Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  ‘Did Ruby bring that picture of her mother back down?’

  Tom lifted his head from the screen and, looking steadily at me, said, ‘No, I did.’

  I felt something inside crack. ‘What makes you think I need your dead lover looking at me every time I enter my own living room?’

  Tom sucked his teeth in a manner that was both high-handed and patronising. ‘Really, Cat, there’s no need to get so worked up. It wasn’t my idea. The social worker said it was important for Ruby to keep her mother’s memory alive.’

  ‘Can’t she do that in her own room?’

  Tom shot me the kind of pained look you might give an errant child. ‘If you absolutely insist. I thought you were better than this, I really did.’

  Sleep eluded me again that night. The gnawing, rotten heat didn’t help, but the real problem was Lilly Winter. Over and over again, I’d be about to drop off when a mental image of Tom and Lilly sprang into my mind fully formed. A dingy B&B. I could see the ugly desk with its pleather chair, the strapped luggage rack and the tiny silent TV and, in the midst of it all, of course, Tom and Lilly naked, their limbs tangled together, sheeny in the muggy aftermath of sex. I kept telling myself, She’s dead, she’s gone, but Lilly Winter was very far from gone. She was there in my living room on the family photo table, she was there among the rubble of my husband’s memories, and she was there in the girl sleeping across the hallway.

  I thought about Ruby then. Was she responsible for washing up on our doorstep? No. Was it even her fault that I didn’t like her? Of course not. Her origins would always have made that hard. The truth was, I resented her both for who she was and for where she came from. And yes, I knew how poorly that reflected on me but you know what? Deep down, knowing that didn’t make me like Ruby Winter any more.

  I must have worn myself to sleep eventually because I woke with the fading fragments of a dream still playing in my mind. Lilly and I were in the locker room of the local municipal pool getting dressed after a swim. I had left my purse in one of the lockers and wanted to retrieve it but Lilly had the key and she was in the shower.

  A light was on in the bathroom. Evidently, Tom was having trouble sleeping too. I checked my watch and saw it was early. Then my eyes fell on the date. The second of August. Our wedding anniversary and also, by some creepy coincidence, the day of the Lilly Winter’s funeral.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I was downstairs in the kitchen making breakfast when Freya appeared.

  ‘Is Ruby awake?’

  ‘She wants a lie-in,’ Freya said, placing four juice glasses on the table before taking a seat and helping herself to Shredded Wheat. I moved behind her and began idly stroking her hair. This was the first morning since Ruby’s arrival that I’d had my daughter to myself. I hadn’t fully absorbed quite how much I’d missed her company. She’d grown quieter in the last couple of days and I was worried that the funeral might be too much for her. But there was also an anxious ticking at the back of my mind, a faint suggestion that Ruby had something to do with her subdued mood. I was tempted to ask but I wasn’t convinced she’d tell me. I took the seat beside her and we ate our cereal in silence for a bit. While she busied herself, I checked her face for signs of fragility but saw only the remains of the night’s sleep.

  Eventually, Freya put down her spoon. ‘Mum, you’re not going to die for ages, are you?’

  So she was feeling anxious. I laid a reassuring hand on her head. ‘Of course not, darling. Look, there’s really, honestly, no need for you to come today. I can stay behind with you and we can have a lovely day together if you like. Your father and Ruby will understand.’ I wanted her to say yes but I wasn’t surprised when she shook her head.

  ‘Ruby says anyone can die any time.’

  My mind buzzed.

  ‘Well, that’s factually true, but it’s so unlikely to happen to any of us any time soon that you don’t have to think about it.’

  ‘It happened to Ruby’s mum,’ Freya said, sounding unconvinced.

  ‘That was just a terrible accident. A freak event. Freak events are freakish because they hardly ever happen.’ I thought about the plumber fixing Lilly Winter’s boiler. Was it a terrible accident, a freak event? Or something else?

  In any case, my words were of little comfort to Freya. In a shrill voice she said, ‘But hardly ever isn’t never.’

  I rested my hand on my daughter’s head once again and she leaned in to it and allowed me to comfort her for a moment, but we both knew I’d lost the argument.

