The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

  I remembered the day they took me to the police station, away from the blue house and the hole in the sky. When they finished asking me questions they left me in a bare room. A woman policeman sat on a plastic chair in the corner. She didn’t look at me. I swung my legs and drummed my hands and made a loud clicking noise with my tongue against my teeth. She didn’t look at me. In the end I gave up trying to make her look at me. I put my cheek on the table and closed my eyes. The room was cold, and when I dragged my mouth across my arm the hairs were spiky on my lips.

  “Can I have a blanket?” I asked the woman policeman. She didn’t answer. She didn’t look at me.

  In the police station there was no way of knowing whether it was day or night, because there were no windows and the lights were on all the time. After a while they put me in a cell with a bunk and a toilet and a cheese sandwich on a plate. A bit later they came back, took away the plate, gave me a pillow. I thought that must mean it was bedtime, so I kicked off my shoes and lay down. The bunk was twice as long as me, because the cells weren’t meant for kids. If you were younger than ten you didn’t usually go to a cell or have a trial, because whatever bad thing you had done, you were just a kid and it wasn’t your fault. I was only eight, but I still got a cell and a trial. Some things were so bad they stopped you being a kid.

  My eyes were starting to droop shut when I heard the cell door unlock and swing open. I sat up. Mam was there. She walked in and the guard shut the door.

  “I’ll just be out here,” he called. “Knock when you need.”

  Mam went and stood with her back against the far wall, so we were opposite each other. We looked at each other for a long time, and then I put my arms out straight in front of me and lifted them up. It was something I had seen little kids do: Steven reaching up to his mammy, Ruthie reaching up to the beautiful woman. I didn’t know why I was doing it.

  Mam folded her arms across her chest. “Stop it, Christine,” she said. “You look like a kid.” Then she went to the door and knocked, and the guard let her out. I kept my arms in the air. I kept them there until all the blood had drained away, until they felt like two lead poles stretching away from my body. Then I lay down and went to sleep.

  In the weeks of the trial they kept me in a small white room in the big dark basement of the prison. I didn’t know what the outside of the building looked like, because whenever they brought me inside from the van they covered me with a blanket that smelled of sweat and potato peel. The first time they did it I kicked and screamed, and they had to carry me, one policeman on each side. I thought they were taking me to have my head cut off, or to be hung on a cross.

  “Don’t do it, don’t do it, I don’t want to be dead,” I screamed.

  “No one’s going to be dead, Christine,” said the policeman on my right.

  “No one else is going to be dead,” said the one on my left. He was my least favorite. I bit him and he swore.

  When we got to my room I saw there was no cross and no guillotine, so I stopped thrashing. They put me on the bed and I lay limp as a slug, looking at the bare white ceiling. There was nothing in the room except the bed and a telly, up on a shelf in the corner.

  “You going to stay calm now?” the right-hand policeman asked. “What was all that about, eh? Why did you think we was going to kill you?”

  I folded my arms and turned toward the wall. The way he talked made it sound like I had been stupid to think they were going to kill me, but that wasn’t true at all. You never knew when someone was going to kill you. Just ask Steven and Ruthie.

  Every morning they covered me with the potato-peel blanket and put me in a cage in the van to drive me to the courtroom. I leaned against the metal mesh and let the rattles bang away my thoughts. I found I felt nothing at all during those journeys, and I knew it was thanks to the rattles. In court I sat in a glass box, looking around the wooden room, and a hundred million pairs of eyes looked back at me. At first I liked it, the feeling of everyone watching me. It made me feel tingly, almost fizzy, almost like God. But the trial went on for days and days, and soon I stopped liking it. People took it in turns to stand up and talk about how bad I was, and I didn’t mind them saying that I was bad, but I minded that there were so many of them, and that they all took such a long time to say what they wanted to say. I got tired and fidgety in my box. Sometimes, when the person standing up had been speaking for a long time, I put my head on the ledge in front of me and closed my eyes. A guard always tapped my shoulder, told me to sit up. I always put my head down again. They always tapped me again. It made the time go faster, because it was almost like a game.

  When I got into my cage at the end of the day I always felt tired, so tired my eyes itched and my face ached. Back at the prison they put me in my room and brought me my tea on a plastic tray, and I ate it so quickly I got hiccups. Then I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes and disappeared. It didn’t feel like going to sleep. It felt like dropping out of the world.

  Weekends in prison were the worst, because there was no van and no court and no one looking at me except the guard outside my room. The days passed like treacle moving through a sieve: sticky and slow. In the morning they brought my breakfast under a sweating lid. When it was gone I put the tray on the floor and waited for the next meal. The telly chattered in the corner, but it was on the wrong channel for kids’ programs and the buttons were too high for me to reach. Sometimes I counted how many steps it took me to get from one end of the room to the other: twenty-five if I went heel to toe. Sometimes I did handstands against one of the clean white walls. It wasn’t the same as the handstand wall.

