by Nancy Tucker
I could only really remember Susan talking to me one time, when I was in Class Two and she was in Class Four. I had been in the playground by myself, trying to walk all the way round the edge with my feet on the bottom bar of the fence, and she had come down the street with a woman who wasn’t her mammy.
“Chrissie!” she shouted when she saw me. I felt quite special, because kids in Class Four didn’t usually talk to kids in Class Two. When she got to the fence she held it and bounced on her tiptoes. “Guess what?” she said. The not-mammy woman came up behind her.
“Susie’s got some exciting news,” she said. “Go on. Tell your friend, duck.”
“I got a baby brother,” said Susan. She said it with her shoulders up to her ears and her eyes shining. I didn’t actually think it was very exciting news at all. People got baby brothers and sisters all the time. I felt pretty cross with her, because she had made me think something actually exciting had happened. Like the vicar had died or something.
“He’s a right little sweetie, isn’t he, duck?” said the not-mammy woman.
“She’s actually a girl,” I said. “Not a duck.”
“He’s called Steven,” said Susan. “Mammy and Da had two names, Stewart and Steven, and they told them both to me and let me choose. I chose Steven.”
“Who’s that woman?” I asked. The not-mammy woman laughed.
“I’m Susie’s Auntie Joan,” she said. “I’ve come to lend her mammy and da a hand while they get to know the little one. What’s your name, pet?”
“Chrissie,” I said.
“That’s a nice name,” she said. “Well, we’d best be getting to the shop.”
“Bye, Chrissie!” called Susan as they walked away. “We’ve got to get the things for Mammy and Da and Steven now!”
“Nice to meet you, duck!” called Auntie Joan.
“I’m a girl!” I called, but I didn’t think they heard me. I watched them until all I could see were Susan’s long white plaits, hanging down her back like two bits of rope. When they were gone I spent a lot of time thinking about how different things would be if I had hair like Susan’s—like how I would be very rich, because I would make people pay me for letting them touch my hair, and how everyone would like me. Probably even Mam.
I met Steven two weeks later, on a Friday. When I came out of my classroom there was a crowd of mammies in the playground, flapping and twittering, soft bellies, soft cardigans. I ran over to see what they were fussing about.
“He’s beautiful!”
“Making me want another . . .”
“You’re looking so well!”
“How’s he feeding?”
When I got to the middle of the crowd I saw Steven’s mammy holding the handles of a pram. Her face seemed bigger and brighter than usual, like she had swallowed a bit of the sun, and she was smiling such a big smile it looked like her mouth was going to break. I peered inside the pram to see what was making her so happy. A baby poked out from a white blanket, screwed up and cross-looking. It was quite a disappointment. I had hoped it might be something really interesting, like a badger.
Susan pushed through the crowd to stand on the other side of the pram, put her hand in, and stroked her finger across the baby’s cheek. “Hello, little brother,” she said. “Hello, little Steven. I missed you, I really missed you.” I wanted to see what his skin felt like, so I reached in and started stroking the other cheek. It just felt like skin, really, like my skin or Susan’s skin or any old skin. Another disappointment. I really didn’t understand why everyone was making such a fuss of him. Susan and her mammy were sicking up love all over him, covering him in fat globs of it. It was such a lot of fuss for someone so tiny, who wasn’t a badger or any other interesting animal.
He wriggled and rubbed his fists across his face. I ran my hand over his head and found a funny spongy part. I was seeing how far down I could press it when his mammy pulled me back. “Careful, Chrissie,” she said. “He’s very delicate. You don’t want to hurt him.”
* * *
• • •
Susan wasn’t in the Class Six row that Monday, which meant she wasn’t at school at all. When all the classes were sitting in rows, Mr. Michaels told us we might have heard that something sad had happened at the weekend, that a little boy who lived in the streets had had an accident while he was playing and got killed dead. I was sitting next to Donna, who I didn’t like because she was a goody-goody and she was also fat. I counted the dimples in her puddingy knees while Mr. Michaels talked, and I wanted to put my finger inside one, just to see how it would feel, but she shoved my hand away when I tried.
“Get off,” she whispered.
I cupped my hands around my mouth and pressed them against her ear. “I was there,” I whispered. “When they found him. I was there.”
She flicked her head round to look at me. Our mouths were very close together, close enough that I could have kissed her, except obviously I was never ever going to do that because she was a fat goody-goody. Her breath smelled of jam.
“What did he look like?” she whispered.
“There was loads of blood everywhere,” I whispered. “It was spraying out all over everywhere. Some of it even got on me.” I showed her a reddish-brown circle on the hem of my dress. “See? That’s a bit of his blood,” I whispered. She touched the ketchup stain with one finger and said, “Wow,” then Miss White tapped our shoulders and told us to listen to Mr. Michaels. On the way back to the classroom Donna walked ahead, talking to Betty, and Betty said, “Really?” and turned to look at me. It gave me a hot, humming feeling at the bottom of my belly.
