turned out).
    But we didn’t talk about the baby. Not once. Maybe some adult – my mother or her mother, perhaps – told Minnie not to say anything. I never asked. I was just grateful that I didn’t have to talk about it. It made everything more bearable. Not talking about it. And after a while of not talking about it and just going about my ordinary, dull, boring life, it was almost as if it had never happened. Not really. It didn’t seem real anymore. Perhaps I had imagined it. A bad dream I had that woke me in the night once, a long time ago.
    Minnie waits.
    I say, ‘Well, the baby was a girl. A baby girl. Faith. That’s her name. And now she’s twenty-four and she wants to meet me. I got a letter. I got three letters, actually. From an adoption agency in London. It said that her name is Faith and she’s twenty-four and she wants to meet me.’ I pick up my cup and put it down again.
    Minnie opens her mouth and then closes it. She pushes her hair off her face. She gets up. She says, ‘Christ.’ She goes to the cupboard where the serious drink is kept and takes out a bottle of whiskey that has dust all over it, like a shroud. She pours a measure into a heavy, cut-glass crystal tumbler.
    Minnie-if-you’re-drinking-you’re-not-driving Minnie. That Minnie. She hands me the glass and I toss it down. It burns.
    Minnie says, ‘Christ,’ again.
    I say, ‘Anything else?’
    She shakes her head. She looks different when she doesn’t know the answer. She looks like someone else.
    After a while, she says, ‘Did you respond to the letters?’
    ‘No.’
    Minnie seems unsurprised by this.
    ‘Does your mother know?’
    I nod.
    ‘What did she say?’
    ‘Nothing, really.’ Minnie nods, again unsurprised.
    For a while, we sit there, the pair of us. In two easy chairs in front of an enormous flat screen that is turned off. For a while, all you can hear is a clock ticking somewhere. It sounds like a timer, counting down the seconds until something big happens.
    Minnie arranges herself straighter in her chair and I can almost hear her changing gears. ‘So,’ she says, back to brisk. ‘What are you going to do?’
    I shrug. Shake my head. Minnie leans towards me, puts her hands on my arms. I’d say she’d like to shake me a little bit but she doesn’t.
    ‘What is it you want, Kat?’
    That’s easy. ‘I want none of this to have happened.’
    Minnie nods, sits back in her seat, crosses her legs. ‘Let’s just suppose for a moment that that’s not possible.’
    ‘Well, you asked me what I wanted. I was just saying . . .’
    ‘What else?’
    I open my mouth.
    ‘Something realistic.’
    I close my mouth.
    ‘Come on, Kat, you must have some sort of a plan.’ In Minnie’s world, people have plans. In my world, people have hiding places.
    I look at my watch. ‘It’s getting late. I’d better go.’ I don’t stand up. I sit on the chair in Minnie’s gigantic kitchen and think about the red flashing light. I’ll have to press the button when I get home. No way I can just leave it.
    Minnie stands up. ‘Wait.’ Something about her tone, her stance, her new shininess, makes me suspect that she is thinking