by Nancy Tucker
The only person who still didn’t come out to play was Susan. She didn’t even come to school. I only saw her in the evenings, when she stood at her bedroom window with her hands pressed against the glass. I never knew if she saw me. When she hadn’t been at school for two whole weeks I went up to one of the Class Six girls at playtime and asked where she was.
“Susan?” she said. “You mean the one with the dead brother?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Don’t know,” she said. “At home, probably.” Then she ran off, because Class Six girls weren’t meant to talk to Class Four girls. I turned it over in my head—“Susan, the one with the dead brother.” Before it had always been “Susan, the one with the long hair.”
Betty wasn’t at school either, but she had mumps, not a dead brother. Miss White said we had to tell her straightaway if we thought we might have mumps too. I told her every day, lots of times, but she just said, “Stop being silly and get on with your worksheet, Chrissie.” At afternoon play I snuck back into the classroom and broke all the coloring pencils in the coloring pencil tray. Snap-snap-snap-snap. I-hate-Miss-White.
On Tuesday I went bottle collecting with Linda after school. Lots of people threw their glass bottles in the bin like they weren’t worth anything, but we fished them out and swapped them for sweets. Sometimes the bottles had dark drops of Coca-Cola at the bottom, and I shook them onto my tongue. Linda said that was gross. The bad Coca-Cola drops were gross, tasted rotten, but the good ones were like sugar syrup. It was worth the risk. On Monday we took Linda’s cousins with us, but they didn’t really help with the bottle collecting. They were just silly little boys. It wasn’t a good bottle day, because the bins had just been emptied and no one had had time to drink any Coca-Cola. I always asked Miss White if I could have the crates of empty milk bottles from school but she always said no, which was typical Miss White. If I’d had the milk bottles I would probably have been a millionaire by the time I was nine. I found two cream soda bottles in the gutter but one of them was smashed in half. I took it anyway. Linda just found one and the boys just made fire engine noises.
“This is rubbish,” said Linda as we walked to the shop. “We never get this little of bottles.”
“Well it’s not my fault,” I said.
“Whose fault is it?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably Prime Minister’s.”
“Why’s it his fault?” she asked.
“Linda,” I said. “Everything is his fault.” Sometimes it was tiring having a best friend who was thick.
When we got to the shop Mrs. Bunty said she would only give us a quarter pound of sweets, which wasn’t nearly as much as we deserved, but that was typical Mrs. Bunty. She was mean, mean, mean. Whenever she weighed out sweets she dropped them into the silver bowl of the scales one by one, until the needle was just brushing the right number, then screwed the lid of the jar on tight. When Mrs. Bunty’s bad knee was too bad, Mrs. Harold worked in the shop, and you could tell she wasn’t mean because she poured the sweets into the scales until the needle was way over the right number, and then she said, “Ah well, a few extra sweeties can’t hurt a kiddie.” Mrs. Bunty never did that. Mean, mean, mean, mean.
Me and Linda couldn’t agree on what sweets we wanted for a long time. In the end we got licorice allsorts because that was what I wanted and I was the one who had found two bottles (including the smashed one, even though Mrs. Bunty wouldn’t take it). Also we basically always did what I wanted in the end. Mrs. Bunty weighed them out and poured them into a white paper bag.
“That’s barely any,” I said. She twisted the bag shut at the top.
“You can be grateful or you can go without, Chrissie Banks,” she said. “Honestly. You kids don’t know you’re born, do you? Things weren’t always easy like this, you know. Not when I was a kid. There was a war on.”
“Ugh,” I said. “Why does no one ever talk about anything except the stupid old war?”
We went to the playground after the shop. Me and Linda sat on the roundabout and the boys ran around. Every few minutes they came to me with their hands held out for sweets and I bit one in half and split it between them. They were only little, so they only needed a little bit of sweet.
I was lying on my back when Linda whispered, “Look,” and hit me on the arm. She pointed at the gate. I sat up and saw Steven’s mammy pushing it open. At first I thought she looked all right, because she was wearing a normal dress and cardigan, but then I saw that her feet were bare. She didn’t look at us, but she did look at the boys. They had stopped running and were trying to climb the swing poles. She smiled a sleepy sort of smile and went toward them. When she got close she knelt down and put her arms out.
“Come here, Stevie,” we heard her say. “I knew I’d find you.”
The boys ran away crying, and we ran too, out of the playground and up the street. Before we went round the corner I looked over my shoulder. Steven’s mammy was sitting on the ground under the swing poles. She was making that sound like a fox with a thorn, the same sound she had made when the man had carried Steven out of the blue house. I tried to find my inside-fizzing but it wasn’t there. Remembering was a blunt, twisty ache, like someone was doing a Chinese burn on my guts.
“She’s crazy,” said Linda when I caught her up. She kept looking back to see if Steven’s mammy was following us, but I knew she wouldn’t be. “Who do you think killed Steven?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” I said. “Doesn’t even matter anyway. He’ll be back soon. Like my da.”
“Your da hasn’t been back for ages,” she said.
