by Nancy Tucker
“You play doctors with me,” she screamed. “You be poorly.” She put the stethoscope in her ears and started pressing the end on her arms and hands.
“That’s not right, Ruthie,” I said. I walked over and tried to take it from her. “I’ll show you how to do it properly.” She squawked and snatched it back.
“Mine,” she screamed. “My the doctor.” Her fat little cheeks were pink, and I wanted to kick her, but I kicked over the rest of the doctor’s set instead. The ball of bandage that the beautiful woman spent most of her life rerolling unwound, a long white tongue across the floor. I walked round the edge of the room, running my fingers along the walls. My insides were boiling. Lava and lectric.
“Play doctors!” Ruthie screamed. She did so much screaming. I had almost never heard her talk without screaming. So much screaming and so many toys and so, so, so much love. She had love spread over her in fat globs. You could see it on her skin. I knew what to look for. I had seen it on Steven.
I leaned my back against the far wall and goose bumps rose on my arms, straight-standing hairs making pimples. The sparkler feeling was everywhere—on my face, down my neck, in my belly, bubbling me up until I could barely stand it. I pushed off the wall with one foot and ran to the other end of the room. The space wasn’t big enough. I couldn’t build enough speed to run the sparkling out of my legs. I looked up at the sky. The blue burned my eyes. I wanted to climb through the hole and stand on the roof and roar until my voice ran out.
Ruthie was watching me. “What you doing?” she asked. I put my hands over my ears. I couldn’t get rid of it, her horrid, high-pitched, whiny little voice. It wormed its way inside me.
“Come on,” I said. “I’ll play. I’m being the doctor though. Give me the stethoscope.” She must have been really fed up of playing on her own, because she gave it to me straightaway. “Lie down,” I said.
“Don’t want to,” she said. “Not lie down. Be poorly sitting up.”
I waved the lollipop in her face again. “Do you want this?” I asked. She nodded. I unwrapped it, and when she was lying down I put it in her mouth. She sucked it like a dummy.
“Good girl,” I said. I put the stethoscope around my neck. “Now. Is there something wrong with your throat?” I traced my fingers along the crease where her body joined onto her head.
She nodded. “Coughs,” she said around the lollipop.
“Shall I try to make you better?” I said. The stethoscope hung down, getting in my way. I pulled it off and threw it to the side. I put my hand flat around her neck, fingers curled close to the floor, thumb resting on the place where her heartbeat thrummed. When every part of my hand was pressed to her neck I wrapped the other hand round too. I blinked, and the clockface flashed onto the backs of my eyelids. Its hands were twinned at the top.
“I’m going to give your neck a little rub,” I said. “It will take the coughs away.” I made my hands hard. She tipped her head back.
“Hurts,” she whined. She wriggled to the side, so she was lying right in the middle of the damp patch of floor. I saw a wood louse crawl into her hair. I kept hold of her.
“It won’t hurt for long,” I said. “I’m going to make it better. It will be better after this. I’ve just got to do it one time. One more time. Everything will be better afterward. I promise.”
I squeezed her neck. I squeezed it with everything I had inside me: all the bubbling and grumbling and grinding. It went down my arms, into my hands, and I used them to squeeze Ruthie’s neck. She swiped at my wrists, but it didn’t hurt because the beautiful woman kept Ruthie’s nails trimmed to neat pink half-moons. Her hands were weak and mine were strong. In the distance I could hear her whimpering, but she was like a fly buzzing inside a locked cupboard in another room in another house in another country. I swatted her out of my mind. I swatted everything out of my mind except my hands on her neck, my eyes on her eyes, the sound of her feet beating on the floor. She was lying on the patch where I had peed, and I looked for that feeling, the black, delicious thrill. It wasn’t there. There wasn’t any fizzing this time, there was only hate, hate and hate and the sound of Ruthie’s feet beating on the floor, slower and slower until they stopped. Ruthie stopped. Everything stopped.
