The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

  “I think we should talk about something else now,” I said.

  So I knew Betty was richer than me, and I knew I was richer than the kids in the alleys, but we were all still basically poor. That was why the little girl looked so different, and that was why I stared. She didn’t look poor at all.

  “Hi,” said Donna. She put her hands on the little girl’s shoulders the way mammies do when they want to show off their kids. “This is Ruthie. I’m looking after her.”

  “Why’s she wearing them clothes?” I asked.

  “Her mammy dresses her nicely. She showed me all the clothes in her wardrobe. They’re all like this.”

  “Is she rich?”

  “Nah. They live in an apartment. It’s tiny. They’re waiting to move into a house.”

  “How comes she looks like that, then?”

  “Her mammy spends all her money on her. Every single bit of money she has. She just only ever spends it on Ruthie.”

  “It looks like a doll dress.”

  “Yeah. My dress is nice too, isn’t it? It’s new. My nana made it for me.” She held out the skirt of her dress, which was made of a curtainy sort of material with little tassels on the edge. “I think this dress is just as nice as Ruthie’s. Don’t you?”

  “No,” I said. “You look like a lamp. Where’s her apartment?”

  “Near the high street. But her mammy still let me take her here even though it’s far. She said I seemed like a dispensable girl.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Grown-up and good. Do I really look like a lamp?”

  “Yup.”

  Ruthie was getting bored. She wriggled out from under Donna’s fingers. Donna leaned forward so their faces were almost touching and spoke in a syrupy voice. “Do you want to go into the playground with Donna, Ruthie? Do you want Donna to push you on the swings?”

  Ruthie stepped backward and screwed up her nose as if Donna’s breath smelled bad. That made me like her a little bit more. When we got inside the playground she ran to the only baby swing left on the poles and tried to climb in by herself, but it was too high and she kept slipping. She shoved Donna away the first three times she tried to lift her, so Donna came and stood by the roundabout with me. The fifth time Ruthie pulled herself up and fell back down she yelled at us to help. It took both of us to get her into the seat. When I tried to push her she screamed and slapped my hand, so I slapped her back. It was a hard slap—it left a pink mark on her soft arm—but she didn’t cry. She looked half cross and half impressed. Donna tried to push her and she screamed even louder, so we went and sat on the roundabout and let her flap around by herself.

  “She’s got so many toys at home,” said Donna.

  “How many?” I asked.

  “More than you’ve ever seen before in your whole wide life. Her mammy gets her everything she wants.”

  “Why?”

  “Just does. But my mammy says it’s bad for kids to have everything they want.”

  I didn’t think it would be bad for me to have everything I wanted. I watched Ruthie thrashing in the swing, crumpling up her dress. I didn’t think Ruthie was a very good person. If I had had a dress as pretty as that I would have sat still all day to make sure it didn’t get creased or dirty. I didn’t properly know Ruthie, and I hadn’t ever seen her flat or her toys or her mammy, but even without seeing them I knew she didn’t deserve them. She didn’t deserve any of it.

  When Ruthie got bored of the swings Donna said she was going to take her home, because I wasn’t a dispensable girl and Ruthie’s mammy only wanted her to play with dispensable girls. I called Ruthie a lump and Donna a lamp, but Donna just took Ruthie’s hand and said, “Come on, Ruthie, let’s go home to your mammy.” I said I would go with them, because I wanted to look at all Ruthie’s toys, but when we got to the end of the road I saw two policemen walking toward the church. I wanted to speak to the policemen more than I wanted to see the toys, so I ran after them. They were quite a long way ahead of me, and before I could reach them they got in their car and drove off. I kicked the curb and felt my toenail break. I didn’t care. I wished Ruthie had still been there. I wanted to slam her against the curb. I wanted to see what color her blue dress would turn when it had her brains smashed all over it.

  Julia

  Guess what,” Molly called. I turned off the taps and went back to the kitchen. “It’s assembly next week,” she said. Her voice was muffled.