“Not that ages,” I said.
“I don’t think Steven will come back,” she said. “My grandda never did.”
I didn’t feel like explaining to Linda about people dying and coming back, so I stuffed the rest of the licorice allsorts into my mouth to make my teeth too gummed up to talk. She shoved me.
“Oi! Pig,” she said. Brown dribble oozed down my chin. When Linda went into her house I spat the sweets into the gutter. I ran my tongue around my mouth to see if I had spat the rotten tooth out too, but it was still there, creaking in the gum.
* * *
• • •
On Wednesday I forgot about trying to get sent home sick with mumps because the police came back to school, and this time they talked to all the classes, not just the babies. I saw them through the glass in the door, all polished shoes and shiny buttons. I got a feeling in my belly like an elastic band pulled to nearly snapping or a handful of sherbet dropped in a cup of Coca-Cola. Miss White let them in and said we all had to listen very carefully, so I turned round to face the front. Richard kicked me and I smacked his bare leg. Miss White told us to calm down and stop being silly, and one of the policemen looked at me and smiled with half his mouth. The elastic band snapped. The sherbet foamed up. I felt like God again.
The policemen said all the same things Mr. Michaels had said right after Steven died: that we might have heard a very sad thing happened to a little boy who lived in the streets and we mustn’t go playing in the alleys anymore and some of us might have known the little boy and if any of us had seen him the day he died we had to go and talk to them. I put my hand up as soon as they finished speaking, and Miss White said, “Chrissie, the policemen are very busy and they need to speak to Class Five and Class Six too; we don’t have time for silliness.”
“I saw him,” I said. I looked her straight in the eye.
“Did you?” she said. She looked me straight back.
“Yes,” I said.
“You saw him that day?” asked one of the policemen.
“Yes,” I said.
“Right,” he said. “Would you like to come over here with us for a moment, lass?”
I stood up and walked to the front. I could feel everyone’s eyes on my back, and I bubbled with the powe
r of it. The policeman put his hand on my shoulder and we went and sat on the chairs in the library corner. In the background I could hear whispering and Miss White telling everyone to finish their worksheets, but more than that I could hear fizzing and popping and whooshing. When Steven’s mammy had come to the playground I had been scared my fizzing might be gone for good, because I had felt so cold and quiet inside, but now it was back and better than ever. No one was really finishing their worksheets. They were watching me.
“What’s your name, lass?” asked one of the policemen when we had sat down. They were too big for the little chairs in the library corner. They spilled over the sides.
“Chrissie Banks,” I said. The other policeman wrote it down in a notebook.
“Hiya, Chrissie. My name’s PC Scott and this is PC Woods,” he said. “So, you think you saw Steven the day he passed away?”
“What does PC stand for?” I asked. “Is it police copper?”
“Close. Police constable,” he said. “You think you saw Steven, do you?”
“I know I did,” I said. I realized my head was completely empty, with nothing in it that I could say next. The policemen were looking at me hard, and I could tell they wanted me to carry on, but I just looked at them hard back.
“Could you tell us a bit more about that?” asked PC Scott.
“I saw him in the morning,” I said.
“All right,” he said, and PC Woods wrote something else in his notebook. I thought it was probably “She saw him in the morning.”
“Whereabouts did you see him?” asked PC Scott.
“At the shop,” I said.
“The shop at the end of Madeley Street?” he asked. “The newsagent’s?”
“I don’t know if it sells any news,” I said. “We just go there for sweets.”
He turned his mouth in at the corners the way people do when they are trying not to laugh. “Right,” he said. “And was he with anyone?”
They waited for me to carry on again, but I didn’t again, because I didn’t know what I was going to say next again.
“Who was he with?” he asked.
“His da,” I said. The way they looked at each other and raised their eyebrows made me think that was a very clever thing to have said.
“What time was this?” asked PC Scott.
“Don’t know,” I said.
“What sort of time? Early morning, late morning . . .”
“Afternoon,” I said.
“Afternoon?” he said. “Are you sure? You said it was morning.”
“No, I don’t think it was, actually,” I said. “I think it was afternoon. Nearly teatime.”
They looked at each other again, and PC Woods scribbled something in the corner of his notebook and showed it to PC Scott. They looked so clumsy, stuffed into the little library corner chairs. I felt like they were my very own person-sized dolls.
“Chrissie, what day was it you saw Steven?” asked PC Scott.
“The day he died,” I said.
“Yes, but what day was that? Do you remember?”
“Sunday,” I said.
“Ah,” he said. “You’re sure it was Sunday?”
“Yes,” I said. “I wasn’t at school, and there was church in the morning.”
“Ah,” he said again. The air went out of him like a flattened football. I knew why. Steven had died on Saturday, not Sunday. No one had seen him on Sunday, because by Sunday he was buried in the ground. I had got the policemen sniffing and slobbering over nothing, and all without telling them the biggest secret of all. The biggest secret of all was that I was the biggest secret of all. I felt even more like God than ever.
“Well, thanks very much for your help, lass,” said PC Scott.
