by Nancy Tucker
Reading the book chapter on weaning made my throat thicken with cotton-wool dread. There were chirpy pictures of babies gumming plastic spoons and paragraphs headed “Moving On from Milk!” I felt I might as well be reading about putting Molly in a cardboard box outside the front door, waving and trilling, “Time to move on, Molly! Time to move on from me!” Feeding her straight from my body—knowing that even if we had no money and no home and nothing but each other, she still wouldn’t be hungry—had given me a warm nugget of power, held in my rib cage. I bought vegetables that I mashed with a fork and pushed through a sieve, that Molly massaged into her hair and pasted up her nostrils. She eyed the bottle of formula with disgust, and when I put it to her mouth she curled away, pawing at my top. I put her in the cot. I slipped out of the room, shut the door, sat on the floor with my arms crossed over my swollen chest.
“She won’t cry for long,” I thought.
“She’ll go to sleep soon,” I thought.
“She can’t be that hungry,” I thought.
“The book says this is right,” I thought.
I watched the clock on the wall. I listened to Molly cry. Twin wet circles soaked through my clothes, and I smelled rotten-sweet, like rancid melon. I took off my jumper before I opened the door, peeled off my T-shirt as I went to the cot, unhooked my bra and let it fall to the floor, and picked her up. Her eyelashes were spiked into small black triangles and her fat starfish hand clenched on my breast as she gulped. I unsnapped her from her babygrow, so she was bare and our skins were pressed together. Sweat made it slippy between us. She drank until she was asleep (undesirable) and I laid her down on the mattress beside me (unthinkable) and curled myself in a bracket around her like a crescent moon (unforgivable).
I breastfed until she was two. Steven had been two when he died. I didn’t know whether his mammy had still been breastfeeding, whether she had swelled and leaked and ached without him. It hurt to see Molly drink from a beaker and feel myself desiccate from the inside out, and that was good. I deserved hurt.
I didn’t stop sitting by her bed when she stopped waking at night. At Haverleigh they had closed and locked my door at bedtime, but a keeper had still sat outside the room, flicking open the shutter every ten minutes to peer at me. If I needed the toilet I knocked on the door and they unlocked it, followed me into the bathroom, stood in the corner as I peed. When we got back to my bedroom they locked me back in and wrote in my notes that I had been to the toilet. They wrote in my notes when I turned over in my sleep. They wrote in my notes when I snored. Molly didn’t have notes, but she had me by her side at night, on the mattress I had pulled off my bed. It was how you looked after a kid. It was what Haverleigh had taught me.
That night I waited until she was asleep, then climbed into bed behind her. We didn’t touch, but she was like a tiny radiator, and her warmth made me feel we were fused. I ran my hand across my belly. I missed being curved and hard with her—the unmatchable closeness, the knowledge that no one could take her away. When she had moved in, my body had been like an alley house—dank and grimy and rotten at the edges—but she had still wanted to live there. She had clung on, determined, refusing to evacuate in a shock of blood on porcelain. I didn’t understand why she wanted me—but then, I didn’t understand why I still wanted Mam.
After Haverleigh, I ached for Mam with a hungry intensity. I saw it as the part of me that was animal—soft, hot, made of flesh and fur. Each time I was knocked I found myself scuttling to her, like a badger retreating into a burrow. Each time I left I felt caked in a layer of grime so thick I had to stand under a hot shower and scrub my skin until it smarted, and I told myself I would not see her again. Months passed. Another knock. I scuttled back. The need was always there, like a pickled lemon, yellow flesh perfectly preserved under the rind. I came to think I didn’t want her, not really, not the way she was. I crawled back because I hoped one day I might find her changed to the way she wasn’t.
I had last seen her three weeks before Molly was born, when I was gray with sickness and tired to the cord of marrow inside my bones. She opened the door and licked me up and down with her eyes.
“Fucking hell,” she said. “You got fat.”
“I’m pregnant,” I said. “You know that.”