  Freya had gone back upstairs to get dressed by the time Ruby Winter appeared. Instead of the purple dress Ruby had picked out at the shop (which she had insisted upon, despite my considering it far too old and sophisticated to be suitable) she was wearing a navy pinafore of Freya’s that we’d bought for our daughter’s birthday. The dress hung off her and I thought about saying something then decided that, in the circumstances, it hardly mattered.

  As she launched herself like a wild thing on the cereal, I sat down beside her. Despite her thinness she looked strangely invulnerable, like a thread of spider silk, and I was moved to reach out a hand and touch her just to see if she was real. As my fingers neared, she whisked her hand away. It was a calculated rejection.

  I turned and stood, swallowing away any hostile feelings once my back was to her so as not to give her the satisfaction of having got to me. After pouring myself another cup of coffee, I resumed my seat.

  ‘I’m wondering if it might help to go through again what to expect today?’ Tom and I had both taken Ruby through the likely programme of events. We’d talked about the hearse arriving, the service, the coffin progressing along its rollered conveyor towards its final destination, the curtains discreetly whining closed.

  She had finished her cereal and was twirling the spoon around in the milk.

  I tried again. ‘Is there anything you’d like to know?’

  Her eyes widened and a kind of brightness came over her face as if a light had been turned on inside her head. ‘Will there be ice cream afterwards?’

  ‘If you want it.’

  She moved back on her chair and turned towards me. ‘I bet you’re happy about Lilly Winter dying. If I was you, I would be.’

  Later, in the shower, I thought about myself at Ruby Winter’s age. Dad had gone back to Jamaica and more or less disappeared from our lives and our mother, Heather, had embarked on what Sally and I later referred to as the Slow Stoli Suicide Slide, though by then, strictly speaking, Stoli had given way to the kind of cheap, supermarket vodka that comes in two-litre bottles. I hadn’t thought about Heather in years, at least not in any sustained way. A shrink once told me that living in the present meant giving up all hope of a better past. And that’s what I’d tried hard to do. Since Ruby Winter’s arrival, though, the dark places I thought I had escaped had come boomeranging back as if they had been out there in the air all this while, tracking their elliptical orbit back to me. Alcohol, abandonment, life in the Ends. Even the drive to the South London Crematorium, which I was dreading, would only be a replay of an earlier event.

  Twelve years had passed since the coffin containing my mother’s body had been rollered into the furnace. The grief I felt at my mother’s funeral was less about the body lying in the coffin than the final extinguishing of the distant but still vivid hope that Sal and I would ever have a loving mother. Sal and I had returned only once since, to scatter her ashes in the rose garden. Then we’d brushed her dust from our hands and walked away. I wanted life for Freya to be different from mine and Sally’s. I wanted for her to be able to live fully in the present with no reason to have to look back.

  Arriving at the crematorium, we left the car park and walked slowly across hot tarmac. The girls ran on ahead, attracted by a graceless water feature to one side of the main building, while Tom and I headed towards a small knot of mourners gathered in the shade of a drought-browned sycamore to await the hearse. Two stragglers from the previous funeral lingered by the
entrance, in the hands of one a photo of a boy not much older than Freya who I recognised from one of the newer shrines near the park. I would have guessed from the raw shock on the family’s faces that it had been a sudden and violent death. South London had seen too many of those recently: kids killed by kids. People said a few days’ rain would put a stop to it, at least for a while, but the rain hadn’t come.

  A tiny gnarled woman with a hard, edgy, heavy smoker’s mien and short, faded red hair was standing nearest to the entrance of the chapel. From the way people approached then retreated around her, I guessed this was Meg Winter. We still hadn’t spoken and I had a feeling Tom would prefer it to stay that way. He’d never told me what exactly had been said between them and he’d made it clear he didn’t want to be asked.

  I waited until my husband was engaged in conversation with one of the mourners before I approached her, then introduced myself and offered the customary condolences. She seemed more overwhelmed than sad.

  ‘Is Ruby your only grandchild?’ I asked. There were no other children present.

