by Nancy Tucker
“Yeah. Just for a bit.”
She pushed open the gate, ran to the roundabout, and began working up speed with her foot, jumped on when it was spinning, off again without waiting for it to slow. The words welled up in my throat—“Mind your wrist, bend your knees, not so fast”—but I swallowed them. When I pushed her on the swing she shouted, “Higher! Higher!” and I thrust my hands against her back, flinging her toward the sky. It wouldn’t matter if she flew out of the seat and arced through the air. I would just be exchanging one kind of crash for another.
When she got bored of the swing I sat on the bench, pulled my bag onto my lap, and took out the tin I had found behind Mam’s telly. The cards looked even more garish in the sunlight. I opened the one on top.
Dearest Mammy,
Wishing you a brilliant birthday. I hope you have all the happiness you deserve.
Mammy, I miss you so much while I am here. I think and think of you, all the time wishing you could come and take me home. I know it is my fault that we are apart. I wish I could make it up to you. I am so sorry for all I have done.
All my love to you, mammy.
Chrissie
I opened the rest in a slow procession, piling them next to me on the bench when I finished reading.
Love you with all my heart, mammy.
You didn’t do anything to deserve such a bad daughter.
I cry every day for the pain I have caused you.
You are the best mammy anyone could wish for.
They had all been written in black ink, with letters that grew and shrank and moved up and down across the page, and not one of them had been written by me. It was Mam’s writing. They were Mam’s words.
At the bottom of the tin was a folded photograph of Mam and me. We were standing on the step outside the house, her in a dressing gown, me in a green-checked dress. Linda’s dress. Her mammy had washed and ironed and sent it home with me, and she had sent a clean vest and clean underpants and clean socks too.
“Why you giving me these?” I had asked when she had handed me the carrier bag. I was standing outside their front door, trying not to leave.
“First day of school tomorrow,” she said. “Got to be clean and smart. I’ve done the same for Linda.”
“Why?” I asked.
“Everyone needs clean clothes for first day of school,” she said.
“But you don’t like me,” I said.
She looked at me oddly. I couldn’t tell if she was going to shout or sigh or shoo me away and go back into the kitchen to make some more scones. Just when I was about to give up waiting to find out she lowered herself onto her knees and pulled me against her pillowy chest. I couldn’t put my arms round her because she was holding them to my sides, and I wasn’t sure I would have put my arms round her even if I could have, because she was mostly quite mean and grumpy to me and I mostly didn’t like her. But I let my head droop onto her shoulder. It felt nice. She smelled of hot milk and Sunday afternoons.
“Oh, Chrissie,” I heard her say. “What’ll we do with you?”
When I put on the clean clothes the next morning they felt funny on my skin: stiff and soft at the same time. I went into the street to wait for Linda and her mammy to walk past. They came up the hill holding hands, and Linda’s da was there too, so she was swung between them. They were all in their church clothes. I was going down the path when I heard Mam behind me, putting a bag of rubbish in the bin.
“Morning, Chrissie!” called Linda’s da from outside the gate.
“Why are you wearing your church clothes?” I asked.
“Big day, isn’t it?” he said. “You only start school once. Anyone taken your photo yet?”
“No,” I said. Mam tried to go back inside the house but Linda’s da said, “Wait a minute, Eleanor, let’s get a quick snap of the two of you.” She turned slowly, like she was hoping if she took long enough he might change his mind and not want her to be in the picture after all. He just waited. When she was facing him she stood like she was frozen, and I stood that way too, as he raised the camera to his face and click-snap-clicked.
In the photo we were standing side by side on the front step, staring, not touching. There was clear space between us with nothing breaking it. Not an arm. Not a hand. Linda’s dress hung on me like a clean, ironed sack, and Mam’s nightie hung low on her chest. We looked like two ghosts.
