by Nancy Tucker
“What do you mean?” I wanted to say. It didn’t come out right. I tried again—“What do you mean?”—but my tongue was too big in my mouth. I felt a trickle of dribble go down my chin and a trickle of sweat go down my forehead. I leaned over and a whoosh of sick shot down to the ground. William and Richard let go of the swing pole, and Richard lifted Paula away just before she put her hands in the sick. She probably would have eaten that too.
“Has she got mumps?” William asked.
“No,” said Richard. “She’s not fat round her chin.”
“You’re fat round your chin,” said William, and Richard shoved him. I could hear what they were saying, see what they were doing, but it was like I was listening and watching through three feet of water. I was horribly thirsty, and I tried to ask for a drink, but I just sicked up some more. It covered my clothes, pooled at my feet. I heard feet running away, and I thought perhaps everyone was leaving me because I hadn’t shared my Smarties, and even before I hadn’t shared my Smarties I hadn’t been nice, so no one had really liked me in the first place, but then I felt warm fingers wind around my arm. Linda lifted the hair off the back of my neck and blew on the sweat-wet skin.
“Don’t worry, Chrissie,” she said. “You’ll be okay. You’re just a bit ill. Richard’s gone to get his mammy. You’re still my best friend, really. You can come to my party. We won’t do coloring-in.”
After a while I saw a short pink jelly of a person coming toward us, and behind her a taller, darker streak of a person. The jelly flapped her hands and made high-pitched noises and the streak put one arm under my shoulders and the other under my knees, lifted me up, and held me tight. Someone said, “Eaten anything funny?” and someone else reached into my pocket, took out the Smarties tube, “Only these,” the rattle of Smarties into someone’s hand, “Not sweets, look at them, they’re not sweets.” And then I was in a car, or a truck, or a milk van, and then a big room where everything was white and everyone was worried. And then there was sleep, or something close to sleep. It came like a thrown blanket, soft and sudden.
* * *
• • •
I knew I wasn’t at the house before I opened my eyes, because the bed underneath me was dry. The bed was never dry when I woke up at the house. I moved my legs around under the sheets and listened to the noises wrinkling the air—clanks and rattles and women’s voices. The smell of cleaning was sharp in my nose. When I opened my eyes a woman in a white cap and apron was looming over me. Her head was right below a bright white light in the ceiling, and the glow around her face made a halo.
“Hello, Christine,” she said. Her teeth were as white as her apron. “How are you feeling, pet?”
I tried to sit up, but pain twanged in my head like a snapped elastic band. My mouth tasted of dead things.
“Thirsty,” I whispered.
“Yes, pet. I’m sure. Let’s sit you up and I’ll fetch you some water. And some breakfast, too? Does that sound good?”
I wasn’t hungry. It felt so odd to be not-hungry that I wondered if I had been magicked into someone else while I was asleep. The woman told me her name was Nurse Howard, and she put her hands under my arms and lifted me up to a sitting position. I saw I was in a room full of metal beds with white sheets over small bodies. There were other nurses walking around in click-clack shoes, talking in voices too quiet for me to hear. In the bed opposite mine a little boy was chasing cornflakes round a bowl with a spoon, one arm wrapped in plaster.
When Nurse Howard had sat me up she tidied my sheets and click-clacked out of the white room. I looked down at myself. My belly stuck out in a pregnant dome, and the dome was full of sickness. Green and swirling. It didn’t feel part of me. My skin was so tight I thought it must be close to splitting. I wondered what would happen if it split—whether I would spill out all over the bed, all my guts and sickness and secrets.
Nurse Howard click-clacked back with a tray, which she put down on my lap. There was a cup of water and a bowl of porridge gritted with sugar.
“I’m not very hungry,” I said.
“I think you should have a go at eating something, pet,” she said. “You haven’t had anything to eat since yesterday. It’ll be good for your sore throat and your poor belly.”
