by Nancy Tucker
“Hello,” I said.
“What do you want?” she asked again.
“The police have been at your house a lot,” I said. “Why have they?”
“Go away,” she said. “Stop meddling in things you oughtn’t to be meddling in.”
I was about to tell her that Steven being killed and the police looking for who had done the killing were things I did ought to be meddling in, because it was actually me who had done the killing, but I swallowed it down. I thought it probably wasn’t what she wanted to hear right then. She started to close the door but I pushed it back open.
“Is he still dead?” I asked. That wasn’t just talking to fill the time—I wanted to know the answer. It had been so many days since Steven had died that I had lost count, and I thought he must be going to come back soon. He was only little, and I was sure that should mean he came back alive quicker than a grown-up. Steven’s mammy’s face flopped in on itself like a burst balloon, like all the bones had disappeared or turned to water.
“Do you know what you are, Chrissie Banks?” she said.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re a bad seed,” she said.
Bad seed. I liked that.
“Have they found out who killed him yet?” I asked.
“Go away,” she said again. I thought of Steven’s baby-bird body, carried out of the blue house by the great big man. Smooth and still, might have been asleep, in a pair of arms so bubbled with muscle they could have crushed him. Behind Steven’s mammy the lounge door opened and his da came out. I could smell his body from where I was standing. It smelled very strongly of a body, of skin and sweat and stale air. He stopped in the hallway and looked at me over Steven’s mammy’s shoulder.
“Is Susan here?” I asked.
“Susan?” said Steven’s mammy, as if she didn’t know who that was.
“Is she here?” I asked.
Without moving or even breathing in, Steven’s da shouted, “SUSAN!” so loudly I jumped. There was no answer.
“She’s out,” he said.
“Do you know where she is?” I asked.
“She’ll be somewhere,” said Steven’s mammy.
“Well everyone’s somewhere,” I said. Steven’s da went down the hallway and into the kitchen. He pushed the door closed behind him but a sicky smell still slipped out. Steven’s mammy looked like she was going to try to shut the front door again, so I said, “It was a man who killed him, wasn’t it?”
“What?” she said.
“It was a man who killed Steven. The man I saw.” It dribbled out easily. It was just another version of the story I had told the policemen at school.
“What man you saw?”
I could feel her creeping into my palm, so I shrugged and said, “Oh. Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
“What man you saw?”
“I saw a man walking away from the alleys that day. The day Steven got killed.”
“That day? Saturday? Are you sure?”
I shrugged again. Since she had opened the door I had been feeling sort of cold, sort of dead, but as her face changed from ghost to person I felt myself come alive again too. “Sort of sure,” I said.
“Did you tell the police? They went to your school, didn’t they? Did you tell them?”
“Maybe. Can’t really remember.”
She stepped forward and stood so close I had to turn my face away. “You’ve got to tell them,” she said. “You’ve got to tell them anything you saw. ’Specially anything you saw that day. Are you listening, Chrissie?”
“I thought I wasn’t to meddle,” I said. At the end of the hallway Steven’s da came back out of the kitchen, and the smell came out after him, strong enough to make me dizzy. I imagined the kitchen humming and dark with flies. I thought of them buzzing around flowers mounded on the table, and buzzing around apples shriveled in the fruit bowl, but most of all buzzing around the stews and hams the mammies had brought, oozing in the glare of the sun.
I ran down the garden path, through the gate, and up the street. Linda ran after me. Steven’s mammy called our names but we didn’t stop running, and when I looked round she wasn’t following, just standing on the pavement. We didn’t slow down until we were at the top of the hill. Linda panted and I dragged my knuckles along the front-garden walls, pressing hard enough to make beads of blood swell up from the skin. I brought my fist to my mouth. The taste was iron and dust. When we got to the handstand wall we dropped down to sit with our backs against it.
“Did you really see a man?” Linda asked once she had her breath back.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Are you going to tell the police?” she asked.
“Maybe,” I said, and then I had to do a handstand so she would stop asking questions. She did one too because she always did whatever I did. While I was upside down I thought about Steven’s mammy, sitting with his dead-looking da in a house with a yellow tricycle in the front garden. I thought another day I might go back and ask her if I could have the tricycle, seeing as she didn’t need it anymore. It was small but so was I, and there was no point wasting a perfectly good tricycle, no matter who was dead.
When we had handstood so much our faces were pink, we played telly. It wasn’t much fun playing telly with Linda. She kept asking me what to say next, and when she said it she didn’t sound anything like anyone on the real telly. The only person who was even nearly as good as me at playing telly was Donna, which was annoying because people who look like potatoes are never actually on telly.
“If you could be anyone famous, who would you be?” I asked Linda.
“Probably just you,” she said.
“I’m not famous,” I said.
“But you’re the best at nearly everything,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said. “I know. I’ll probably be famous one day.”
