school photos 34

Little Ally’s head felt fuzzy in the morning. A musty old-wallpaper smell helped her eyes flicker open. Daddy struggled to sit up in bed, her nose squished up against his bare back. He broke away from her with a cough, and pushed away from the equalising slope of the mattress and sat like a chair, feet on the linoleum, at the edge of the bed. He sensed her looking at him. In the gloom of the room, he turned to peer at her, the hedge of his eyebrows lifting and he reached across to pat her curling legs through the blankets. His knees cracked as the leaned across the bed, kissed the side of her hair and whispered. ‘You’ll be all right now beauty.’

            She giggled, because Black Beauty was a horse on telly, and she wasn’t a horse, but Daddy could sometimes be funny. Mum had an arm roped round her waist, pulling her body tight into the pillows of her breasts, to keep her safe. The familiar cloud of fading talc and cigarette smoke enveloped her. She sleepily turned towards Mummy for warmth and a cuddle. But she moved away a tad, then another. Ally’s arm slackened and a gap appeared between them, her arm and fingers curling like seaweed fronds round the space were Mum had been.

            ‘I’ll need to get up too darling,’ but Mummy’s voice sounded cold.

Ally couldn’t quite work out, what she’d done wrong, before her eyelids weighted with an infant’s need, found the answer in sleep.

Getting up for school in the cold wasn’t much easier. Our Jo sloped out of the kitchen balancing a level soup-plate stacked with a cereal mound of Cornflakes. With great daring taking her squinty eyes from the rim, so that the milk   began to slop, tilt and almost spill, she patted Little Ally on the top of the head like a spaniel and stole the best seat in the living room by the one-bar fire.

‘Mum. Mum. I wanted that seat.’ Ally’s bottom lip sulking, eyes on the edge of tears, one hand clasping her chewed teddy-bear, she stamped her feet, but Mum didn’t come rushing to comfort or tell her, or both of them off.

Ally stumbled into the kitchen with her grievance up for renewal, the teddy-bear’s head and body dragged from shiny carpet to linoleum. Bleary-eyed and a cloud of cigarette smoke were yoked together as Mum stood tight in the corner, her back against the smaller of the two kitchen sinks.

‘Mum. Mum,’ said Ally again but was stopped short. Mum’s feet clattered across the kitchen. Crouching down on her knees, hand resting on the back of Ally’s head, she jerked her daughter’s body in close, the girl’s mouth pressed against her mum’s shoulder and the sound of her mum’s sniffing holding back a flush of tears.

When she did eventually speak it was with a whispery sigh. ‘Is Lily with you today?’

Ally had to wiggle her head out from underneath her Mum’s oxter to look about before replying. ‘No Mum.’

Mum lifted and carried her, plonking her bum down on the miscoloured wooden seat at the kitchen table, hidden behind the living- room door. Her spoon and Cornflakes bowl were already set out for breakfast, slightly elevated, a bit too high for Ally’s liking, but she picked up the spoon. Straightening up the crook of her back Mum’s head rolled to one side, heavy with sighs. ‘Well, you tell Lily from me.’ Mum sniffed a few times and took a deep breath. ‘You tell Lily from me, never, never, never to come back her again and bother us.’ She leaned her head down, her face an angry knot Ally couldn’t unravel. ‘You got that?’

Ally’s fingers loosed and her teddy-bear slipped and fell to the floor. Tears rolled down her cheeks. ‘Yes Mum.’ She dipped her spoon in the plate, but there was no space in her belly for Cornflakes, her mouth tightened into a question, but she didn’t know what it was. The spoon clattered onto the table into a stodgy silence that the whine of the radio, balanced on the window ledge, blaring out summer hits could not fill.

‘Bye.’ Our Jo peered cock-eyed into the kitchen before leaving for high school. The front door banging shut behind her.

Mum resumed her sentry position with her back to the sink. Between cigarettes, chain-smoked, one lit from the other, she put the kettle on the ring and boiled the water twice for tea that remained undrank and swilled down the big sink. ‘You finished?’ she asked, watching  Little Ally playing with spooning milk and dropping bombs of it back into the bowl, but her voice was icy and her look inky. ‘Remember. You hear me. You see that Lily you tell her from me.’

Ally’s head fell into her chest, her eyes had grown as big at tea-plates with tears and she dared not look up. ‘Yes Mum,’ she lisped, lips barely moving, a choking loneliness in her throat.  She was scared to move from the chair, scared to breathe. Out of the corner of her eye she watched Mum leaving the kitchen and dart into the living room.   Her legs were pressed tight together, knees knocking, but her bladder was tighter than both of them, a trickle,  a flood of pee pooled where she sat, soaking through the nylon fabric of her nightie and dripping onto the linoleum.  She shook her head from side to side and cried. When she looked up Mum was bent down over her, studying her, with her arms by her side. ‘It wasn’t me Mum. It was Lily that did it,’ sobbed Ally.

Mum’s hand shot out and handcuffed her wrist, jerking her forward off the chair and standing bare-toed in a puddle of pish. Her other hand gripping the lower jaw and around the mouth,  jerking her face from side to side, her eyes a frown as she peered deep deep into the light of  her daughter’s eyes. Her grip loosed, allowing Ally to squeal,‘I’m sorry Mum. I won’t do it again. I promise, I promise to be good.’

‘You won’t get her without a fight.’ Mum dragged her by the wrist, marched through the living room and into the hall. Ally unable to keep up slipped, her body playing tumbling her wilkies, but her mum swung her in a lazy curve and kept walking and dragging her towards the front door.  

‘I’m sorry Mum. I’m sorry.’ Ally’s pleading voice was a mixing bowl of hair and snot. She slumped at Mum’s feet at the alcove beside the front door.  

Mum reached up to a boxed-in- pipe shelf that ended in a ledge and brought down a medicine bottle filled with a clear liquid. Unscrewing the lid she sloshed holy water over her daughter’s head, making the sing of the cross, whilst in a tearful voice reciting The Lord’s Prayer again and again.