by Ellen Datlow
“There. Good as new.” She kissed the top of his damp, spiky head and rested her cheek against him for a second, holding him tight to her heart. “Wait,” she said as he tried to move away. They crouched on the bare floorboards of the bathroom together while she cuddled him and nuzzled the warm, tender flesh of his shoulder, breathing in his boy-skin smell. She imagined it adhering itself to the delicate fretwork of bone and tissue inside her nostrils, sinking into the sponge of her sinuses. All she’d have to do, years from now, was pinch the tips of her nostrils closed to summon the memory and smell him again.
After a while she loosened her hold and patted him away. “Get some clean clothes on now, Boo, while I have a quick wash. Stay in calling distance though. Don’t leave the house.”
“Can I feed the sheep?”
“There’s nothing to feed them, I don’t think they like fruit. Okay, give them a slice of bread. But stay in the garden.”
She watched from the bathroom window as the boy, dressed in one of her T-shirts and nothing on his feet, skipped down the garden path with the loaf of bread and upended the lot into the field, calling to the sheep in a high sing-song voice. One of the flock dozed in the shade of the hedge not far from him. She hoped he hadn’t seen it.
“I said one slice. Now what am I going to eat?” she shouted down, and slammed the window shut to contain her sudden anger, turning away from the sight of him to run the hot tap into the tub. It spurted a tepid, rusty gush that quickly became cold. Ankle deep, she squatted and shivered, getting herself as clean as she could and then drying herself roughly on the wet towel. She dashed naked into her room and dressed in yesterday’s clothes, bruising her sharp hip bones as she knuckled her jeans up to her waist. She gathered in a pile everything that needed to go to the launderette, bagging whites in with coloureds and not caring if they all came out pink.
When she went back downstairs her son wasn’t in the kitchen or framed in the open back door. She dropped the bags and leapt over them even before they hit the floor, running outside, calling his name. The garden was just a small square of overgrown grass speckled with dandelions, baggy with wire fencing at its boundary. Nowhere for a five-year-old boy to hide.
She looked back at the house, peering up at the windows for a glimpse of him grinning down at her, then spun round and scanned the field for movement, her hands a visor against her forehead. “Tom? Come here. Now.”
She should have locked him inside the house. Made him stay with her while she washed. She should have been less complacent.
“Tom, come inside right now.”
The sheep had moved away from the fence and were facing into the shaded corner just out of sight. Rosy climbed into the field and moved through the flock, shoving greasy flanks out of the way with her shins. She saw the top of her son’s head bob up quickly and then disappear as he ducked back down. She began to run and when she got close she saw that he was kneeling by the prostrate ewe, bending low over her. His face had taken on a slack, drooped look, his mouth hanging open as though he were frozen at the pinnacle of a yawn.
He started when she yelled his name, scrambled guiltily to his feet just as she was about to grab his arm and haul him up. The ewe opened its eyes and flailed weakly from its prone position, legs scissoring the air. Rosy grabbed her by the woolly neck and heaved her over so that she was on her stomach, checked her over then slapped her hard a couple of times to force her upright and drive her away. As her arm swung high in the air and then swooped down to connect with a hollow thump she didn’t take her eyes off her son. The slaps were cruel and unnecessary, a sudden small violence that let Tom know she’d rather be delivering them to him. You made me do this. He glanced at her and then looked down at the ground, scratching at a smear of mud on his wrist.
“I didn’t do anything, I was just looking at it,” he whined. She turned him with a palm rough against his back and began to march him towards the house.
“I told you to stay in fucking calling distance, Tom. What part of that didn’t you understand?”
He tipped his head back to stare at her scarlet face. “You did swearing!”
“Well, that’s because I’m furious with you, and now we’re both dirty again and I’m going to have to give you another fucking bath.”
