The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

  “What you crying for?” I asked. “Is it because I came back?”

  She didn’t answer. I pulled the door shut, because it seemed like I was making things worse, not better. There was a shriek, then the sound of something hard and heavy thrown against the wall.

  “You don’t understand,” she shrieked. “You don’t even care. You don’t even care, Chrissie.”

  She stopped crying quite quickly after that, probably because I couldn’t see her and she realized I wasn’t coming in to tell her I did care. If she wasn’t going to get me to do anything by crying, she wasn’t going to get much from crying at all, except sore eyes and a scratchy throat. I squeezed the muscles in my belly, bent over, and sicked Angel Delight onto the floor. It dripped through the cracks between the boards. Mam could clear it up. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand, stepped over the cream-colored puddle, and went into my bedroom. Shut the door behind me. Jumped onto the bed, front first. Told myself the next morning I would hurt someone, anyone, as many-one as I liked. Took a lump of pillow in my mouth and roared.

  Julia

  In the six months Molly had been at school, I had never been late to collect her. The closest I had come was the day she had broken up for Christmas, when I had been stuck in a queue in the toy shop. I had paid, raced back to the apartment, and hidden the marble run in my wardrobe, next to a box of stocking toys I had been squirreling since August. I had slipped through the school gates at three thirty, just as Miss King had led out the crocodile of four- and-five-year-olds. Molly had scampered over with holly painted on her cheeks and a chocolate Father Christmas in her fist.

  “We had a party and there was missing-toe, you kiss people under it, me and Abigail didn’t kiss, we just rubbed our noses together, can I eat this now?”

  I had been so blind and so lucky back then. I hadn’t even been properly late. This time the gates were swung wide and the tide of other-mothers and other-kids was working against me. I stood still, waiting for them to pass. I felt I was an outline with nothing inside. Being bumped by the crowd would have made me crumple.

  Molly was standing by the water fountains with Miss King, who saw me and launched her my way.

  “You were late,” Molly said when she reached me.

  “I was on the phone,” I said.

  We got to the seafront and she pointed to the skeleton of the funfair, which was open but empty, with frozen rides and men smoking roll-ups in control booths.

  “Can we go there?” she asked.

  “No,” I said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because it’s just a normal day. The fair isn’t for normal days.”

  “What days is it for?”

  “Special days.”

  “Like the first day of spring?”

  “No. Not like that at all.”

  I tried pressing the skin around my eyes again, but I couldn’t squash the pain cloyed in the sockets. Molly kicked a pebble onto the grass and made a noise that was halfway between a groan and a whine. “You never let me do anything fun,” she said.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  A woman and little girl joined the path in front of us. The girl was wearing a flouncy dress and slip-on shoes that gapped from her heels when she walked. Before I could stop it, the tally machine in my head whirred to life.

  It’s cold. She should be wearing tights. Molly is wearing tights. Molly’s legs aren’t cold. One point.

  Those shoes are too big, and they don’t have any support. Her feet won’t grow properly. Molly’s shoes are the right ones for growing feet. The woman in the shoe shop told me. Two points.

  That’s not a sensible dress. She won’t be able to run around in it. She’ll have to worry about getting it dirty. Her mam shouldn’t use her like a doll. Molly’s clothes are made for living, not for show. Three points.

  The woman bent and lifted the girl onto her hip. The girl wrapped her legs around her waist and dropped her head onto her shoulder.

  She has a proper mother. Molly doesn’t. Soon, Molly won’t have a mother at all. Minus points. Minus all the points you ever earned.

  I looked at Molly hopping over cracks in the path. The wind had whipped color into her cheeks, and it made her prettier, because it made her less like me. That was where the best bits of Molly lived—in the gaps between her and Chrissie, in her soft mouth and clear eyes. I sometimes felt there was a template kid, a pale, dark-haired little girl, and Molly and Chrissie were there to show what happened when she was was fed or starved, clean or grimy. Since I had been in the real world I had washed every day and eaten away the sharpest of my edges, and it gave me a warm thrill to know how much Molly looked like me. It stopped me having to think about the genes that weren’t mine.

  The man who had given me Molly had been less a man than a boy, and less a boy than a gangling mesh of limbs and bravado. He was called Nathan; it said so on his badge. My badge said Lucy, because that was the first new name they gave me when they let me out, the first new life I slipped into. Nathan and Lucy stacked shelves at the hardware store where probation officer Jan had found me a job. Jan always talked about how good it was that I was out in the real world, because life in the real world was so much better than life in prison. At the hardware store interview they laid out a selection of screws and bolts and doorknobs and asked us to choose the item we were most like, ready to “present” to the group. People clamored at the table until the only thing left was a packet of iron nails. I pressed one into the pad of my finger as I waited for my turn to say how strong and sharp I was, and I thought of Haverleigh. It had been a kind of prison. It hadn’t been nearly as bad as this.

  Nathan liked to tell me which pub he had been to at the weekend, who he had been with, and which football match they had watched. He stammered, but only on words beginning with t. His local pub was the Tavern, his football team was Tottenham, and all his friends seemed to be called either Tom or Tony. One of the checkout girls told me he liked me, and I laughed, because nobody liked me. I didn’t laugh when he asked me out for a drink. I said, “Okay.”