I picked up the first card again. She hadn’t tried to disguise her writing—the spikes and slants of the letters matched the address slips she had given me each time she had moved. I still had them, crouched in a wad in my purse. It was, I realized, the same as the writing on the hate mail she had brought to Haverleigh to show me, the vicious notes she said had been posted through her door. I wondered whether Mam ever felt stooped under the weight of her strange, sad charade. It wouldn’t have made sense to anyone else, but it did to me. “I am here, I am here, I am here,” she was saying, scrawling threats to herself from herself. “You will not forget me.”
I put everything back in the tin, the first-day-of-school photograph on top. I still remembered that day: Miss Woodley’s gray hair, the milk and school dinner. Most of all I remembered the swing of Linda’s dress around my knees, and the way we had pretended to be sisters, because our clothes had smelled of the same washing powder.
Molly groaned theatrically when I told her it was time to leave the playground, but I said that the first person to spot five red cars would be the winner, and she relented. As we walked down the street I looked at the front doors and thought of who had lived behind them when I was Chrissie. Donna and William. Betty. Mrs. Harold. Vicky and Harry. I knew most of them would have moved on, but it felt good to imagine they were all still contained within those walls, as if life in the streets had paused when I had left.
It took me a moment to recognize the house, because the door had been painted and the front wall rebuilt. We went up the path and rang the bell and she appeared, a toddler on her hip, “Hello!” on her lips. It died when she saw me.
“Linda,” I said. The toddler burrowed his face into her neck.
“It’s okay,” she said to him.
“Mammy,” he said.
“I know. We thought it was your mammy, didn’t we? Never mind. She’ll be here in a minute.”
“Who dat?” he asked, stabbing a finger at me. She pulled his arm down.
“We don’t point, do we?” she said. “That’s another lady. Someone Linda knows.”
She wasn’t looking at me. She was swaying on the spot, and I didn’t know whether it was to soothe the toddler or herself. Molly started tugging the back of my jacket.
“What is it?” I hissed.
“I need the toilet,” she hissed.
“Can’t you wait?” I hissed.
“I’m bursting,” she hissed.
“You can come in,” said Linda, breaking up our snake talk.
“It’s fine. We don’t have to.”
“Yeah you do. She needs the toilet. Come on, sweetie.”
She backed into the hallway and Molly stepped inside. I shut the door behind us. The house was the same as I remembered, but fresher, cream-painted, and teeming with a small zoo of kids. They seemed to spill out of every cupboard and from behind every door, most of them in a cheerful state of half undress. There were drawings taped to the walls, toys stacked in the corners, and a warm smell of cooked potato.
“It’s the door you can see from here,” Linda said to Molly. “The one at the top of the stairs. It hasn’t got a lock, but don’t worry, no one will come in.”
“That’s my daughter,” I said when Molly went upstairs, as if, up to this point, her identity had been a mystery. I wasn’t sure I had ever called her my daughter before—it was a starchy word, hard-edged in my mouth. Linda would know about her already. They had put it in the papers when they had found
us, debated it on the radio. Men whose voices had sounded fat and balding had asked, “Can we really trust a child killer to raise her own child?” It was playing in the corner shop where I was counting change for a box of sanitary towels. When I heard it I wrestled the pram out onto the street. I didn’t work up the courage to go into another shop until I felt blood soak through my underpants and trickle down my leg in a sticky trail.
“Yeah,” said Linda. “It’s Molly, isn’t it? Molly Linda.”
“Oh,” I said. “You got them.”
In all my different lives, I had always written to Linda. From each of my Haverleigh bedrooms, from when I was Lucy. I had told her the things no one was supposed to know—my address, my phone number, each new name they had given me. Black ink filling up white rectangles. The writing was hungriest when I was little. Have you got a new best friend yet? Is it Donna? Has your mammy had another baby? Will you come and visit me? I gave the letters to Matron, asked her if she knew Linda’s address, asked her if she definitely knew her address, heard her say yes, yes, she’ll get it, don’t worry, Christine. She never wrote back. I carried on writing and she carried on not writing back. Sometimes I imagined my letters straining against an elastic band on a shelf in Matron’s office because she hadn’t really known the address but hadn’t wanted to say so. That made me feel better. It wasn’t that Linda didn’t care. It was just that she had never got to know how much I did. I had last written when Molly was a baby, when I had just been made into Julia. You’re probably not even getting these letters. You probably don’t even live at this address anymore. I just wanted to tell you that I’ve had a baby girl. I’ve called her Molly Linda.
