by Nancy Tucker
“Did you get alive again?” I asked. That was one of the special things about my da: he died and came alive again. The first time it happened I was in Miss Ingham’s class. Da had been living with us for a while, doing normal da things like picking me up from school. He didn’t wait in the playground at the end of the day like the mammies, and he wasn’t always there, but sometimes when Miss Ingham let us out of the classroom he was walking past the railings and I saw him and shouted, “Da! Da!” He pretended to be surprised to see me but that was just his joke. He was really there to pick me up. And even if he didn’t pick me up from school, I always saw him in the evening. Almost every evening. He came through the door and flopped onto the couch and I leaned against his side. He smelled of sweat and something else, something sweet and bready. If there was lectric we watched telly, but if there wasn’t we just sat together. I didn’t really care about telly when Da was there. When he went to sleep I lifted his arm and put it around me. He would have put his arm round me himself if he hadn’t been so tired. I was just helping him.
One day I came back from school and he wasn’t there. I sat on my windowsill looking down at the pavement and every time I saw a man at the top of the street my chest did a little jump, but none of them were Da. It got dark and my eyes got heavy and he didn’t come. The streetlights came on and lit the ground in yellowed pools and he didn’t come. My head tipped forward and I jolted awake just before I fell onto the floor. He didn’t come.
In the end I got off the windowsill and climbed into bed. I was nearly asleep when I heard the front door slam, but I woke up quickly and went out onto the landing. I knew it was Da. There were heavy Da-footsteps downstairs. I was going to go down and jump into his arms, but then him and Mam started shouting. I lay down flat on my belly and watched through the banisters, my cheek pressed against the dirty floorboards. Da pulled Mam into the hallway by the front of her top and threw her against the wall like a sack of potatoes, then crashed out of the house. Mam lay very still, looking at where he wasn’t, and I lay very still, looking at where she was. She didn’t move the whole time I looked. In the end I tiptoed downstairs. I stood in front of her, watching her tears make a puddle on the floor.
“Are you dead?” I whispered. She didn’t answer, just sniffed. “You can’t sniff if you’re dead, so you must not be dead,” I said, and went back upstairs. I lay on my bed, thinking I would hear her moving around soon, but the house stayed quiet. I tried to go to sleep. I closed my eyes and thought my going-to-sleep thoughts, the imagining ones I saved for bedtime. I imagined winning New Faces. I imagined the Queen visiting Class Three and telling Miss Ingham I was the best kid in the class so she had better stop telling me off so much. I imagined Mam and Da coming to pick me up from school together, the way Betty’s mammy and da always came to pick her up together, walking down the street with my hands in their hands the way she did. I imagined getting all the right numbers on the lottery and being so rich I could build towers of money notes that stretched from the floor to the ceiling.
When I had thought all my going-to-sleep thoughts and still hadn’t gone to sleep, I listened for Mam again. She still wasn’t making any noise. I went back downstairs and got a blanket from the cupboard. She had closed her eyes, and she didn’t move when I put the blanket over her, so she could have been dead, but I didn’t think so. She wasn’t the sort to die.
In the morning I checked the couch, but Da wasn’t there. Mam was in the kitchen, shuffling around with her head so far down I couldn’t see all of her face. On the table there was a glass of yellow-brown stuff that looked like apple juice. I had only ever had apple juice once before, at Betty’s birthday party, and I still remembered the taste—syrupy, like melted sweets—so I went to drink it. Mam moved so fast I barely saw her. She snatched the glass.
“Leave it,” she said. I saw her face properly. Half of it was purple-blue and puffy, like the split skin of a rotten plum. I reached up to touch it but she slapped my hand away. “Go to school,” she said.
“Where’s Da?” I asked.
“Not here,” she said.
“When’s he coming back?” I asked.
“He’s not,” she said.
“Not until when?”
“Not ever.”
I felt a creeping hotness starting in my neck, crawling up to my ears. I touched my face, but it didn’t feel hot; it felt like cold clay. So cold it got pins and needles. So cold I had to sit down on the floor.
“Is he dead?” I asked. Mam made a snorting sound at the back of her throat and drank all the apple juice in one gulp.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’s dead.”
All day I had the same words in my ears. Da is dead, Da is dead, Da is dead. I didn’t cry because I never cried, but at school I was even badder than usual.
“What has got into you today, Chrissie Banks?” said Miss Ingham.
“Nothing’s got into me. Something’s got out of me,” I said.
“Stop talking nonsense,” she said.
“It’s not nonsense,” I said.
“Don’t argue, Chrissie,” she said.
“Don’t arg me, Miss Ingham,” I said.
She went to her desk and took a headache pill.
After school I went out to play with Stacey and Shannon. Shannon said she didn’t want to play Stars in Their Eyes, so I kicked her in the stomach. Stacey said she was going to tell their mammy, so I kicked her too. Hard. She fell over. I left them in a crying heap. I didn’t care if they told on me. You had to hurt people when they annoyed you, to teach them a lesson. There wouldn’t be anyone to teach Mam her lessons now that Da was dead. That was a very serious problem indeed.
