by Nancy Tucker
“I’ll give you some,” she said. “You can leave it if you don’t want it.”
We ate at the table. I felt like we were two of Linda’s kids. The pie was thick, textured with meat and grainy potato. Molly forked it in until her lips were ringed with orange. Linda cleared away the other bowls, pausing to make an appreciative noise about a kid’s activity every few minutes. Molly finished and went back into the garden.
“I thought you might not still live here,” I said when Linda sat down.
“Oh, yeah, we do,” she said. “Didn’t make sense to move. We got the house after Mam and Da died. Pete lived with us for a bit, but then he went to Africa.”
“Africa?”
“Yeah. He’s a missionary. We’re so proud. He’s doing such good work.”
“Wow,” I said. I wanted to ask whether he still had a wonky foot, and whether he remembered the afternoon I had tried to take him to the alleys, but I thought those probably wouldn’t be helpful things to mention. “I’m sorry about your mam and da.”
“Yeah. They were quite young. Mam wasn’t well for a long time, but it was a shock with Da.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You figure it out. So we got the house, me and Kit. That’s my husband. It made sense to stay. And he did it up. He’s a builder. He put in the French windows and everything. There was a problem with some of the beams. They were weight-bearing or something. So it took ages. But it was really worth it. It’s made the kitchen so much brighter. Because it faces the right direction. I can never actually remember which direction, but it’s the right one. For the sun.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“Church. You know they always had those helpers at Sunday school? Teenagers? We did that. That’s how we met. And then we got married. As soon as we left school.”
“But you were—what—sixteen?”
“We were really ready. We had a lovely wedding. So posh. We had salmon.”
“Yeah?”
“Not even in a tin. In a fish.”
“Wow.”
I wished I had something real to say back—“Salmon in a fish, eh? Good choice. At my wedding we had chicken in a bird”—but our lives felt far apart. To me, sixteen was the fifth Haverleigh bedroom. I shared it with Nina, whose face was decorated with silver-pink knots of scar, because one of the other girls had thrown black-tea-with-three-sugars in her face the day she’d arrived. It was in the dining room, when the hot drinks had just been handed out. Nina crumpled out of her chair and writhed on the floor, clutching her cheeks, her skin bubbling and blistering like a vat of jam. Normal tea only burned for a bit, but sugar-tea stuck like glue. The scalding went on and on. Nina lived in the medical bay for a while after that, and when she came back she never stayed in our bedroom for long. Every couple of weeks she swallowed something that wasn’t for swallowing—bleach, batteries, letters from the Scrabble set—and the keepers had to take her to hospital. While Linda was setting up home and churning out kids, I was turning back the blankets on Nina’s empty bed, wondering if she would be back or if this time she had managed to swallow herself to death.
“Is Molly’s dad . . . ?” Linda said, reaching her hand up her back.
“No,” I said. “He’s not around.”
“Oh. Must be tough. I wouldn’t manage without Kit.”
“You’ve got about five hundred kids, though.”
We watched the five hundred and one kids charge around the garden. Molly was throwing a Frisbee with the oldest boy, and it clipped the toddler on the side of the head. He came into the house howling.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “Molly. Come and say sorry.”
“Oh, don’t be silly,” said Linda, pushing back her chair and gathering the toddler onto her lap. “Accident, accident.” She carried him to a cupboard, took a small biscuit from a jar, and slipped it into his fist. His crying stopped like a tap turned off. Outside it was nearly dark, and the kids had a glowing look as they ran around, as though their limbs were lit from inside. The toddler put his head on Linda’s shoulder. “I need to start getting them to bed,” she said.
“Yeah. Of course. Sorry. We’ll go,” I said.
“How long will it take you to get home?”
“Few hours. Four, maybe.”
“You can’t do that. You wouldn’t be home until midnight. Molly’s—what—five?”
“We can cope.”
“Why don’t you just stay here?”
“It’s fine. We’ll go.”
“But why don’t you stay?”
“We can’t. You’ve already given us loads.”
“Come on. I’ve just given you some tea. We haven’t even talked properly. I want you to stay. Please. Please, just let me be nice to you.”
I spent a lot of the next hour hanging in hallways, feeling spare. Linda was more than capable of executing the bath and bedtime ritual alone, even with an extra kid, even when that kid was Molly, who was drunk and overconfident on the departure from routine. Linda told her she didn’t have to have a bath if she didn’t want to take her clothes off in a strange house, but she was naked by the time she reached the top of the stairs, jumping into the tub next to the twins, suddenly oblivious to the hunk of plaster around her wrist. I helped her into the Spiderman pajamas Linda found at the bottom of her son’s drawer and squeezed toothpaste onto my finger to rub around her mouth. I was amazed that the process of bathing and changing and tooth brushing took the same amount of time for five kids as for one. When they were all clean and smelling of peppermint Linda gathered them onto her bed for a story, and I felt as though I was in a story, because I hadn’t known this kind of anarchic joy existed outside books. I sat with my back against the wardrobe and listened to her read—the way she pointed to the words and sounded out the letters. You would have believed it was for the kids if you hadn’t known her as an eight-year-old, hunched over her reading book in the classroom, pink grooves in her knuckles where they pressed against the desk. I thought of what I had said to Mam. If you want to, you figure it out. Most of the time it’s really hard and boring, but it’s not impossible. You just have to really want to do it.
