by Nancy Tucker
In front of us a woman took hold of a toddler around the middle and lifted him with a small grunt. He walked along the top of the wall, arms held out either side of his body, face tilted up to catch the salt in the air.
“Mummy!” he said. “Look at me!”
“Amazing, darling,” she said, looking in her handbag. We looked at the boy. We looked at him as he reached the end of the wall, tensed, and jumped into the woman’s arms. She kissed his cheek and put him down.
“He didn’t fall,” said Molly.
“No,” I said. “He didn’t.”
I hadn’t seen her climb onto the wall on Friday—I had been watching an other-mother and other-kid. They were walking with their fingers knotted, swinging their arms in a lazy swish, and I was wondering how it would feel to have Molly’s fingers laced between mine. Molly’s fingers were small and thin, like skin-covered matches. I was wondering how they would fit into my gaps.
“Look!” she had shouted. When I turned I saw her balanced on the top of the wall. “Look!” she shouted again. She didn’t mean “Look.” She meant “React.”
“Come down,” I said. I went to the wall and held up my arms. “You can’t be up there. It’s not safe. I told you.”
“I can do it,” she said.
“Get down, Molly,” I said.
She didn’t answer, didn’t fold herself onto my hands, so I tugged her arm. It wasn’t a big tug. I meant to catch her. She yelped as she pitched forward, and I scrabbled at her coat, and the chunk of it grasped in my fist slipped out as she tipped to the ground. The sound was a crunch. She stared up at me, her mouth puckered in a small o, and I felt splashed with icy water. There was a scream of silence before she cried, and when it came it was a thin, bewildered moan. Her arm hung limp in her coat sleeve.
I felt someone behind me and turned to see the woman and girl with the laced fingers. The woman didn’t ask what had happened or whether I wanted her help; she knelt beside Molly, put one hand on her wrist and the other on her back, and asked, “Is this where it hurts, sweetie?” When I moved my tongue around my mouth it made a noise like footsteps on wet pavement. I tasted of carpet. I wanted to yank the woman up by her collar and demand to know where she had learned what to do when a kid fell off a wall, but I couldn’t speak. My throat was blocked by a mesh of pushed-down scream.
“I’ll go to one of those houses to use the phone,” the woman said, pointing to the row of cottages along the seafront. She bustled away before I could ask whether she was going to call an ambulance or the police.
I knelt beside Molly, put one hand on her back and one on her arm. Her wrist was white and waxy, and I found myself wishing there was blood. Blood was frank—the oily sluice of it on skin, the smell of metal and butchers. Molly’s arm was live on the outside but dead on the inside, and I pushed down her sleeve so I could pretend it was bleeding instead. When the woman had been kneeling she had murmured things, but I hadn’t heard them, so I couldn’t copy them, so I didn’t know what to say. I listened to the seagulls crying overhead and tried not to listen to Molly crying beside me.
Eventually the woman bustled back, holding a bag of frozen peas wrapped in a tea towel. I could tell she was having the time of her life.
“Here,” she said, giving me a look that said, “I’m back now. You can get out of the way.” I got out of the way. “Lovely lady in that first house,” she said. “The ambulance is coming. They said we could drive her ourselves but I’ve not got the car. Let’s pop your poor wrist on here, sweetie.” She held the peas like a cushion and lifted Molly’s hand on top. I didn’t ask why she had assumed I also didn’t have a car with me, because getting cross with people for making assumptions only really works when the assumptions they have made aren’t true.
When the ambulance whined to the end of the road the woman tucked Molly’s hair behind her ear and said, “Here we go, sweetie, here they are to help you.” I watched the white van stop and spit out two grinning paramedics, who walked over without obvious urgency. They were heavyset and exhaustingly upbeat. Once they had established that the woman wasn’t Molly’s mother, that I was Molly’s mother, that I was her mother despite the fact I was standing like a scarecrow while another woman comforted her, they took us to the ambulance. The woman waved as we climbed the metal steps.
“Good luck!” she called. I didn’t reply, because I couldn’t say the only thing I was thinking: “How much did you see?”