We couldn’t think of anything else to play outside, so we went back to Linda’s house. When her mammy had finished huffing and puffing about me being there for tea she gave us soup with bread and margarine. I ate the soup while it was still too hot, and it burned the inside of my mouth to sandpaper. I didn’t talk much. I had Steven’s mammy’s gray face in front of my eyes and it wouldn’t go away, even when I shook my head.
I stayed at Linda’s until her mammy took her upstairs for a bath. Then I stayed a bit longer, sitting on my own in the lounge. I looked at the pictures on the mantelpiece, the ones of Christmas and holidays and Linda’s First Holy Communion. Upstairs, I heard Linda’s mammy hissing at Linda’s da. I heard “still here” and “get her to go” and “how long’s it been” and “you’d know if you came out of your precious shed once in a blue moon.” Linda’s da came down the stairs and into the lounge and said, “Hiya, our Chrissie. Want me to walk you home?” I didn’t want him to walk me so I had to say I would go by myself, though actually what I really wanted was to stay.
I wasn’t surprised that the front door of the house was locked. Mam always locked it after she shouted at me. I had to go round the back and climb through the kitchen window, which was broken and never closed properly. It was a squeeze to get through, and as I was squeezing I thought maybe that was why Mam didn’t give me much food, because she knew if I got too fat I wouldn’t be able to squeeze through the kitchen window when I needed to. It was just her way of looking out for me, really, I thought, as I stood with my feet in the sink. It just showed how much she cared.
* * *
• • •
I went out before school on Monday, when the streets were full of milk-bottle clinks. The milkman saw me and did a little salute, but he didn’t put any bottles on our doorstep because we didn’t get milk delivered. Mrs. Walter did. She lived next door. She kept birds in cages and was so old she had started to grow backward, shrinking down so she was barely taller than me. The milkman put two bottles of milk on
her doorstep, got back in his little cart, and drove away. I didn’t take a bottle until he was round the corner. Mrs. Walter once told me off for screaming too loudly in the back garden, and she was also unnecessarily old. She didn’t need that much milk. I took big swigs as I walked, the creamy top clagging in my throat.
When I got to the handstand wall I saw Susan, sitting on the ground with her back against the bricks. Her hair was knotty. I sat down, and she looked at me with her nothing-colored eyes.
“Why has your hair gone so horrible?” I asked. I pressed the milk bottle against my knee. She looked at the rat’s tail of hair hanging over her shoulder.
“Just has,” she said.
“It’s really knotty,” I said.
“Yeah,” she said.
“Has your mammy lost the comb?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” she said. She had The Secret Garden open in her lap, and she looked down at the page, but I didn’t think she was really reading. Whenever I had seen Susan recently she had had The Secret Garden with her, and it was always open at about the same place. Before Steven had died she had had a different book every week.
“Why aren’t you at home?” I asked.
“Why aren’t you?” she said. I moved the bottle around my knee to find the coldest bit of glass. Susan looked back at her book, but she never turned any pages. She was wearing a cardigan with sleeves that drooped over her hands, and the sleeves were chewed to strings. As I watched, she took some of the strings in her mouth and chewed them some more. I wasn’t sure she knew she was doing it.
“Your mammy came to the playground the other day,” I said.
“I know,” she said.
“How do you know?” I asked.
“Vicky’s mammy brought her home. She told my da what happened.”
“Was she crying?”
Susan moved her head forward and backward in a strange, robot nod, and took more of her cardigan sleeve into her mouth.
“Does she do anything else except cry?”
“Sleeps.”
“Did she ever do anything except look after Steven when he was alive? Or was being his mammy her only job?”
“Susan and Steven,” she said. There was something sharp in her voice, like a razor blade in the middle of a cotton wool ball. I didn’t know what she meant.
“What?”
“Susan and Steven. She was both of ours mammy. Her job was to look after both of us.”
“Whatever.”
“Well, she doesn’t do it anymore anyway.”
“Do you want some milk?” I asked. She took the bottle and swallowed the rest in noisy gulps. When it was all gone she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and rolled the bottle into the gutter. I didn’t tell her about Mrs. Bunty giving you sweets if you took your bottles back to the shop. I was already wishing I hadn’t told Donna.
“Do the police still come to your house a lot?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“What do they do when they come?”
“Ask questions to my mammy and da.”
“What kind of questions?”
“About Steven.”
“Do they not ask questions to you?”
“No.”
“How do you know what they ask, then?”
“Listen through the lounge door.”
“Do they know who killed him yet?”
“No.”
The remembering was warm this time; a tiny fire lit in my belly. “Do you think they’re going to find out?”
“Don’t know.”
“I don’t think they will.”
She just shrugged. She was like a piece of wet lettuce. No fun at all. I raked my fingernails along the insides of my arms and brought away a cloud of white dust, and I thought about the tub of cream that sat on the shelf in the corner of the medical room at school. When my eczema bled at school Miss White sent me to the medical room and Mrs. Bradley smeared cream on my arms in a layer so thick I could write my name in it. Sometimes I scratched myself raw under the desk when Miss White wasn’t looking, just so I could go and sit in medical with my arms wrapped in creamy white sleeves. While Susan pretended to read The Secret Garden I dragged my nails over my skin in a sandpaper scritch-scratch. I imagined jumping into a whole bathtub full of cream, cool on my blistered creases.