As Molly came down the stairs the bell rang again, and Linda touched my arm. “Look,” she said. “It’s going to be chaos here for the next half hour or so. All the childminding kids get picked up at this time.”
“We’ll go,” I said.
“You don’t have to,” she said. “I mean, not if you don’t want to. If you don’t mind giving me half an hour to get everyone sorted, things will be calmer. Molly can play with the others. They’re—you know—” She gestured vaguely, and I wondered what she meant—that they were running wild, or mostly naked, or multiplying as we spoke? “But you don’t have to stay. Not if you don’t want to. Whatever you want. I’ve got to get this.”
Linda greeted the woman at the door and deposited the toddler in her arms. He started crying immediately. Molly came to stand beside me.
“Would you like to stay here for a bit?” I asked. She looked through to the garden, where assorted kids were playing with balls and hula-hoops in the dying light.
“Yeah,” she said, and led me deeper into the house.
Chrissie
They sent me away from hospital after two more days. I didn’t want to go. I pretend-coughed and pretend-sneezed and said my belly hurt, my head hurt, my everywhere hurt. They still told Mam I was ready to leave. When we were going, Nurse Howard said, “Take care of yourself, Chrissie.” I wished she’d said, “Take care of Chrissie, Mam.” Mam didn’t speak to me on the bus. She sat straight-backed and smoked two smokes with a trembling mouth. When the bus dropped us outside church she walked off without me. I didn’t try to catch up.
Linda was extra nice to me for the next few days because I had been so poorly. Even her mammy was nicer than usual. When I stayed for tea she gave me as much food as she gave Linda (which she normally didn’t) and she didn’t make Linda wash her hands after she’d been playing with me (which she normally did). Linda told Donna that I had been so poorly I had nearly died, because that was what I had told her. Donna didn’t admit it, but she was really impressed, and she let me have a go on her bike the first time I asked. If I had known people would be so nice to me just because I had been in the hospital, I would have tried to get myself in the hospital much sooner.
I went back to school on Monday but Miss White wasn’t particularly nice to me, and she was even more not-nice to Linda. When we were doing maths she asked her to read the time off the clock on the classroom wall, even though she knew Linda was thick at telling the time. Linda stared and stared at the clock without saying anything and Miss White kept saying, “What’s the time, Linda?” and Linda kept not saying anything. I could almost hear her heart banging from across the room. The rest of us went out to play but Miss White wouldn’t let Linda come. She said she had to sit on her own in the empty classroom until she said the right time.
When I got into the playground I went to the classroom window and looked through it. I could see Linda’s face from the side. Her mouth had turned down at the corners the way it did when she was going to cry, and under the table she was knotting her fingers so tightly the pads were turning red. I couldn’t see them from outside but I knew they were turning red, because the pads of her fingers always turned red when she knotted them like that. In the end she got let out to play because Miss White wanted to go to the staff room and have a cup of tea. I told the teacher on duty I needed the toilet. I didn’t go to the toilet. I went into the classroom, climbed up on a chair, took the clock off the wall, and threw it on the floor. It didn’t smash because it was made of plastic, so I turned it faceup and jumped on it until the numbers were hidden under a spiderweb of cracks. I left it on the floor and went back out to play. When Miss White saw it she looked at Linda, but she knew Linda would never have done something like that. There was only one person in the class who was bad enough to have done something like that. She waited until everyone else was doing worksheets, then called me to her desk. She had the clock in front of her.