  “Don’t talk with your mouth full,” I said.

  She leaned over, opened her mouth and gently released a clod of chewed potato onto the chip paper. “It’s assembly next week,” she said.

  “Why did you do that?” I asked.

  “You told me to,” she said.

  It was four thirty. I took her reading book out of her book bag and sat down at the table opposite her.

  “Come on. Reading,” I said.

  She knelt up on her chair and stretched until a sliver of skin appeared under her polo shirt. “I think I’m going to be a cat,” she said.

  “What?” I said.

  “I’m going to be a cat. That means I only talk in ‘meow’ and I do things like this.” She curled her hand over, licked the back, and rubbed it behind her ear. “I play it with Abigail. It’s a really fun game.”

  “You can be a cat later,” I said. “Now you’re going to read your book.”

  “Cats can’t read,” she said.

  “I think this one can,” I said.

  “Meow,” she said.

  After fifteen minutes, I agreed that I would stop trying to make her read if she stopped meowing. She trotted into the bathroom looking mildly victorious, and stood on the mat, waiting for me to undress her.

  “Do you know what I’m being in assembly?” she asked as I peeled off her vest.

  “What?”

  “Narrator Four,” she said. She was bare now, ribs cording the skin above her belly, which stuck out like a mixing bowl. Her knees were patchworked with bruises, pushed to the surface of the skin in a mauve-brown sheen. I lifted her into the tub and propped her plastered arm on a stool.

  “Narrator Four,” she said.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “It’s the most important one in the whole assembly,” she said.

  “How many narrators are there?” I asked.

  “Four,” she said. “Miss King said Narrator Four is the most important.”

  According to Molly, Miss King spent most of her working life telling Molly she was better than all the other kids in the class. I wasn’t sure it was ever an honor to be the last in a procession of narrators. Linda had been Narrator Five (of five) three years in a row, because she couldn’t read and she cried whenever she had to speak in front of people. The first year it happened I was next to her on the stage. I knew her lines as well as mine, because I knew everyone’s lines, and when I realized she wasn’t going to say them I stood up and said them for her. I was surprised there was room in my head for the memory—I felt stuffed to the sides of my skull with echoes of Sasha’s voice and visions of Molly’s new mother—but it slipped fluidly into the cracks. Linda’s pale face. The silence before I rescued her. The feel of her hand, cold and sweaty, curled around my wrist.

  I filled a plastic cup with water, tipped Molly’s head back, and poured it over her hair. It turned it to a thin black snake, and the heat turned her skin slick and spongy. Sometimes I felt I was closest to Molly when she was in the bath, because in water she was back to the creature I remembered: a thing made of naked tissue, like a girl-shaped graze. That was how she was when she tore out of me, washed through in a wave of pain that made me want to collar someone and say, “This can’t be real, this must be a joke, you can’t seriously expect me to cope with this,” because nothing that was natural could hurt so much. She came out screaming, as if I was the one who had hurt her, and I
wanted to say, “This isn’t fair. It isn’t fair of you to act this way. You’re the one who hurt me.”

  The pain crested and dissolved, and a nurse held her up like an offering.

  “Skin-to-skin, skin-to-skin!” she said.

  “I don’t want it on my skin,” I thought. “It hurt me.”

  “Time for a cuddle!” she said.

  “I don’t want to cuddle it,” I thought. “It’s too loud.”

  “Lovely healthy girl!” she said.

  “A girl,” I thought. “A girl like me.”

  Then she was there, hot and slimy on my chest. Her face looked made of folds of skin, and it struck me that perhaps this was my punishment. Not the years behind locked doors or the lifetime of probation. My punishment was to have given birth to a baby with no face, only fold upon fold of skin. I heaved, and the nurse shoved a kidney-shaped bowl under my chin, and I vomited into it. Molly stopped screaming, lulled by the hacking she had heard every night for nine months. She was still covered in a fine layer of my insides, and it struck me that she was like an organ, that I felt about her the way I would have felt if someone had scooped out my heart and put it on top of me.