He twisted out from under her hand and ran ahead towards the fence, his thin white legs flashing like lolly sticks beneath the billowing T-shirt. As he leapt a pile of sheep droppings the loose cotton caught a draught of air and flew up around his chest, exposing the soft circles of his tiny buttocks, perched like bread baps at the base of his knobbled spine. Despite the nauseous tremble of anger and relief jerking through her limbs, hobbling her, Rosy began to laugh. She whistled and, when he turned to look, roared like a monster and began to chase him slowly across the grass, herding him back to the safety of the house with her arms clawed in the air. By the time she’d lifted him over the fence and clambered after he could barely stand for shrieking.
The town was small and easy to negotiate. Rosy circled it a few times in an aimless way, taking rights and lefts randomly, following the signs to the high street and car park and then around again, before parking up and letting them both out. “What do you think, Boo? Could this be home?”
He took her hand as they walked. “Does it have a toy shop?”
“I’m sure it does, or somewhere that sells toys anyway. And I think I spotted a library. We can get you some books to read at night. Don’t pull that face, it’s important that you learn your letters properly. I’ve been very slack lately at giving you your lessons.”
She saw the gates to the school a fraction of a second before he did, but too late to divert his attention. He dragged on her hand to slow her down and they dawdled past the yard where children charged and whooped. Tom’s expression was rapt with his desire to join in. His limbs echoed the movements of the little boys he watched, twitching in empathetic delight as they ran after balls and chased each other down. Rosy tugged him along until the noise was behind them and the main street of the town ahead of them. She’d try to find another route back to the car after they’d shopped. “Can I go to school here?” Tom asked. “I don’t know. Maybe when you’re a bit older.”
He grabbed the belt loop on her jeans and pulled, jumping up and down beside her. The rough material ground against her skinny, sore waist as he hung his weight from it. “I’m old enough now, mummy. Please let me go to school and have friends.”
“Stop pulling, Boo, you’ll break it. Remember what happened when you went to nursery and made friends? I need to know that you’ll not do that again.”
His mouth crumpled and his voice rose. “But I was four then. Now I’m so much older there won’t be nap time after lunch. You promised me I could go back to school one day, you promised.”
Rosy pulled his hand away from the waistband of her jeans and held it between both of hers, crouching down beside him. “Ssh, Boo,” she whispered, “people are looking. Why do you think we’re here right now and not there? Do you think I want to keep leaving a place as soon as we’re settled? You have to show me that you’ll be good and then I’ll think about you going to school. Okay?” And god knows I could do with a bit of time to myself as well, she thought but didn’t say.
To placate him she let him choose yet another toy car for his collection and gave him a chocolate bar to eat while they waited in the launderette. He knelt beside her, running the toy across the floor and crashing it into her feet, rolling it around her ankles. A woman with a baby in a pram came in and sat on the bench beside them, flicking through a magazine while the baby fidgeted under blankets, its hands fisted either side of its sucking mouth and its blue gaze searching the ceiling for a clue to its existence. “He’s a bugger to get to sleep,” the mother said to Rosy. “I bring him in here most days; the noise of the dryers usually sends him off and buys me a couple of hours’ peace.”
Tom shifted nervously and stood up, putting a hand on Rosy’s knee so that he could lean acros
s her and peer into the pram. His chest pulsed with his rapid breathing, his skin was hot through his clothing. She pushed him gently back and sent him to the bench set against the opposite wall. “You’re smearing chocolate all over everything,” she said. “Go and put the wrapper in the bin and then play with your car where you won’t make a mess. Don’t make too much noise though, the baby’s nearly asleep.” They looked at each other for a quick moment before he walked away and she nodded at him.
While the clothes finished their cycle Rosy watched the baby. His eyelids drooped and then flicked wide open, again and again. Each time he appeared to be on the edge of falling sleep, his lashes feathered across his cheeks, she cleared her throat and shifted fussily on the bench, yawned loudly, and he’d startle and wake. He mewled a few times and his mother stroked him idly as she turned pages of her magazine. “Stubborn little thing,” Rosy said admiringly. “He’s refusing to give in.” She glanced at Tom who was bent over his toy, running it up and down his calf and making quiet vrooming noises. If it weren’t for the tension she saw stiffening his shoulders into a hunch, the effort not to cross the room bunching his hands into fists, he could be oblivious to the adults sitting opposite him.