“You’re very welcome,” I said. He stood up and PC Woods copied. I wasn’t sure PC Woods was a real policeman at all. He seemed more like a secretary. “Are you going to catch the person who killed him?” I asked. PC Scott coughed and looked around at the other kids, who were all staring at him.
“We’re going to find out exactly what happened,” he said loudly. “Don’t you worry.”
“I’m not worried,” I said. I went back to my place. Richard jabbed my arm with his pencil.
“What did you talk about?” he whispered. I watched the policemen speak to Miss White. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but I saw PC Woods throw the page of notes he had been writing into the bin by her desk.
“Shhh,” I said. Richard was balanced on the two side legs of his chair, with his arm pressed against mine and our cheeks almost touching. He sniffed three times in a row.
“You smell of pee,” he said. I scooted my chair back from the table so he toppled into my lap, and before he could sit up I slammed my fist down hard on his ear, like my fist was a hammer and his head was the top of a nail. I was holding my pencil. The point went into his ear hole. He wailed. Miss White said good-bye to the policemen looking flustered, and the policemen said good-bye to Miss White looking like they were very glad they were men, not women, because that meant they could be policemen, not teachers. When Miss White came over, Richard was crying too hard to tell her what had happened.
“He just toppled over, miss,” I said. “I think maybe his chair broke. Maybe because he’s quite fat.”
“Christine Banks,” she said. “We don’t make personal remarks.”
“It’s not personal,” I said. “It’s just true.”
When Richard stopped wailing Miss White said we could do coloring until break time, because everyone was overexcited and no one was finishing their worksheets, but then she said actually we couldn’t do coloring after all because someone had broken all the coloring pencils in the coloring pencil tray. She asked if anyone wanted to own up to that. I knew she knew it was me and she knew I knew it was me, and we both knew no one could prove it was me. What an excellent day it was turning out to be.
When we went out to play everyone gathered in a huddle to say what they thought had happened to Steven. Roddy thought there had been baddies in the alleys who had been shooting at each other and one of their bullets had hit Steven by accident. Eve thought he had had a heart attack that made him fall over dead without anyone knowing he was even ill. Some people had such good ideas, I thought they must be right. The thing was, I didn’t always remember I had killed him. It slipped soapily out of my head, and when I went to look for it, there was nothing there. It always slipped back in eventually, and the slipping back in felt different every time. It could be a firework exploding or a block of lead falling or a splash of icy water. It could be a toothache twinge, like when I was watching Steven’s mammy in the playground, or a butter-in-a-pan sizzle, like the night I walked to church in my nightie. But most of the time it just wasn’t there. I liked it that way. It meant I got to be a killer, but I also got days off from being a killer, because a killer was quite a tiring thing to be.
We lined up to go back into the classroom and I saw the policemen through the railings. They were walking to their car and talking to each other. I got a bang of sadness so hard it made me bend over. As they moved away the bubbly power I had felt when I was walking to the library corner got smaller and smaller. I wanted to claw it back. It was the same power I had felt with my hands on Steven’s neck, hearing the spittly wheezing sound, watching the popping eyes. The feeling of my body being made of lectric.
“I need it back,” I thought. “I need it again. I need to do it more, more, more.”
The line ahead of me started filing into the classroom and Catherine pushed me to make me follow, so I pushed her back and she fell over and that meant everyone in the line behind her fell over too. Toppled like dominoes. She cried and Miss White told me off, but I couldn’t hear her over the pulse of my inside clock.
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
* * *
• • •
I wanted to see the policemen again after school, but their car wasn’t parked where it was normally parked and I didn’t know where else to look. I hung around outside Steven’s house for a long time and the policemen didn’t come, so I started walking to the playground. I was nearly there when I saw Donna coming toward me, pulling a little girl by the hand. She didn’t look like any other little girl I had ever seen in real life. She was wearing a puffy blue dress with matching blue shoes, and there was even a blue bow in her hair. It was long hair, and orange-colored, like tiger fur. She didn’t have any mud on her knees. She didn’t even have any mud on her socks. She didn’t look like she came from the streets at all.
The thing about the streets was that everyone living there was poor. Some people were a bit less poor, and you could always tell who those people were because they called things “common.” Betty wasn’t that poor, and the things her mammy called common were pink clothes, tinsel, knee socks, saying “what” instead of “pardon,” tinned fruit, shorts, salad cream, not taking your shoes off inside the house, tulips, saying “toilet” instead of “loo,” felt-tip pens, toothpaste with a stripe in it, loud music, cartoons, and icing. Also, on the table in the hallway of Betty’s house there was a big glass jar where her mammy and da put their pennies so they wouldn’t weigh down their pockets. That was another way you could tell someone wasn’t that poor—they didn’t think pennies were real money; they thought they were just the same as stones or bottle tops. I once asked Betty what they did with all the pennies when the jar was filled up to the top.
“I think Mammy takes them to church for the donation bucket,” she said. “But it hasn’t been full up in ages. Not since before you started coming to my house.”