by Nancy Tucker
After I had washed my body I sat with my arms wrapped round my legs, pressing my mouth against my knee, harder and harder until I felt my teeth print my lips like plasticine. Just when I thought my teeth were going to come through my lips and clatter my knee bone, I heard a creak on the floorboards outside. I climbed out of the tub and cracked open the bathroom door. Mam was standing on the landing, just outside her bedroom. I opened the door wider, and stood with my feet apart. Her eyes went across the whole of me.
“Where’s Da?” I asked.
“Not here,” she said.
“Where is he?”
“Don’t know.”
“When’s he coming back?”
“Why do you want him?”
I picked up a towel and wrapped it around my shoulders. Sometimes Mam said things just to trick me, just to give her an excuse to shout. I looked at her face to see if that was what she was doing this time. I didn’t think so. When she was tricking, her lip curled up on one side, making a dark wrinkle at the top of one of her nose holes. She wasn’t doing that. Her lips were tight and there was a crease between her eyebrows.
“I just want him,” I said.
“But you’ve got me,” she said.
That didn’t really make any sense. It was like saying I didn’t need a toothbrush because I had a twig, or I didn’t need a blanket because I had a sheet of tinfoil. The two things weren’t the same: the one I wanted was what I needed, and the one I had was much, much worse.
“I don’t want you,” I said. “I want him.”
She swallowed, and the skin between her neck and shoulders went very tight, and for a second I thought she was going to scream.
“Chrissie,” she said. “That little boy.”
My heartbeat thrummed in my throat. It wasn’t ticking. Too fast for ticking. Flap-flap-flap, a moth-wing flutter. My muscles felt like icy poles.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You,” she said. I thought she would carry on—“You knew him” or “You played with him” or even “You killed him”—but she didn’t. She just looked at me. Her teeth clenched and something twitched in her jaw, like an insect trapped under the skin. Then she backed into her bedroom and shut the door.
Julia
Mam was standing by the sink in the kitchen. It was a narrow room, with a small table and two chairs in the space at the end. I opened one of the cupboards above the worktop, expecting empty shelves. Packets of biscuits were stacked as deep as my arm. Three cartons of eggs stood on top of each other.
“So you buy food now,” I said. “Now that it’s just you.”
“Do you want a drink?” she asked. She took a tumbler from a shelf and poured an inch of amber into it.
“I don’t drink.”
She drained the glass in one swallow. “Why not?”
“I’ve got Molly.”
She frowned as though that wasn’t relevant, and took her second drink to the table, where she sat with her back to me. I opened the rest of the cupboards one by one. I didn’t particularly care what was in them, barely looked, barely saw, but I wanted her to hear me opening them. I wanted her to feel I was groping my hands around her insides.
When I sat down opposite her she didn’t look up. She was hunched and small inside the dressing gown.
“Is this where you were moving last time I saw you?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “Been here five years.”
“Why did you come back?”
“Just wanted to. The other places never felt like home. At least here I know what’s what.”
“Does it feel like home here?”
She shrugged and took a juddery breath. It struck me that she might be going to cry, which I found repulsive. I cast around for how I could take her from sadness to rage.
“Do you get any bother?” I asked.
When Mam had visited me at Haverleigh she had loved to tell me about the bother she was having. She brought in the notes that had come through the letter box, scrawled and screaming. MURDERER MAMMY OUT. HELL FOR SATAN-MAKER.
She sipped her drink. “Nothing major. Touch wood.” She tapped the table, which was clearly plastic. Neither of us spoke for a while. When I had imagined being with her I hadn’t imagined this: the tight words moored by gaping white silence. I had imagined shouting, tears, thrusting Molly forward. “Look. Look what I did, Mam. I made her. I did something good.” Mam dropping to her knees on the floor, pushing the hair away from Molly’s face. “Yeah. You did. Well done. She’s beautiful, Chrissie. She’s beautiful.” I hated myself for having believed it might happen, and more for still wanting it to happen.
“Have you got a job now?” I asked.
“Cleaning,” she said. “The offices in town.”
“Okay.”
“It’s early in the morning. Get there at four, five. Come back midday to sleep. That’s why I was asleep. When you arrived. I don’t normally just—you know. I only sleep in the day if I’ve worked the morning.”
“Okay.”
A tic nibbled at the corner of her eye. She dipped her finger into her drink and pressed the wet tip to where she was twitching. It didn’t stop. She ran the droplet around the rim of her glass. I remembered Da doing it—the fine hum that had throbbed the air.
“Do you know where Da is?” I asked.
“Lost touch. Could be anywhere,” she said.
“Oh,” I said.
“Good riddance,” she said, coming alive at the edges. “He was a bastard.”
Da hadn’t been to visit me at Haverleigh until I was sixteen. He had turned up three days after my birthday, lumbered into the visiting room with a bag of wrapped sweets the keepers had had to open and check for drugs or razor blades. When he got to the table he dropped them in front of me. Most of them spilled onto the floor. Neither of us picked them up.