The paramedics sat me next to Molly and said, “There we go, now Mum can hold your good hand while we get you to hospital to have a better look at the sore hand, eh?” It took fifteen minutes for us to drive to the hospital. It took fourteen minutes for me to push my hand toward Molly’s and pat it, lightly, twice. She had stopped crying. Snot crusted her top lip in a sandy trail.
The hospital was a rush of cubicles and beds and men in blue pajamas. One of them showed me the X-ray of Molly’s wrist, and I saw the snapped bone surrounded by empty black space. I wanted to ask, “Is that normal? Would another kid’s X-ray look like that? Surely that’s not what all people are like—not full of empty space like that. Is it because she’s my daughter?” I didn’t ask anything. I didn’t say anything. Static hissed in my ears, as though the waves from the beach were breaking against the sides of my skull. Once the doctor had explained about the fracture he left us alone in a cubicle for a long time. I fed Molly chocolate buttons from the purple packet I kept in my bag for emergencies. She seemed happy to lie on the bed and let me put them on her tongue one after another, and if I was feeding her it meant I could keep the sweets coming in an unbroken chain, without pauses we might have felt we should try to fill with words.
Just as I was starting to think we had been forgotten, or left to rot in the cubicle as punishment for what I had done, a different doctor swept in with a nurse. He sat opposite me with a clipboard while she wrapped Molly’s wrist in plaster.
“So,” he said, “could you tell me again exactly how this happened?”
“She was walking on the wall,” I said. “She’s not allowed. She knows she’s not allowed. She just got up there when I wasn’t looking. But I’m usually looking.”
“I see,” he said. He wrote something on the clipboard, but he had it angled upward, so I couldn’t see. “Walking on the wall. And then what?”
“She tripped,” I said. “I was telling her to get off, and she just tripped. I tried to catch her but I couldn’t.”
“Okay,” he said.
“I think she just put out her hand to catch herself,” I said.
“Right,” he said.
“She’s not allowed on the wall,” I said. “She knows she’s not. She’s never climbed up before. I think it’s because she just started school, just a few months ago. Other kids do stuff she’s not allowed to do and she copies. She’s never been hurt before.”
“Sure,” he said, but he wasn’t writing anymore. He was giving me a strange, slit-eyed look. He kept his slit-eyes on me when he said, “Molly? Is that right, what Mum’s said? About how you hurt your wrist?”
“What?” said Molly. The nurse had given her something to play with—a watch in a ladybird case with wings that snapped open and shut—and she had been too busy snapping to hear what I had said. I was suddenly aware of the snot on her lip, and the way most of her hair had worked free from its plaits, and the stain on the neck of her school jumper.
“How did you hurt your wrist?” the doctor asked, wheeling his chair so he was closer to her.
“I just told you,” I said. Something steely bubbled up my throat. He turned to me as if his neck was very stiff and he was very angry with me for making him turn.
“I know,” he said. “Just want to hear it from Molly as well. Just to be sure.”
“I was walking on the wall,” she said. “Then I fell off.”
“What made you fall off?” he asked.
“Just did,” she said. “Just tumbled off.”
He scribbled on the clipboard. He was disappointed. I could tell. I didn’t know whether to be relieved that Molly had lied or horrified that she’d known she needed to. I looked at my hands, knotted in my lap, and pretended one of them was hers.
We stayed in the cubicle until her cast was set and harnessed to her chest with a sling. The nurse lectured me about keeping it dry and staying off sports and going to the GP if her fingers started to swell, and I nodded, zipping it inside her coat and pretending it wasn’t there.
By the time they let us go it was nearly eight. The outside world was dark. I hadn’t looked at my watch since I had collected Molly from school, which was probably the longest I had gone without looking at my watch since she was born. We hadn’t got back to the apartment at three forty-five, or had a snack at four, or read the reading book at four thirty, or watched Blue Peter at five, or had tea at five thirty. Our fragile, sugar-work schedule was fractured, and so was Molly. That was what happened when I stopped concentrating.