I thought about shouting and swearing and throwing the bowl on the floor, but I was too tired to be bad. Nurse Howard click-clacked off to another girl and I scooped up a gob of porridge. It was jellied, holding its shape on the spoon, but I put it in my mouth and it tasted less sicky than it looked. When I swallowed it my throat was coated in a gluey layer of thickened milk, and it didn’t hurt my rotten tooth because it didn’t need chewing. Nurse Howard came back as I was picking up the last sparkles of sugar with my finger.
“Hungry after all, were we, pet?” she said.
“Why am I here?” I asked.
“You know you’re in the hospital, don’t you?” she said. I nodded. I hadn’t really known that before she had said it but I didn’t want to look thick. She put my breakfast tray on the floor and sat down on the edge of the bed. “You’re in the hospital because yesterday you swallowed something you shouldn’t have. Some tablets. Do you remember that? They were in a sweetie packet. You might have thought they were sweeties. Do you remember?”
“They were Smarties,” I said.
She nodded. “Well, actually, they weren’t Smarties, pet. They were tablets. Some grown-ups use them to help them go to sleep. They’re not for kids at all. So when you swallowed them they made you sick.”
“Oh,” I said.
She licked her lips. “Did someone give you those Smarties?” she asked. She touched my hand. I looked at her nails, short and rounded. My nails were different lengths, some of them snapped off low down, others so long they nearly curled over, all of them caked with dirt. I bent my fingers to hide them.
“I don’t remember how I got them,” I said. “Must have found them somewhere. Maybe on the ground somewhere. I don’t remember.” Nurse Howard looked disappointed. She picked up the tray and stood, leaving a dent in the bedsheets.
“Well,” she said. “Maybe you can have a think about it. Hmm?”
“Was I dead?” I asked. “Before I came to the hospital. When I swallowed the tablets. Was I dead?”
She laughed. “Of course not. If you were dead you wouldn’t be talking to me now, would you?” She was obviously another one who didn’t understand about the different kinds of dying. Thinking about people coming back alive again gave me a grasping feeling in my throat, and I looked on either side of my bed.
“What’s the matter?” she asked.
“Where are my clothes?”
“The clothes you were wearing when you came in? We’ll have kept them somewhere. Don’t worry. They won’t be lost.”
“I need them now,” I said. My voice sounded full and wet, and I hated sounding that way, but I had to carry on talking. “It’s important.”
“Why?” she asked.
“There was important stuff in my pockets,” I said.
“Was there? Well, I expect it’s still—”
“I need them now,” I shouted. Nurse Howard made her eyes very wide, then she click-clacked off. She disappeared through the door at the end of the white room and I was going to run after her but she came back again quickly, carrying my clothes in a folded pile.
“Here you are,” she said, dropping them onto my bed. “Better now?”
I didn’t answer. I was too busy digging my hands into the pockets of my skirt. My fingers closed around the marble and I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “Better.”
Now that I knew my marble was safe I didn’t really want the clothes anymore, so I pushed them onto the floor and pushed myself back up to the head of the bed. The boy with the broken arm had had his breakfast tray taken away and was turning the pages of a picture book with his good hand. On the floor next to him
was a shopping bag bulging with toys and books and packets of sweets. I held my marble on my palm, so if he looked over he would think someone had come to bring me toys too.
It was boring sitting in bed with no one to talk to and nothing to do, so I was glad when a white-coated man and his click-clack nurses swept in. He had a stethoscope around his neck, which I knew was called a stethoscope because there was a stethoscope in the doctor’s set Donna’s nana had given her last Christmas and she never let anyone else have a turn with it. The white-coat doctor didn’t speak to me, just to the nurses, who nodded and twittered and scribbled things on pieces of paper. He had dark hair and thin fingers, and I thought he probably didn’t ever let anyone else have a go with his stethoscope either.
