by Nancy Tucker
I trailed behind them, feeling spare. Sasha stopped at a door, knocked, and pushed it open. “Go on in, Molly,” she said. “I’m just going to have a little chat with your mum in another room. Edie can come and get us if you need anything.”
“Wait,” I said. They both looked at me, and I sympathized with Sasha: wanting to say things that Molly wouldn’t hear, when Molly was very present and very keen to hear. “Will I get to see her again?” I asked.
“Get to see who?” asked Molly.
“No one,” I said.
Sasha touched my arm. I wondered how much time, in total, she spent touching people’s arms each day. “Of course you will,” she said. “It’s not. We just. Let’s leave her here with Edie, okay? And we’ll go and talk. Of course you’ll see her again.” I nodded once. I could tell I wouldn’t be able to keep the crying in for much longer, but I didn’t want Molly to see it. “In you go, Molly,” said Sasha. “Those look like chocolate biscuits to me. We’ll see you in a bit.”
She closed the door and carried on down the corridor, up the stairs, and into a large room with a table and chairs in the middle. I sat in one of the chairs and Sasha sat opposite, then changed her mind and moved to the head of the table, so our knees were almost touching. She muttered something about it being cold, got up, and spent some time crouched in front of a portable radiator. It clicked and creaked and began to breathe warm air onto my legs. The room wasn’t that cold. She was stalling.
“So,” she said when she sat down again. “Okay. So. The police know you’re here. Your probation officer. She’s going to come and speak to you. I think she’s bringing a colleague.”
“Okay.”
“Obviously we had to tell them when you took Molly. Because of Molly’s care order. We have to tell them when something like that happens.”
“Okay.”
Neither of us spoke for a while, then Sasha jerked back in her seat and flicked her hands out in front of her.
“Fucking hell, Julia,” she said. “Why?”
I had never heard a social worker swear before. I hadn’t thought they were allowed. The tissue in my hand was damp with snot, and I pulled until it broke apart. “You’re going to take her,” I said.
“What?”
“You’re going to take her away. The meeting. You’re taking her.”
“You mean the meeting we were meant to have yesterday?”
“Yeah.”
“You thought that meeting was to tell you we wanted to take Molly away from you?”
“Yeah.”
“But why? Why would we be doing that?”
“Her wrist. Obviously.”
I could tell Sasha wanted to swear again, but she put her fingers over her mouth, then moved them up to her hair and began raking through it. I thought she had probably been doing that all day, and that was probably why so much of it had come down from the ponytail.
“Okay. I see,” she said. She breathed in deliberately. “Yes, I wanted to have a quick word with you about the accident. We have to follow these things up. That’s the whole point of Molly being under a care order. But I mainly just wanted to check you weren’t too upset by it. Because we all understand that it was exactly that. An accident.”
“Oh,” I said.
“To be clear, at no point has there been any talk of taking Molly into care. Not ever. Not the whole time we’ve known you. If a child is under social services, all hospital visits are reported. It’s a standard thing. But if we took every child who broke a bone into care there’d be very few families left intact.”
“Other families aren’t me,” I said.
“You mean other families don’t have your history?”
“Yeah.”
She leaned over the table. With her head bowed, I could see the dark roots of her hair. I didn’t know how old she was. I had always thought of her as a proper grown-up, in a different category to me, but hearing her swear and picturing her bleaching her hair over the bathtub made me think she might not be that old at all. I was a grown-up—I had seen it in Linda’s French windows. Sasha and I might be the same age. Perhaps she got fed up with being in charge too.
“Where did you go?” she asked, rolling her head onto one hand to look at me. “Where have you been?”
“We just went away for a bit. We saw a friend. Molly was safe. She wasn’t in any danger.”
“Okay,” she said. “Well. That’s good.” She sat back in her chair. “Do you want to know what I was going to say at the meeting yesterday? Once I’d checked Molly’s wrist was on the mend? I was going to say how impressed I am with how you’ve been doing recently. When I visit you Molly always seems happy, she always seems to have everything she needs. It’s obvious how much work you put into being her mum, and I think that work is really paying off. I was going to tell you I’ve been thinking about winding back my involvement quite soon. Because I think you can manage on your own.”
The crying came. Not in noisy cat howls; in a quiet, leaking flow. I felt like a book being cracked at the spine. Since Molly had been born I had been telling myself a story about scheming social workers crouched in the shadows, waiting to wrench her out of my useless hands. Sasha made it sound as if there was another story, one with goodies as well as baddies, one where you could turn into a goody even after you had been the baddest baddy. I hadn’t known that story existed. I had got lost in the terror of having a mewing bundle of a person relying on me for everything in her tiny life, and having to hold her with the same hands that had ended two other tiny lives. I had forgotten that my freedom was a gift, not a sentence, and had put all my energy into building us a new prison.