When I settled Molly on the couch downstairs she tucked the blanket under her chin and sighed.
“I like it here,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“It’s fun.”
“Yeah.”
“I like that woman.”
“Mmm.”
I stood to leave, but she sat up. “Where are you going?” she asked.
“Just into the kitchen,” I said.
“Aren’t you going to stay?” she asked. It shouldn’t have surprised me. In her world, there was no alternative to my sitting by her bed until she went to sleep. I heard the front door open, Linda call, and a man answer. I sat back down.
“Yeah. Course,” I said.
She was asleep within minutes, and when I went into the kitchen Linda and the man were sitting at the table. I felt shy. He was wide-set and stubbly.
“This is Kit,” Linda said. “I’ve been telling him about how we used to be friends. At secondary school.”
“So nice to meet you,” he said. “I don’t know many of Linda’s friends.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Well. Thanks for having us. Thanks for letting us stay.”
“Don’t be silly,” he said. “You’re brave to accept. It’s a madhouse here. We never really know how many we’ve got for the night anyway.”
Linda fetched plates from the cupboard and served up more shepherd’s pie. She gave me some without checking I wanted to eat again. Kit drank a bottle of beer, and when the pie was finished we ate chocolate ice cream from bowls the kids had painted. At nine o’clock Kit stood up and stretched.
“Really sorry, but I’d better turn in. I’ve got to be on-site at six tomorrow,�
� he said.
I thought of Mam, sneaking out before the sun came up, head bowed, feet dragging. I pushed her away.
“So nice to meet you, Donna,” he called as he went upstairs. “Hope I’ll see you again soon.”
And then it was just us, Linda and me. It was always us, really.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I hate lying. It’s really bad. I just didn’t think you’d want me to tell him about you. I thought it was safest to make something up. And I didn’t know what you’d want to be called. So I panicked and said you were Donna.”
“Well that’s unforgivable,” I said. “My face looks nothing like a potato.”
She laughed. “I was going to ask if you remembered that,” she said.
“I was proud of it,” I said. “It was cutting.”
“It’s Julia, isn’t it?” she said, taking the ice cream bowls to the sink. “Your new name, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “I don’t really want you to call me that, though. I’d rather you just called me Chrissie.”
Haverleigh was the last place I was really Chrissie. It was the last place I let myself cling to people with her leechlike suction, the last place I stuck out my chin when they told me off. It was the last place I wet the bed. At Haverleigh they understood: our mattresses were rubber, and we had laundry baskets and extra sheets in our rooms, so if you were wet in the morning you could change your sheets between checks without anyone knowing. When I first got there I didn’t understand about checks, about the clear fifteen-minute windows between them, and a keeper came into my room while I was taking the wet sheet off my bed. I froze, hunched over, thinking of the damp circle on the back of my nightie. The keeper went to the opposite end of the bed and unhooked the corners of the sheet.
“Why are you in my room?” I asked.
“Just checks,” she said. “Thought you could use a hand sorting your bed.”
“I don’t want your hand. I hate you. You’re ugly. I hate the way you look. I don’t want you on my checks anymore. I want someone else. Anyone who’s not you,” I said.
She bundled the sheet into a ball and dropped it into my laundry basket. “I’m afraid it’s me this morning,” she said.
“I spilled some water on my bed,” I said. “I was having a drink in bed and I spilled it on my sheets.”
We didn’t have sinks in our rooms, and we never had drinks in bed, and I couldn’t have spilled a drink on the back of my nightie even if I had tried.
“Oh dear,” she said. “That was bad luck.”
She fetched a clean sheet from the wardrobe and shook it over the mattress. “You know, a lot of kids here spill their drinks in bed,” she said. “That’s why we have extra sheets in the wardrobes. It’s not a problem. Why don’t you choose some clothes? Most of the boys aren’t up yet. I’ll take you for a shower.”
I wet the bed my last night at Haverleigh, then never again. The outside world dried me into a liquidless husk. It was lonely and it was safe. Nothing could hurt me if I had nothing inside. Sometimes I thought what I missed about Haverleigh wasn’t Haverleigh at all, but who I had been there. Sometimes I thought what I missed was Chrissie.
“Does Donna still live here?” I asked.
“No,” said Linda. “She moved into town. Most people our age did. There’s not much here. You start to realize that when you’re not a kid anymore.”
“Where are Steven’s family?” I asked.
“They went to the countryside. After that campaign. Did you know about it? The campaign?”
I had seen it on the telly in the Haverleigh lounge. Steven’s mammy’s face had been big and old-looking on the screen. The hair falling down her back was long and lankly brittle, and her shoulders were dusted with white flecks of dandruff. By then it had been years since Steven had died, but she still looked rotted with grief, like someone who had had their insides pulled out and spread on hot tarmac to fry and stink.
