42
Saturday, 2 July 1966
‘This will be nice and tidy when we finish, Daddy,’ piped Mary. She was helping pack up Michael’s room because her mum would not come in there. Her daddy was using two gigantic boxes. If Michael was there and she was not grown up, they would have hidden inside them. Instead she was doing as she was told and filling them with Michael’s comics and cars, his toys and his Andy Pandy books.
Mary had expected to enjoy the task. Michael would be cross she was touching his things and even crosser that they would be given away. But being dead he couldn’t spoil it and stop her. She kept forgetting all the things that being dead meant. Some of them were not fun. She did like helping her dad. She would do anything for him, and was waiting for the moment to say so.
She heaved Michael’s shoebox of lead soldiers out of his toy cupboard. A headless sentry fell on to the floor. ‘He was broken already,’ she said quickly. ‘Where shall I put it for mending?’
‘In the box, no need to mend it.’
Michael’s marbles filled an enormous glass sweet jar to the brim. Mary grasped the jar and lifting it, staggered to the boxes. The jar slid from her grasp and crashed to the floor. The afternoon they had moved in she had dropped a box and broken china and glass.
The jar landed on Michael’s sheepskin rug and did not break. The lid burst off, scattering marbles among the tufty wool. Her dad had gone. Mary tiptoed to the window. Grass grew around the legs of Michael’s swing. She stepped on a marble and, stooping, picked it up. It did not have the pattern of the others – single twisting leaves of blue, white, red or yellow. This one had fiery orange snakes coiling around each other. It was Michael’s champion marble. She had confiscated it from him. He must have stolen it back from her. She heard voices and ran to her place on the landing.
‘Jean, we have to get it done. The room’s a mausoleum.’
‘You never wanted her.’
‘Don’t go over this again.’
‘You blame me.’
‘That woman said it, the one you allowed in and blabbed away to. Children need mothers, especially boys.’
‘Blame me, go on.’
‘You’re not to blame.’
Mary stumbled up the stairs and into her room. She barricaded the door with a chair and like a snake slithered under the bed and found her duffel bag.
She laid the Angel’s hands on the bedspread, palms uppermost, the ends of the wrists white and sharp. She touched the left one.
That’s my blood.
She dropped Michael’s champion marble into the hand; it made a chinking sound. She tried to close the cold fingers around it, but they were too stiff. ‘You won it, it’s yours.’ She spoke into the room.
The bedroom door slammed into the chair but didn’t open.
‘Open up, girl. What are you playing at?’ her dad shouted. ‘What’s that mess in Michael’s room?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stuffed the hands into the bag and kicked it under the bed. She moved the chair. The door flew wide. Her dad was on the landing.
‘Did you do this?’
Mary looked into Michael’s room. Marbles were strewn like petals all over the rug. ‘No.’ She was firm. ‘Maybe the jar fell.’
‘Nobody likes a liar.’ His eyes were like marbles. ‘Clear it up.’
Mary scooped up the marbles and dropped them into the jar. Since Michael was dead, nothing belonged to him. Nobody had said so.
That night Mary sat up in bed. The woman was in her lighthouse. Mary imagined she was painting the Angel.
She shut her eyes, put her hands together in prayer and in a lullaby voice like her mum, sang herself to sleep.
‘Mary had a little lamb,
Little lamb, little lamb…’