  The last day of the trial was my ninth birthday. When I got into my box I saw the beautiful woman, sitting next to Steven’s mammy on the long wooden bench. She hadn’t been there before. She looked pale and fat in the way that meant she was going to have a baby. I spent a long time looking at her belly from behind my glass wall. Then I put my head down on the ledge. There really hadn’t been any point in it at all. I had killed Ruthie because if I wasn’t going to be the beautiful woman’s little girl, then no one else was going to be, either. Now she was going to have a baby all of her own. I knew it would be another girl. I just knew. I wouldn’t be able to kill her because I would be in prison, and that meant she would get to live, get to grow up with the beautiful woman as her mammy, get toys and dresses and kisses. The guard tapped my shoulder to get me to sit up, but I didn’t. I was too tired.

  I dragged myself up when the judge told me to stand. He looked me in the eye and said I would be going to a Home, and by then I knew Home was just another word for prison, and I wanted to say, “But you can’t. You can’t send me to prison. It’s my birthday. It’s not fair.” He said words like wicked and reckless and evil, and the guard took my elbow and I realized I would never see the handstand wall again. Never see Linda again. And I wanted to run up to the judge’s desk and beat my fists on the wood and roar, “But I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean the killing! I take it back! I take it back! Take me back!”

  I didn’t roar. I didn’t even speak. The sound of women wailing exploded around me, and I looked around just long enough to find Mam, alone on her bench. She wasn’t wailing. She wasn’t crying. She had her lips pressed together in a thin, dark line. I let the guards lead me out of the room. I didn’t kick or bite. Deep down I knew people couldn’t go back in time. Deep down I knew people couldn’t come back alive again once they were dead. There were lots of things I didn’t know about dying—how it felt, how it worked, almost everything, really—but the one thing I had learned was that it lasted forever. When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not. If it didn’t last, it wasn’t r
eal dying, it was just someone caring so little they disappeared.

  I was quiet as we walked to the cells and quiet as they locked me in. I lay on the bed, put my fingers on my throat, and counted my heartbeats—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. Sometimes when I turned a new age I used it as my lucky number, so my lucky number was my age number and I could be lucky without even having to try. I decided I wouldn’t have nine as my new lucky number.

  * * *

  • • •

  I dragged my finger along the train window and left a greasy smear. When I thought of the old life I remembered the misery, but also the giddy, euphoric freedom, and that freedom was what I wanted for Molly. Freedom from the apartment and from snooty school receptionists and from the routine I strapped around her, like a straitjacket, because it was the only way I could trust myself to keep her safe. I could have told her I had been sad all the time, and it would have made me more comfortable and more of a coward. I had been happy as well as sad, because it had been heaven as well as hell. And I had taken it, chewed it, digested it, and done things that had left two families with no heaven, only hell. That was the truth. Every time, every day. It would always be the truth.

  “I was sad a lot. But not all the time,” I said. “Sometimes I was happy. And sometimes I was angry. Angry enough to hurt people.”

  I had laid a path for questions—“How did you hurt them? Did you push them? Did you hit them? Who were they? Did they hurt you back?”—but they didn’t come. Molly had gone back to sleep. Her mouth was open and a clear stream of dribble ran down her chin. I didn’t have a tissue. It collected in dark drips on her T-shirt.

  I thought of taking Molly to school and struggling for breath in the crowd of other-mothers, watching her disappear into the building and wondering if this would be the day the head teacher phoned to tell me she had attacked another kid, the day I discovered that despite everything I had done, I hadn’t stopped her turning into me. I thought of the seize of panic when I looked at the clock and realized we were five minutes late for dinner, tea, bath, bed, the torturous reading-book ritual, the way each missed moment felt like a failing, the way I struggled to hear my thoughts above the jabber of kids’ telly. I thought of sitting on my mattress and watching her sleeping face, yellowed by the yolky chink of bulb light coming through the door. Holding her clothes to my nose to see whether they needed washing, breathing in the smell of crayons and school dinners. Carrying her back from the playground the time she grazed her knee, her arms a warm chain around my neck. It had been hell and it had been heaven, and now it was over. She would forget me.

  I reached around in my bag for a pen. Molly’s bad arm was laid across the table, and I moved it gently, without waking her. There wasn’t much white space left, but I found a patch big enough for my name.

  Mum.

  Chrissie

  I walked back from the alleys stooped over, like an old person. I knew my insides would fall out if I stood up straight. I had to go the long way round, because I didn’t want to pass the beautiful woman’s house and have her nag me about where Ruthie was. I really wasn’t in the mood to be nagged. The long way round took me past the church and the church clock, and I saw it was getting toward ten o’clock. I had only been with Ruthie for half an hour. It felt like half a year.

