“Can we can keep her?”
“Of course, we’re keeping her. We’re a family.”
My broken heart lifted a little. I wanted to scoop the baby up in my arms and snuggle her, as I had when she was born. But she looked so tiny and fragile that I didn’t dare. Instead, I watched her sleep, and prayed that she would make it. I couldn’t lose her after everything I had been through.
“What are we going to call her?” I asked.
“Your mother wanted to call her Alicia after Alicia Markova, the ballerina.”
“I like it.”
I would have liked any name my mum picked. I would have done anything to hear her voice again.
I imagined another reality, where I could have helped her out of the bath and led her out to safety. I pictured myself lowering her gently down the sheet ropes I’d made, to be helped by the people below. If only I’d found a way to save her, then we’d all still have a mum.
We left the room, and waited outside while Sam went in to see her. The doctor was in the baby unit with him, pointing out Alicia.
I’ll tell him when he comes out, I decided. But my resolve was already weakening.
If I told him about what Dad had done, I would lose Alicia. If I kept quiet, we could stay together, and I would still have a family. That seemed more important than ever now.
I watched Sam through the window as he looked down at the baby, his expression no different than if he were looking at a coat rack. He didn’t feel the immediate rush of love for her that I did. But that was OK, he would find it in time. Tonight, he was in too much pain.
We all were.
“When are we going to see Mum?” he asked, when he came out.
I stared at him. The thought of seeing Mum’s body hadn’t occurred to me. I was disgusted that he’d even asked. I waited for Dad to say something, but he was looking down the corridor. A smartly dressed couple was walking towards us. They were dressed in quiet colours. Him, in a pale grey suit, and her in muted shades of blue and yellow. She pulled her hand from her pocket and flashed Dad her badge. Her voice was soft but strong.
“Mr McBride? We’ll need to ask you a few questions.”
“What, now?”
Dad’s bottom lip arched up over the top one. “I’ve just lost my wife. These kids have lost their mother…”
“Who are they?” I asked Sam, in a whisper.
“I think they’re cozzers.”
“But they’re not wearing uniforms. They don’t even have helmets.”
“They’re still cozzers.”
I don’t know exactly how he knew. Maybe it was the graveness of their faces.
A nurse came and took us back to the waiting room while Dad talked to them. We both lay down and Sam was soon fast asleep, sprawled across two chairs. I wanted to sleep too, but I kept picturing Mum, lying there in all that blood, the smoke like a creepy hand, fumbling under the door. There would be no more sleep for me, not that night.
13
We moved into a B&B the following evening, after a long day at the hospital.
“Can we see the house?” I asked Dad in the van.
“You don’t want to see it. The fire ripped it to pieces. There’s no way we’re going to be able to move back in.”
“What about all our toys?” asked Sam, his chin quivering.
“All gone,” Dad said. “Anything they pull out will reek of smoke. No use to no one.”
“I still want them, even if they smell,” Sam said.
“Me too.”
Dad shrugged. He never had understood how much we loved our toys. I was glad I still had the copy of The Gingerbread Man, even if it wasn’t really mine.
“What’s going to happen to our house, Dad?” I asked.
“I don’t know. That’s up to the council.”
“Will they rebuild it?”
“They might. Or they might rehouse us somewhere else. We don’t get a say, I’m afraid.”
“I don’t want to move,” I said.
Cold Bath Lane was the only home I had ever known. And all my memories of Mum were there.
Still, at least the B&B was clean and comfortable. Someone brought round a few clothes for us. I tried not to mind that the sleeves of the shirts were ridiculously long, or that the jeans were grey and not blue. There was no satin party dress or any other dresses for that matter. The clothes were drab and unfashionable compared to the stuff Mum used to buy me.
The biggest perk of living in the B&B was that we had our breakfast cooked for us. It smelt really good, but I couldn’t help remembering those times when Mum made us thick, gloopy porridge, drowning in gooey brown honey. She hadn’t been the best cook in the world, but her food had been served with love, and I missed it, just as I missed everything else about her.
“What’s going to happen to Mum? To her body?” Sam asked, as he pushed his food round the plate.
“They’ll bury her, I suppose,” Dad said.
“Are we going to have a funeral?”
We had been to a funeral once before, when our Grandma Joan died. I remembered sitting on a hard pew, while the vicar droned on about things we didn’t understand. Even the songs had had strange words in them. Mum had sniffled into her hankie the whole time. She hadn’t even tried to hide it.
A dark look flashed across Dad’s brow. “No. Funerals are morbid. Your mother would hate it.”
I thought of her, waltzing about in her best dress, the one that fitted before she got so fat. Dad was probably right.
“Where will they bury her?” I asked, cutting the crusts off my toast.
Sam looked at me over the table and I saw a glimmer of his old self.
“In the graveyard, dumb-dumb.”
I thought of the cold stone slabs and the dirty brown earth that lay beneath.
“Can she have some blankets?” I asked.
I didn’t even have a picture of her. I asked Dad if he had any, but that set him off crying all over again. His tears really confused me. All my life, he’d drilled it into us how important it was to be big and tough, and now he was reduced to this blubbering wreck.
