Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  He went on: ‘They think it was carbon monoxide poisoning – faulty boiler, no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector. The policewoman said you don’t smell it, you don’t hear it, you don’t taste it. If the gas leak is big enough, it only takes thirty seconds to kill you. Ruby’s mother was dead drunk, she wouldn’t have known anything about it.’ He stopped and rubbed a hand across his face as though trying to obliterate something, but I was relieved to see there were no tears. Whatever feelings were going through his heart right now, grief for Lilly Winter wasn’t among them.

  ‘Oh God, that’s horrible,’ I said.

  ‘Ruby’s room is in a separate corridor in the flat and she was sleeping with her window wide open, otherwise…’ He frowned and sat with the thought a moment, then, getting up, went over to the kettle and refilled the pot. He brought the tea over then seated himself once more in the chair beside me.

  ‘Drink this, you’ll feel better.’

  I pushed the mug away. I didn’t want to feel better. Not now. Not at five thirty in the morning with my husband’s love child in the room next door. I thought about Freya asleep upstairs, still oblivious to the existence of a half-sister, and wondered what we were about to do to her world.

  Tom’s head was in his hands now and he was rubbing at his temples with his thumbs.

  ‘What were you thinking?’

  He swung up so his face was angled towards me and let the air blow out of his lips. ‘Evidently, I wasn’t,’ he said.

  I let out a bitter laugh. Even when he wasn’t trying to be funny Tom managed to be amusing. Maybe that’s why we’d lasted as long as we had. The Tom I first met was a glossy, charming man who smelled brightly of the future. I wanted him and he wanted me. We were young and wanting one another seemed if not enough (we weren’t that stupid), then at least the largest part of the deal. Not long after we’d married, life came along. The sex, at first wild, calmed into something more manageable. But it was all OK. We got on well, rarely fought and seemed to want the same things. The years slid by. We had our daughter and moved into a house and enjoyed trips to the seaside on the weekends. We were good parents. We respected one another’s careers. When Tom left Adrenalyze to start his own company, I’d kept the joint account ticking over. He’d supported me as I’d worked long hours at the institute, cheering me from the sidelines when I’d been called as an expert witness in child psychosis. When I’d failed so publically, so devastatingly, and all I’d worked for had come tumbling down, he’d stood by me. Over the years we somehow turned into the couple other couples pretend not to envy. Unflashy, boring, steady. The couple who never got the point of counselling sessions, ‘check-ins’ or ‘date nights’. ‘Never let light in on magic,’ Tom used to say – another of his jokes. We liked it that the outlines of our marriage were blurry and out of focus. Because what is marriage, after all, but a kind of wilful blindness, an agreement to overlook the evidence, a leap of faith for which, in these days of Tinder hook-ups and casual sexting, it pays to be a little myopic?

  Tom was going on about something, but I’d stopped listening. The room had begun to feel very claustrophobic. It was as if everything was speeding inwards, converging into a single laser-like beam of almost blinding intensity. Everything has changed. From now on our lives will be different in ways neither of us can predict. Eventually, when I realised he’d fallen silent, I said, simply, ‘I’m so bloody angry I can hardly speak.’

  Tom’s chest heaved. ‘I know, I know.’ His voice carried on but the words were lost to me. Instead I began thinking about how things had been after Freya was born, when we’d tried and failed for another child. The doctor’s best guess had been that our bodies were in some undefined way biologically incompatible. Tom hadn’t wanted to go through IVF again or risk another episode of my prenatal psychosis, that wild paranoia which had overwhelmed me in the weeks preceding Freya, and he wouldn’t entertain the idea of adopting. What had followed was a kind of mourning for a child I’d never have, years of hopeless and, for the most part, unspoken longing. Through it all I’d at least been comforted by the notion that neither of us was to blame.

  ‘Biological incompatibility’ had been my ‘get out of jail free’ card. But now, the arrival of my husband’s other daughter was proof that the ‘incompatibility’ was actually something to do with me. I was the problem. And not just because of my hormones and my predilection for going crazy while pregnant, but because there was something fundamentally wrong with my reproductive system. I was the reason we’d had to resort to IVF. And now here was the proof, in the shape of Ruby Winter. Concrete evidence of the failure of my fertility.