  When I knocked on Linda’s door her da answered, and he smiled in a way her mammy definitely wouldn’t have smiled.

  “All right, our Chrissie?” he said through a mouthful of toast. Butter and marmalade gathered at the corners of his lips in glistening pockets. “You’ll be wanting Linda.” He wiped his mouth on his sleeve and transferred the oily orange jelly to his shirt in a snail trail. He didn’t seem to have been told about the new Linda-not-playing-with-Chrissie rule.

  “Look at that sky,” he said, pointing above my head. I looked up. My eyes ached with the blue of it. “Perfect. Proper spring day.” He looked back at me. “You all right, Chrissie? You’re looking a bit peaky.”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “You sure?”

  “Yeah. Can I go up to Linda’s room?”

  “Course, course. Up you go. I’ll be in the shed if you need me.”

  Linda had one shoe on and was hopping around, looking for the other. “Can you see my shoe?” she asked.

  I sat down on her bed. “No.”

  “I thought I took it off in here yesterday.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Don’t want to go out.”

  She came and sat next to me. “What do you want to do, then?”

  “Can we lie down for a bit?”

  “Eh?”

  I kicked off my shoes, crawled onto the bed, and lay with my head on the pillow. She leaned over and peered at my face. “Are you poorly?” she asked.

  “No. I just want to lie down for a bit.”

  “Okay.”

  She nudged me across and we lay top-to-toe, so our feet were next to each other’s heads. I put my cheek against her bare arch. The skin was soft and cool.

  “Linda?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If I went away, what would you do?”

  “Don’t know.”

  “What would you, though?”

  “Get a new best friend, I suppose.”

  I didn’t much like her saying that. She made it sound as if it would be easy. “Yeah,” I said. “If you moved away I’d get a new best friend. Might get one anyway. I don’t really like you.”

  “Is your da taking you away?” she asked. I flexed my foot on the pillow beside her head and one of my toenails tangled in her hair. She squeaked. I pulled away fast, even though I knew it would hurt her.

  “Ow!” She pulled herself free. “That hurt.”

  “My da’s not taking me away,” I said.

  “Why not?” she asked.

  “Because I’m the bad seed,” I said.

  “Oh,” she said.

  “I didn’t even want him to take me away in the first place.”

  “Why not?”

  “Don’t like him.”

  “But he’s nice. He gave you that marble.”

  “Shut up.”

  Neither of us spoke for a while. Sunlight came through the branches of the tree outside and cast dappled shadows on the carpet. I could feel her hair tickling my toes.

  “How comes you’re going away?” she asked.

  “Just might. Might go away by myself,” I said.

  “You can’t. You’re a kid,” she said.

  “I can do whatever I want,” I said.

  Pete started grizzling downstairs and Linda’s da started singing to him. I knew it was a made-up song, because it had Pete’s name in it. Linda’s da was always making up songs with Linda’s and Pete’s names in them, and sometimes when I was there he put my name in too. I loved it when he did that.

  “Your new best friend might not be as good as me,” I said.

  “Don’t know. Might be better,” said Linda.

  “Probably not, though.”

  “No. Probably not.”

  “Will you miss me?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Will you write to me?”

  “I’m rubbish at writing.”

  “Yeah. But if I write to you will you read my letters?”

  “Probably. If the words aren’t too long.”

  “I won’t make them too long.”

  “Okay, then. I’ll read them.”

  I still had my cheek pressed against her foot, and I turned my head to the side so my lips touched the round bone at the bottom of her big toe. I kissed it. She giggled.

  “What you do that for?”

  I sat up. There was no more fizzing left in my belly, not the sherbet kind or the lava kind or the lectric kind, just a hollow space, like someone had reached in and clawed out everything I used to have
inside me.

  “Come on, Linda,” I said. “Let’s go out.”

  * * *

  • • •

  From the outside, the blue house looked just the same as it had looked when I had walked up to it with Ruthie. Linda skipped and chattered as we went into the alleys, but I didn’t say anything. I kept looking over my shoulder to see if the beautiful woman was coming after me. I knew it wouldn’t be long before she started wondering where Ruthie was, and then it wouldn’t be long before she realized she wasn’t in the playground, and then it wouldn’t be long before everyone was searching for her. Thinking about it made me feel tired.

  I went first up the crumbling stairs. Ruthie was lying where I had left her, with her dress rucked up around her underpants and her orange hair messed out around her head. When I went closer I saw there were ants gathered around the lollipop that had fallen out of her mouth. One of them was crawling up her cheek, following the trail of sticky dribble that had oozed from the corner of her lips. I crouched down beside her, lifted it away, and squashed it between my finger and thumb.

  “Is she asleep?” asked Linda, coming to crouch by her other side.

  “No,” I said.

  “Is she poorly?”

  “No.” I didn’t want to have to listen to any more of her guesses, so I said, “She’s dead.”