The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

  “Shut up, potato face,” I said. “He just died. The same as her grandda. The exact same.”

  “Bet it wasn’t the exact same,” said William.

  “Yeah. Bet it wasn’t,” said Donna.

  “Look, everybody,” said Linda. “You have to listen to Chrissie. She’s the cleverest. She knows everything.” Her cheeks went pink, because she didn’t usually say things starting with “Look, everybody,” especially not to Donna. She moved closer to me and I held her hand.

  “Yeah,” I said. “You have to listen to me, and you have to not be mean to Linda, because she’s my best friend and if you’re mean to her I’ll get you. But you mainly have to listen to me because I’m the cleverest and I know everything. And I definitely know what happened to Steven.”

  It wasn’t just special that I was the one who knew what had happened to Steven. It was special that I was the only one who knew what had happened to him, out of kids and grown-ups and even policemen. At school they told us he had an accident while he was playing in the alleys, fell through the floor when the rotten-soft boards gave way underneath him, got his life knocked out of him like water from a slammed-down cup. “That’s why you must never go and play in the alleys,” they said. “Do you understand?” Even if I hadn’t killed him, I would have known that wasn’t true. They’d found his body in the upstairs room, so he couldn’t have died from falling unless he had been playing on the roof, and no one played on the roofs of the alleys, not even me, and everyone knew I was the best climber. He couldn’t have died from cutting himself on glass either, because there hadn’t been any blood when they had found him, whatever I had told Donna. He died from me putting my hands on his throat and squeezing until there was nothing left to squeeze.

  Since Steven had died there had been police cars purring through the streets most days. On Tuesday one of them parked outside the school gates and two policemen went and talked to the baby class. I asked to go to the toilet so I could creep down to the infants’ room and try to hear what they were saying, but the door was shut and Mrs. Goddard caught me trying to crack it open.

  “Stop loitering, Chrissie,” she said. “You know you shouldn’t be here. Back to your classroom, please.”

  “You mean listening,” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Listening,” I said. “You mean ‘Stop listening, Chrissie.’ ‘Loltering’ isn’t a word.”

  “Go back to your classroom, Chrissie,” she said. She didn’t like me being right.

  The policemen didn’t talk to any of the juniors that day, which was unfair because I wanted to see them up close and I didn’t want to do my worksheet. After school I saw their car parked outside Steven’s house again, and I sat on Mrs. Whitworth’s front wall, waiting for them to come out. When they got to the gate one of them saw me watching.

  “You should get home, lass,” he said. “Your mammy will be wondering where you are.”

  “No she won’t,” I said.

  “Well, you go home and put the telly on, then,” he said.

  “There’s no lectric,” I said.

  He opened his car door. “Go on, get off with you,” he said. “Not safe for kids to be out in the streets alone.” He folded his body into the seat and they drove away. I watched the car until it disappeared round the corner. The police were spending a lot of time trying to find out what had happened to Steven. Knowing that gave me the sherbet feeling in my fingertips, the same feeling I’d had on my tongue the time Betty had dared me to suck a battery for ten seconds.

  * * *

  • • •

  When we ran out of things to do in the blue house we went back to the streets. While we had been in the alleys the mammies had hung out washing between the roofs of the matchbox houses, and sheets and shirtsleeves waved us a swoopy hello. I told Donna to give me a go on her bike but she wouldn’t, so I hit her and she pedaled home to tell on me. William had coins in his pocket, and when Linda went home for dinner he went to the shop to buy a meat pie. We sat in the playground with our backs against the swing poles while he ate it.

  “How long do you think Steven will be dead for?” I asked. His mouth was too full of pie to answer. A tear of gravy slid down his chin. I could smell it—brown-smelling, salty—and my insides sucked. He chewed for a long time, and then he took another bite and chewed some more. I kicked his leg to make him pay attention.

  “How long do you think Steven will be dead for?” I asked.

  “Don’t kick me!” he said.

  “Kick you if I want to,” I said.