  Tom had stopped speaking and was slumped in the chair picking at his fingers. He seemed angry and distracted.

  I said, ‘Why isn’t she with a relative or something?’

  He looked up and glared. ‘I am a bloody relative,’ then, gathering himself, he said, ‘Sorry. There’s a grandmother, apparently, Lilly Winter’s mother, but they couldn’t get hold of her. In any case, they said Ruby asked to be taken to her dad’s.’ He shot me a pleading look. ‘Look, we’ll sort all of this out and Ruby will go and live with her gran and maybe we’ll see her at the weekends. The most important thing for now is that she’s safe, isn’t it?’

  I glanced at the wall clock. It was nearly six in the morning and the little girl in our living room had just lost her mother. I pushed back my hair and forced myself to think straight. In a couple of hours’ time I would be at the institute doing my best to work with a bunch of kids who needed help. How could I possibly live with myself if I didn’t help the kid on my own doorstep?

  I stood up and cleared my throat. ‘We’re not done talking about this, not even close. But for now I’m guessing there’ll be paperwork and we’ll need to show the girl to the spare room so she can get some sleep. You go back to the living room. I need a few minutes alone then I’ll follow on with some fresh tea and a glass of juice for’ – the words fell from my mouth like something bitter and unwanted – ‘your daughter.’

  While Tom went through the admin with the social worker, Ruby Winter followed me up the stairs in stunned silence, still clutching the rabbit’s foot key, and my heart went out to her, this motherless, pale reed of a girl.

  ‘You’re safe here,’ I said.

  I switched on the bedside lamp and invited her to sit on the bed beside me. Those off-colour eyes scanned my face momentarily, as if she were trying to decide whether I could be trusted. She sat, reluctantly, keeping her distance and with hands jammed between her knees, her skinny frame making only the shallowest of impressions on the mattress. We were three feet from one another now, brought together first by drink and carelessness and then by the terrible fate of her mother. Yet despite all the shock and horror she must have been feeling and my sympathy for her situation, it was as though she possessed some kind of force field which made being close to her unsettling.

  I pointed to the rabbit’s foot keyring in her hand.

  ‘Shall I keep that safe for you? We might need it later, when one of us goes to fetch your things.’ The social worker had brought a bag of basic clothes and toiletries to tide Ruby over while the police did whatever they needed to do in the flat, but the policewoman had told us that they’d been working for several hours already and, given there were no suspicious circumstances, would probably be done by the morning.

  Ruby Winter hesitated then handed me the keyring. The combination of fur and metal was warm from her hand.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m really terribly sorry about your mother. It’s going to take a while to sort everything out, but we will. For now it’s best if you get some sleep.’

  I pulled out a toothbrush and wash cloth and a pair of pyjamas from the bag the social worker had brought. ‘Would you like me to come with you to the bathroom?’

  Ruby shook her head.

  While she was gone, I unpacked the few remaining bits and bobs then sat back on the bed, scooped up the rabbit’s foo
t keyring and held it in the palm of my hand. It really was an odd thing, the claws dirty and the skin jagged and ratty at the cut end. It had been Lilly Winter’s, I guessed. Who kept animal-part charms these days except maybe Wicca nuts or sinister middle-aged men living with their mothers? I dropped the keyring into my pocket and tried to separate the new arrival from the circumstances of her creation. It wasn’t Ruby’s fault that she’d been conceived in an act of betrayal. But it wasn’t going to be easy to forget it either.

  When she returned, dressed in her PJs, I took her wash things and put them on the chest of drawers and sat in the chair at the end of the bed as she slid under the duvet. ‘Did your father tell you we have a daughter about your age? Her name’s Freya. You’ll meet her in the morning.’

  I waited for a response that didn’t come. In the dim light thrown by the beside lamp, with her tiny body and huge hair, the girl appeared otherworldly but also somehow not quite there, as though what I was looking at was a reflection of a girl rather than the girl herself.