Da was dead for lots of weeks, but then I got back from school one day and he was in the kitchen, drinking a can of beer. He waved when I came through the door.
“All right, Chris?” he said.
“Da?” I said.
“How are you doing?”
“You came back.”
“Yep.”
“You came back from being dead.”
He laughed and took a big gulp of beer. “Yep,” he said. “That’s right.”
“How?” I asked.
He reached into his pocket and took out a marble the size of a gobstopper. “Here—got you this,” he said. He put it in my hand. There was a tongue of light coming through the kitchen window, and when it licked the marble I saw it had all the colors in the world inside. Threads of pink and blue and yellow and green and bright, sparkly white, all pressing their faces up to the surface. I curled my fingers around it one by one, and squeezed so tight I could feel my bones bending. It was the best thing anyone had ever given me.
Da died a lot more times after that, but I didn’t mind as much because I had my marble to remind me it wasn’t forever. I squeezed it tight in my fist, or rolled it between my palms, or put it in my mouth so it stretched out the skin of my cheek. I never, ever let anyone else play with it or even touch it. Da always came back alive again in the end, and as soon as he was alive again he always came to find me, before he did anything else. That was how much he loved me. Sometimes when he found me he looked me all the way up and all the way down and rubbed his hand backward and forward across his chin. It made the same sound Mam’s nails made when she rubbed them on the emery board—scratch-scratch-scrib-scrub. He looked around the house—at the empty cupboards in the kitchen and the ripped-down curtains in the lounge—and rubbed, rubbed, rubbed.
“I’ve just got to get myself sorted, you know, Chris?” he said. “I’ve just got to get myself together, and then I’ll get you out of here. We’ll go somewhere new. Just the two of us. I’ve just got to get myself sorted.”
“Where will we go?” I asked.
“Wherever you want,” he said.
“Seaside?”
“If you want.”
“What will our house be
like?”
I always tried to get him to talk more about what it would be like when he took me away from the streets, but he never wanted to. He just said, “Yeah, yeah, when I get myself together, as soon as I get myself sorted, Chris.” Then he went to the pub. Usually when he was at the pub Mam came downstairs with her hair brushed and makeup on her face.
“Was your da here?” she asked. “I thought I heard your da.”
“He was here,” I said. “He’s gone to the pub now.”
When I said that, Mam’s face slipped away. The makeup was still there, locked in a pretty mask, but there was no one underneath it. Her mouth went straight and her eyes went unsparkly, like plastic pretending to be glass. Then she went back upstairs.
Anyway, that was how I knew being dead wasn’t forever. Not always. People who talked about dying as if it was forever were either lying or stupid, because I knew two people who definitely, definitely came back from being dead. One was Da and the other was Jesus.
* * *
• • •
There weren’t many kids playing out as Da and I walked through the streets. I wished there were more, because I wanted everyone to see us together. He stopped to buy me a paper bag of dolly mixtures from the shop, so at least Mrs. Bunty got to see us together. I hugged his arm as he paid and looked her straight in the eye, which made her screw her mouth into an ugly little wrinkle. She dropped Da’s change into his hand without touching him and said, “Forty pence back, sir,” in a voice that told me she didn’t think he was a sir at all, she thought he was just a him.
Inside the Bull’s Head the smell was of smoke and beer, and everything was sticky, and solid men sat in corners talking in grizzled voices. Da lifted me onto a stool and bought me a can of cream soda.
“What you been up to, then?” he asked when he had swallowed half his pint and burped over his shoulder.
“Lots of things. Lots of worksheets,” I said. “Mrs. Bunty’s not giving us enough sweets for the bottles and Donna bit me. And there’s this little boy that’s got dead.”
“What?” said Da.
“Mam says I have to call you Uncle Jim,” I said, because I was having a day off from being the one who had killed Steven and I really wasn’t in the mood to turn it into a day on. Da snorted and drank the rest of his pint in one gulp. I wondered how much more he would drink, and hoped it wouldn’t be so much he started shouting. I had odd ends of memory from the last time he had been alive, and all the odd ends smelled of beer and sounded of shouting. I was just thinking about what other exciting things I could tell him when one of his friends came and clapped a hand on his shoulder, and he turned his back on me to talk to him. They talked for a lot of time and Da drank a lot more beer. I lined my dolly mixtures up in a row on the high strip of table in front of my stool.
After a long time Da wobbled away from his friends, past the tables, and out of the door, and I jumped down to follow him. It was almost like he had forgotten I was there, except obviously he hadn’t. I was the whole point of him coming back alive again. When I caught up with him he held on to my arm, and as we walked he kept stumbling and yanking it so hard I thought it was going to come out of its socket. I didn’t care. If he had torn my arm away from my body and kept it for himself, I wouldn’t have minded. I would have said, “You can have the rest of me too. The other arm, and both my legs, and my belly and face and heart. It’s all there for you, if you want it.”
Mam wasn’t at the house when we got back. We hadn’t been there for long when the door knocked and Da told me to go to my room. I climbed the stairs and lay down on my front on the landing. I heard the man at the door say “Steven” and my stomach whirled. I pushed myself forward as slowly and quietly as I could, until I was lying in the special spot where I could see the person at the door but they couldn’t see me, the same as the special spot on the church hall roof. It was easier to understand what people were saying when I could see their mouths. The man on the doorstep was a policeman.
