The Doorstep Child

by Annie Murray

  After work she went, as usual, to pick up Tracy and Andrew. Even they, like the rest of her life, now seemed to her to be on the other side of a glass screen which she was forever trying to reach. It wasn’t as if they were behaving any differently from before. Tracy was being a good girl, as ever. Mom, Rita and Shirley all sucked up to her; Ann was friends with her some of the time and bitterly envious and bad-tempered at others. Tracy tried to please everyone – Nanna, aunties, cousins and Mom – and at times she looked strained and confused.

  It was Andrew who played up more, never wanting to go home when Evie came to fetch them, his favour being bought by the family with toys and sweets and lots of cousins to play with. She dreaded picking them up every day because it was almost always a fight and she ended up feeling exhausted and in the wrong.

  ‘Oh Mom,’ Andrew yelled rudely as she came to the door that afternoon. ‘It’s not time to go – I’m playing. Wayne and me are playing football.’

  ‘Andrew,’ she said sternly. She had never known him behave this aggressively before, rejecting her on sight. It pierced her already wounded heart.

  ‘Come on, Andrew,’ Tracy said. ‘We’ve got to go.’

  ‘Here y’are, you two!’ Rita was there, as usual, baby Dean in her arms. ‘Here’s some sherbet dabs to take with yer.’

  ‘Cor!’ Andrew grabbed one.

  Tracy took hers more politely. ‘Thanks, Auntie.’

  There was a sickly smell in the hall, as if every child in the family was breathing out sugar.

  ‘Is that my other daughter who can’t keep a man?’ she heard her mother bawl from the living room. ‘Got us doing all her dirty work, ain’t ’er?’

  Shirley passed through the hall in a slouchy jumper and jeans. She didn’t say a word. She gave Evie a look which once she might have thought of as sympathetic, but now she wasn’t so sure. The look seemed to contain malice. Evie blinked. You never knew with Shirley.

  ‘Come on, Andrew,’ she said wearily, as he started to kick off. She did not want to go inside. She just wanted her kids to follow her out, slowly and quietly so that they could slip away.

  ‘I s’pose ’e don’t want to go with ’er,’ she heard Mom observe to Shirley. ‘’Er might just as well leave ’im ’ere for all the mothering she does.’

  ‘Trace, get him, will you?’ Evie whispered.

  Tracy disappeared and came back dragging her yelling brother by the arm. Evie stepped in, twisted him round and picked him up from behind. Andrew started to kick back at her and she felt sharp pains in her thighs.

  ‘Hark at that,’ she heard Rita say. ‘I don’t s’pose we’ll get no thanks, neither. She ought to be paying us, by rights.’

  ‘Bring his coat,’ she ordered Tracy.

  Tracy, who had her own anorak on, grabbed Andrew’s red one and Evie bundled them all out of the door. Further along the street she plonked Andrew down, grabbed his shoulders and found herself shrieking into his face.

  ‘Stop it! Just stop that noise, Andrew, or I’ll . . .’

  Another, older lady was staring at her as she walked past.

  ‘What’re you bloody looking at?’ she roared at her and the lady turned away, walking faster. Tracy stood next to her in mute misery.

  ‘I hate you!’ Andrew bawled, beside himself. He was writhing and stamping. ‘I hate you! I want my dad!’

  It was the first time in ages Andrew had mentioned Jack and the word ‘dad’ stabbed Evie again with guilt and hurt.

  Well, he didn’t bloody well want you – ever! she wanted to snap back. But she managed not to say it.

  She knelt down and took her little boy, still fighting, in her arms.

  ‘Come ’ere, babby.’ Her own tears were flowing now. She felt more sobs swelling in her chest. ‘Come on, it’ll be all right. Mommy’s sorry.’

  He fought for a moment, then stilled and cried like the tiny boy he was. Tracy was crying too and Evie pulled her into her arms as they all wept there in the street.

  ‘Why’re they all so nasty to you, Mom?’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t like them being so mean to you.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Evie said. ‘I just don’t know, babby. As long as they’re not nasty to you, though?’