When I had asked, Mam had said that she wanted to be young, with a whole new life ahead of her. She hadn’t said what that really meant: that she wanted to be me. I was the one who had been given the new life. I didn’t know if that was right or wrong. I hadn’t been the one to decide what would happen to me, so it wasn’t my job to know whether it was right or wrong. But even if it was wrong—a travesty, an abomination, the wrongest decision that could have been made—my wasting the new life wouldn’t make it right. It wouldn’t make things right for Steven and Ruthie. It wouldn’t make things right for Molly and me.
I put my head on my arms. Sasha was close beside me, warming my side like the heater warmed my legs. I remembered my conviction that she had called the journalists to rat me out. It seemed garishly unlikely, and faraway, like a fever dream. I screwed my eyes shut so I didn’t have to see her kind face.
“I didn’t tell you that to upset you,” she said softly. “I thought you’d want to know how impressed I’ve been.”
“Am I going to go to prison?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Your probation officer’s coming, but she just wants to make sure you’re okay. Maybe give you a bit of a lecture about not worrying everyone again. Those things I was going to say at the meeting yesterday—they’re still true. You shouldn’t have run away, but you know that. It doesn’t change everything. Not nearly. As far as I can tell, you’re still the same mum you were three days ago.”
“Am I good?”
“Good?”
“Do you think I’m a good mum?”
“Yeah. I do. Definitely.”
I sat up and rocked my head from side to side. My neck was stiff. I could feel it click. “What happens now?” I asked.
“Well, I expect the people from the police will be here soon. You can wait for them here or in the family room with Molly. While you’re with them I’ll have a chat with my team manager.”
“About what happens to us?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. I want to wait with Molly. Can we go down there now?”
“Of course. Is there anything else you want to ask before we go? Or tell me?”
I gathered my tissues into a sticky ball. I was grindin
gly tired, but the desperation to be freed of responsibility for two people had lifted. I didn’t know how. Perhaps it had been helter-skeltered out of me. I was back to the woman who had woken in the apartment the morning before and dozed next to Molly, listening to the tick and creak of the pipes in the walls. I had opened my eyes and looked at the radiator under the window. The curtains had fluttered in the rising air. It had been so warm in the room, and had smelled so gently of carpets and boiling water, and at the back of my throat there had been a bubble of something like pride.
“We have enough lectric for the lights and the telly,” I had thought. “We have cereal in the cupboard and milk in the fridge. We have clothes that haven’t had to be cleaned and pressed and passed on in a carrier bag. I have done badly at so many things in my life. But I have done well at being this little girl’s mum.” I had wanted so desperately to stay there forever, tucked behind my daughter, watching the radiators breathe heat around us.
If I could have got the words out, I would have told Sasha that I loved Molly. “I love her because she grew inside me, because she kept me company and saved my life, and because when she came out she liked me straightaway,” I would have said. “She stopped me having to be Chrissie or Lucy or Julia, made me Mum instead. She’s my friend and my girl and my funny, stubborn, constant companion. I love her down to the dark space around her bones, and I want to keep her, to have her with me, to smell her on my clothes. I want to tie tinsel in her hair at Christmas and put a new height mark on the door on her sixth birthday and slip into bed beside her before I go to sleep tonight. I want to carry on being her world.”
I couldn’t say it. It would have left me too bare.
“Not really,” I said. “I suppose I just. I just want to carry on being her mum, you know.”
“I do know,” said Sasha. “I do.”
Molly
When Mum had finished talking to the police she took me into the garden. Edie came out with us but she just sat on the bench by the door, so it was like me and Mum were by ourselves. I asked Mum what the police had wanted to speak to her about and she said they just wanted to make sure we were both okay. I didn’t believe her, but I didn’t say that. Her face was pink, a bit like she had been crying, but she never cried, so I thought perhaps something else was wrong, like maybe she’d got stung by some bees.
The climbing frame in the garden was really for babies but I still went on it. I went down the slide three times and Mum pushed me on the swing.
“This is a bit babyish, isn’t it?” Mum said when I had been on the slide and swing and realized there was actually nothing else to do.
“A tiny bit,” I said. “Can we go to the big playground tomorrow?”
“Mmm,” she said. “Mmm” was what she said when she wanted me to stop talking about something.
There were daisies growing in the grass around the climbing frame, like the daisies at the church Mum had said wasn’t our church. She knelt on the ground and started picking them, so I did too. She was good at threading them together in a long chain. I couldn’t do it without splitting the stalk all the way up and spoiling it, so she let me be in charge of picking and I let her be in charge of chaining. We were a good team. She made me a necklace and a crown and two bracelets. I wanted her to have something too, at least a crown or a necklace, but she said she didn’t want anything.
My tooth still felt funny. It had been feeling funny for ages, weeks and weeks. I had stopped telling Mum because whenever I talked about it she said, “Mmm.” I pushed it back and forth with the tip of my tongue, and suddenly it wasn’t in my gum anymore, just in my mouth. I spat it onto my palm.
“What’s that?” Mum asked.
“My tooth,” I said.
“What happened?” she asked.
“Just came out,” I said.