Things were strange that week. Susan didn’t come to school, not on Tuesday or Wednesday or any day. At home time the mammies waited in the playground and when their kids came out they scooped them up and clutched them to soft chests. People weren’t allowed out to play like normal. In the afternoons I walked through the streets with a long stick, dragging it across bricks and gates with a scrape-scrape-clang. Sometimes I stopped and watched telly through a lounge window. When I knocked on doors mammies said their kids weren’t coming out, and told me I shouldn’t be out either. “But I am out,” I said. They sighed and shooed me away. Most days I ended up sitting with my back against Mrs. Whitworth’s front wall, watching mammies go in and out of Steven’s house with loaf cakes and pots of stew. I thought having a kid die wasn’t too bad, really. It got you a lot of cake and stew.
Whenever I looked at the upstairs window of the house I saw Susan. She was always there, always with her hands pressed against the glass. It wasn’t like she was trying to get out, just like she wanted to feel the cold on her skin. I could never see her face properly, but I could see the white of her hair, hanging down past her bottom. I guessed Steven hadn’t come back alive, because I watched and watched the house and I never saw him.
At school on Thursday we started making Easter bonnets and Easter baskets and learning Easter songs because it was nearly Easter. We were supposed to have brought in a cereal box but I hadn’t.
“Where’s your cereal box, Chrissie?” asked Miss White.
“Don’t got one,” I said.
“You haven’t got one,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t got one.”
She folded her arms. “Why not?” she asked. “I reminded you before you went home yesterday.”
“Don’t got no cereal,” I said.
“Don’t be ridiculous, Chrissie,” she said. “Everyone has cereal.”
“I don’t,” I said. She gave me a piece of corrugated cardboard, which was the wrong sort of cardboard for an Easter bonnet, and she should have known that except obviously she didn’t because I was the only person in the whole school who really knew anything. My scissors didn’t cut through it, just chewed it like a baby chewing toast. I gave up and cut the end off Donna’s plait instead. She cried. Miss Wh
ite sent me to Mr. Michaels but I didn’t care. The hair had made a lovely snicking sound when the scissors had gone through it, and I played that sound again and again in my head while I waited to be told off.
After school I went to Linda’s. Her cousin had given her a new Mirabelle magazine at the weekend, and we lay side by side on her bed to read it. Most of the pages were called things like “How to Live Through Love and Stay Smiling.” Mirabelle clearly wasn’t a very good magazine, because Linda’s cousin had been reading it since forever and I had never once seen her smile.
When I was so bored I thought my brain was going to slither out through my nose like snot, I got off the bed and pulled my dress out of my underpants.
“Linda,” I said. “Enough is enough.”
“What’s enough?”
“Enough is. Enough is enough.”
“That doesn’t mean anything.”
“Yes it does. It means we’re going to play out now.”
She rolled onto her back and stretched her legs up in the air like a fly. “No we’re not. It’s not safe. We’ll die like Steven.”
“No we won’t.”
“We might.”
“Well if we don’t play out we’ll die from being bored. And I’d rather die from playing out than from being bored. So I’m going. You do what you want.”
“Shhh. Mammy will hear you.”
When I was at Linda’s house I had to spend a lot of time making sure her mammy didn’t hear me. Linda’s mammy wasn’t a very cuddly sort of mammy. She was the sort of mammy who smelled of church and ironing, and who sometimes went months without saying any words except “Be careful” and “Stop that” and “It’s time for tea.” If you fell over in front of Linda’s mammy she plonked you straight back onto your feet and rubbed your knees like she was scrubbing away dirt, muttering, “No harm done, no harm done.” Except if it was me who fell over. Then she didn’t do any picking up or rub-scrubbing. I knew why she didn’t like me: because when I was seven I told her she had more gray hair than any of the other mammies (which was true) and that that must mean she was older than any of the other mammies (which was also true). That was why whenever she opened the door and found me on the doorstep she folded her arms tight across her chest, like she had to stop me leaking onto her.
I went down the stairs and out of the front door, treading lightly so I hardly made a sound. I didn’t need to look behind me to see if Linda was following. She always followed. That was the whole point of Linda. I said we should call for Donna, even though I didn’t like her, because she was the only person I could think of who might be allowed out. She had so many brothers that her mammy never noticed if one kid was missing. There were lots of reasons I didn’t like Donna, apart from her being fat and a goody-goody, but the main one was that in the Christmas holidays she bit me on the arm just because I said she had a face like a potato (which was also also true). I had a purple tooth-mark bruise for a week. So she was fat, she was a goody-goody, and she looked like a potato, but beggars don’t get to choose who’s allowed out to play. When we first rang Donna’s bell her mammy tried to send us away, but then one of her other kids was sick on the floor in the kitchen and she changed her mind. She said Donna could come but only if William came too, because he was twelve and a big strong boy and he could look after Donna if there was any bother. Really and truly, William was a weedy, skinny boy who would have been no use at all if there had been any bother, unless the thing doing the bothering was a very tiny baby or a very tiny baby mouse, and even then he would have been no use at all because he was scared of tails. I bit my mouth shut to stop myself saying that. Donna had a pink bike with blue handles. If she came out I could make her give me a turn on it.