“Do you know what happened to our clock, Chrissie?” she asked.
“It’s smashed,” I said.
“Yes, it is. Do you know how it got smashed?”
“Must have fallen off the wall.”
“And how might that have happened?”
“Probably just got blown off.”
“Blown off?”
“Yeah. By the wind.”
“Wind?”
I pointed to a leaf skimming across the playground outside. “It’s windy today,” I said. “Just look at the leaves.”
She sighed. I wanted to say, “You might have blown it off the wall with one of your sighs, Miss White,” but I thought I had better not.
“You are going to get yourself into serious trouble one day, Christine Banks,” she said.
“Because I’m the bad seed?” I asked.
She made a little snorting sound. “Did someone tell you that?”
“Yeah. I’m the bad seed. I’m not going to get in trouble, though.”
“Oh?” she said. “Because you’re going to start behaving?”
“No,” I said. “Because no one’s ever going to catch me.”
“Go back to your seat,” she said.
“Did you know I was in the hospital, miss?” I asked. “I was. I got given some sweets but they were actually tablets. They poisoned me.”
“Who gave them to you?” she asked.
I thought of Mam pushing the tube into my hand, pushing her mouth against my cheek. Lips like tree bark on my skin, feeling in my belly like a fluttering feather. Maybe she likes me now. Maybe I’ve got good.
“Just someone,” I said. “I got poisoned by them. I had a bad belly for loads of days. I nearly died.”
Miss White pulled a stack of worksheets toward her and started ticking and crossing. “Of course you did, Chrissie,” she said. “Of course you did.”
The next day at break time I went to bring the milk bottles in from the playground, but Miss White said, “No, Chrissie. Your turn as milk monitor has finished. Caroline, can you go, please?”
Caroline got up slowly, watching me.
“But it’s my job,” I said. “It’s my monitor job.”
“It has been your job, and now it’s someone else’s turn,” said Miss White.
“But I did it yesterday,” I said.
“Yes. You’ve been a very lucky girl, haven’t you? You’ve been milk monitor for a long time. Which is why we need to give someone else a turn.” She clapped her hands. “Come on, Caroline. Spit spot,” she said.
Caroline went out of the door and dragged in the milk bottle crate. She huffed and puffed and acted like it was too heavy to pull, so I went to do it for her, but Miss White put her hand on my shoulder. “Christine. How many times? It’s someone else’s turn now. You need to sit down at your desk and wait for your milk. Come on, Caroline. This is taking far too long. Spit spot.”
I stayed standing by Miss White as Caroline started giving out the milk bottles. I looked up at her big, ugly face. “You’re just saying ‘spit spot’ to be like Mary Poppins,” I said. “But you’re not anything like Mary Poppins. She’s nice. She’s not mean like you. You’re the meanest ever.”
“I’ve had enough of this, Christine,” she said. Her face was going red. Mary Poppins’s face never went red. “Go and sit in the corridor. You’re missing your playtime today. You can come back when you’ve decided not to be so bad-tempered.”
“But what about my milk?” I asked.
“I think you’ve had enough milk to last you a good long time,” she said.
“But what about my biscuit?” I asked.
“You can miss that too. It’s hardly going to kill you,” she said.
I went to the door, but as I passed the last line of desks I held out my arm and swiped it across, hitting the row of milk bottles hard enough that they flew into the wall. Milk went everywhere. Lots of kids squealed. Miss White shouted. I turned around.
“I’m just going to sit in the corridor like you asked me to,” I said. “I just knocked over some bottles on an accident. It’s just milk. It’s hardly going to kill anyone.”
In the corridor I slid down the wall under the pegs and sat with my knees against my chest. It was hot that day. As I had left the classroom I had smelled the tang of yellowed milk, droplets collected in sour pimples on the carpet. Soon it would be the summer holidays. Six weeks of no school. Six weeks of no break-time milk and biscuit, no school dinner, no sweets on someone’s birthday. My belly made a noise like a faraway train.