  He slammed his fist between my eyes and knocked my head against the pole. The clunking sound rang in my ears. I didn’t cry. I never cried. I tried to kick him again but he pulled his leg out of the way.

  “He’ll be dead forever,” he said.

  “Nah,” I said. I knew that wasn’t right. He had been dead for a long time already, and forever was a very long time more. I thought he would probably be back alive by Easter. Easter was a good time for coming back alive. He definitely wouldn’t be dead for actual ever.

  “Yeah,” said William. “He will.”

  “He won’t,” I said, and I put my hands over my ears so I couldn’t hear him anymore. The sucking on my insides grew until it felt like there were clawing fists in my belly. “Give us a bit of your pie,” I said. He shook his head without looking up. His cheeks were so full they bulged. “If you give us a bit of your pie I’ll let you put your hand down my underpants,” I said.

  He swallowed and sighed. “All right then,” he said. “But only one bite.”

  We stood up. I lifted the front of my dress, took his hand, and slid it between my legs. His fingers were warm and limp against me, and he was standing close, close enough that I could count the freckles on his cheeks. His breath was hot and smelled of gravy. We stood that way for a little while. His fingers stayed limp. I dropped the hem of my dress and hung my arms by my sides. I pretended to be a puppet. It was pretty boring, really.

  When he took his hand out he put it straight into his pocket, and he shoved the rest of the pie toward me so he could put the other hand in the other pocket. I ate it quickly. It tasted of salt and lard, with rubbery meat that squeaked between my teeth. I was so hungry I forgot about chewing on the side without the rotten tooth, and pain snaked all the way down my neck. When I’d finished we climbed the swing poles, but we couldn’t get as high as usual because of the grease on our hands. William said he was going to go home, and I said if he left I’d run after him and give him the worst Chinese burn of his life, and he cried. I didn’t know whether it was because of the Chinese burn or because he had put his hand in my underpants. I didn’t think either was something to cry about.

  Julia

  By the time I got up the stairs the phone had stopped ringing. I washed the speckled milk out of Molly’s cereal bowl and went back to the door. I stopped before unlocking it. My thoughts were wrapped around the phone, and when my thoughts were elsewhere I still forgot I could unlock doors for myself. I thought perhaps by the time I was thirty I would have unlearned the instinct to wait for a grown-up to come with a key. When I was thirty I would have lived outside Haverleigh’s walls for longer than I had lived within them.

  Haverleigh was a Home, but the sort with a capital letter at the beginning and a fence around the edge, a place for kids too bad for their small-letter homes. They had taken me there from prison, in a car with grayed-out windows. Before I left my cell I ate the plate of food the guard brought up from the canteen: sausages with split brown skins, a dark circle of black pudding like the soil at the bottom of a plant pot. I ate it quickly, using my fingers, swallowing lumps and feeling them land like pebbles in my belly. I didn’t know if I’d ever be fed again. When I finished they put me in the car with two policemen and we drove for hours, down winding, twisting roads that made my breakfast wind and twist around inside. A thin film o
f grease settled over my gums, across my tongue, crouched in my lost-tooth gaps. It tasted of meat and something bitter, like petrol, washing up from my guts.

  “I feel a bit sick,” I said.

  “Take deep breaths,” said the woman policeman.

  “Can I roll down the window?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. She opened the glove compartment and passed me a paper bag. “Here you go. You can be sick in there.”

  I spent the rest of the journey trying to get the sick to come up my throat, because I wanted to spit it all over the backseat. They’d have to let me roll down the window if I did that. It didn’t come until the car pulled to a stop in the Haverleigh drive and the woman policeman came round to open my door. The rush of cool air hit me in the face. I leaned out and threw up on her shoes.

  “Oh, God,” she said.

  “Told you I felt sick,” I said, wiping my mouth with my hand and wiping my hand on the seat. She pulled me out by the elbow and I saw a squat, square collection of buildings. It didn’t look like a prison at all. I twinged with disappointment. I had imagined barbed wire and bars on windows. I knew that would have impressed Donna when she came to visit.

