The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

“It’s number sixty-six,” I said as she emerged from the stairwell. She looked at the numbers on the doors beside us.

  “That’ll be further down,” she said.

  “I know,” I said. I sounded petty, as if I was becoming younger as I drew closer to Mam.

  Molly ran ahead, counting off the numbers aloud: “Sixty-two, sixty-three, sixty-four, sixty-five—this one, it’s this one, sixty-six. Can I knock?”

  “Wait,” I said. I knelt down in front of her, licked my thumb, and rubbed away the food marks around her mouth. A porthole in my middle had opened, and thinking of Mam on the other side of the wall made it stretch.

  “Can I knock?” Molly asked again, spinning around on one toe.

  “Go on, then,” I said.

  She thumped on the door and we waited for five breaths. I counted. There was no answer, and she looked up at me.

  “Try again,” I said. She knocked harder, eight loud raps. We waited again. No one came. It hadn’t occurred to me that Mam might not be there. I had no plan for what we would do if she didn’t answer, and the thought of her absence was liquid lead poured into the cups of my lungs. Molly raised her fist to knock again, but I put a hand on her shoulder.

  “Wait,” I said. We heard footsteps inside, the click of the door being unlocked, and a slow swish as it opened. The lead in my lungs set hard.

  Mam had clearly been asleep. She was wearing a dressing gown and her face was puffy. When she had visited me at Haverleigh her hair had been dyed yellow, but badly, so the roots had splayed out from her parting in dark fingers. Now the color was grown out, and she was as much gray as black. There was no powder caking her face. I could see the freckles and pock marks. She seemed to have aged more than five years in the time since I had last seen her, but that made sense—I sometimes felt I was twenty years older than I had been when Molly was born. I couldn’t tell if that was what Mam was thinking as she looked at me. I couldn’t tell if she knew who I was.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “Hello,” I said.

  “It’s you.”

  “Yes.”

  “Huh.” She looked at Molly, her mouth screwed like the gray star at the bottom of an apple. “She’s got a broken arm.”

  “Wrist.” My mouth was horribly dry. Speaking felt like chewing on dead leaves. “It took us a long time to get here. Can we come in?”

  Her eyes were still on Molly. She sucked her teeth. “Jesus. She’s just like you,” she said.

  Something in me flared. I put my arm around Molly’s shoulders, and she scrabbled at my hand. It was a long time since the skin on our hands had touched. She was warmer than I remembered.

  “Are we coming in?” I asked.

  Mam stepped to the side and gestured into the hallway. “Not giving me much choice, are you?” she said.

  The apartment was clean, but it had a strange smell: yeasty, like a fold of unwashed skin. It reminded me of when Molly had had tonsillitis and her throat had been webbed with yellow-white strings—the sweet-sour smell of infection. The couch and coffee table in the lounge had the look of objects sinking into the sea, because the blue carpet was inches thick. It was so thick that walking on it felt like treading on sponge. Mam was in front, but when we got into the room she trotted behind us and raked over the dents our feet had left with her heel. She tried to smooth over her own steps too, but she kept making more. I wondered how long she spent doing this when she was by herself: walking in circles, trying to hide her own trail.

  Next to the telly cabinet was a mantelpiece crowded with frames. Up close, I saw that most of them weren’t filled with photos, but pictures cut out from magazines. There was a strong baby-animal theme: kittens and puppies and next to them a small painting of Jesus. I imagined Mam sitting at the coffee table, cutting around the pictures, sliding the crinkling squares into the frames. There was only one proper photo in the row—a black-and-white print of a woman and baby. I picked it up.

  “Is this you and me?” I asked.

  “No,” she said.

  “Who is it?”

  “Me and my mam.”

  I checked for frames tucked at the back. “Why don’t you have any of me?”

  “Just don’t.”

  “But why not?”

  “I just don’t, Chrissie.”