“Flat on the bed, please,” he said, snapping on a pair of stretchy plastic gloves. Two nurses came forward, stripped the sheets away from my body, and made me as flat and straight as I would be in a coffin. The doctor pulled up my smock and pressed on my swollen belly with his thin fingers. I didn’t have anything on under the smock, not even any underpants. My body felt bare and my face felt hot. He took out a pencil-shaped stick that lit up with a click and shone it straight onto my eyeballs. The blob of light floated in front of me for a long time after he took it away. When he had listened to my chest from the front and back with his stethoscope, he snapped off his white gloves and gave them to one of the nurses. She took them with her fingertips and threw them in the bin at the end of the bed, like touching me had made them dirty.
“Now,” said the doctor, “you’ve been very lucky, young lady. If you hadn’t been brought to the hospital so fast, you wouldn’t be here now.”
“No. Obviously,” I said. “I’d still be in the playground.”
He lifted up one dark eyebrow and one corner of his thin pink top lip. “You won’t be so silly again, will you?” he said. I knew he wanted me to shake my head, but I didn’t. I stared him straight in the eye and squeezed my marble under the sheets until he swept away in a flourish of creases and nurses.
Once he was gone time curdled again, lumpy like my porridge. I looked out of the window at the end of the white room, but all I could see were rooftops and rain. I told a nurse I needed the toilet and she brought me a cold metal pan. She pulled up my smock and helped me to sit on it, there in the white room with everyone watching. When the pee trickled out of me it felt like pushing out razor blades. I didn’t cry. I never cried.
After years of curdled time the doors of the white room opened again and Mam was there.
“Chrissie! My Chrissie! My precious girl! My poor little lamb!”
She was at the bed, throwing herself forward, wrapping me in her arms. I had been eating rice pudding and jam from a china bowl, and it fell off my lap. I watched it splatter across the floor in gummy pink clots. I hoped someone would bring me some more. Mam smelled of perfume pasted over dirt, and at the edges the other smell, the woman smell that made me heave. My smock got wet from the rain on her clothes. Over her shoulder I saw Nurse Howard coming toward us.
“Hello,” she said when Mam let go of me. “You must be Mrs. Banks.”
“Yes. Yes. I am,” said Mam.
“It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Banks. We’re taking good care of Christine.”
Mam nodded and stroked my cheek with one finger. “Thank you, nurse. I’ve been so worried. I came here as soon as I heard. I’ve been away working, and my sister only called to tell me this morning. I came straight here. My poor, brave Chrissie . . .”
Mam didn’t have a sister. Not one we went to stay with at the seaside and not one who had told her I was in the hospital. She was a big fat smelly liar. Nurse Howard smiled, because she didn’t know about the big fat smelly lying. Mam moved up the bed and snaked an arm around my back. Her hand rested just above my elbow, where my smock sleeve ended.
“Christine has been ever so brave,” said Nurse Howard. “As your sister may have told you, she was very poorly when she came in. She’d somehow managed to get her hands on some tablets—sleeping tablets—and she’d taken quite a few of them. We think she may have thought they were sweets.”
Mam’s arm tensed behind my back. “That would be just like my Chrissie,” she said too loudly. “She’s a greedy girl. And careless. She’ll put anything in her mouth, anything she finds, things from the medicine cupboard.”
“They were in a sweet packet,” said Nurse Howard. Her voice was much quieter than Mam’s, but it still made Mam stop talking. “Christine’s had her stomach pumped, and she seems much better this morning. Obviously we want to find out how she came by the tablets—if someone gave them to her intentionally, it will be a matter for the police.” She looked from Mam to me, and made her voice softer. “I did want to ask you again, love—have you thought any more about how you came to have those sweets? Where you found them?”
Mam’s fingers closed hard on a fold of skin above my elbow. I clenched my teeth. “I can’t remember,” I said. “I think I just found them. I really can’t remember.” Mam patted my knee.