  She pulled back and looked at the two of them. She couldn’t have cared less if anyone in the street was witnessing this scene. Her children and their feelings were everything to her.

  With tearstained faces the two of them agreed that no, Nanna and the aunties were not nasty to them.

  ‘Auntie spoils us, really,’ Tracy said, wiping her eyes with the backs of her hands. ‘And Nanna. They’re always giving us sweets and we can do anything we want.’ Her face beneath the cream bobble hat looked pained and bewildered. ‘Only I wish they’d be nicer to you. What did you do? You must have done something to make them be so nasty?’

  ‘Is that what they told you?’ Evie said. A chill feeling went through her of terrible aloneness. Were they trying to poison her own children against her?

  ‘Well, no.’ Tracy looked down. Andrew was gulping and sniffling. ‘Not exactly.’ She seemed to consider for a second what answer to give, then looked up again. There was a pained look in her eyes but she shook her head. ‘No.’

  Evie lay under the heavy brown blankets and thin eiderdown that night, turning from one position to another, desperate for sleep.

  She could hear her children’s breathing from across the room, usually reassuring, but now, on these fractured nights, any sound seemed to echo through her head, jarring her, sending her even further from the sweet oblivion of sleep that she wanted to enter.

  The bedclothes weighed on her. She lay with her eyes stinging from exhaustion staring up into the darkness which seemed to pulse round her with a new malevolence.

  She found herself thinking about Gary again. It didn’t make her feel any better. She felt she had betrayed Gary back then when they were young. But then she had had her own problems. Seeing him just after Christmas she had been shocked. He looked a wreck. So much time had passed, so much had happened to each of them. That smile he had flashed at her, just for a second, brought back the old Gary, the funny boy she had loved. But now . . . She only had the vaguest idea of where he might be living and she knew she was not going to go and find him. There was no time to try.

  Turning over yet again, she sighed in despair at the thought of struggling through the next working day.

  If only I could get some sleep, she thought. I’m blowing things all out of proportion because I’m so tired. Her head was crowded with horrible, jarring things. Her blood seemed to race round her body and she could not stop it. She drew in some deep breaths but felt no calmer.

  Alan’s face, gentle and smiling, floated into her mind. But the thought of him only gave her more pain. He was keen on her, in his shy way. But what was the use of longing to have someone love her, of giving him hope? It only went wrong every time. And if Alan knew her, knew what she was really like, this hopeless, hateful thing, he would not want her anyway.

  Fifty-One

  Spring 1972

  ‘Are you all right, dear?’ Mrs Grant met her as she came in with the children that evening after work. ‘Only Bill and I have been saying you’re looking awfully pale.’

  Evie heard her landlady’s voice as if echoing from the bottom of a well. Gently she ushered Tracy and Andrew along the hall, which smelt of recent baking. You go on up, she nodded to the children and they crept away, Andrew in his usual overwrought state after being at his grandmother’s house, from too much rushing about and too many sweets.

  Mom and Rita were now firmly in charge of her children. That was how it felt. Evie had kept them to herself over the Easter holidays and taken time off to go about with them as much as she could – to Cannon Hill Park, even all the way to Dudley Zoo. But there were all the work days, when she could not be there after school.

  ‘Thanks, Mrs Grant, I’m all right,’ Evie said, trying to suppress her irritated exhaustion. Usually she was grateful
to Mrs Grant for mothering her. But now all she could think was, just leave me alone! All she wanted was to sink down, down into the darkness and peace of a proper sleep, to lose the world for a time and all her worries in it.

  ‘Probably just the end of the winter,’ Mrs Grant said, her own pasty face examining Evie’s. Evie felt her gaze like pins pricking into her. It was like being spied upon. She wondered for a second if Mom had been talking to Mrs Grant, was trying to get her on her side. She pushed the thought away. What was the matter with her?

  ‘We all need some sun and we’ll feel much better now spring’s coming.’ She was turning away, in her usual busy, practical fashion. ‘They say it’s going to brighten up again tomorrow. Would you like a cup of tea with us, dear?’