“There’s big and there’s big,” she said. “I was never fat with you.”
She would have liked to pretend she hadn’t carried me in her body at all, to claim I had grown in a tank on her bedside table. I stayed for two sour, push-and-pull hours, and when I got up to leave she pressed a piece of paper into my hand. It had become ritual.
“Off again?” I said.
“Yeah,” she said. “This place doesn’t suit me. Neighbors are shits. Council found me somewhere better. New apartments. They’re in a block.”
“Right,” I said. I opened the folded slip and read the address. I recognized the postcode: back in the streets.
“Why are you going back?” I asked.
Her eyes flicked from side to side, as though she was hoping she might find the answer in a corner of the space around her. She shrugged. “Home, isn’t it?” she said.
I didn’t stop wanting her when Molly was born; if anything, I wanted her more. Molly was my second heart for nine months, but when the nurses ripped her out I didn’t think of my body, robbed of its pendulum. I thought, “Twenty years ago, Molly was me. Twenty years ago, I was Mam,” and I felt closer to her than I had ever felt when we had lived in the same house, breathed the same air. When Molly cried I wanted to turn up on Mam’s doorstep with my throbbing head, sore chest, and bundle of baby. “Is this how you felt?” I wanted to ask. “Did you feel this mad? This tired? Did you feel like other people had a secret book you’d never been given? Is this why you were the way you were? Will she turn out like me?”
Beside me in bed, Molly snuffled and started in her sleep. I lifted a piece of her hair off the pillow and ran it around my mouth. It felt like a feather.
“I made this,” I thought. “I made this hair, this skin, the blood in these spiderweb veins. I made it all. It came from me.” I wanted to hear her say it—hear her tell me, “Yes, look at you, look at her, you did it. You did that, Chrissie. You did something good.” It had to be her voice: scratchy, like wire wool. When I closed my eyes I saw her face seared onto the lids.
Mam.
Chrissie
The day after I spoke to the police I came back from school and found a tin on the kitchen table. It was blue with a swirly gold pattern on the top, and when I peeled it open I saw chocolates stacked in neat columns. I took it into the lounge, sat on the couch, and ate them. I had to eat them all up, because Mam had bought them for me, and when Mam bought me things I had to eat them all up. If I didn’t she cried and said, “I got that for you special, Christine. What’s wrong with you? Don’t you care?”
When Mam cooked me things it was extra important that I ate them all up, because if I didn’t she would think I extra didn’t care. She didn’t cook much. The last time was Christmas when I was seven, when she’d been given a turkey by Mr. Godwin the butcher. I didn’t know why he had given it to her. It sat in the kitchen for lots of days before Christmas, big and ugly and covered in pimpled white skin. On Christmas Day Mam put it in a saucepan with lots of water and boiled and boiled and boiled. The whole house smelled of meat, and the kitchen windows steamed up, and all the spoons and surfaces got coated in a layer of slippy grease. I sat on the floor in the hallway wearing the scarf I’d got as my present from the Sunday school Christmas party over my nose and mouth. I had not had a fun time at the Sunday school Christmas party. It had happened straight after the Sunday school Nativity play, which had also been unfun because Mrs. Idiot Samuels hadn’t given me the right part. I badly wanted to be the baby Jesus but she said it had to be a doll, and then I badly wanted to be Herod but she said it had to be a boy, and then I badly wanted to be a shepherd but she said it had t
o be someone who had brought a tea towel to wear on their head. The angel of the Lord had to be someone pretty and Mary had to be someone whose mammy had given Mrs. Samuels a nice bottle of wine. I had to be a goat. That was not my idea of a fun time at all, and I showed her I was not having fun by making a very loud bleating noise whenever anyone else tried to say their lines. I didn’t care about ruining the stupid play. My da hadn’t even come to watch.