“It’s just not right,” she had said to the reporter. “She’s had—what—nine years? Nine years in a glorified boarding school. She’s never even seen the inside of a cell. And now they want to let her out? Want to let her start again? How is that justice for my son? Steven doesn’t get to start again. I don’t. She deserves a life sentence. No—to hell with it. She deserves the death penalty.”
She had had a photograph of Steven clutched against her, the same as the one on the cover of Susan’s book. She had pushed it at the reporter. “Look at him,” she had said. “Just look at him. Look at him and tell me that monster deserves to be free. He died without his mammy. He died frightened. It’s every mammy’s worst nightmare: for your kid to be without you and frightened. She’s scum.”
That was what happened to kids like Steven: they got frozen in a state of perfection, ever pure, ever wonderful, because they were only ever two years old. Most kids lived long enough to make mistakes and let people down and do bad things, and they weren’t perfect, they were just living. Kids like Steven didn’t get to carry on living, so they got perfection instead. It was a kind of trade. I didn’t much mind the things his mammy said about me. They were just true. Scum was thin and grimy, and it floated on top of liquid, stretched out, diffuse. That was how I felt: as though I was floating on top of the world, waiting to be skimmed off and thrown away.
Linda pulled out a piece of her hair and started tying it in knots. “You get it, don’t you?” she said. “Why she couldn’t forgive you. I mean. Imagine if it was Molly.”
I wanted to scream. “Linda, all I do is imagine it was Molly,” I wanted to howl. “All I’ve ever done, ever since she was born, is imagine it was Molly. Sometimes I look at Molly and I wonder if I’ve ever even seen her, ever even seen what she really looks like, because I don’t see her face when I look at her. I see a face with the life squeezed out of it. And there are moments where I forget, where Molly’s laughing, and I catch myself enjoying her, and then I remember I can’t. Because I took that away from other people, and they never get to enjoy their kid laughing, or smiling, or growing. Not ever again. I want them to forgive me, but I know they can’t, because I couldn’t forgive me if it was Molly. Sometimes I think I didn’t need a life sentence, because I got Molly instead. She’s my sentence. As long as I have her I won’t be able to forget what I did. Not ever. Not ever.”
“I should just give up, really, shouldn’t I?” I said. My voice sounded thick, as though my nose was blocked, and I made myself laugh to show I wasn’t crying.
“What do you mean?” Linda asked.
“I can’t ever get the time back. And I can’t ever make it right. So it’s all pointless. It’s all stupid. I should just give up.”
“What ‘all’? What should you give up?”
“Just all of it. All of the trying.”
“Because people won’t forgive you?”
“Yeah.”
“I think that should mean the opposite of giving up.”
“What?”
“I don’t think they’ll forgive you whatever you do. So you could spend your whole life being as miserable as possible, because you made them as miserable as possible, and they wouldn’t forgive you. Or you could just have a normal life, just try, like the rest of us, just try to make things as good as they can be for you and Molly. And they wouldn’t forgive you. They don’t forgive you in either version. You can’t make things better for them. But there are two people you can make things better for.”
“One. Molly.”
“Two. Molly and you.”
I didn’t say anything. Pointlessness clogged my throat like hardened grease in a drain, and it wasn’t the pointlessness of trying to make people forgive me. It was the pointlessness of imagining a future for two people who would soon be wrenched apart.
“They’re taking her away,” I said. I hadn’t meant it as a retort, but that was how it came out. Clipped and snappy.
>
“Who? Social?” Linda asked.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Why?”
“Just not much of a mam, I suppose.”
“Not sure anyone feels like much of a mam.”
I laughed. It came out mean. “Like you’re not perfect,” I said.
“Me?” she said. “What? Have you seen the state of this place? It’s a shambles. We’ve got more kids than we can even nearly afford, and soon there’ll be another one. I mean, I love them, I love being their mammy. Of course I do. And I’m better at it than I’ve been at anything else. But perfect? Not even nearly. Not even close.”
“You seem pretty good to me,” I said.
She looked down, and pink crawled into her cheeks in blotches. It occurred to me that it might be the first time I had ever told her she was good at anything. She couldn’t stop the corners of her mouth dragging upward. It was obvious for me to want to go back in time and undo the big wrongs, but in that moment I would have settled for changing the small ones. I wished we could go back to being eight years old, just so I could be nicer to Linda, just so I could tell her she was good at handstands, a good best friend.
“Why do you think they’re going to take Molly?” she asked, scrubbing her face with her sleeve as if she could wipe away the blush.
“Her wrist,” I said.
“Is it broken?”
“Yeah.”
“Poor thing. Lily had a broken wrist last year.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. She liked it at first—the cast and everything—but by the end she was really bored. She wanted to go swimming and stuff. And the year before Jason broke his leg and Charlotte got this awful cut on her head. Any lower and it would have been her eye out. Felt like we lived in A and E that year.”
“Weren’t you worried?”
“Well, yeah. But they’re sturdy, little ones. They bounce back.”
“They’re not sturdy. They can get badly hurt. Really easily. Before you even know what you’re doing.”
“This isn’t like that. It was an accident.”
“She was on this wall. She wasn’t meant to be, but she climbed up. I wasn’t looking. I tried to get her down. I pulled her arm. She fell.”