The First Day of Spring - Hardcover

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nancy Tucker studied psychology at the University of Oxford. This is her first work of fiction.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Chrissie

I killed a little boy today. Held my hands around his throat, felt his blood pump hard against my thumbs. He wriggled and kicked and one of his knees caught me in the belly, a sharp lasso of pain. I roared. I squeezed. Sweat made it slippy between our skins but I didn't let go, pressed and pressed until my nails were white. It was easier than I thought it would be. Didn't take long for him to stop kicking. When his face was the color of milk jelly I sat back on my heels and shook my hands. They had seized up. I put them on my own neck, above the place where the twin doorknob bones stuck out. Blood pumped hard against my thumbs. I am here, I am here, I am here.

I went to knock for Linda afterward, because it was hours before tea. We walked to the top of the hill and turned ourselves upside down against the handstand wall, gritting our palms with smoke ends and sparkles of glass. Our dresses fell over our faces. The wind blew cool on our legs. A woman ran past us, Donna's mammy, ran past with her fat breasts bumping up and down. Linda pushed herself off the wall to stand beside me, and we watched Donna's mammy run down the street together. She was making noises that sounded like cat howls. They ripped up the quiet of the afternoon.

"What's she crying for?" asked Linda.

"Don't know," I said. I knew.

Donna's mammy disappeared round the corner at the end of the street and we heard faraway gasps. When she came back there was a lump of mammies around her, all of them hurrying, brown shoes slapping the road in a thrum-thrum-thrum beat. Michael was with them but he couldn't keep up. By the time they passed us he was hanging a long way behind, panting in a crackling shudder, and his mammy tugged his hand and he fell. We saw the raspberry-ripple splash of blood, heard the yowl slice through the air. His mammy hauled him up and clamped him on her hip. She kept on running, running, running.

When the mammies were just past us, so we were looking at a herd of cardigan backs and wide, jiggling bottoms, I pulled Linda's arm and we followed. At the end of the road we saw Richard coming out of the shop with a toffee chew in one hand and Paula in the other. He saw us running with the mammies and he followed. Paula didn't like Richard pulling her, started grizzling, so Linda picked her up and clutched her round the middle. Her legs were striped where her fat folded in on itself. They hung out of a swollen nappy that dropped lower and lower with every step.

We heard the crowd before we saw it: a rumbling blanket of sighs and swears, wrinkled by women crying. Girls crying. Babies crying. Round the corner and there it was, a cloud of people standing around the blue house. Linda wasn't next to me anymore because Paula's nappy had fallen off at the end of Copley Street and she had stopped to try to put it back on her. I didn't wait. I ran forward, away from the lump of twittering mammies, into the cloud. When I got to the middle I had to squat down small and wind between the hot bodies, and when there were no more bodies to wind through I saw it. The great big man standing in the doorway, the little dead boy in his arms.

A noise came from the back of the crowd and I looked on the ground for a fox, because it was the noise a fox makes when a thorn gets stuck in its paw, the noise of something's insides coming out through its mouth. Then the cloud was breaking, disintegrating, people falling into one another. I got pushed over, and I watched through legs as Steven's mammy went to the man at the door. Her insides were coming out of her mouth in a howl. She took Steven from him and the howl turned to words: "My boy, my boy, my boy." Then she sat down on the ground, not caring that her skirt was around her middle and everyone could see her underpants. Steven was clutched against her, and I thought how it was a good job he was dead already, because if he hadn't already been dead he would have got suffocated by her rolls of breast and belly. I couldn't see his face under the rolls. Didn't matter. I already knew what it looked like-gray as gone-bad liver, eyes like staring marbles. He had stopped blinking. I had noticed that when I'd got done killing him. It had been strange to see someone not blink for so long. When I'd tried to do it my eyeballs had burned. His mammy stroked his hair and howled, and Donna's mammy broke through the crowd to kneel beside her, and Richard's mammy and Michael's mammy and all the other mammies swarmed and cried. I didn't know what they were crying for. Their kids weren't dead.

It took Linda and Paula a long time to catch up with the rest of us. When they arrived in the blue-house alley Linda was holding Paula's wet nappy.

"Do you know how to get this back on her?" Linda asked, holding it out to me. I didn't answer, just leaned round so I could carry on watching the heap of howling mammies. "What's going on?" she asked.

"Steven's there," I said.

"Was he in the blue house?" she asked.

"He was dead in the blue house," I said. "Now his mammy's got him, but he's still dead."

"How did he die?" she asked.

"Don't know," I said. I knew.

Paula sat down on the ground beside me, her bare bottom nestling into the dirt. She moved her chubby hands around until she found a little stone, which she ate carefully. Linda sat on my other side and watched the mammies. Paula ate three more stones. People muttered and whispered and cried and Steven's mammy stayed hidden under a shawl of breasts and pink cardigans. Susan was there. She was Steven's sister. She was standing away from the mammies, away from the crowd. No one seemed to see her except me. It was like she was a ghost.

When the sun started to go down Paula's mammy came over, picked her up, hooked a stone out of her mouth, and took her home. Linda had to go too, because she said her mammy would have tea on the table. She asked if I was coming but I said no. I stayed until a car purred up and two policemen got out, tall and smart with shiny buttons on their clothes. One of them crouched and talked to Steven's mammy in words I couldn't hear, even when I closed my eyes and clenched my teeth, which usually helped me hear things grown-ups wanted to keep secret. The other one went into the blue house. I watched him slink through the downstairs rooms, and I thought about shouting, "I killed him upstairs. You need to look upstairs." I bit my lips shut. I couldn't give the game away.

I wanted to stay watching, at least until the policeman got to looking in the right place, but Mr. Higgs from number 35 told me to run along. When I stood I was patterned with lines and bumps from the ground. I could see Steven better from standing. His legs were flopped over his mammy's arm, and I could see that one of his shoes had come off, and that he had mud on his knees. Susan was the only other kid still there, because she didn't have anyone waiting for her at home anymore. Her arms were crossed over her chest and she was holding on to her shoulders, like she was hugging herself, or holding her pieces together. She looked thin and glowy. When she flicked her hair out of her face she saw me, and I was about to wave, but Mr. Higgs took me by the elbow.

"Come on, lass," he said. "Time to go now." I wriggled away. I thought he would just shoo me off, but he walked me all the way back to the street, close beside me the whole time. I could hear his breath: hard and panty. It felt like slugs leaving slime on my skin.

"Look at that sky," he said, pointing above our heads. I looked. It was all blue.

"Yeah," I said.

"First day of spring," he said.

"Yeah," I said.

"First day of spring and a little lad lying dead," he said. He made a tutting sound with his tongue on the roof of his mouth.

"Yeah," I said. "Dead."

"You're not scared are you, lass?" he asked. I climbed onto Mr....