As the turkey cooked I made a paper chain and Mam drank whisky, which put her in a happy mood. She was so happy, she went upstairs and got the radio from her bedroom. It hissed out a fuzzy sound when she first turned it on, and I had to put my hands over my ears, because the fuzzy sound made me think someone was trapped in the radio and I really didn’t like that idea, but she fiddled with the buttons then pulled me up by my wrists and spun me around the kitchen, singing, “I saw three ships, I saw three ships, I saw three ships,” because she didn’t know the rest of the words. I felt so good, I didn’t care about not having Da there or any proper presents. The radio started playing “O Little Town of Bethlehem” and I put my arms around Mam’s middle and pressed my face into her belly. A lot of turkey water had splattered on her, so she was damp and smelled of bones, but I didn’t care. She didn’t push me away. She let me hug her. She put her hands on my back and rubbed up and down. It was probably the best happy mood she had ever been in, probably even happier than the happy mood Mary must have got in when the baby Jesus was born.
It was dark by the time Mam turned off the cooker. She told me to come to the table, and she put a bowl and a cracker in front of me and said, “Isn’t this a treat? Turkey for Christmas.” She sat opposite. She didn’t have any turkey, just the end of the bottle of whiskey. The stuff in the bowl didn’t look much like a treat. It was gray, with foamy scum gathered at the edges. I blew on it for as long as I could, and then I spent a lot of time picking up spoonfuls and letting them pour back into the bowl.
“Stop playing and eat,” said Mam.
“Will you do my cracker with me?” I asked.
“Eat your food,” she said.
In the first mouthful I bit down on something that wasn’t quite bone and wasn’t quite meat, a gristly lump that crunched when it went between my teeth. The taste was wax and skin and toilets. I spat it back into the bowl. I didn’t look at Mam. I looked at the oily circles collected on top of the gray, growing and shrinking like screaming mouths.
“I think the turkey wasn’t right, Mam,” I said. “I think it was in the bag for too long. I think it went moldy. It doesn’t taste right.”
I didn’t have to look at her to know she had got out of the happy mood. I could feel it. The happy-sad switch was like opening a window to cold air.
“I’ve spent all day cooking that, Christine,” she said. “You sit here and you eat it.”
“But I think it went moldy, Mam,” I said. “I think it’s not right.”
“You sit here. And you eat it,” she said.
“Can you do my cracker with me?” I asked again.
Her chair made a screeching sound when she pushed it back from the table. “Will you ever stop wanting things, Christine?” she shouted. “It’s fucking Christmas. I’m trying to make things nice. Cooked you that turkey, got you them crackers. I even topped up the lectric for us to watch telly later. Thought we could watch something nice together. Why is nothing ever enough for you? Why can’t you just be good?”
She walked out of the room, down the hallway, stepping on my paper chain and leaving it flat. I felt like it was my head she had stepped on, like she had put her foot on my cheek and trodden down until she felt the bones splinter into shards. I pulled my cracker with my two hands. The right hand won: a blue paper hat and a baby set of cards. The joke fluttered under the table. When Mam’s bedroom door closed I took my bowl out of the kitchen, opened the front door, went down the garden path, and put it outside the front gate. I hoped a dog might come and eat the horrid gray soup. I stood on the garden path for a long time, leaning on the gate. I could see the colored lights on Betty’s Christmas tree, winking through the net curtains in her lounge window. Then I went inside and watched telly until the lectric ran out.
The things Mam got me to eat were usually much better than the rotten turkey, because she usually didn’t cook them, usually just bought them, so it usually wasn’t too hard to eat them all up. When I had eaten all the chocolates, I left the empty tin on the kitchen table and went back to lie on the couch. After that, there was no food for a week. I tried to stay at other people’s houses long enough that they gave me tea, or I ate what I could find in the kitchen cupboards. Tins of sardines with fingernail bones that clawed my throat, spoonfuls of milk powder from the big red tub. One day I got sent to Mr. Michaels for taking Donna’s biscuit at break time, but I didn’t care because by then I had already eaten it, so he couldn’t make me give it back.