“Please can we go back to the hospital?” I begged, after breakfast.
I was desperate to see Alicia.
“I don’t know. I’ve got a lot to sort out today.”
“Please, Dad. I really need to see her.”
“Look, I really don’t…Oh, what the hell…”
He pulled a few coins from his wallet and placed them in my hand.
“There’s a bus stop across the street. You can figure it out, can’t you?”
“Yes.”
I glanced down at the coins. If I was lucky, I’d have an extra quid to buy myself some chips for lunch. If I was able to eat lunch. I hadn’t had much success with breakfast.
I stood at the bus stop, watching the rain pelt down.
Put your wellies on.
That’s what Mum would have said. Instead, I just had these stupid plimsolls the hospital gave me.
“Why don’t you step back, Poppet? You’ll get splashed by the cars.”
I turned and saw an old lady with a head scarf. She probably meant well, but I paid her no heed. What did it matter if I got my feet wet?
Nobody asked why I was travelling alone as I pushed my way onto the bus. I handed over my money, and the bus driver took it with a grunt. I wanted to sit at the back, but the bus lurched off before I could sit down, so I scrambled for the nearest seat. The bus had throbbing yellow lights, but outside, everything looked dreary and grey, even though it was the middle of the day.
The hospital was as large and unfriendly as I had remembered, a big, busy building, where everyone bustled about. I remembered the way up to the baby unit: up to the first floor, turn right, past the big desk with the fruit bowl and the stern woman with glasses. No one paid me any heed as I waked past. I loitered in front of the children’s unit. There was a huge teddy bear sitting by himself in the waiting room. He looked sad, sitting there all o
n his tod, so I walked over and ran my hands over his soft brown fur.
“You’re going to be OK,” I whispered.
I took a wrong turn after the Children’s Unit and ended up back at the lifts. I looked up at the board, trying to work out where I was, but then I saw the doctor who had taken us to the baby unit and I followed him down the corridor. The doctor strode past the unit and disappeared into another room. I stood in the corridor, uncertain what to do. I had a feeling I wasn’t supposed to go in by myself, but I wanted to see Alicia so badly, I couldn’t bear to wait.
I looked up and down but no one was watching, so I slipped inside and went straight to Alicia’s bed. She was sleeping again, but this time, I gave her my finger to hold. Without even opening her eyes, she reached out with her tiny fist and clutched it tight. I felt that she knew I was there, so I talked to her about Mum and what she had been like.
“I’m so sorry you’re not going to have a mum,” I told her, “but I promise that I will do my best to teach you everything Mum taught me, so you don’t have to miss out as much.”
It felt good to have Alicia to talk to. How I wished that she could reply.
“What are you doing in here?” a woman in a white coat snapped when she saw me.
“I was just visiting.”
“Not by yourself.” She looked me up and down. “Where is your mum?”
I opened my gob and closed it. I was unprepared for such a brutal question. I pictured her, rising from the ashes and floating up, up, up into the sky. I raised a shaky hand. It was all I could do to point. The woman in the white coat wasn’t clever enough to understand.
Tears welled in my eyes as I slunk out. I wandered back to the lift and took it down to the canteen, where I bought myself some chips. Nobody seemed to mind me being on my own there. Even when I ate with my fingers.
Afterwards, I snuck back up to the baby unit and said goodbye to Alicia.
“I’ll be back soon. I promise.”
After a couple of weeks, Alicia was allowed to come home, not that we really had a home. By then, we had been moved from the first B&B to another, cheaper one, where they expected us to cook and clean for ourselves. We hardly had any baby stuff, just a travel cot, and a rusty old pram that someone gave us.
The nurse at the hospital had explained how to make up the baby formula and sterilise the bottles, but I felt like I was the only one listening. Dad and Sam went down the Halfway House as soon as we got home, so I was left holding the baby. It didn’t seem to occur to Dad that I shouldn’t be left with such a huge responsibility.
“Grand job,” he said.
“You have to buy some nappies,” I told him. “We only have two and Alicia will need several changes a day.”
I already thought of Alicia as my baby. A switch had gone on and I went from being an ordinary little girl, to a stand-in mum. Alicia gave me a purpose, something to focus on. Something to live for, amidst all the trauma.
The B&B was terribly cramped. We all slept in the same room. I felt weird about that and Sam must have felt weird too. Although he didn’t act very grown up, he was two years older than me, and growing more awkward by the minute.
Dad and Sam shared the big bed, and I took the little one, next to the crib. When Alicia woke in the night, I was the one to get up and warm her milk. Sometimes Dad would stir in his sleep and yell “Pack it in!” as if she was doing it to annoy him.
Sam said Dad couldn’t help being grumpy because he had alcoholism.
“No, he hasn’t,” I argued.
It was a long word, but I understood what it meant. Alcoholics sat on the bench outside Woolworths, their toes peeping through their shoes. I remembered how Mum had crossed the street to avoid them. The pong was unbearable, like when the gutters overflowed in Cold Bath Lane. Dad wasn’t like any of them.