“Where are we going?” William asked when we passed the playground.
“Alleys,” I said.
“Nuh-uh. Not allowed. Our mammy won’t let us,” said Donna.
“Your mammy’s not here,” I said.
“She wouldn’t let us if she was here,” she said.
“Well she’s not here.”
“Well I’m not coming.”
“Well I never wanted you to come.”
“Fine. I’ll come then.”
The alleys used to be places for people to live, the same as our houses in the streets. The poorest families lived there, in slummy rooms with black mold on the walls. The alley kids got bad crackles in their chests from breathing dirty air, and scabs on their tummies from being eaten by bedbugs, and scaly rashes round their mouths from the cold drying up their spit. Now the alley houses were being pulled down, and the poor families had nowhere to go. When the houses were gone they were going to build tall, shiny buildings made of boxes stacked on top of each other, and different people were going to live in the different boxes, but the alley families weren’t going to live there because they were going to be expensive. There was a meeting about it at the church hall. Grown-ups took it in turns to stand up and say things like “It is a tragedy that we live in a community that does nothing to protect those most in need.” Me and Linda hung around at the back and ate the biscuits off the trestle table until the vicar told us to scram.
People had started tying white ribbons around the slats of the alley-house fences, so everyone would remember it was where Steven had died. I pulled one off and tied it in my hair. The blue house had cones outside with police tape stretched between them, but there were no policemen and it was easy to duck under. William found a window that hadn’t yet been broken and started throwing rocks at it so we could push out the glass and climb through. We could have used the doorway, but if you were going to be boring like that then you might as well not even go to the alleys in the first place. I got almost all the way through the window before I wobbled and held on to the frame to stop myself falling. There was a biting pain in my palm, and when I jumped down I felt warm run over my fingers. Oozy, oily red. I wiped it on my dress. I didn’t cry. I never cried. It just gave me another stain to pretend was Steven’s blood.
Everyone wanted to see where he had died, so I took them to the upstairs room. I noticed things about it that I hadn’t noticed when I had been there with Steven, like the couch cushions stacked in a pile by the fireplace and the bits of rubbish at the edges. The paper on the walls was peeling, and where the walls met the floor there were bubbles of rot that foamed in a cream-soda collar. In their corners, the alley houses were mainly liquid.
“How do you know it was here?” asked Donna.
“She was there when the man brought him out of the house,” said Linda. “She ran ahead when I was putting Paula’s nappy back on. She watched through the window. She saw the man pick him up off the floor in this room and take him downstairs to his mammy.” That wasn’t actually true, but I liked how important it made me sound. When Donna looked at me I knew she was having to pretend not to be jealous, and for a moment I wanted to tell her it was me who had done the killing, to make her really properly jealous. I had to bite my mouth again. I was having to bite my mouth a lot since Steven had died.
“Is that really true?” Donna asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I saw everything.”
I walked to the patch of floor underneath the hole in the roof, where the sun came in and licked yellow light across the boards.
“This is where he died,” I said. “This is exactly where he died.” The others came and stood in a circle. There was enough space in the middle for a little-boy body.
“How did he?” asked William.
“Just did,” I said. I spat on my finger and rubbed it into my cut.
“That’s not how it works,” said Donna. “People don’t just die for no reason.”
“Sometimes they do,” said Linda. “My grandda, he was at our house for fish supper, when I was five, and he died for no reason. He was just sitting in his chair with a fish cake on his knee. Then he died.” She looked around like sh
e thought one of us was going to scream or fall over.
“Your grandda was probably a hundred years old, though,” said Donna. “Steven was just a baby. It’s not the same.”
“It’s quite same,” said Linda.
“No it’s not,” said Donna. “That’s thick.”
Redness rushed up Linda’s neck, into her face, and she took the corner of her bottom lip between her teeth so her mouth was lopsided. Really and truly, Linda was thick. That was why not many people wanted to be her friend. She was thick at reading and writing and telling the time and tying her shoelaces, and sometimes she said things that were so thick you were surprised that she was even walking around, because you wouldn’t have thought you would know how to walk when you were that thick. Her being thick meant she believed everything you told her, and that was fun sometimes. When we were in Class Three she swallowed her tooth in a mouthful of biscuit at playtime and I told her she would grow an extra mouth in her belly, and the new mouth would eat all her food, and she would waste away thinner and thinner until she died, and now that she had swallowed the tooth there was nothing she could do to stop it. She cried hard, her tears mixing with the red worm of blood running down her chin, and Mrs. Oakfield sent her to the medical room. Mrs. Oakfield asked if I knew why she had been so upset but I didn’t answer. I was busy finishing her biscuit.
Linda hated being called thick because she knew deep down it was true, and I hated people calling her thick because she hated it. I pushed Donna in the chest.