“I was hoping to talk to . . . Christine? Christine Banks. Is that your daughter, Mr. Banks?”
“No.”
“Oh.”
“I’m her uncle.”
“Oh, I see. I’m sorry, I—”
“What you want with Chrissie? She’s eight.”
“We’re speaking to all the kids in the area. It’s part of our investigation into the death of Steven Mitchell.”
“Waste of time, speaking to kids.”
“Is Christine at home, Mr. Banks? I’ve just got a few questions for her. It won’t take long.”
“No.”
“It’s very important that—”
“She’s not here.”
“Oh. Where is she?”
“Her mam’s taken her away.”
“Taken her away? Is this permanent?”
“Don’t know. Could be a week, could be a year. You never know with Chrissie’s mam.”
“Oh.”
The policeman took his notebook out of his pocket and wrote something down. I thought it was probably “Chrissie is not here.”
“Do you know whether Christine was here on the twentieth of March, Mr. Banks? Around that time?”
“Don’t know. I was inside.”
“Oh.”
“I shouldn’t think she was. Chrissie and her mam don’t spend much time here. Was it a school holiday?”
“No, but it was a weekend. A Saturday.”
“Won’t have been here, then. They’ll have been with her sister.”
“Is that your other sister?”
“Her mam’s other sister. She’s my brother’s kid.”
“I see. Could I take the name of your sister-in-law?”
A very noisy car went down the street just then, so I didn’t hear what Da said. I thought it could have been “Alison” or “Abigail” or “Annabel” or “Angela.” One of those names.
“And where does she live?” asked the policeman.
“Don’t know. Never asked.”
“Is it local?”
“Don’t think so. Think it’s on the coast. By the sea somewhere.”
“And you think Christine was staying with her aunt on the twentieth of March?”
“Don’t think nothing. But she could have been.”
“Right. I see. Well, thanks for your help. I’ll come back another day. Try to catch her.”
The policeman went down the garden path and out of the gate. Da stuck his middle finger up as soon as his back was turned. By the time I got downstairs, he was already outside, leaning against the garden wall. Smoke bloomed around him in a cloud.
“Why did you tell that policeman I wasn’t here?” I asked, hoisting myself onto the wall next to him.
“They’re pigs, they are, Chris. The lot of them. Fucking pigs. It’s all our fucking jobs to keep them from getting what they want.”
“Did you mean you were inside heaven?” I asked.
“Eh?”
“When they asked if I was here when Steven died. You said you were inside. Did you mean inside heaven?”
He cleared his throat and spat onto the ground. His spit was made of tiny white bubbles. “Yep,” he said. “That’s what I meant. Did you know that little lad what died, then?”
“Yeah. He lived on Marner Street,” I said.
“Did you play with him?”
“Sometimes.”
I felt see-through then, like anyone could look past my clothes and skin and see my heart ticking and my lungs puffing. The policeman had turned my day off to a day on, and remembering was a narrow blade slid into my neck. I was sure Da could see I had killed Steven, and I wondered whether that was why he had told the policeman those lies. A part of me hoped he did know, hoped he’d told the lies to stop the policeman finding me out. You have to care about things to want to keep them safe.
<
br /> “Sick old world, eh?” said Da, and blew out a thin gray stream.
“Yeah,” I said. “Sick old world.”
Chrissie
In the Easter holidays time lost its size and shape. Da stayed for a couple of weeks. He sat at the bar in the Bull’s Head most days, came back most evenings to shout at Mam and sleep. The shouting kept me awake. I heard it through the walls and floor—not the words, just an underwater burble of grown-up hate. It usually finished with a slam, of Mam or the door. Once, after the slam, there were creaks on the stairs and she slid into bed behind me. I pretended to be asleep, but she started crying, so I had to turn around and wipe her tears away. I licked them off my fingers. In the morning she was gone and my pillow was dry. My mouth still tasted thinly of salt.
The holidays finished and I went back to school, which meant school dinners as well as worksheets, so it was good as well as bad. Nothing very interesting happened at school, and I wouldn’t have known that time was even passing at all if the classroom hadn’t got hotter and the milk hadn’t got lumpier. The police didn’t come back. I still saw them in the streets sometimes, and Linda said one day they had knocked on her door to speak to her. She said they had asked the same questions they’d asked at school, about whether she ever played with Steven and whether she had been playing with him the day he died. I wished Da hadn’t made them think I didn’t live in the streets anymore. I really wanted to talk to them again. I decided that if they did come and talk to me, I would tell them I saw Steven going toward the alleys with Donna the day he died. That would get her back properly for biting my arm.
Linda’s birthday came on a Sunday, which was bad luck because it meant she had to go to church in the morning. I went round to her house after church and gave her a Beano comic as a present. It was actually her Beano comic that I had taken from her room when I had been there on Thursday, hidden between my vest and jersey. I’d finishing reading it, so I didn’t need it anymore. When she opened it she frowned.