  We went to the pub by the train station. I didn’t know what I would tell him if he asked about my life before the hardware store. Luckily he didn’t. He didn’t seem interested in any part of my life, but he still asked if I wanted to go back to his apartment. I said, “Okay.”

  I was wearing my work polo shirt: blue, with the Penton Supplies logo on the chest. He pulled it over my head without undoing the buttons, left my ears ringing. He wore a crucifix on a silver chain around his neck, and while it was happening I counted how many times the pendant bumped against my face. When I lost track I turned my head to the side and read the titles of the videos stacked next to his telly. I felt I was being pushed against very hard, as if he was trying to break through a solid wall inside me. I thought how frightening it was to be crushed underneath someone bigger and stronger than you, their body blocking the light, squeezing out your air. It was horrid, feeling frightened. I wished it hurt more.

  “Are you okay?” he asked from above me, again and again.

  “Okay,” I said from below him, again and again. I was flat on the floor, his weight drilling into me, my body cracking and seeping like a stretched scab. I was a lot of things. “Okay” wasn’t one of them.

  “Oh,” I said when the pain changed from an ache to a stab. He made a grunting noise at the back of his throat. “Oh,” I said again. He grunted again. It was a happy sort of grunt. It made me think he liked me. I wondered how anyone ever knew this thing was over, whether it would go on indefinitely, whether he would know when to stop, whether he would tell me it had finished. After a long time he went still, gasped, and slid out, and I was relieved that the ending, at least, was clear: a stinging emptiness. We rolled away from each other. I pulled up my jeans and curled my knees into my chest. I felt open and sticky, like a wound.

  “Right,�
�� I thought. “So that’s that.”

  We did it five more times over the next three weeks. It didn’t hurt after the first time, just felt like stretching, like being a glove full of hot oil. He liked it, and I liked the feeling of him liking it. It felt almost the same as him liking me. I wasn’t sure if I liked it or not—the act itself, the smells and sounds and heavy closeness—but there was a peace to it, an occupied feeling, and I liked that. I didn’t feel much about him, and he gave me no reason to think he felt much about me. We never talked about what we were doing. We looked in opposite directions while it happened. I sometimes felt it was a secret we were trying to keep from each other.

  A month after the first time, I was putting paint tins on shelves when the checkout girl tapped my back.

  “Can you cover my till for five minutes?” she asked. “I’ve got to run to the chemist.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “Thanks,” she said, and leaned in. “Morning-after pill.”

  “Okay,” I said, suddenly feeling a lot less than okay, suddenly hot and sick. I bought a test instead of dinner, and sat in the fourth-floor toilet that no one used because the window didn’t close and the cold tap was broken. There was a poster advertising halogen lightbulbs on the back of the door, and I read it from start to finish while I waited, trousers and underpants wrinkled at my ankles. I learned a lot. The two lines came up like swearing fingers.

  “Right,” I thought. “So that’s that.”

  * * *

  • • •

  I held Molly’s sleeve as we crossed the road in front of the shop. Inside, Arun was filling the pickled egg jar. Eyeball globes in murky brown vinegar. I could smell them from the pavement, and I felt the sickness as a spider, inching hairy legs onto the back of my tongue. As I looked for the key to the apartment, Molly dawdled in the strip-lit doorway, looking for attention.

  “Hi, Arun,” she called when he didn’t immediately oblige.

  “Hello, Miss Molly,” he said, wiping his hands on his apron and drinking from a can of Coke. “How are you this afternoon? How is the poor arm?”

  “Okay,” she said. “How many chips have you cooked today?”

  “Oh, today is slow day,” he said. “We only cook fifteen thousand today.”

  “Yesterday it was twenty.”

  “I know. And the day before it is twenty-five. What can I do?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “Today we do not even sell all the chips we cook. Is nightmare. So many left over. I am thinking—do I know any hungry little girls? But then I am thinking, no, I can’t think of anyone . . . not anyone at all . . . .”

  “She’s not hungry,” I muttered. I found the key and crunched it into the lock, but Molly was already in the shop. I heard the scrape of metal on tile as she pushed past the stools by the mirror.

  “You know me, Arun,” she said.

  “Molly, can you come inside please?” I called. When she didn’t appear I leaned round to look through the shop doorway. She was at the counter, her face pressed to the heated display, watching Arun rustle chips onto a sheet of white paper.

  “No, Arun, really,” I said. “We’ve got food. She doesn’t need those.”

  “Is nothing, is nothing, Julie,” he said. He wrapped the chips in a parcel that he handed to Molly, which she clutched like a newborn. Upstairs, she deposited it on the table and peeled away the layers of paper. I breathed through my mouth. In the shop the smell of oil bounced off the tiles, but the apartment was made of carpet and curtains, made to suck up the stink of grease. I opened the window.