I started to think Mam must have moved away, because I hadn’t seen her for days and days, not even on Sunday for church. I wandered through the rooms of the house, running my fingers along the walls, wondering if I was an orphan. I had only ever read about orphans. I didn’t know if they were real like God or pretend like witches.
I had just got used to the idea of being an orphan, a real live orphan, when I went downstairs on Saturday and found Mam at the kitchen table.
“Did you like the chocolates?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Did you eat them all?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Good. I got you them special,” she said.
“Thank you,” I said.
I didn’t really know what to do. I pushed my feet into my shoes and did the laces in tight knots, pulling until all the blood was squeezed out of my feet.
“I’m going out now,” I said.
“That’s right,” said Mam. “Go off and leave me. Go off and leave me right after I got you them chocolates, right after I spent my own money getting you them chocolates. Leave me all by myself.”
“Do you want me to stay?” I asked.
“Get lost, Chrissie,” she said. “I want you to get lost and never get found. That’s what I want.”
“Okay,” I said. I left the front door open behind me. I’d preferred being an orphan.
I knocked for Linda and we walked up the hill on only the front-garden walls. I was brilliant at wall walking. William timed me once, before his wristwatch got stolen: all the way from Mr. Jenks’s to the haunted house in four minutes and thirty-three seconds. I wanted him to time me again so I could get faster and faster, and he said he would if I helped him find out who had stolen his wristwatch. Unfortunately it was me who had stolen his wristwatch, so I had to say I actually didn’t want to be timed again, but four minutes and thirty-three seconds was still faster than any other kid in the whole of the streets.
When we got to Steven’s house I saw that the front room curtains were closed. It was the only house in the street with its curtains closed, and that made the inside of the hidden room so much more exciting than it ever could have been with the curtains open. Steven’s tricycle was in the front garden. The yellow paint on the seat was peeling. I jumped down from the wall.
“Let’s knock,” I said.
“We can’t,” said Linda. “My mammy says she has to be left.”
“Why?”
“Don’t know. But Donna’s mammy was going to take her flowers and she asked if my mammy wanted to go too and my mammy said no. She doesn’t think it’s right that so many mammies are taking her so many things all the time.”
She wiped a scrape on her leg with her cardigan sleeve before blood wormed into her white sock.
“My mammy said it’s brutal,” she said. “She said, ‘It’s brutal, what that woman’s going through. You wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy.’ That’s what she said.”
I thought Steven
’s mammy probably would wish someone else’s kid had died, especially if it could have been someone else’s kid instead of Steven. She probably wished it could have been any other kid in the whole wide world, even her best friend’s kid. Usually when people said you wouldn’t wish something on your worst enemy it meant you probably would wish it on your worst enemy, and in fact you’d find it quite fun to watch it happen to them. There wasn’t much I wouldn’t wish on Donna.
Linda was still talking without really saying anything new, which was unfortunately something that she did a lot.
“She says it’s worse because he was the apple of their eye,” she said. “I asked her what that meant and she said it’s that he was the one they all loved the most. I said we knew that already. You and me did know that, didn’t we? We did, didn’t we, Chrissie? We knew they made a big huge fuss of him, didn’t we? We was always saying that, wasn’t we?”
“Linda,” I said. “You need to stop talking now. You are giving me a headache in my ears.”
“Oh no. Sorry,” she said.
I went up Steven’s garden path and knocked on the door with three hard taps. No one answered for a long time. I thought Steven’s mammy must have got so sad she had just lain down and died too. I would have given up on her ever coming at all, but then Linda would have been right and I couldn’t stand for Linda to be right, so I knocked again and didn’t stop knocking until the door opened.
Steven’s mammy looked a lot worse than she had looked at the playground. Her face was the color of the layer of gray skin on the inside of fish batter and her cheeks were hanging all loose from their bones, slack and swinging under milky pink eyes.
“What you want?” she asked in a gray-sounding voice. I didn’t really know what to say. I hadn’t expected her to look so bad. I couldn’t really remember why I had wanted to knock in the first place.