  ‘Your dad told me you have a grandmother.’

  Ruby Winter looked up and gave a little smile, oddly empty of feeling, then looked away.

  ‘She’s a bitch,’ she said flatly. Her voice was soft but with the sharpened edges of a south London accent.

  ‘I’m sorry you feel that,’ I said. I sensed she was testing me, hoping to catch me out. Perhaps I should have left then and allowed her to sleep but my curiosity overcame me.

  ‘Did your mother ever tell you anything about your dad?’

  Ruby gazed at her fingers and, in the same expressionless tone, she said, ‘Only that he was a real shit.’

  This was the kind of behaviour I dealt with on a daily basis at the clinic, but in the here and now, I felt oddly at a loss. ‘I’m sure she didn’t really say that. And, anyway, he isn’t.’

  Ruby looked at me then shrugged as if what she had said was of no consequence. ‘I’m tired now.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ I said, feeling bad for having pushed her into a conversation she didn’t want to have. I went to the door. ‘Sleep now and we’ll talk later.’

  Back downstairs I made another pot of tea and some toast and took a tray out to the others. The policewoman was in the middle of saying that there would have to be a post-mortem on Lilly Winter and a report would be filed with the coroner, but it was unlikely that the coroner would call an inquest. The situation at the flat had been straightforward enough. An old boiler, no batteries in the carbon monoxide detector, Lilly passed out from drink.

  ‘Presumably Ruby will go and live with her grandmother?’ I voiced this as a question but I hoped it was also a statement.

  The social worker briefly caught Tom’s eye.

  ‘That’s the plan,’ Tom said.

  The policewoman’s phone went. She answered it, listened briefly, then, turning to Tom, she said, ‘I’m afraid we’ll need to keep you a little longer to go over a few things – but we’re done at the flat if…’ She smiled at me. ‘Perhaps you’d like to go and fetch Ruby’s personal effects?’ She told me the address and began giving me directions.

  ‘That’s OK, I know the Pemberton Estate.’

  ‘Oh!’ the policewoman replied, her voice full of amazement, as if neither of us had any business knowing anywhere like the Pemberton.

  ‘It’s where I grew up,’ I said.

  CHAPTER THREE

  According to the police, Lilly Winter had taken over the lease on flat sixty-seven in the Ash Building, one of the red-brick hutches forming part of the original estate, from her mother, Megan Winter, who had moved into the flat from another council property near Streatham. Ruby was born at the flat while her grandmother was still the registered tenant so grandmother, mother and baby must have been living together at that point. The names didn’t mean anything to me and it seemed unlikely that we’d ever coincided. I’d left the place twenty years ago and hadn’t been back since the death of my mother. I didn’t particularly want to go back now, but I was too curious about Lilly Winter to let the opportunity pass. So I left a message on my assistant Claire’s mobile asking her to move my nine o’clock, then Tom and I had a brief discussion about what to tell Freya if she woke up while I was gone and I got in the car and headed south.

  When I was growing up, in the nineties, working-class kids of all ethnic varieties lived on the Pemberton, which we called the Ends. The whole district was more than a bit scrappy and shitty. The main road south towards Croydon split the area in two and it was impossible to leave without running into a busy arterial road, as a result of which we rarely ventured far. The surrounding workers’ cottages were occupied by first-generation immigrant Jamaicans who put up cheery curtains and planted their gardens with sunflowers. A handful of elderly whites and some Asian families lived among them and a few middle-class gentrifiers had taken over flats in the villas behind the cottages, though a lot of those were still squatted. But even as kids we could tell that, in some unspecified way, the area was on the move, which made the Ends feel as if it was about to be cut off by the tide. For years there were rumours that the whole estate was to be completely redeveloped and the residents moved elsewhere. At the time, we felt like anarchists, free to run wild without consequences. With hindsight, the instability left us feeling insecure. Those of us who grew up on the Ends did our best to ignore the sense that we had drawn the short straw. We lived for music, sex and a bit of weed. Destiny’s Child, N.W.A., Public Enemy, R ’n’ B, urban, whatever. Friday and Saturday nights you’d meet your homies around the ghetto blaster, roll some joints and have yourselves a party. There were gangs and the odd gang-related ruckus but you could steer your way around them. We felt free but at the cost of knowing we didn’t matter, that kids like us were only of any consequence within the narrow confines of the Ends themselves.