* * *
• • •
Do you know how I know it’s the first day of spring?” asked Molly. “Because Miss King told us. That’s why we made them flower crowns.”
“Ah,” I said. “Yes.” She had come out of school the day before wearing a gummy halo of sugar paper and cotton balls, which had slipped down her head as we walked until it hung round her neck like an ugly, ineffective scarf. I hadn’t risked asking what it was. It had taken her a long time to forgive me for thinking her papier-mâché Christmas tree was a volcano. “It was such a good flower crown,” I said.
“Miss King said it was the best in the class,” she said. “She’s so nice, isn’t she?”
“Angelic,” I said.
It was difficult to imagine a flower crown worse than the one on Molly’s bedroom shelf. I thought perhaps some kids had just stuck paper straight onto their faces.
“If it’s the first day of spring does that mean it’ll get warmer now?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. The wind coming off the sea was so biting I couldn’t imagine it ever being warm again. Molly scuffed her shoes on the ground and sighed.
“I’ll ask Miss King,” she said. “She’ll know. She knows everything. She’s so clever, isn’t she?”
“A genius,” I said.
I pressed my fingers to my eyelids. They felt like flower petals: soft, furred, slightly swollen. The pain had roiled up as we had watched the other-kid walk along the wall, pouring to the front of my face like heated engine oil, and it wasn’t shifting. High-pitched, humming pain. I kneaded the tops of my cheekbones until all I could feel was pressure.
“Can we go arcade after school?” Molly asked. She was looking past me, past the row of burger vans and the shut-up funfair. Slot machine noise trickled down to meet us—the rattle of money being sucked away.
“Can we go to the arcade,” I said.
“I asked you that,” she said. “Can we? I’ve got coins.” She took four pennies and a tiddlywink from her pocket and shook them at me.
“No,” I said. “Hurry up. We’re going to be late.”
We weren’t going to be late. We were never late. We left the apartment at eight o’clock every morning and got to school at eight fifteen, before most kids had finished breakfast. If we had left later we would have risked seeing other-mothers on the journey, bleating and tutting and letting their other-kids walk on walls. I couldn’t protect us from everything, but I could protect us from that.
By eight twenty we were at the school entrance, huddling under the WELCOME plaque. As we waited, an unwelcoming receptionist clopped up to the side gate, unlocked it, and slipped through.
“We’re very early this morning,” I said, loud enough to carry across to her. “Much earlier than usual,” I nearly shouted. Molly looked at me with something like pity, then pushed herself against the fence, patterning her forehead with a grid of grooves.
“That’s breakfast club,” she said. She pointed to the dining hall, which was oozing the clink and chatter of spoons and kids.
“You’ve had breakfast,” I said. The receptionist had disappeared into the building, but I still said it loudly. “You had breakfast before we left.”
“I could have more breakfast.”
“Are you still hungry? Do you need something else to eat?”
“Not really.”
By the time the caretaker ambled up to unlock the gates, we had been joined by the army of other-mothers and other-kids, and I had been reminded of why the other-mother avoidance plan was in place. They grouped in huddles, talking at whiplash speed, breaking into laughter that made my ears ring. I always had the same feeling when they engulfed me: that I was in disguise as a member of another species. The way they circled and cooed reminded me of pigeons, so that was what they became—a gaggle of birds—and I was a person with feathers stuck to my clothes. They looked at me and looked away, embarrassed by my big, stark sticking-out. When Abigail arrived Molly ran to meet her, and I felt naked without my little shield. Abigail had brick-colored hair and tiny gold studs in her ears. I watched the two girls together, coiling around each other, breathing in each other’s air. I felt their closeness as an ache, but I didn’t know what I ached for—to have Molly all to myself, or a friend to coil around.
By nine o’clock the playground was a sea of ankle socks and polyester. Around us, other-mothers began plastering other-kids in kisses and high-pitched exclamations.
“Have a lovely day, sweetie!”
“I can’t wait to see you later, precious!”
“I love you so much, angel!”