  ‘That’s kind of you. But no – I need to go and sort the kids out.’ Evie could not bear the thought of sitting trying to make polite conversation with the Grants. She turned away, adding, ‘Thanks. Thank you.’ Words wouldn’t seem to come out in the right order when they were needed.

  ‘All right. Well, our high tea will be ready in about half an hour.’

  Mrs Grant’s high teas were bread and butter, with a scraping of jam, tinned fruit with custard or evaporated milk and a frugal cake.

  When she went up the stairs, Andrew was waiting on the top step, his back to their door. Tracy seemed to have gone ahead. Andrew held the banister and was sliding his feet off the top step onto the one below, then stepping back up to begin again. Seeing her, he stilled and just stood on the last but one step, staring at her.

  Evie stopped. She was about to say, ‘Go on then, in you go,’ when she felt the force of her little boy’s stare. His expression was blank, sullen, his fringe long over his forehead, his eyes fixed on her. His gaze chilled her.

  He looks like a devil, she thought, her breath shallow in her chest. He’s a devil and he hates me! She was possessed, for that moment, by the conviction that her son had evil intent towards her. She blinked, trying to make his expression change, but he kept giving her that fixed, concentrated look. She froze, unable to move.

  After a moment, Andrew started kicking one foot against the step.

  ‘Come on, Mom,’ he said, sounding like a normal, hungry boy. ‘Has Mrs Grant done our tea?’

  Evie felt her breath return again. Tracy came out of their door as if to check where they had got to.

  ‘Mrs Grant says tea in half an hour,’ she reported. ‘High tea.’

  ‘Oh goody!’ Tracy said. High tea usually meant a break from stew, which was not her favourite. ‘Cake!’

  Evie swam through the days. Sometimes when she was sitting in front of the comptometer she felt like a machine herself, doing her job, trying to keep going. The click of the new machines – not like the metallic ‘thunk’ of the old ones – throbbed in her head. She felt foggy and far away from things.

  ‘Oi, dream boat!’ Her friends had started to tease her. ‘Blimey, Evie must be in love!’

  ‘It’s that feller from the print department,’ one of the others said. ‘He’s chatting her up every chance he gets.’

  Evie smiled mildly in the laughter that followed this. Although Alan nearly always came and had a chat in the coffee break, he had not pressed her any further into going out with him. He was sweet, the way she imagined a nice older brother might be. He treated her with shy respect and she liked him. The only trouble was, she was never properly there these days.

  Once or twice, when he had obviously already said something to her and she had not responded, Alan said, ‘Penny for them.’ And she stared at his brown sleeve, his cuff there on the table beside her cup of coffee, and tried to think what on earth it was he had just said.

  ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled, looking into his face. Often when she looked at him he was looking back with an amused expression. Today, though, he seemed concerned. ‘I’m . . . I’m not sleeping all that well at the moment. I don’t feel very with it.’

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘That’s all right. I have that trouble sometimes.’ And he started giving her advice about ways to get to sleep, from counting sheep – or cats, what about cats? he said – to a nice warm bath. As if she had not tried those things a hundred times already.

  Every day after work, she left the office, heading out into the lightening evenings and changeable spring weather, and the Bristol Road traffic. She had to concentrate hard to get across the road. She was so exhausted that she could scarcely judge how far away the cars were. Sometimes she stood dithering for some minutes and one day she found Alan beside her, taking her arm to lead her across.

  On the other side, he stopped her and looked into her eyes. She found it difficult to meet his. She felt ashamed, as if he might see the dark horror that really waited inside her instead of the blonde, pretty little thing that faced the world.

  ‘Is there something wrong?’ he asked carefully.

  Her throat tightened at his kindness, tears waiting to force into her eyes.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said, managing to look at him. ‘Ta, Alan. I am, really.’

  His face wore a slight frown. He looked full of tenderness and he was standing close to her.

  ‘You know . . .’ he began. He looked as if he wanted to put his arms around her. For a second that was all she longed for, to be held, for someone to rescue her. But no. He was good. He was lovely. And he didn’t know what she was really like. She looked down at his brown thin-laced shoes.

  Alan felt her retreating from him and released her arm. ‘You’ll be all right, then?’ he said. ‘See you tomorrow, Evie.’