She took my chin and looked at the gap where the tooth used to be, in the front at the bottom. I couldn’t see the space but I could feel it. Cold and whistly. Mum took a tissue out of her pocket and pressed it inside my mouth, and when she took it away there was a little red splat of blood.
“Does it hurt?” she asked.
“No,” I said, because it really actually didn’t. “It just came out. Look.”
I put it on her hand. It was white and shaped like a little flipper.
“Why did it come out?” I asked.
“Just time, I think,” she said. “Just ready.”
“Are they all going to come out?” I asked.
“Yeah. In the end.”
“So I’ll have none?”
“You’ll get new ones. Bigger ones.”
“When?”
“In a while. Let me see.” She held my chin again and looked at my tooth gap. “The new one’s already coming in there. I can see it. There’s a little white bit at the bottom.”
“Can I see?”
“Next time you’re in the bathroom you can look in the mirror.”
“Can we go to the bathroom here?”
“Not now.”
I really wanted to see, but I didn’t want to make Mum upset. She was looking at my tooth very carefully, turning it over and pressing the tip against her fingers.
“Can I have it?” I asked.
“Yeah. Sorry,” she said. She put it back in my hand, wrapped my fingers around it, and wrapped her hand around my fist. “It’s a good tooth,” she said. “Well done.”
It was cold outside and Mum saw goose bumps making pimples on my arms, so she gave me her jumper. The sleeves drooped way down over my hands but we rolled them up. I thought Edie might make us go inside but she had her head tipped back toward the sky and her eyes closed, so actually I didn’t think she was going to make us do anything, because actually she was asleep.
“When are we going to go home?” I asked Mum.
“I’m not sure,” she said.
“What am I having for tea?” I asked.
“I’m not sure,” she said. She was sounding a bit cryish, so I didn’t ask any more questions. I squeezed my fist until the tip of the tooth nibbled into me.
“Molly?” Mum said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You know when you’re in bed?” she said.
“Yeah,” I said.
“You know, I’m still thinking about you. When you’re asleep and I’m awake. If you had a dad I’d talk to him about you. There’s just me, but I still think about you. About how to make things good for you.”
“Okay,” I said. I thought it was a funny thing to say.
“It won’t change,” she said.
“What won’t?”
“Me thinking about you.”
“Won’t change when?”
“Just won’t change. Not ever. No matter what happens.”
“Is something going to happen?”
“Whatever happens. You’re my Molly. You always will be.”
I did like Mum saying those things, but they weren’t the sorts of things she normally said, so I didn’t know what I should say back. She looked like she really wanted me to say something back. In the end I just said, “You’re my mum.”
She pulled me back between her legs and wrapped her arms around my middle. I stretched up and put my arms around her neck, and it hurt because arms aren’t meant to bend that way, but I didn’t mind. She pressed her chin into my shoulder. She smelled of washing and rain. We stayed like that for a long time. I had to take my arms down after a while because they got too sore, but I put them over Mum’s arms instead, so it was like we were both hugging me. She kept her chin on my shoulder and whispered some things very quietly. I couldn’t hear them properly, because her head was pressed against one of my ears, and that meant I got to decide for myself what she was saying. I decided she mainly said, “I love you, Molly.”
When I next looked at the building there was a face in the window a
bove the bench.
“Mum,” I said. “Sasha.”
Mum looked up. Her body went hard against my back. Sasha came out of the building and touched Edie’s shoulder to wake her up. Edie went inside and Sasha came toward us with her jumper sleeves over her hands and her arms crossed over her chest.
“Bit chilly, isn’t it?” she said.
“I gave her my jumper,” said Mum. I yawned. Sasha crouched down and patted my leg.
“Been a long day for you, hasn’t it?” she said. “Sorry we’ve kept you all this time. We’re done now.”
I heard a gritty sound above my head. Mum was grinding her teeth together.
“Are you free to pop in again tomorrow?” Sasha asked her. “When Molly’s at school?”
“Why?” she asked.
“A few things to chat about. We’ve thought of a couple of extra ways to support you. It would be better to talk it through when we’re all a bit fresher. Do you think Mr. Gupta will be able to spare you for an hour?”
“Are you going to—”
She didn’t finish. “Going to what?” I asked.
“Nothing,” she said.
“No,” said Sasha. “We’re not. Come on, Molly. Time for Mum to take you home, eh?”
I still wanted to know what Mum had been going to say after “are you going to,” but I was too tired to try to find out. Me and Sasha stood up but Mum stayed sitting on the ground. She didn’t move her body at all, so it was still in the same shape it had been in when I had been sitting between her legs, and she looked empty without me there. I held out my hand in case she needed help getting up. She didn’t take it. She stared at Sasha.
“We’re going back?” she said. “Both of us?”
“Yes,” said Sasha.
“Really?” she said.
“Yes,” said Sasha.
Mum stood up slowly, without using my hand. She wobbled like she might be going to fall back down and Sasha took hold of both her elbows. They talked to each other with their eyes for a bit, then Sasha went inside. I could just see her, standing in the doorway that went to reception, waiting for us. Mum took my hand and squeezed it tight.