When the bell rang the other-kids tottered into lines and the other-mothers tottered home to do the laundry. I waited until Miss King saw me, then called Molly over. I gave her the book bag, the PE kit, the plastic pot of peeled-and-cut-up apple, and she went to Miss King like an iron filing to a magnet. She didn’t turn to smile or wave. Across the playground, an other-kid had attached himself to an other-mother’s waist and was refusing to let go. I felt for him: it was what I wanted to do to Molly each morning, before she could go to Miss King. I wanted to cling to her, and when her teacher tried to peel us apart I wanted to say, “But we are made of each other. We are parts of the same whole. Don’t you know she grew inside me, like one of my organs?” It seemed extravagantly cruel that there was no biological system for keeping Molly with me always, no way of carrying her around in a pouch above my pelvis like a joey.
* * *
• • •
The phone in the apartment started ringing as I fumbled with my keys outside. Behind me I could feel people bustling and buses passing, stuffed with hot breath and bored faces. None of them seemed to mind the noise, but it made me want to sink onto the ground. I wanted to crouch, then kneel, then rest my forehead on the concrete. Dry headache boiled in the space behind my eyes, and the pavement looked quenching.
I hadn’t known what the apartment phone sounded like until Saturday morning. The shrieking had split the air and I had looked at the hob, at the oven, at the radiators. I had sniffed for smoke. Molly got up from the couch without shifting her eyes from the telly and reached for where the phone was mounted on the wall. I connected the sight and the sound slowly, clunkily, and the connection went into me like a corkscrew biting the soft flesh of a cork.
“No,” I said, crossing the room. “Don’t,” I said, pushing her hand away. We stared at each other until the sound stopped.
“Why didn’t you answer it?” she asked, stroking her cast.
“Didn’t want to.”
“Why?”
“Finish your programs. It’s ten o’clock. We’ll go to the park soon.”
When she wasn’t looking, I took the receiver out of the cradle and let it hang, disconnected.
On Sunday it rang later, when she
was in bed. I came out of her room and stood next to it.
“I’m not going to answer, so you might as well give up,” I thought. “You can call and call but I’m never going to answer.”
I looked at myself in the mirror next to the coat hooks. My eyes were bucketed by bruise-colored rings, the whites webbed with threads of scarlet vein. I dug my nails into my arm and felt sticky half-moons spring up where I broke the skin. When the ringing stopped, the silence was like cool water closing over my head. I made myself count my breaths, the way they had taught me to count my breaths when I was teetering on the edge of a rage, but the noise started again before I got to ten. It seemed even louder, even more insistent. I pushed my belly with my fingers and felt the hard pouch of an organ, and I kept one hand there—on the liver or spleen or whatever else lived in the dark inside swamp—as I picked up the phone. The voice that spoke was tight, like a can peeling open.
“Hello?” they said. They were breathing heavily. I imagined I could smell them through the holes in the receiver, the mustard-colored smell of unbrushed teeth.
“Chrissie?” they said.
I pushed the button to disengage with my fingernail. The dialing tone was a dull cry.
“Right,” I thought. “So that’s that.”
Chrissie
At school on Monday they made us sit in rows in the hall, like for Friday assembly, except it wasn’t Friday, it was Monday. The hall smelled of mince and pencil sharpenings and the sun lit up the dust in the air, made it dance in sparkling columns. My class came in when Class Six was already sitting down, and I looked in the rows for Susan. You could always spot Susan because she had the longest hair of any girl in the school. It went all the way down to her bottom. In the summer she sat on a cushion in the front garden after her bath, and her mammy sat on a stool behind her and chatted to Karen’s mammy in the garden next door while she combed her hair, and Steven toddled up and down the path and every time he came up to his mammy she kissed him. Sometimes I leaned on the wall to watch. By the time the hair was all combed through, the sun had dried it to a yellow-white sheet, and Susan’s mammy ran her fingers through it like warm sand. Then she put the comb in her pocket and patted the top of Susan’s head. Susan didn’t often join in when we were playing out, even when it was something really fun, like the game where we snuck into Mrs. Rowley’s house through her broken back door and pinched her things, or Sardines. She mainly sat in the playground with the other Class Six girls, letting them take turns stroking her hair.