  The people who patrolled the Haverleigh corridors were less parents than zookeepers. They woke me at the same time each morning, took me to the bathroom, watched me shower, took me back to my bedroom, watched me dress, took me to the dining room, watched me eat, took me to school, watched me rip up my exercise book and hide under my desk. Most of them were kind. They called me things like “mate” and “pal” and “kid,” and taught me ways to pull myself back from the brink of a rage—breathing, counting, listing the objects I saw around me. During the days, the keepers were with me all the time, making me think they were there because they liked me, but in the evenings they started looking at their watches and saying, “Are night staff here yet?” Whatever we were doing together, when the night keepers arrived the day keepers got up and said, “Bye, kid, see you tomorrow.” That was when I remembered they didn’t really like me at all. They were just being paid to be with me. That was when I threw the game board across the room, or ripped up my homework book, or slammed another kid’s head into the wall. When you did bad things like that the keepers descended, one for each limb, held you so tight you couldn’t move. I did lots of bad things. It felt nice to be held. I liked going limp in their arms and hearing them say, “There. Well done for calming down. Good girl, Chrissie. Good girl.” It was almost like I wasn’t bad at all.

  Haverleigh buzzed with rhythms and noises all its own—alarms that screamed down the corridors, kids who screamed in their rooms—but most of all its sound was the rattle of the keys the keepers wore in fat bunches on their belts. When I started the new life I stood at every closed door I came to, waiting for a keeper to unlock it and let me through. Every time I realized I could open it myself I felt an urgent need to scream. People said it wasn’t fair that I had been let out when I turned eighteen, said I should have been locked up forever. I agreed: it wasn’t fair. The people in charge had hidden me away, then thrown me into a life I hadn’t expected to have to live, in a world I hadn’t expected to have to understand. I missed the clanks and clinks of Haverleigh’s halls, the big metal locks on its doors.

  “That was my home,” I wanted to say, “my small-letter home. It wasn’t fair to make me leave.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The cold weather brought a gust of workmen into the shop, and I spent the day putting parcels of chips into plastic bags and ringing up prices on the till. At dinnertime I took a chicken and mushroom pie from the heated display and ate it in the corner of the kitchen. The filling was mealy, bound by salty gray glue. I licked stray crumbs of pastry from between the tines of the metal fork and felt a small loss when it was finished.

  At three, Mrs. G came out of the office and tapped me on the shoulder.

  “I have a woman on the phone for you,” she said. “Sasha someone. She says she tried your phone upstairs. She says she is from the Children’s Services. She doesn’t say what she wants. You will come and speak to her?”

  My tongue turned to a hot hunk of raw meat in my mouth. I looked at Arun, and with my eyes I said, “Please tell me I can’t go. Tell me I need to mop the floor or fry some more fish or see to the customers.” There was one old woman at a table in the corner, peeling the batter off a piece of cod. Arun flapped his hand and said, “Yes, yes, go, Julie,” and I followed Mrs. G. I felt like a kid sent out of the classroom. In the office, she patted my shoulder, went to the couch, and picked up her knitting. I thought she would go back to the kitchen, but she chose two pink-wrapped sweets from the bowl on the coffee table and sat down.

  “Don’t take notice of me, dear,” she said. “You get on with your phone-calling. I will be listening to my radio.”

  Mrs. G was very sweet and very nosy. She wouldn’t be listening to the radio. She would be listening to me. I picked up the phone with the tips of my fingers.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “Hi, Julia, hi.” Sasha was one of the only people in the world who knew who I really was. She pretended not to hate me, but it didn’t work—I could hear it in her voice, under the topcoat of brightness. Hatred. “How are you?” she asked.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “Good. Good. So. I had a call from the hospital,” she said. I felt it as a fishing hook lowered down my throat, snagging on my tonsils and trying to turn me inside out. “How’s Molly? Getting used to the cast?”