“Happy birthday,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Grown up now,” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Bigger,” he said.
I didn’t say anything.
“All all right here?” he asked, waving his hand at the window. Outside you could see the ten-foot perimeter fence.
“Great,” I said. He flicked his thumbnail against his teeth and we watched the telly mounted in the corner of the room. Inside, I felt warmed by a small, defiant flame. He had come. He had come to see me. He had come to see me and bring me sweets. He had come to see me and bring me sweets for my birthday. He looked and sounded the same as I remembered, and I wanted to lunge across the table and put my face in the crook of his neck, in the place where the skin was cool and clammy.
When the telly program finished Da cleared his throat. “Suppose I’ll head off, then,” he said.
“But you only just got here,” I said.
“Been half an hour almost,” he said.
“No it hasn’t.”
“I’ve got things to be getting on with.”
“But I want you to stay.”
He sat down, picked up a sweet, unwrapped it, and put it in his mouth. I heard it rattle against his teeth. We watched another telly program. When it finished he laid his palms flat on the table.
“See you soon, then,” he said.
“Are you going to come back?”
“Yeah. Expect so.”
“I’ve only got two more years here. I have to leave after that. Will you come back before I leave?”
“Sure I will. Sure.”
“Thanks,” I said, and I knew he wouldn’t, but I still felt grateful for the almost-hour with a grown-up who hadn’t been paid to be with me. He pushed his chair back and I walked round the table and pressed myself against him. When I had hugged him as a kid my face had pushed into the soft dome of his belly, but now the bone of my nose braced the bones of his chest. I turned
my head so my cheek was flush with his shirt. He patted my back, then pushed me away by the shoulders, but not like he wanted me to fall backward, like he just needed there to be space between us. Sometimes you have to have space between you and someone else, even when you really like them, even when you love them, like because you’re too hot or because you need to breathe. That wasn’t why Da pushed me back: he did it because he didn’t want my body pressed against his. Because I had grown and strained and sprouted, but I was still the bad seed.
“He came to see me a few times,” I said to Mam. “He wasn’t that bad.”
“He was,” said Mam.
“He was better than you,” I said.
“When? When was he better? He was never there.”
“He was. Sometimes he was.”
“Once in a blue moon.”
“Well it wasn’t his fault. He had other stuff on. It was your job to look after me, not his.”
“Why?”
“Because you were the mam.” She didn’t retort, and the silence left me space to hear myself in my head—deluded, whingeing—which made me angrier than anything she could have said. “He didn’t need to be there to be better than you. At least when I saw him he was nice to me.”
She made a snorting sound at the back of her throat. “Yeah,” she said. “Nice to you.”
Another memory, grayly translucent, like a photo negative. Seven years old, seeing Da from my bedroom window, running out of the door and into his arms. Mam at the door, Mam on the path, calling as we walked down the street hand in hand. “Da, she wants you.” “Keep walking.” Mam in the house when we got back that night, sitting on the stairs, leaning against the wall. “Go to bed, Chrissie.” “I’m not sleepy.” “Go to your fucking bed.” Standing in my room, listening to the shouting. “So you’re just going to leave?” “I’ve seen the kid, done my bit.” “But what about me?” “Don’t embarrass yourself.” “What about me?” “You sound like a kid, Eleanor.” Gate creaking, warm breath on the cold window, Da walking away, Mam barefoot outside, “Come back, come back, please, come back.” Voice breaking, jagged edges. Footsteps on the stairs. Mam in my bedroom, Mam hitting my face, a thunderclap pain and a whipcrack sound. “This is all because of you.” Palm on my cheek, hot, tender like meat. “Yes. All because of me. All for me. He came back for me. Not for you. Didn’t you hear him?”
My chair screeched as I got up from the table. “I’m going to check on Molly,” I said. She was where I had left her: on the couch, her face lit by a history program.
“Are you all right?” I asked. She didn’t look over when I sat down on the couch arm.
“Why does she say Chrissie?” she asked.
“That’s what I was called when I was little,” I said.
“But not anymore?” she said.
“No,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Just got changed.”
“Will I get changed from Molly?”
“No,” I said, though it occurred to me that I didn’t know what would happen to her name when she moved to the new parents. A part of me hoped they might change it. I hated the idea of her soft syllables in their mouths. I wondered whether, when I was in prison, I would find I still needed to say her name a certain number of times a day in order to feel whole. I imagined myself chanting it, alone, hunched on my bunk.
On the way back to the kitchen I stopped to look into the room next to the lounge. It was messier than the rest of the apartment, the bed covered in knotted tights and blouses. There was a person-shaped indentation in the middle, and I pictured Mam curled within it, like a mouse burrowed into a nest.
She was still at the kitchen table, her head resting on one hand. As I walked past the worktop I ran my fingers along the boxes of cereal stacked against the wall.
“You buy food now,” I said as I sat down.