  “Well done, Mum!” said the nurse.

  “That’s not my name,” I thought.

  “Looks like she’s hungry!” she said.

  “What if I’m hungry?” I thought.

  She took hold of Molly’s head and clamped her firmly onto my nipple.

  “There! You’re a natural!” she said, but that wasn’t what I heard. I heard what I was used to hearing: “You’re unnatural.” “Eight years old and killed a kid? That’s not normal. She’s unnatural.” I looked at the nurse, wondering how she had found out who I was. She touched the back of Molly’s head and nodded. “A natural,” she said. I heard it properly that time. I took hold of it like I had taken hold of “Well done,” stored the compliments in my cheeks like a rodent hoarding food. My gown had fallen down when the nurse had shoved her onto me, so I was bare to my belly button. It was suddenly horrible to be so bare in front of a loud woman I didn’t know. I wanted to cry. I looked at Molly, lying across me. She made me less naked, and I felt she was doing it on purpose. I felt she was feeding not for her but for me, so I could use her body as a blanket over my chest. When she stopped sucking the nurse reached over, hooked a finger between her lips, and unstuck my nipple from her gums.

  “Let’s get you cleaned up, little one,” she said, lifting her away from me. I felt untethered without her weight, as if I would float up to the ceiling. When she was in the nurse’s arms she squawked. “You want to go back to Mum, eh, madam?” said the nurse. She returned her and watched as I curled my hand around the back of her head. I thought I was probably doing it wrong. “Has she got a name?” she asked.

  “Molly,” I whispered. It was the only name I had picked out, which made me wonder whether I had somehow felt her girlness inside me. I hadn’t known a Molly in any of my lives; it was fresh and untainted. I liked the softness of the letters in my mouth, the way saying it felt like chewing on silk.

  “Lovely,” said the nurse, and bustled away.

  “Do you like me, then?” I whispered to Molly. She moved her head around as she fell asleep. It was sort of like a nod.

  * * *

  • • •

  I lifted Molly out of the bath at five fifteen and dried her with a large blue towel. She wasn’t usually allowed more than an hour of telly each day, because too much telly would turn her brain to soup, but once she was in her pajamas I turned it on, knowing I wouldn’t turn it off until the kids’ programs finished at seven. I sat at the kitchen table, feeding leftover chips into my mouth one after another.

  At some point between the start and end of ChuckleVision it came to me that I wouldn’t be going to see Sasha in the morning. It wasn’t a decision I had to make; it arrived in my head fully formed. I wouldn’t be at the Children’s Services building at ten, because to walk into that building would be to hand Molly over, and I would walk into the sea before I gave her away. The prospect of the meeting had been a vise around my chest, and without it my lungs had room to swell. Molly and I were ruled by can’ts, musts, the juddering arc of the hands on the clock, because that was the way I steered our rickety carriage. The wheels had come off now; we had careened away from the tracks and were falling through the air. The crash was inevitable—they would find us, they would take her—but until we hit the ground we were free. I didn’t know how long we had before the vultures came pounding at the door, and I didn’t want Molly’s last memory of me to be of my face turning white as an angry mob wrestled me to the floor. So we wouldn’t stay. We would run. There were things I had sworn I would never do, places I had sworn I would never go, because they couldn’t be allowed to leach into Molly’s bubble. That didn’t matter anymore. I was losing her. Nothing mattered.

  At seven I turned off the telly and started brushing her hair.

  “I think we might go away tomorrow,” I said, running a finger down her parting.

  “Where?” she asked.

  “Just away,” I said.

  “Somewhere I know?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. Molly only knew the seaside. She was too small to remember the first new life, the Lucy/Nathan/hardware-store life. In that life I had existed in the three square rooms of a ground-floor apartment, subsisted on metal-tasting food from cans. When I found out I was pregnant I stopped going to work. Like the decision about the meeting, it wasn’t one I had to make; it came to me as fact. Nathan couldn’t find out I was pregnant. I couldn’t go to work without him finding out I was pregnant. I couldn’t go to work. Jan registered me for benefits, and I spent the next eight months sleeping all day and being sick all night.