  Molly was offensively proud of her cast. She’d only had to wear the sling for the weekend, and I had been glad to slide both her arms into her coat on Monday morning. When she had worn her coat with the sling the empty sleeve had flapped ghoulishly. On Monday I eased it down over the cast, so only the white edge peeped out, and she hoiked it back up, determined that the plaster should be the first thing anyone noticed about her. She walked into school with it held aloft, like a trophy, and came back with felt-tip drawings from elbow to palm. She spent a long time pointing at different pictures and telling me who had drawn them, and when we got back to the apartment she asked me to add my own. I didn’t.

  “She’s fine,” I said.

  “Good,” said Sasha. “That’s good. Well, I just thought it might be a good idea if you popped in to see me. Just for a quick meeting. I was wondering about tomorrow morning. Would that work?”

  “Tomorrow?” I said.

  “The morning. Ten? Would ten work for you?”

  “But Molly’s fine.”

  “Shall we just chat tomorrow?”

  I didn’t want to chat tomorrow. I wanted to tell Sasha that her saying “just” so many times didn’t make the things she was talking about any less threatening, and I wanted to ask who had snitched on me. My guess was the slit-eyed doctor who thought I had hurt Molly on purpose. Mrs. G had started humming along to the music on the radio, and the clock on the wall told me I needed to leave to collect Molly from school, and my throat felt narrowed to a thin rubber tube.

  “Tomorrow. Fine. Bye,” I said. I put down the phone. It hurt to swallow. It hurt to breathe. I tried to push away the blockage between my collarbones, but it stuck.

  If Mrs. G hadn’t been clacking her knitting needles behind me, I would have asked Sasha whether the point of the meeting was to tell me they were taking Molly away, and she would have made high-pitched objection noises and changed the subject. I was glad that that pantomime hadn’t been played out. They had wanted to take Molly for years but hadn’t been able to find a reason, and now it was here, big and clumsy and covered in felt-tip scribbles. I thought of the peeling-can voice I had heard on the phone. Chrissie. Whoever it was had tracked me down somehow. They must have spoken to someone who knew me, someone who hated me. Sasha knew me. She hated me.

  The pain was a tight band across my shoulders, spreading through the base of my skull. I arched my
back against it. It was the same pain I felt every year, sprouting with spring and waning with summer. Sometimes, when I felt it spread from my shoulders to my head, I imagined it as blood in water. Dark red hands reaching into clear fluid. I rubbed the bumps of spine that rippled the back of my neck.

  “You have a stiff neck?” Mrs. G asked.

  “It’s fine,” I said, but she was already behind me, a head shorter and twice as wide. She moved my hands away and I felt her thick fingers on me. The skin on the pads was hard from years of guiding knitting needles through wool. I smelled spices and sawdust and found, abruptly, that I wanted to cry. The brush of her skin on mine made me feel young and bare. I clenched my teeth. I never cried.

  “You have a very stiff neck, dear,” she said. She moved her thumbs in steady circles at my hairline. “Very stiff neck and shoulders. Is all this hunching over the fryer that Arun is making you do. I will have words with him. You should lie on the floor every day for twenty minutes. Put books under your head and lie flat on the floor. Very still. Yes?”

  I nodded but didn’t speak. I took off my apron, pulled on my coat, and walked into the cold afternoon.

  It had all been for nothing. The months of sickness and stretching, the years of washing and working and worrying. I had bought Molly trainers with lights in the heels and taken her to church on Christmas Eve and taught her to look both ways before crossing the road, and I might as well have thrown her baby body in a corner and waited for her to cry herself to death. Both versions ended the same way: with me alone again.

  The week before she fell off the wall she had stopped chewing in the middle of tea and stared at me, bug-eyed, fingers on her mouth.

  “My tooth, my tooth,” she had squeaked.

  “Does it hurt?”

  “It feels funny.”

  “Funny sore?”

  “It feels funny.”

  That was the worst thing—the fact that Sasha was cruel to take her, and wicked to take her, and right to take her. Because any kid who stayed with me would grow up a jigsaw of rotted, crumbling parts. If Molly stayed with me, she would grow up to be Chrissie.