I kept my hands on her neck for a while after she was dead. The skin was soft. It was soft like a flower petal. It was so soft I wasn’t sure where I ended and she began. The lollipop had fallen out of her mouth and left a sticky trail across her cheek. Her eyes were still open, but she had stopped blinking, and the bulging brown circles were like marbles in her head.
When I had finished killing Steven I had sat back on my heels and shaken out my seized hands, and I had felt warm and tired and not hungry, for once not hungry, and I had thought, “This is as good as a person can feel.” I looked at Ruthie and tried to get that feeling back. I tried so hard I thought my insides would be pushed out, because that was what the trying felt like. Straining. Squeezing. I put my hand on her shoulder and gave her a little shake. I tapped her face.
“Come back now,” I whispered. “Don’t be dead. I didn’t mean to. Come back.”
She stayed quiet. She stayed still. I shook her again, slapped her cheek, put my face above hers and blew warm breath. I said it right into her ear—“Come back. Please come back.” She stayed quiet. She stayed still.
The sky in the hole above us was hot blue, and the sun was hot on my neck, but my guts were cold. I was tired. My hands were sore. Ruthie was still. I had made her dead. She was never going to come alive again. I tipped my head back and looked up at the hole in the sky. I howled, howled, howled.
Julia
In Linda’s house, the morning mayhem began promptly, with full intensity, at six a.m. I was woken by one of the twins putting her face an inch from mine and shouting, “GET OFF THE COUCH. WE NEED TO WATCH TELLY.” Linda stuffed small bodies into school uniforms and poured Frosties into bowls and didn’t seem to care that no one could hear her over the yammer of cartoons. Molly and I were ready to leave by eight. We had to stand on the doorstep for a while, Linda calling from the kitchen, “Wait, wait a second, I’m just trying to work out if Mikey’s swallowed this or not.”
She came down the hallway with Mikey on her hip. He was grinning proudly.
“What’s he swallowed?” I asked.
“It’s just a little bit of a toy. But it’s only tiny. And I don’t think he has. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t. And if he has—well—I suppose I’ll find out soon.”
I was surprised that any of Linda’s kids were still alive.
“We’ll get off,” I said.
“Yeah. Things to get back to,” she said.
Mikey coughed and she put him down to pat his back. He leaned forward, spluttered, and spat something into her hand. It was a tiny doll head. She wiped it on her T-shirt.
“Well done, poppet,” she said. “Does that feel a bit better?”
He nodded and barreled back into the kitchen.
“Phew,” she said. “One less thing to worry about.”
“You know, earlier, you asked if I came because you called?” I said.
“Oh, I was just being silly. I didn’t mean anything by it.”
“I did come to see you,” I said. “I didn’t know it was you calling. But you were the person I really wanted to see.”
It wasn’t a lie. It had been Linda I had wanted: not in my brain, in my body. For years I had been hung up on Mam, because your mam was the one who was supposed to fill you up when you felt empty, but she had never done that for me. She had given me dregs and scrapings of warmth, and now that I had seen her again, I believed it was all she had been able to give, but it hadn’t been enough. She was never going to give me enough. I knew, because when she had told me what she wanted, she had talked about going back and making things different for her. She hadn’t talked about doing things better for me.
Only one person in Chrissie’s life had loved her in an ordinary, everyday way, the way you love salt or sunlight. Linda hadn’t been able to tie shoelaces or tell the time, but she had been the cleverest at loving, at loyalty, at giving everything and expecting nothing in return. She was the person I had needed to see one more time, before I lost Molly and everything stopped. I knew, because I didn’t feel hungry anymore. It wasn’t just shepherd’s pie and chocolate ice cream and Frosties. It was Linda.
“Thanks,” she said. She rolled the doll head between her fingers. “I didn’t know whether to say this or not. I didn’t know if it would make you uncomfortable. But I want you to know, we’ve always prayed for you. Me and Kit, we always have. He does know about you, just doesn’t know that’s who he met, if that makes sense. After we’ve prayed for the family and anyone else we know who needs to be lifted up to God, we’ve always finished with you.”