The B&B was a loud place. Dogs barked throughout the night. The people in the building next door had dozens of them, and they never shut up. One night, they barked more than usual. I don’t know what set them off, but it went on and on. It only took one dog to start, and they were all at it, as if it was some kind of barking contest. Dad climbed over to the window. There was barely any space in our room that wasn’t taken up by the beds. He kneeled there, thick wiry hairs poking out the armpits of his vest. I watched as he threw up the window and stuck his head out. A blizzard blew into the room, and I dived down under the blankets. The dogs were even louder with the window open, barking their faces off. Dad listened for a moment, then he let out a loud howl of his own.
“Dad!” Sam said. But Dad wouldn’t shut up. The dogs went berserk. People banged on the walls but still Dad wouldn’t stop, not even when he woke Alicia up. She roared her head off and there was even more banging on the walls. Our neighbour on the left side hit the wall so hard that he put a hole through it, and that set me off screaming. I’d seen enough horror films to know it was bad when something came through the wall. I scooped up Alicia and darted across the hall to the kitchen. I made her a bottle of milk and slept with her on the floor until early morning.
I was really tired the next day, but I had to carry on as normal. There were nappies to change and bottles to make. I also had to cook, if I didn’t want to go hungry. Sam didn’t know how and we could be waiting all day for Dad to get round to it.
We were just sitting down to dinner, when there was a knock at the door.
“Get rid of them, whoever it is,” Dad said, as I set our plates on the bed. We didn’t even have a proper table to eat at. There was no space for anything.
Sam opened the door. “You’d better come in,” I heard him say.
I looked up, annoyed. “We’re eating.”
I was crabby and hungry and not in the mood to be bothered. But then I saw who it was. The same smartly dressed people we’d seen at the hospital.
“It’s the cozzers,” I said in a whisper.
Dad must have heard me, but he did not get up. Instead he picked up his fork and coolly ate his spaghetti.
I ate too, because Alicia was asleep, and I might not get a chance later.
“We have some more questions for you,” one of the cozzers told Dad.
“I think it’s best if you come down to the station.”
I continued to eat my food, forking it faster and faster into my mouth. I didn’t understand what was happening, but I wasn’t going to miss my dinner, even with cozzers watching.
The thing I remember about them was the way they just stood there. Neither of them attempted to take their jacket off, or sit down anywhere. It was as if they were visitors to the zoo, and we were the animals.
The cozzers questioned Dad all afternoon. They didn’t think it right that us kids should be left on our own, so we had to come with him. Sam and I were given a drink and biscuits while some other woman looked after Alicia. I was annoyed at that. I was the one who had looked after her since she’d come home from the hospital, but I knew to keep my trap shut. That’s what Mum would have done.
“We might not be perfect, but we’re a family,” she’d told me once. “As soon as you get social workers sniffing around, they’ll split us up. You wouldn’t want that, would you?”
I didn’t know exactly what social workers were, or what they looked like, but the things Mum had said had struck terror into my heart. I imagined these awful faceless people tearing our family apart and I sat on the truth, no matter how horrifying it was.
After we’d finished our drink and biscuits, a female cozzer came over to me. She told me her name was Debbie.
“Jody, I want to ask you a few questions about the night of the fire.”
I eyed her with suspicion. I didn’t know the difference between the cozzers and social workers, but I had a feeling they were on the same team. I followed her into the next room, where she and another officer asked me some questions.
“Does your dad often spend the evening down the pub?”
“Not really.”
“Had your mum and dad been arguing
that night?”
“No. They never argued. They were in love.”
Debbie kept looking at me but I kept my mouth shut. I wasn’t going to tell these people anything that would give them a reason to break up our family. Even with Mum gone, I knew the threat was still very real. They could split us all up. They could put Dad in the clink.
“Jody, are you certain you are telling us the truth?” she asked, her voice alternating between kind and stern. “Because if we find out you’re lying, you could get yourself into serious trouble, do you understand?”
I caught the bitter essence of coffee on her breath and nodded, grimly.
She leaned closer. “If you have anything you want to tell us about your father, anything at all, then now is the time.”
14
Debbie gave me a long, hard look. A more cowardly child might have lost her bottle, but not me. Sam and I had been having staring contests since we were nippers and I knew how to hold my ground. I returned her look, staring until my eyes felt like they would bleed. I could see the tension in her face and she leaned closer still, but I did not back down. She blinked first.
“I don’t have nothing else to tell you, except that I need the bog. Can I go now?”
“I suppose so.”
She murmured something to her colleague and showed me down the corridor to the loos.
Afterwards, I was allowed to go and wait with Sam in the waiting room at the front of the police station. Sam had built a big tower out of Lego, and I took great pleasure in knocking it down.
“Stupid cow! What did you do that for?”
“Because I felt like it.”
I watched as he attempted to rebuild his masterpiece.
“What did happen the night of the fire?” I asked. “Please, just tell the truth.”
“It’s like Dad said. We went down the Halfway House.”
“What, all night?”
“Yeah, well we played snooker with a couple of his mates, and they all drank a lot of beer. The landlord had a lock-in after closing and Dad and his mates carried on drinking. We didn’t find out about the fire till early the next morning.”
Cold Bath Lane Page 7