  I looked along the row of animals and Jesus. If we had been alone in the room I would have swiped my hand across the mantelpiece and swept the pictures to the floor. I couldn’t do it with Molly there. It would frighten her. She already seemed frightened, looking from me to Mam, her hand holding tight to the pocket of my jacket.

  “Why does it smell so bad in here?” I asked.

  “It’s damp,” said Mam. “They’re all damp. All the apartments on this level. We’re trying to get them to do something about it.”

  “It’s disgusting.”

  “It’s not that bad.”

  “The furniture’s probably moldy.”

  I could feel myself goading, trying to make her lash out and fit into the space I had carved for her. She seemed too heavy to rise to it.

  “Don’t know what you want to do,” she said. She picked up a cereal bowl from the arm of the couch. “There’s some magazines there. There’s telly. I’ll go and wash this up.”

  She left before I could ask why she was presenting her lounge like a waiting room. The magazines she had gestured to were on the shelf of the coffee table. Most of them seemed to be about horses. I flicked through the telly channels until I found a high-pitched kids’ program. Before I let Molly sit down on the couch I spread my jacket across the seat. I didn’t particularly want to do it, but I wanted Mam to see that I had done it.

  “I need you to stay here,” I said.

  “Where will you be?” Molly asked.

  “Just in the kitchen. I’m just going to talk to Grandma.”

  “She’s cross.”

  “Yeah. Don’t come in. Shout if you need me. Okay?”

  “Yeah.”

  She had put her good hand under her cast, and was cradling it to her front.

  “Is your wrist okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” she said. She looked down at the plaster and rubbed her finger across an illegible message. “That’s what Rosie wrote. It says ‘Get Well Soon, Molly.’”

  “That was a stupid thing to write. You are well.”

  “My wrist’s not well.”

  “Don’t come into the kitchen, okay? If you need me, call. I’ll hear you.”

  “Okay.”

  I put my hand on her parting, over the bright white line. I thought of Mam doing it: her palm on my head, the whispered prayer. “Father, protect me. God, keep me safe.” It was what she had said before she had tried to have me adopted, and again whenever she had tried to get rid of me after that. I hadn’t taken much notice of the words. They were prayer words, Jesus words, thrown in a corner with the vicar’s droning and Mrs. Bunty’s nagging. I thought about them as Molly’s scalp heated my hand. Mam had asked God to protect her. She could have asked him to protect me, or both of us, in the same number of words. She never had.

  Chrissie

  The police came back to my door the next day. They rang the bell early in the morning, when I was still in my nightie. I had got back late the night before, because I had spent so long lying by the handstand wall waiting for Mam to come and find me. She hadn’t come, but she had wedged the front door open so I wouldn’t have to climb through the kitchen window, which was actually almost better, if you thought about it.

  The policeman was the same one who had spoken to Da, but this time he had a friend with him, a shorter one with shinier shoes. My belly danced when I opened the door and saw their silver buttons. I felt like I had been standing in the middle of a dark stage and someone had just turned on the spotlight. They asked whether Mam was home and I told them she was a
sleep upstairs, which might have been true or not true. They asked if I could wake her and I said I couldn’t because she was sick, which was definitely not true. The taller policeman sighed and started to leave. I wanted them to stay. I wanted the same sherbet feeling I had had in the library corner. My days were hanging long and loose, and I had nothing better to do.

  “You’re looking for who killed Steven, aren’t you?” I said, leaning against the doorframe. The taller policeman turned back around. “I saw him,” I said. “The day he died. I just remembered. I saw him with Donna. They were going toward the alleys.”

  The policemen looked at each other and the shorter one got out his notebook, flicked through, and showed the taller one something written on a page. I thought it might be the notes PC Woods had made when they had talked to me at school, but then I remembered that those notes had gone in the bin. These policemen didn’t know anyone had ever spoken to me before. People kept forgetting me. It wasn’t good enough.

  “Donna Nevison?” the tall one asked.