  At the traffic lights I made a right, skirting around the southern side of Grissold Park, then up along the wide, leafy road that ran along its western border, and turned again at the filter into a grid of half-gentrified Victorian terraced houses punctuated by shabby corner stores and fried chicken shops.

  I slowed and tried to quell the fluttering in my chest. Memories. My manor. Approaching the rack of brutalist tower blocks fronted by older, lower tenements of red brick and what might once have been, but were no longer, cream tiles, I was a teenager again. Furious, mouthy and secretly determined to escape. The parties and the friendships and the ‘what the fuck’ Saturday night feeling had never been quite enough. There had been an itch in me to leave and I knew it would take everything I had to make it happen. Because the trouble with the Pemberton was that if you didn’t get out fast, you didn’t get out at all.

  The late July sun was steadily beating down now and, despite the early hour, the estate was already sticky in the heat, the pavements speckled with clumps of dog shit – dark matter in an expanse of Milky Way. Some kids were mooching their way to school, kicking a football along the tea-coloured grass, their elder brothers and sisters hurrying them along, weapon dogs strung in tightly beside them.

  I parked up and got out, conscious of being watched – someone is always watching in the Ends. It wouldn’t do to be taken for a social worker or, worse still, a Fed. Two girls were standing at the foot of an external stairway smoking, one in wedge sandals too small for her feet, the other sporting a set of sprayed acrylics which she was tapping on the handrail. Tough kids, showing off their credentials. I headed over; they’d spread the word among whoever needed to know.

  ‘Hey,’ I said.

  ‘All right?’ the girl in the wedge sandals replied.

  The girl with the acrylics looked me up and down then squinted and tipped her head. ‘You slippin’ here, man.’

  ‘Nuh uh. This my manor.’

  ‘I never seen you. Who your people?’

  ‘Lilly Winter. Me and her got the same baby daddy.’

  The girls exchanged glances. Then the girl with the wedge sandals said, ‘You too late, innit. Feds ba
gged her up. Some accident, I dunno.’

  ‘Yeah, I heard.’

  ‘She not my crew.’ The girl turned to her friend. ‘The young’un, though, the gingernut?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the friend. ‘Facety bitch.’

  ‘What I’m sayin’. Nobody give a shit if she gone the same way as her mother, and that’s the truth, innit.’

  Sixty-seven Ash Building was the second to last flat on the top floor of one of the older, red-brick blocks overshadowed by the towers, and distinguished only by its tattered, unloved exterior. You didn’t have to step a foot inside to know the place was a dump. Close up, everything about number sixty-seven exuded neglect. It was the only dwelling on that floor which hadn’t been customised with door gates, a window box or some cheerful paint. Where the number had once been attached to the door two rusted screws jutted from their holes. The letter box had fallen out and the hole in the door was duct-taped over. There was grime on the windows and the blue-painted windowsill was feathery with disrepair.

  Ruby’s key was an awkward fit and got stuck in the barrel. The door rattled in the jamb but remained firmly shut. I was thinking about giving it a good kick when I became aware of a woman in her early thirties who was peering around the door of number sixty-nine, dressed in a pink onesie.

  ‘You want something?’ The door opened wider.

  ‘The little girl who lives here, Ruby Winter? I’m picking up some of her things but the key…’ The woman’s face softened. She said her name was Gloria. Eastern European accent. Something familiar about her that I couldn’t put my finger on.

  She came over and, waving me away, pressed her shoulder to the door. ‘You got to push hard. Council said they sort it out, but they don’t. Lilly always waking me up.’ When the door gave, Gloria righted herself and stepped over the threshold. ‘Terrible what happen. And that kid, Ruby, she got no mother.’ When I hesitated, she beckoned me with her hand, saying, ‘Come on then.’