“Why do you keep saying that?” she asked.
“Because you didn’t bother when I lived with you.”
“Didn’t I?”
“No. I never had enough to eat. I was starving. I stuffed my bedsheets in my mouth at night just so I had something to chew.”
“But I remember buying you things. Sweets and things. I remember it.”
“That was—what—once a month? The rest of the time there was nothing.”
“Well I didn’t know that. I don’t remember being hungry.”
“You weren’t.”
It was true: even when the cupboards had been bare, Mam had had enough to eat. Sometimes when she had come back at night I had waited until she was quiet in her room, then gone downstairs and pawed through the handbag she had dropped in the hallway. There had always been something coiled at the bottom, a crisp packet or rustle of chip paper. I had always hoped it was chip paper. When it had been chip paper I had sucked off the ketchup. We had been like a gone-wrong bird family, me and Mam: her out scavenging, me in the nest. She had only sometimes hacked up half-chewed worm parts for me, and whatever scraps she had given me I had swallowed down. I thought of it now and felt coldly degraded.
“I was hungry,” I said.
“Okay,” she said. “I get it. But, come on. It was only food.”
The snag of anger caught me in the soft place where my jaw met my neck. I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t. I couldn’t think how to explain the hunger, and I wasn’t sure there was any point in trying. You couldn’t understand hunger like that unless you had felt it. I wanted to tell her how it had shaped me, made me, because it had been huge and I had been tiny and it had always been there, a gnawing, nagging constant. It would have been mad to say I had killed because I was hungry, but the hunger had been a form of madness. It had driven so much of what I had done back then. Sometimes I wondered if the hunger could have stopped my brain growing the way normal brains grew, because I had never had any sustenance to make into new cells.
At Haverleigh we had all eaten together, sitting on long benches either side of the dining table. The table was wide enough that we couldn’t kick the people opposite us when we were sitting down, so we had to kick the people next to us instead. They tried to sit us next to people we liked so we wouldn’t kick them, but no one liked me and I kicked everyone. I always stopped kicking when the food arrived. The keepers put plates of sandwiches in the middle and I grabbed as many as I could fit in my hands, piled them onto my plate, grabbed more, piled them higher, made a shield with my arm as I pushed them into my mouth. I didn’t taste food at Haverleigh; tasting wasn’t the point. Eating wasn’t the point. The point was having, and keeping, and filling. Sometimes, when we were doing cooking with the keepers in the kitchen, I snuck away to the larder. My feet made soft slapping sounds on the lino floor, and I peeled open the door with a quiet sigh. It wasn’t about being caught or not—I was always caught—it was about how much I could swallow before the ugly strip light snapped on above my head. Different foods moved down my throat in different ways: cornflakes scratched, jam oozed, butter slid. When the keepers found me they sighed loudly, much louder than the larder door. They pulled me to the bathroom and washed the sticky gloves off my hands. I screamed.
“Be quiet, Chrissie.”
“But it hurts.”
“What hurts?”
“My belly hurts. My belly hurts.”
“Of course it hurts. You’re too full. You shouldn’t have stuffed yourself like that.”
“But it hurts. It hurts. I hurt.”
They sighed even louder, and I screamed even louder, because they didn’t understand. My belly hurt in a sicky, low-down ache, like an iron fist squeezing my guts, and then I hurt in other places, secret places, in my throat and hea
d and chest. I hurt because I missed Da and Linda and the handstand wall and my marble. I screamed so much I was sick, and then I was quiet. I felt better when I had been sick. The keepers usually didn’t, because I had usually been sick on them.
After a while they put a lock on the larder door, so I started stealing things from the breakfast table. I squirreled them in my cupboard and ate them under the covers at night.
“Why is there raspberry jam on your sheets, Chrissie?” a keeper asked one Sunday, peering over my shoulder as I stripped my bed.
“What raspberry jam?” I asked.
“That raspberry jam,” he said.
“That’s not raspberry jam,” I said. “That’s blood. I had a nosebleed.”
“Hmm,” he said, taking the sheets from me. “A nosebleed with seeds in it. Interesting.”
“Well I am the bad seed,” I said.
By the time I left Haverleigh I had learned to fear the strength and size of my appetite, because what I had eaten there had strapped itself to my body. Each time I splashed my face with water my hands brushed over bulges at my cheeks and chin. When I left I barely ate, and my bones rose back to the surface like curds separating from whey. The hunger was always there, beating fists against the tight seal I had fastened around it, but I pushed it down. It hurt too much to be big. Too big to fit in the clothes that smelled of Linda and the streets. Too big to hide. Too big to love.
* * *
• • •
Is there a reason you’ve come here?” Mam asked.
I put my elbows on the table and pressed my fingers into my eye sockets. The ache in my head was so strong I saw rings of pink and blue light each time I blinked. I could picture every cell inside my skull, red and raw and angry with pain. I didn’t want to tell her that I needed her. She didn’t deserve it.