  Her eyes darted about. ‘One’s enough.’ I turned to see what she was looking at and caught Tom’s eye. Meg turned her gaze back to me. ‘Why have you come? There’s nothing for you here.’ There was no aggression in her tone, only a wariness I didn’t understand.

  ‘I hope you’re not offended,’ I said. People are apt to blurt all kinds of things at funerals, I thought. At Tom’s mother’s funeral I heard someone whisper, as I walked up the aisle to give a reading, ‘Fingers crossed we’re not going to get a rap song.’ Later, a woman with what looked like an overbaked meringue on her head approached me over the Waitrose platters and said, ‘You must be so pleased the mayor’s here.’ For a while that became our family catchphrase. Whenever Tom and I were doing something we didn’t want to do, scraping ground-in food off Freya’s high chair or clearing the garden of fox shit, one of us would pipe up, ‘I’m so pleased the mayor’s here.’

  Whatever was going through her mind, my response seemed to have calmed her a little. She shrugged her shoulders and in that gesture I saw my chance.

  ‘Ruby seems to be getting on so well with our daughter Freya.’

  Something flitted across Meg’s leathery face. Maybe she was just a bitch, like Tom said, and maybe Ruby did hate her, but we were at her daughter’s funeral and I decided that now was hardly the time to rush to judgement. Besides, I had cooked up a plan in the middle of the night and I needed Meg to pull it off.

  ‘Are there any other family members here?’ It was usual at these things to be able to detect a genetic thread in the crowd, but, so far, apart from Meg, I hadn’t spotted anyone who even vaguely resembled Ruby or her mother.

  Meg shook her head decisively. ‘Me and Lilly never kept up with family.’

  ‘Oh, well, we’re glad to have Ruby – and you – in ours. You must come and see us,’ I went on, as sincerely as I could. From across the small collection of heads, I saw Tom’s eye flick towards me as he tried to extricate himself from a conversation with a young woman. ‘We’d love to have you over for a meal.’ I scrolled through my mental calendar as if the idea had only just occurred to me. ‘Say, tomorrow?’

  Meg Winter looked a little taken aback. ‘I could, I suppose.’

  ‘We’ll see you at seven then.’ I pulled out a notebook from my pocket, scribbled down the address and handed it to her.

  At that moment, the hearse appeared and a cheap coffin containing the corpse of Lilly Winter slid along rollers into the waiting hands of the bearers and into a sombre, wood-panelled room smelling of floor polish and formaldehyde.

  We walked into the chapel as a family, Freya holding on to my hand while Ruby took her father’s. A rent-a-vicar gave a passable eulogy during which I learned nothing new about my once-rival other than her age – thirty-two – and the fact that, like me, she’d grown up on the Pemberton, had done moderately well in her studies and worked, variously, as a beautician and a hairdresser. I was sure I hadn’t known her, the seven-year difference in our ages being sufficient to keep us apart, but our paths must have crossed every so often without either of us having registered the other. I was hardly in a position to mourn the dead woman but I was nonetheless struck by an abstract sense of loss. My thoughts went to that night all those years ago when Lilly Winter and my husband had – unwittingly? – created the reason we were here today. Had she ever longed for Tom to return? Or regretted what she had done?

  Ruby reacted to the perfunctory rundown of her mother’s life with indifference. Once or twice she swung her legs back and forth under the pew and gazed with rapt attention at her shoes. Other times she stared ahead, her face expressionless, eyes unfocused, and I recalled what the social worker had told us, that she would likely be numb for a while or, conversely, that her feelings would be as intense and fragmentary as comets and she would be blindsided as they shot past. The social worker had produced a pocketful of metaphors. Roller coasters, thunderclouds, stormy seas.

  Afterwards, when everyone was processing outside to look at the flowers, a ritual that had always seemed oddly beside the point, or milled around, holding their faces to the sun to remind themselves that they were, as yet, among the living, I was surprised by the almost complete absence of grief. A young woman had died in horrible circumstances, leaving a child behind, and no one seemed anguished by this or even much surprised. To be so little mourned seemed itself a cause for mourning but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. Instead, I wondered what impact Lilly Winter’s death might have, and where it had left us.