When the washing machine sounded its conclusion in a series of beeps, Rosy got up to pull the wet clothes out of its deep innards. “Give me a hand please, Boo,” she said, waiting until he’d climbed down from his bench and come to stand beside her before she bent to reach inside the machine. The woman watched them fold the clothes and bag them then gather their things together and put their coats on. “He’s a good boy,” she said, nodding at Tom as they left. “I hope mine grows up to be half as good.”
Rosy smiled at her son. “Oh, he has his moments,” she said, hugging him close, steering him past the woman and the pram and out onto the safety of the street, without pausing. She could tell by the pink rising in his cheeks that he was pleased with the woman’s compliment.
They stopped at a phone box partway between town and the flat, endless sweep of earth that was now the landscape of their home. Rosy pulled onto the verge, parking the car between fields that bumped away from the eye in a sequenced corrugation of brown furrows, endless fields that butted up briefly against distant hedgerows and then shrugged through and continued rippling onwards. Beyond them more brown furrows, more brown hedgerows, as far as she could see. The sameness of the view was relentless, no matter which way she turned. Dreary, she thought. That’s the only word that can describe it. Is this really where I have to live now?
“Shall we call Uncle Ross?” she said, fishing coins out of her purse. She watched Tom slide and kick on the heated, slippery bonnet of the car as she dialled the number and waited for it to connect. She tapped the glass and waggled her fingers at him, part reprimand, part hello. As soon as her brother answered she began to cry, surprising herself, turning away from her son and huddling into the graffiti scrawls of the booth.
The house was lovely, she told him, really homely, and thanks for the money he’d put in her account. She was fine, just tired. Some more of the pills would be good if he could please post them as soon as possible. Yes of course she knew how important it was to look after herself. They were both fine, Tom was loving the videos he’d sent last month and she was loving the peace and quiet they were giving her for an entire hour at a time. There was nothing wrong, she just missed him, that was all, and she was tired. A few days’ rest and she’d be back on form. Of course it was fine that he had to go eat his dinner and couldn’t speak to Tom, they’d phone back in a week or so and chat then. She loved him.
Tom scrambled off the car when she pushed open the door. “Is it my turn now?” he asked, squeezing past her and into the grubby telephone box, hands outstretched for the receiver.
“Sorry, Boo,” Rosy said. “Uncle Ross had to go but he sent his love and said he’ll post you some comics.” The afternoon was sliding into evening, the breeze cool against her overheated cheeks. “Come on, little buddy, let’s get home,” she said, ignoring his disappointed pout as he shuffled back to her.
“He’s still cross with me,” Tom said as she started the engine and turned to check he was strapped into his seat. “He’s really mean. I said I was sorry.”
“Don’t be silly, of course he’s not cross with you. And he’s not mean, he’s looking after us. What shall we have for dinner?”
Tom shrugged and looked out of the window. “How will Dad find us if we keep moving around?” he asked.
They reached a junction Rosy only vaguely recalled from the morning drive into town and she pulled on the handbrake while she considered the route. “God, it all looks the bloody same,” she said, guessing the turn and driving on.
“I said, how will Dad . . .”
“Yes, I heard you the first time, Boo. Shouting’s rude. If your dad wanted to find us then he’d find us. He could ask Uncle Ross at any time.”
The boy’s averted face was glazed to marble by the late sunshine, his features indistinct and somehow inhuman. He muttered something Rosy didn’t ask him to repeat.
“There it is,” she said triumphantly as the house, hunkered in its camouflage of hedgerow, loomed drably up beside them. “Nearly didn’t see it. God, it’s probably the ugliest place I’ve ever lived.” Her tone was cheerful but the quick, involuntary glance she gave her son, the brief, barely conscious reproach she would deny indignantly if accused of it, was suddenly thick in the car. Tom tumbled out and charged up the path to the front door, waiting there with his back turned in stiff fury while she unloaded the bags by herself.