  May arrived and the sun shone more warmly, but as the weeks passed, Evie was finding it increasingly difficult just to get through each day.

  Getting up in the morning was one of the hardest things. She would wake, feeling as if her whole body was weighted to the mattress. If it wasn’t for the kids – ‘Mom, come on!’ – she would not have managed it.

  Other times, at her desk in the office, she found it almost intolerable having to stay there all day. Nothing felt right, as if she could not sit content in her own skin; she wanted to crawl out of it, get away from herself and hide away, somewhere dark, safe and peaceful – away from all her struggles.

  Mom’s nasty comments and Rita and Shirley joining in was something she could not protect herself against any longer. The words slashed through her and she was bleeding inside.

  Before things grew this bad, she had gone over and over in her mind a conversation with Tracy and Andrew that she had imagined.

  What if we move away from here? Let’s just go somewhere else – start a new life.

  She could imagine Andrew’s fury. I don’t want to move. I want to stay here with Wayne, and Auntie! Andrew was attached to Rita, who spoilt him along with all her own lads.

  And Tracy’s puzzled expression floated before her. But Mom, you said when we came here we were starting a new life. Where’re we going to go?

  Where? Yes, where? She had no idea. And now she had no energy, no hope.

  One sunny afternoon, after she had picked them up from Alwold Street, they were walking back along the road towards Weoley Avenue. For once Andrew was not making a fuss and seemed glad to be outside. It was so warm that Evie had taken off her mac and slung it over her arm along with the children’s coats and a bag of their school things. The road ran alongside the cemetery and the green space beyond the railings made it a tranquil place to walk. The sound of birdsong came from the flowering trees between the gravestones.

  Tracy and Andrew skipped along in the sun, friends for the time being. Evie watched from behind in a moment of calm at the sight of their happy movements in the warm afternoon. How beautiful they were, both of them. Despite everything, they seemed to be all right.

  ‘Mom?’ Tracy ran back to her. ‘When we get home, can we play in Mrs Grant’s garden?’

  ‘Yes, I s’pect so,’ Evie said, the trace of a smile on her lips. She knew Mrs Grant liked to see the children out there, amid the apple blos
som. It was what gardens were for, she said.

  Tracy hesitated, looking up at her. Her slender body had a solidity to it and her face a gravity which made her seem older than her seven years.

  ‘Mom?’

  ‘Yes?’ Evie stopped.

  Tracy looked down. ‘I just . . . Nanna said she thought there was something wrong with you. And I . . . Only now you look all right . . .’

  Evie felt her pulse race again, her breathing compress. It was as if a hand, her mother’s fat, malignant hand, had reached out for her once more, pressing on her throat.

  ‘Oh,’ she said, trying to sound light-hearted. ‘I’m all right. Go on, let’s get home to the garden.’

  Tracy looked doubtfully at her, but ran along again to catch up with Andrew.

  As they reached the corner, where the grounds of the cemetery ended, the children stopped, as she had trained them to do, to wait for her to cross the road.

  Evie had almost caught up with them when she saw something lying in the weeds, close up to the cemetery railings. What she first saw was something watching her which jerked her attention. An eye. Her already banging pulse slammed harder. It was a doll, she saw, a greyish rag doll thing amid the grass and dandelions. Leaning down, she saw that it had straggly brown wool hair, big blue eyes inked on, a dull red dress of some sort. It was slumped, head to one side. And it was watching her.

  She knew for certain as soon as she saw it that it was there to watch her. That someone had left it there quite deliberately to spy on her – Rita and Shirley most likely. Even in her jangled state she could not imagine her mother bothering to walk all the way down here and plant this spy to report back on her movements.

  A sense of fearful, helpless rage filled her. She bent over the doll, nervous in case it leapt up at her in some horrible way, snarling up into her face.

  ‘You needn’t think you can get me,’ she hissed at it. ‘I know why you’re here and I know who sent you. You can just go away and leave me alone. All of you. I know you hate me but you shouldn’t be spying on me.’ She felt close to breaking down, sobbing and howling in the street. ‘Just leave me be! What have I ever done to you?’