“Well, nurse, like I said. She’ll put anything in her mouth. There are some nasty types round where we live, nurse. I’m sure you heard about the business with the little boy. I try my best to keep Chrissie safe, but sometimes I have to work away from home, and her da’s not around as much as I’d like. There’s always someone watching her, but you never know how careful they’re going to be, do you? I told my sister, ‘Look after her proper, she’s very precious.’ I can’t do more than that, can I? Not my fault if she doesn’t take good care of her, not when I’m away working.”
I could see that Nurse Howard wasn’t listening to much of what Mam was saying. She was looking at her all over, from the knots in her hair to the rips in her stockings. I didn’t know if she could tell she was saying lies, lies, lies. I didn’t know if I wanted her to be able to tell. When Mam ran out of words Nurse Howard smiled a tight smile and click-clacked off. Mam turned to me and tucked the hair behind my ears. She didn’t look at my eyes. She spoke in a high, humming voice.
“Oh, my poor little Chrissie. Poor, unlucky Chrissie. Terrible luck for a kid, to have a packet of sweeties turn out to be tablets. Terrible bad luck for a kid. Such a shame she can’t remember where she found them.” She grabbed my face in her hand and squeezed my cheeks so my mouth popped open. “But she can’t remember. Can she?” I shook my head.
“Good,” she said. She let go of my face, but I could still feel her fingers there, pressing my cheeks into my teeth. “Good. Because if Chrissie ever remembered how she came by them tablets, she might find that other things started getting remembered. Things she doesn’t want anyone to know.”
She put her mouth by my ear. I could smell her stronger than ever. Stale. Bloody. “About Steven,” she whispered.
When she sat back she did look at my eyes. We stared at each other until the air between us had a heartbeat. Her hands were on the bed, and I broke out of the staring match to look down at them. I turned one over, so it was palm up, and lifted it back to my face. She let me lift her, made her arm loose like a puppet’s. I put her hand on my cheek and pressed both my hands over it, then tipped myself forward until the top of my head was on her chest. She knew what I had done. She was the only other person in the world who knew what I had done. I wanted to crawl back inside her belly, because that was how close I felt we were, both of us together, knotted inside the secret.
She let me sit with my head against her chest for a while, rising and falling as she breathed in and out. Then she stood. I kept my head down. I didn’t watch her gather her bag and walk down the aisle between the beds. I only knew she was gone because I heard the door at the end of the room open and close.
The little girl in the bed next to mine was sitting up and crying, and I lay down with my back to her, curled in the shape of a question mark. There was a small warmth at the bottom of my belly, like the glow of a blown-out candle. Mam
knew what had happened with Steven. She knew and she hadn’t told anyone. She hadn’t told anyone because she didn’t want me to go to prison, wanted to keep me with her, wanted to keep me safe. You have to care about things to want to keep them safe.
Julia
By the time I went back to the lounge, Molly had lost interest in the telly. She was headstanding on the couch. I wasn’t sure headstands were the best thing for a broken wrist, but I felt too heavy to care. Mam leaned against the wall, watching me thread Molly’s cast through the sleeve of her coat. Our last visit had ended in shouting—“Get out of my house!” “I’m never coming back!”—and it had been safe, because it had happened on the surface. We had been able to scream at each other and still hold on to the nub of feeling underneath, the nub that said, “I’ll be back. I need you and you need me.” There were no fireworks this time. There was nothing to shout. We both knew I wouldn’t be back. She followed us to the door, and I stepped through it feeling like a blister: thin-skinned, tight with oozings. I walked along the balcony without looking back.
“Are we going home now?” Molly asked when we got to the stairwell.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Promise?” she said.
“Promise,” I said. Like promise was anything more than a stupid word.
We had to go back through the streets to get to the bus stop. When we passed the playground Molly trailed her fingers along the railings. “Looks like a good playground,” she said, to no one but also to me. I looked over the fence. The concrete had been covered in the same springy surface that covered the ground under Molly’s school climbing frame, and the new equipment was so bright and sturdy it was hard to remember the stark metal poles I had hung on with Linda and Donna and William.
“Go on, then,” I said.
“What?” said Molly.
“You can play for a bit.”
“Really?”