  “Yes. She’s in my class,” I said. “She lives on Conway Road. She’s got a green front door.”

  “Where did you see them?” he asked.

  “Walking up Steven’s road,” I said. “They were near the end. Where it goes to the alleys.”

  “You’re sure it was her?” he asked.

  “I think it was. It was a girl with yellow hair.” I thought if I said that, they might go after Betty when they found out it wasn’t Donna, because she had yellow hair too and I didn’t much like her either. I wondered whether they might find out that it really was Donna who had killed Steven, and whether they would take her straight to prison, and then I remembered. This time it was a balloon end, pulled taut and then punctured, so the air hissed out in a sigh. For the first time ever I sort of wished it was Donna who had killed him and not me at all. It was getting harder and harder to have days off from it; whenever I tried, the remembering snuck across me, like drizzle or a shadow. It was really tiring without days off.

  The policemen were looking at each other and seemed to be speaking with their eyes. I didn’t know what they were saying. The tall one went down the path and out of the gate, but the short one stayed on the front step, tucking his notebook into his inside pocket.

  “Do you go to stay with your aunt a lot, Christine?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Where does she live?” he asked.

  “Don’t know,” I said.

  “Is it close?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s by the sea somewhere.”

  “Do you sometimes miss school when you’re staying with her?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Were you at school when some of our officers visited?” he asked.

  “What’s officers?” I asked. I sort of knew the answer, but I wanted to keep him there for as long as possible.

  He smiled. “Officers are policemen. Like us,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “No. I don’t think I was there.”

  He nodded and went down the path. As he got to the gate a third policeman came round the corner, shaking his head and tapping his hand with his notebook. I remembered him from school—PC Woods. The tall policeman asked the short policeman something, and the short policeman said, “No, she wasn’t there at the school visits. Must have been with the aunt.” PC Woods looked at me and said, “Yes she was. We spoke to her.” Then they all looked at me. I was surprised they couldn’t hear me fizzing from all the way down the path.

  When they had muttered for a bit the tall policeman and PC Woods came back up the path. “So, Christine, PC Woods thinks—” the tall one started to say.

  “Oh yeah,” I said. “I was there. I remember now. I just got confused before. That’s all.”

  “You were a bit confused when you spoke to us at school, weren’t you?” said PC Woods. “I seem to remember you thought you’d seen Steven the day . . . on that day, but then it turned out to have been a different day? A Sunday? Sunday of the week before? Something like that?”

  “Yeah. But I realized actually it was that day. The day he got killed.”

  “The Saturday?”

  “Yeah. I saw him on Saturday. In the morning.”

  “With his father?” said PC Woods.

  “His father?” said the tall one.

  “No. Not his da. It was actually a girl. I got it wrong. It was Donna.”

  The policemen did a lot of talking with their eyes but I couldn’t get what they were saying. Eventually PC Woods took out his notebook, scribbled something on the page, and showed it to the tall one. I leaned forward to see but he snapped it shut. I hoped it said, “Let’s stop all this talking with our eyes and talk out loud so Chrissie can hear us.”

  “Christine,” said the tall one in a stern voice. “You do understand, don’t you, that this is serious. It’s not a game. We’re working hard to find out what happened to Steven. We need to find out what happened to him because we want to keep you and all the other kids in the streets safe. We can’t do that if anyone’s telling lies. Do you understand that?”

  “I am safe,” I said. He looked like that wasn’t what he’d expected me to say.

  “Well, we’ll make sure you’re all safe,” he said.

  “I am safe,” I said again. “And I’m not telling lies.”

  “Right. Good. Well, Christine, I think we’re going to come back and have another word with you when your mammy’s better,” he said.

  “Better from what?” I asked.

  “I thought you said she was ill,” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Yeah. She is very ill. She’s actually probably dead by now.”

  “What?” said PC Woods.

  “Has something happened to your mammy, Christine?” asked the tall one.