“Are we going home now?” Molly asked loudly.
“Yeah, we are,” I said to her, and to Linda, “Thank you. It doesn’t make me uncomfortable. It’s really nice of you.”
“I haven’t got anything new for show-and-tell,” Molly said.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said.
“I need something,” she said.
“Show-and-tell, is it, Molly?” said Linda. “I think I’ve actually got something you might be able to use. I wanted to give it to your mammy anyway. Well done for reminding me.”
“She doesn’t need anything,” I said.
“What is it?” asked Molly. Linda went into the house and up the stairs.
“It’s really not that important,” I muttered to Molly.
“It’s show-and-tell,” she muttered back.
Linda came back sooner than I had expected. I was amazed she could locate anything with speed in a house that was an oozing, seething snake nest of chaos. She put a gobstopper-sized marble on Molly’s palm. The sun glanced off its surface. All the colors in the world.
“Would your class like to see that, do you think?” she asked. She didn’t look at me. Molly passed it from one hand to the other.
“Is it just a marble?” she asked.
“It’s a very special marble,” said Linda.
“Why?”
“Because it used to be your mammy’s.”
“Does it do anything special?”
“Well. No. But it’s very pretty.”
“Have you got anything else?”
“I didn’t think you’d keep that,” I said to Linda.
“Of course I did,” she said. She looked at the marble balanced on Molly’s palm, then dropped her gaze to the ground. “It was my bit of you, wasn’t it? It helped. Helped when I was missing you.”
I felt a tug in the tie that had held us together for the past seventeen years. I stepped forward and I hugged her. She was warm and broad, and she held me so tight I felt we would turn into one woman. When she let go I walked down the garden path and through the gate. She stood in the doorway, and Mikey came and hung on her leg, and she looked tall and strong, like a lighthouse. I didn’t know why that was what came to me, but it did come, strongly. A lighthouse.
* * *
• • •
On the train Molly ate a sandwich the length of her arm, then fell asleep with her head on the wrapper. I couldn’t see her face, only her dark hair. I felt tired to the gossamer veins at the ends of my fingers, but I couldn’t sleep, and traveling backward made me feel sick, but I didn’t move seats. Sitting next to Molly would mean feeling the warmth coming off her body, feeling fused. It would make it more painful to be wrenched apart. By the end of the week, she would be with an infertile couple in a three-bedroom house, earning stars on a chart for eating vegetables and doing homework. I thought I might write a letter to her new parents: tell them about her reading books, what television programs she liked to watch, how much she wanted a party dress. They could take her to the department store. They could take pictures of her standing on their doorstep, trussed in satin and frills. You could do those things when you didn’t have to remember pale, still legs stretching out of a red-and-white-checked skirt.
My future was decided too. I would be arrested for breaching the court order, and if I didn’t go to prison I would kill myself. It was another foregone conclusion: without her, there would be no alternative. I would do it before I had time to be scared, before I had time to go back to the flat. Those rooms were impregnated with Molly: her height marks on the doorframe, her smell on the bedsheets. I couldn’t walk through them by myself. I would walk into the sea instead.
I rolled the marble in small circles on the train table. My thoughts spooled around, liquid and slippy. When I stopped trying to contain them, they went back to Linda. I imagined her in her matchbox house with her French windows open, kids spilling from drawers and from beneath the floorboards, grubby, semi-naked. I imagined Kit coming home for tea, putting his arms around her from behind, leaning round to kiss her cheek. I thought of her new baby, growing inside. She hadn’t seemed embarrassed about the glut of kids she had produced. When I’d had to tell Jan I was pregnant with Molly, my skin had crawled with sicky shame. We had been in her office at the police station, sitting across the desk from one another. She had taken a slow breath through her nose and moved her face around until she stopped looking exasperated.
“Have you thought about what to do?” she asked. She eyed my belly to decide how cross to be, and took another slow nose breath. Very cross.