“What’s the time?” I asked.
“Don’t know,” said Susan without looking at her watch.
“Give it,” I said, and pulled her wrist toward me.
“Doesn’t work. It’s stopped,” she said.
“You should get your mammy to take you to Woolworth’s. They put batteries in watches. She could probably get a new comb too,” I said.
She moved her head forward and backward in the same robot nod, and as she nodded she started to cry. She didn’t make any noise. The tears just came out of her eyeballs. She let them run down her face and fall off her chin. I had never seen anyone cry that way before. I watched and watched. It was such an odd way to cry.
“That’s a really boring book, isn’t it?” I said, pointing to The Secret Garden. She sniffed and dragged her sleeve across her face.
“Have you read it?” she asked.
“Miss White reads us some if we finish our worksheets early. I hate it. It’s really boring,” I said.
“I like it,” she said. “It’s got a nice garden in.”
“It’s got loads of miserable people in too. You’re never going to stop being miserable if you read books like that. You should read a joke book. That would make you laugh.”
“Not allowed,” she said.
“You are,” I said. “You can read anything you want. If it’s not rude. And joke books aren’t rude. They’ve got one in the library at school.”
“I mean I’m not allowed to laugh,” she said.
“Why?” I asked.
“Because my little brother died,” she said.
“Oh,” I said. I watched her wipe some more tears off her cheeks and some snot off her lip with her sleeve. “You really talk about having a dead brother a lot, you know,” I said.
Being with Susan was the same amount of fun as being with a moldy cauliflower, and I knew I had to go and be somewhere else before I got bored to death. I thought I might go round to Donna’s and pretend I had just fallen over in the street outside, because then her mammy might give me a plaster and some breakfast. Donna was definitely my worst enemy, but at her house there was always lots of food and lots of lectric. I reckoned if I picked the top off one of the sugary scabs on my knee I could get quite a lot of blood out, and her mammy couldn’t tell me to go away if I had blood all over me. I’d do that just as I arrived at their door.
“Bye, then,” I said.
“Bye,” said Susan.
When I got to Donna’s her mammy let me sit on the couch with Donna and her brothers and watch the cartoons on the telly. She gave me a wet cloth to press on my knee and a bowl of Frosties to eat. The flakes swam in thick, cream-globbed milk, and when I ate them I felt my belly burble, “Please, please, not more milk.” I ignored it. I ate until the bowl was empty: chewed and swallowed and clanked my teeth on the cold spoon.
Julia
The café at the train station was called Choo-Choo’s. I could see that before it had been called Choo-Choo’s it had been called Chew-Chew’s—the spikes of the Ws showed through the new paint. I wasn’t sure I would have bothered to change from the first ridiculous name to the second. When I bought Molly’s hot chocolate and package of three custard creams I noticed “Happy Birthday” bunting strung across the counter, and I asked the old woman at the till whose birthday it was. I was surprised to be asking. I couldn’t remember the last time I had talked to a stranger. The old woman looked surprised to be asked.
“No one’s,” she said.
“Why d
oes it say it on that?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s been up since last summer,” she said. “It was the café’s birthday. We’d been open ten years. Then we never got round to taking it down. And every day’s someone’s birthday, isn’t it?”
I counted out the money with my hands in my bag. I didn’t want her to see my purse, bulging with everything I owned. She gave me my change and gestured to Molly, sitting at a table by the window.
“Your little one’s been in the wars, eh?” she said. “How did that happen?”
I looked round and saw that Molly had wriggled out of her coat. She had her cast on the table and was stroking the drawings. I picked up the biscuits and the polystyrene cup.
“Just did,” I said.
When Molly had drunk her hot chocolate and eaten two and a half custard creams, and I had checked the street outside for police and eaten half a custard cream, we looked through the case of secondhand books in the corner of the café. I missed books like this, with tea-colored pages softened to the texture of petals. When Molly was younger I had given her a pound to spend at the charity shop each Saturday, and while she had inspected ornaments and board games I had slid paperbacks off the shelves, put them to my nose, and breathed almonds and dust. One week I had seen Steven’s face, smooth and snub-nosed, beaming out from a front cover. My Brother Steven: An Angel Taken by the Devil. Susan’s book, the one that had thrust me back into the spotlight just as I had been uncoiling in the dark, started the hunt that had finished in Molly and me running to the police car under bedsheets. It had ended my life as Lucy, and I thought perhaps that was what Susan had wanted—to take a part of me like I had taken a part of her. We stopped going to charity shops after that, because the thought of stumbling across the book again was too frightening. I missed the warmth, the smell of damp carpets, and Molly missed the battered trinkets she had treated as treasures. She asked why we couldn’t go anymore, and I wanted to say, “Don’t ask me. Ask Chrissie. She’s the one who worms in and takes things from you. She’s the one who’s famous. It’s all her fault.” I told her it was because we were too busy.