  “Well. No. Obviously. She’s just got gout,” I said. I didn’t know exactly what gout was, but I knew it was a very bad illness because it was what Mrs. Bunty’s husband had and she never stopped talking about how bad it was, except for when she talked about the war or God.

  “Are you going to speak to Donna?” I asked.

  “We’ll speak to everyone we need to speak to,” said PC Woods. “Don’t you worry yourself.”

  I sighed loud enough to be sure they would definitely hear it, because I was getting sick of people thinking I was worrying myself when myself had actually never been less worried. “You should worry yourselves,” I said. “You should worry yourselves about Donna.”

  “All right, Christine,” said PC Woods, and he went back down the path to where the short one was waiting by the gate. The two of them started to walk away, but the tall one stayed on the doorstep. He had his notebook in his hand and was flipping through the pages. I tried again to see what was written in it, but he hugged it close to his chest. I wasn’t surprised. I had learned lots of things since Steven had died, and one of them was that what policemen loved more than anything else in the whole world was notebooks.

  “Just one more thing, Christine,” he said. “This aunt you go and stay with. What’s her name?”

  My tongue grew a bit bigger in my mouth. The tall policeman was watching me, and I tried and tried to remember the name I had heard Da say when the police had asked him about the made-up aunt.

  “Um. Abigail,” I said. He looked back down at his notebook, but in a way that made me think he was looking because he wanted me to see him looking, not because he needed to read what was written on the page.

  “Hmm,” he said. “Funny that. Your da seemed to think it was Angela.”

  “Oh. Yeah. That’s right. Angela,” I said. “It’s Angela. Auntie Angela. I just got—”

  “Confused?”

  “Yeah. I got confused.”

  He snapped his notebook shut and put it back in his pocket.

  “All rig
ht, Christine,” he said. “See you soon.” Before he went to join the other policemen on the street he said something in eye-talk that even I could hear. He said, “I’m watching you.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Talking to the policemen left me twitchy, and when they were out of sight I put on some clothes and went to call for Linda. We walked to the shop and I made her distract Mrs. Bunty by asking her to take down the jar of rosy apples, then the jar of jelly beans, then the jar of raspberry bonbons, each time saying, “No, no, I didn’t mean that one, I meant that one.” When I had taken the bag of toffees and tucked it up my dress I made Linda say, “Actually I don’t want any sweets today. It’s too complicated to choose.”

  “Bye, Mrs. Bunty,” I said, waving as I pulled open the door. “Thanks for the sweets.” She looked confused, then cross enough to explode. We ran out of the shop, round the corner, up the hill, toward the alleys.

  The blue house had the same moldy smell it had had the last time we were there, with Donna and William, and the downstairs rooms were still carpeted with broken window glass. It sounded like tiny bones breaking under my feet. When we got to the upstairs room we both looked at the patch of floor under the hole in the roof, which was bubbled with damp. Rain had soaked into the wood and sun had heated up the rain and the boards had turned mushy as wet paper. I went toward it slowly, feeling my steps go from stamp to scud, wood to mush. When I got to the place where the floor was darkest, Linda said, “Be careful. You might fall through.” I ignored her. I pushed a toe into the middle of the patch, lifted away a layer of wood, and watched egg-backed wood lice seethe onto my shoe. When I shook them off they scattered, wiggling to the corners of the room, but one got stuck in a dip in the floor. I hooked it out with my heel, trod down and rubbed back and forth. When I took my foot away there was no more wood louse, just a silvery smear.

  I had a pencil in my pocket, and while Linda ate the toffees I used it to scribble on the white-painted walls. Scribbling on walls was one of my favorite things to do, because it was never, ever allowed and it always, always made someone cross. I wasn’t sure who would get cross with me for scribbling on the walls of the blue house, but I knew someone would, in the end. I started out with lines, then pictures, then words. I wrote them as big as I could, swooping my arm like an eagle wing. I wrote until the pencil was completely flat at the end, then stood back and looked at the wall. Read the words. Fizzed.