  Ruby and Freya were at the fountain with Tom, demonstrating some water trick they’d come up with, and, as I swung my head back to catch one last scent of the bunches of lilies now lying baking in the sun, I spotted Gloria, standing on her own in a leopard-print dress. I went over.

  ‘Nice family,’ she said, meaning mine.

  I did my best to smile.

  ‘You husband look nothing like Ruby.’ Gloria leaned in and, tapping her finger on my chest, said, ‘I tell you one thing, Lilly have a lot of men.’

  The heating engineer sprung to mind along with the compelling idea that he and Lilly Winter might have been closer than Gloria supposed. I asked Gloria if she had heard from him. She took a beat before she shook her head and I got the feeling she knew something she wasn’t about to tell me. Instead, she gave me a searching look and, placing her hand on the crook of my arm, added, ‘How are you find the girl? Pleasant?’

  My eyes flitted momentarily to the fountain. Freya and Ruby were no longer in view but I supposed they couldn’t have gone far. Tom was over by the sycamore talking to someone. I wondered whether sharing my disquiet about Ruby might encourage Gloria to say whatever was on her mind, but we were only acquaintances and there was no reason for her to trust me. In the end I plumped for something equivocal and diplomatic. ‘I think she’s struggling to know how to react to the new situation. We all are really.’

  A crimp appeared at the corner of Gloria’s eyes and she withdrew her hand.

  ‘Are you trying to tell me something about Ruby?’

  Gloria raised herself up a little. Her eyes flitted about as if she were afraid of being heard and she tilted her head towards me, saying in a low voice, ‘I don’t know about this girl.’

  My throat had tightened into a knot and it took a cough to clear it.

  I could see Gloria pause in her thoughts as if questioning herself then she leaned back, withdrawing. A small, uncertain smile played on her face.

  ‘Well, I go now, it was nice talking.’

  She hurried away. As I turned back to the crowd, my eye caught the quiver of air above the furnace chimney. I looked around for the girls but couldn’t see them anywhere. At the far end of the chapel a path turned along an ivy-spattered red-brick wall. Where the path gave out onto an open area two figures were seated on the grass bent over a memorial slab so preoccupied with some joke they didn’t hear me approaching. As I got closer I understood what they
were laughing about. Someone had scratched out two of the letters in the name on the slab and carved a horizontal to run through a double ‘L’ so the name, formerly Pearl Shill, now read Pear Shitt. The scratch marks looked new, the lines still raw and un-weathered. It didn’t take a genius to work out who’d done it. For a moment or two I tussled with myself, then decided not to make a fuss. What kind of person gives a kid grief at her mother’s funeral?

  We drove home in silence. The parking space outside our house had been filled with a skip for the building works next door. Tom continued on a little way then backed in between two parked cars and the girls clattered off down the street towards number forty-two. I waited behind, knowing Tom and I had air to clear and wanting to do it before we went inside the house. The electronic key pluk-pluked and Tom swung his head around to look at me.

  ‘You just couldn’t leave the Meg thing alone, could you?’ He slammed the car keys into his pocket and gave me a look to shrink a giant, then stormed off down the street. I went after him and grabbed his arm and held him back.

  ‘We have to talk.’ I told him about the memorial slab. ‘This isn’t about me, Tom. I worry about Ruby being around Freya. If she’s going to stay with us, we have to get her some help. Otherwise her grandmother is going to have to take her, at least for some of the time.’

  Tom strode off without answering, leaving me to follow on with my tail between my legs like some chastened puppy.

  Freya and Ruby were waiting by the front door. Tom unlocked the door and ushered them in. I was bringing up the rear, when I saw Tom freeze at something over my shoulder. An instant later the front gate squealed and I swung about and found myself face to face with a wiry man in his forties, with heavy, dark-blond eyebrows and weak blue, vaguely Scandinavian eyes. I hadn’t seen him in nearly a decade but I would have recognised James White anywhere.