“Not really,” I said, because I hadn’t.
“Well, do you want to keep it?” she asked.
I thought of the clump of new cells anchored inside me, like bubbles or frog spawn, something I had swallowed by accident. Jan knew who I was. She knew what I had done. I felt Steven and Ruthie between us, their small cold bodies laid flat on the desk.
“I can’t kill anything else,” I whispered.
“What?” said Jan.
“I’m keeping it,” I said. “It’s mine.”
Jan came to see us while we were in hospital. Molly was clean and dressed in a tiny white babygrow. I told Jan she weighed eight pounds, and Jan said that was big, and I almost laughed. Molly was the smallest person I had ever seen. When we had been sitting quietly for a few minutes, Jan straightened in her seat.
“You know I have to ask,” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“Your feelings might have changed,” she said. “There’s no shame in that. It would be a lot for anyone to cope with.”
Molly was sucking at me lazily, eyes half closed. It was a mean trick, I thought, to have slammed her onto my breast the moment she left my body, to have knotted us together with iron rope before I had even agreed to be tied.
Stay with us, Chrissie. What can you see?
Bed. Blankets. Molly.
“She’d be hungry without me,” I said.
“She’d take a bottle,” said Jan.
“She wouldn’t like it.”
“She’d get used to it.”
“She’d be hungry before she got used to it.”
“Maybe.”
Molly’s mouth came away from my nipple and she started awake. I put my hand on the back of her head and she fastened around me again. One of her hands clutched a fold of my skin.
“She likes me,” I said. “She really acts like she likes me.”
“Yes,” said Jan. “You’re her world.”
“I want to keep her,” I said.
“Okay,” said Jan. “Well then. That’s that.”
* * *
• • •
Molly lifted her head, squinting. The sandwich wrapper was stuck to her cheek, and when she peeled it away it left creasy marks on her skin. “My neck hurts,” she said.
I took off my jacket and gave it to her. “Here. Fold this up and put it against the window. See if y
ou can sleep like that. Your neck’s just been in the same position for too long.”
Her eyes didn’t close straightaway. She looked out of the window, head shuddering when the train went over bumps in the track.
“Was Grandma a nice mum?” she asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Did she not know how to be a mum?” she asked.
I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but as I turned it over in my head I decided to make it true. Mam had been useless; she hadn’t been evil. She hadn’t wanted me, so she had tried to give me away. She had found out that I had killed Steven, so she had tried to kill me. It could have been to punish me, or protect me, or neither. It could have been because she was tired of trying and failing to love a kid who felt like a stranger. I wouldn’t see her again, and I could choose how to remember her. I chose for her to be someone who didn’t know how to be a mam. I chose for her to be hopeless and clumsy and carelessly cruel, and to care about me just enough for it to mean something. Enough to remember my age. Enough to keep our first-day-of-school photograph. I chose for her not to be evil.
“No,” I said. “I suppose not.”
“So were you sad all the time?”
I tipped my head from side to side and felt my neck creak. I didn’t know the right answer. It would have been easiest to say, “Yes, I was sad all the time, Molly. I was horribly, terribly sad, from the moment I woke up to the moment I went to sleep, every day, every week, every year. I was so sad, I had to kill people. That was the only reason I did it, Molly. Because I was so sad.”
It wouldn’t have been an out-and-out lie. When I remembered being eight years old I remembered the hunger that had twisted my brain into sharp shapes, and the shame of waking between wet sheets, and the feeling of having no one in the whole world who wanted me. No one in the whole world who even really liked me. But I also remembered chasing William and Donna down Copley Street and feeling so light I was sure I would soar into the sky. Stealing sweets behind Mrs. Bunty’s back and whooping a long, loud siren as I ran away. Walking along the garden walls from Mr. Jenks’s to the haunted house on strong skinny legs. The tight itch of sunburn and the smell of crayons in the classroom and the marzipan taste of apple pips. Playing telly with Linda. Learning clapping games with Linda. Doing handstands with Linda.