Later, standing at the bathroom window, she saw that one of the ewes was splayed and too still in the field behind the house, far from the rest of its flock. A crow strutted around it like a school yard bully, pecking with idle greed at the purple spill of its tongue. It didn’t have to be the same ewe, or if it was then maybe it was already dying when Tom was with it. She was sure she’d got to him in time. This didn’t have to be his fault.
While her son slept in his room she spent the evening drinking beer and looking through old photograph albums, remembering those sweet first months of his life when she would pluck him from his cot and settle into the armchair in the nursery to feed him, dozing through the deep night hours with her arms laced tight around his solid little body, her husband in the next room, waking to the sight of baby Boo’s mouth fastened to her breast with gentle greed and his eyes bright and wide, fixed on her face with nothing but wonder and innocence.
When the postman brought a fat parcel to the door a few days later Rosy let Tom open it at the fold-out picnic table she’d bought for the kitchen. His excitement at seeing his name written in thick black capitals below hers on the address label ignited her love for him and for her brother; brought it like a fire into the room. It flamed in her cheeks and scorched her throat so that she was speechless. This was the type of small kindness intended as much for her as for Tom. Remember, it said, how delighted we were as children when we got a present in the post with our name on, and how envious the other was. Remember that I think of you, little sister. She stacked this kindness on the top of the other constant and ongoing kindnesses. Shelter, money, discretion, forgiveness.
Rosy watched over Tom as he held his bright child-sized scissors with awkward stiff-wristed care and sawed at the tape wound round the parcel, almost as excited as he to see what was inside. These were the small highlights that strung jewels through the days of her life. She clapped her hands with joy when she saw that Ross had even wrapped and addressed the individual items using garish Christmas paper and sticky labels.
“Master Tom Boo Fletcher. That’s for me,” Tom said. “Mistress Rosalind Fletcher. That’s for you.”
He laid out two piles and waited until she was sat opposite him before looking quickly at her to check that he could start opening his. Comic books, a toy pistol, sweets, videos. He was out of his chair and pretending to shoot everything in sight before Rosy had opened half of her gifts.
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br /> “That’s not fair, that should have been on my pile to open,” he said as he charged past, gesturing with his gun to the bottle of pills Rosy was reaching to place on the high kitchen shelf. “They’re for me.”
“For me to give to you,” she corrected him. “Not a present. But you can have this if you’d like.” She passed her son a tatty copy of The Tale of Mrs Tiggy Winkle. “It was mine when I was little. Uncle Ross spent an entire summer when I was about your age hanging my handkerchiefs on shrubs and trees around the garden and pretending she’d taken them to wash. He probably only did it for a day, really, but it felt like an entire summer.”
Her son’s interest was more polite than sincere. He moved the book to rest on top of his pile of comics but she knew it would be left on the table when he scooped up his haul later to take it up to his room. He preferred super heroes to talking animals. Never mind, she hadn’t really wanted to part with it anyway. There were beige and silver whorls on all of the pages, the precious marks made by grubby little fingers turning the story from start to end, over and over. She wanted to press her grown-up fingers over those ancient blemishes, absorb the passion and sweetness of her younger self and remember the past. She was living too much in the past these days, she knew, missing it like a phantom limb. Missing the loss of the self she might have been. Missing that ghost self more, even, than she missed the flesh and blood reality of her coward husband.
They finished the morning with spelling lessons for Tom, then had lunch and spent the afternoon lying on cushions on the living room floor watching Tom’s videos on the new television set. It was grey outside, and chilly. It could rain, Rosy reasoned, so best not to attempt a walk. Her guilt at allowing her son to stuff his mind with cartoons while she indulged in laziness was relieved by fingering the stony swell in the glands looped below her jaw. She rubbed at the low grind of a headache she couldn’t seem to shift and thought, We need rest. I need rest. She let her mind drift as he leaned against her chest and concentrated ferociously on the television screen. The warm beat of his body beside her soothed like a hot water bottle. He looks more like me than like his father, she realised, as he strained forward to further capture the action flickering in front of him. I’d assumed he’d look like him but he’s all me.