  Watching Molly eat, I felt a dull, itchy panic. It was four o’clock. Four wasn’t teatime. Four was snack time, ready for four thirty reading time, ready for five o’clock Blue Peter time. If Molly had tea at four we would have an empty slot at five thirty—half an hour of blank time I wouldn’t know how to fill—and then she might be hungry again by bedtime, and I wouldn’t know whether or not to feed her, what to feed her, whether to brush her teeth again, how long she should wait between eating and sleeping.

  The phone began to ring, and I pushed my head out of the window. The air was cool and slightly sweet, and I sipped it through clenched teeth. Outside, a man was trying to get into the house next to the souvenir shop. He banged on the door with the flat of his hand, forced it with his shoulder. It was like watching a lump of unproved bread dough thrown against a wall: bluntly, yeastily ineffective. He slithered down to the ground, tried to drink from a glass bottle, missed his mouth. Started to cry. The trill of the phone seemed to grow with each ring—louder, more insistent—and I imagined the journalist on the other end of the line. I felt her perfume, the tip-tap of her nails on the typewriter.

  “Why have you got the window open?” Molly called. “It’s cold.”

  “Just getting some air,” I said. The phone stopped ringing, and I ducked back in to lean against the glass. The explanation had solidified in my mind on the walk back from school: the doctor had called Sasha, and Sasha had called the papers. I rummaged around inside myself for panic or betrayal, but it wasn’t there. Sasha would have been paid a lot of money for my phone number, more money than she’d earn in a year of work. It was horrid to be poor. I felt numb.

  “I really need a party dress, you know,” Molly said.

  “What?” I said.

  “I need a party dress. For Alice’s party.”

  I touched my forehead: chilled, spongy, like the skin on a dead person. I went to the bathroom and spread the mat on the floor. Molly maintained a stream of vague dress-based grumbling, which blended with the grumble of water into the tub. It occurred to me that it didn’t matter whether I kept her clean anymore, because keeping her clean was part of keeping her, and I wasn’t getting to keep her. It occurred to me that if I didn’t give her a bath, there would be more unstructured time to fill before she went to sleep. The taps stayed on. I tried not to picture her trussed in puff sleeves and a sash. I knelt next to the tub, rested my head on the side, and watched the water rise.

  When Molly had been growing inside me, I had spent most of my life looking at bathrooms side-on. I was sick in a way I had never been sick before, in a way I thought, surely, no one had ever been sick before. At night I would wake with bladed fingers squeezing my stomach, and crawl to press my cheek to the cold lip of the tub. My sweat was so salty it felt like granules pushing out of my skin, milled crystals running down my neck. My belly would cramp and then it would come, a retch that sent me choking into the toilet bowl, so violent I expected to throw up the baby in a swish of bile.

  Since they had let me out, I had been doing my best to disappear, but Molly made me neon. Strange women beamed at me, asked if it was a boy or a girl, asked when it was due, asked if I was tired, tried to give me their seat on the bus. I felt like a con artist. If they had known who I was, they would have kicked me under the bus’s wheels. As I got bigger—comically big, unnecessarily big, surely the biggest anyone had ever been—I left the flat less and less. I looked down at the foreign mass stuck to the front of my body and thought, “Please get out, please get out, please, somebody, get it out of me.” And then night would come, and I would be back on the bathroom floor. I would hold my hands to my belly, feeling the knobs of knee and elbow through my skin. She didn’t feel foreign. She felt like a friend. I had been so lonely before.

  At Haverleigh we had planted sunflower seeds, and I had told the keepers mine would grow shriveled, because I was the bad seed and any seed I planted was bad too. My flower grew yellow and strong. You wouldn’t have known it had come from a seed at all. That was what I thought of as I knelt on the bathroom floor at night: the bright, soft petals. Babies grew from seeds. Matron had said so. I clenched my teeth in prayer. “Please stay inside. Please stay inside. Please, whoever you are, stay inside me.”

  Chrissie

  When Steven had been dead for a while, most mammies stopp
ed keeping their kids at home with them after school, because it got warmer and they got sick of having their kids at home with them after school. Mam was still sick of me, but she didn’t try to give me away again. She was usually out when I got back from school or from playing, or else she was in her room with the door closed and the light off. We still went to church every Sunday. Mam always liked God, even when she didn’t like me. We had to get there late and leave early because Mam didn’t like other people, and if we got there late and left early other people barely noticed we were there. Church was the only time Mam was really happy—when she was singing “Lord of the Dance” and “Morning Has Broken” and “Bread of Heaven” with her eyes closed and her face tilted toward the sky. Her singing didn’t fit with the rest of her. It was high and pretty. I quite liked church, because sometimes I could steal some coins off the collection plates at the back, and I liked the vicar touching my head when I went to the front to get blessed. When we got back to the house Mam usually slithered into a lump on the doormat. I tried to make her come into the lounge but she wouldn’t move, and she was too heavy to lift. In the end I usually lay down beside her in the hallway, took a piece of her hair in my fingers and ran it around my mouth. It felt like a feather. I didn’t know why she got so sad after church, but I thought it was probably because she knew she wasn’t going to get to sing any more hymns for a whole week.