  They tracked us down when Molly was a small, soft bundle, wrapped in a blanket and draped over my shoulder. They gathered outside with cameras that clicked like an army of crickets. We had to run down the garden path covered in bedsheets, and her head bumped against my chin hard enough to close my teeth around my tongue, and by the time we were in the police car my mouth was full of blood. It tasted of salt and grease. I spat it into my hands. Molly stared up at me, and I was glad she wouldn’t remember this, wouldn’t remember running to the car dressed as a ghost or seeing me spit blood into my hands.

  After Lucy, I was Julia, and they promised me no one would ever find out that Julia had once been Chrissie. But they had promised me no one would ever find out that Lucy had once been Chrissie. Promise was just a word and a name was just a name and I wasn’t Chrissie, not inside, not anymore, but the vultures didn’t care about that. Jan found me the apartment above Arun’s shop, which came with a job frying fish and mopping floors.

  “Not for now,” she said. “Just for when you’re ready. Maybe not until she starts school. Your benefit money will cover the rent until then, and once you start work they’ll do a reduced rate. They’re kind.”

  Nobody asked me if I wanted to fry fish and mop floors. When you used to be Chrissie you didn’t get to choose. Jan thought it was the perfect arrangement, because Arun and Mrs. G were the sort of people who chose not to see things they thought you didn’t want them to see, who twisted facts as much as they needed in order to believe what they had always believed: that people are all, in essence, good.

  Jan drove us to the new town and helped carry our boxes up to the apartment. It didn’t take long; we didn’t have much. Mrs. G had left a film-wrapped cake on the kitchen table. It was dark with seeds, and next to it there was a note: “Welcome, Julia.” When the car was empty we stood on the pavement outside the shop. Molly had been crying and I had strapped her to my chest in a sling. I liked having her there, holding my pieces together.

  “Right, then,” said Jan. “I’ll say my good-byes.”

  It turned out that when the vultures had tracked us down they had taken away more than my apartment and my nam
e, the hours of sleep I had started to piece together at night. They had taken away Jan. I was under a new probation officer now, attached to the police force in the new town. I had just been starting to like Jan.

  She stepped forward and put her hand on Molly’s back through the fabric of the sling. “Bye, Molly,” she said. She moved her hand to my elbow and squeezed it tight. “Bye, Lucy.”

  I stood on the pavement as she got into her car. I watched her drive down the high street and disappear round the corner. “Bye, Lucy,” I said.

  * * *

  • • •

  How long are we going away for?” Molly asked.

  “Not sure. A bit.”

  “Will we be back on Friday? It’s show-and-tell. I have to be back for that.”

  “Mmm.”

  I let my eyes tip shut. My brain felt tender in my skull, like a bruised peach, juice seeping through cracks in the skin. Molly followed me to her bedroom and climbed into bed when I turned back the duvet.

  “Can I get something for show-and-tell from the place we’re going to?” she asked.

  “Good night,” I said, and sat down on the mattress next to her bed.

  When she had been a baby, I had sat by her cot until she was asleep every night. Sometimes she had glared at me through the bars and roared, and I had tensed at the indignant fury of it, but the book I had stolen from the library said I shouldn’t pick her up every time she cried. I closed my eyes against the screwed, pink segments of her face, whispered, “Please don’t be sad, please don’t be sad, please don’t be sad.”

  By the time she was three months old she never cried at night, and the silence scared me more than the screaming. I counted down the minutes until I was allowed to pick her up and hold her on my chest to feed. I did it sitting on the floor, my shoulder blades digging into the wall behind me. I was allowed to hold her to feed, because that was for her. I wasn’t allowed to hold her for me, for the comfort of feeling her warm weight in my arms. That was the rule I had made when she was born: I would give her everything, and ask nothing in return.