A few months passed, and the results of freedom were visible. Mother kept her at home again. For decades she had sat imprisoned in the house; now she sat in the house behind the bulk of her pregnant belly. How did you get in that condition? her friend Sholto had once asked her. She had thought back, leaning on the hospital fence, looking over it into the world. I gave them the slip, she said. Mother took me to the door, down the path I went, round the corner, where I saw the dog lying on the path, the fox-terrier dog that lay there every Thursday afternoon; and I gave it a kick. I walked on, and I stood, and when I saw that little bus coming, I just turned myself round and went the other way.
I gave them the slip, she said. I went for a go in the park, looking in the litter bins, going in the summer house, getting on those swings. I should have been at my class doing basket weaving and community singing but I went for this go in the park instead. And your beau, Sholto asked; he had a little fiddle? He was a professional man, Muriel said; he had a lovely tweed coat, and some credit cards.
So it came about, she said sonorously to Sholto.
Sholto could keep a secret. He rolled her a cigarette, she smoked it leaning on the fence, and then they went in for their dinner. They had just got the cafeteria system. They took a tray and stood in a line and got brown baked beans and white fish pie. A few people arranged it into patterns, but Muriel had no heart for it. Talking about the past upset her: the cold and discomfort, Mother’s bullying, the lack of proper food, the musty unlit rooms inside the house, and the screen of dark trees outside. Buckingham Avenue was so silent you could hear the dust move, and Mother’s dying thoughts rustle through her skull; Christmas 1974, mice in the kitchen cupboards, two seasonal envelopes coming through the door. Miss Florence Sidney, their neighbour, came with a plate full of warm mince pies. Muriel was shut up; their fragrance, wafting up the staircase, made her jaws ache. Mother put Miss Sidney in her place. She forced raw whisky on her, bawled out “Merry Christmas,” and booted her out in short order. One of Miss Sidney’s pies leaped from the plate as she scurried down the hall, and smashed and opened itself on the dusty parquet floor. Muriel came down; she put her finger into its steaming golden insides and tasted it. Evelyn shooed her off, pushed her into the back room. She told her to let it lie. Next day it was gone.
Mother had knocked over the paraffin heater. She had groaned in the wet weather when her knees and hips gave her pain. She had taken away Muriel’s cards from the Welfare and burned them, and forbidden her to play in the garden for fear that the neighbours might see her and report on her state. Mother was afraid of the neighbours. She was afraid of ghosts, of changelings. She complained that as she walked down the hallway little claws pulled at her skirt, little devil’s crabs with no bodies, sliding noiselessly away from under her feet.
At one time, her trade had been giving seances for the neighbours. Mrs. Sidney, the pie-maker’s mother, had called in to speak to her late husband, and had got scared so badly at Mother’s proficiency that she had turned funny, and shortly afterwards had been sent away. People had come from the other side of town; once a woman had come all the way from Crewe, bringing a parcel of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof to sustain her during her trip on the train. Afternoons, Mother had spent in the front parlour; groaning, sweating, making the bleak monosyllabic conversations that the dead enjoy. Evening, money in her purse; she would snigger, and go and put the kettle on. One day, as she headed for the kitchen, a black wall of panic rose up in front of her and blocked her path. Muriel, lurking at the foot of the stairs, watched Mother’s throat gaping for air, watched her raise a fist and first hammer, then claw at the wall; saw her lift her feet and tussle in the thick air, treading and weaving inside her big woollen cardigan like a dancing bear.
The episode passed. I had a black-out, Mother said. It’s my age.
After that Mother had regretted her seances. The house was full of what she had conjured up; a three-bed two-reception property on a large corner plot, all jostled and crammed with the teeth-baring dead, stranded souls whistling in the cavity walls, half-animated corpses under the flagstones outside. One bedroom, which they called the spare room, had its special tenants. Without eyes and ears, they made themselves known by shuffling; by the soft sucking of their breath, in and out; but they had no lungs. They were malign intentions, Mother said, waiting to be joined to bodies; they were the notions of the dead, expecting flesh.
Mother was now seventy years old; tired, done for, blue stains under her eyes. She’d tried to make a living and now she was to be penalised. No one can help you, she said. No one ever will. They were on their own. They never went out, because they were afraid of what might happen in the house while they were away.
Muriel could see herself as she was then; her pudding face above her smock. Days went by when they never spoke.
She felt a movement inside her, very strange. Mother said, you’re occupied. It would be another mute, an ugly, a ne’er-do-well. She felt it ready to burst out, and that she would die. She knew about death very well, believing that her little thoughts would empty out of her head, and roll round and round in the spare room, picking up the dust from the floor.
Mother got books from the public library, first aid. When the baby started to be born she got out her reading glasses. She fumbled around in the bedroom, cursing. She went round the house with a torch, shining into all the dark corners. Muriel had a pain, a private pain, and she felt that something was going to come of it.
Next day Mother was tired. She made no secret of it; she had entertained hopes that a better sort of infant would be forthcoming. It was an evil-smelling scrap, greedy, drinking up everything that it was offered; it gave evidence of an intemperate nature, of an agitating character. It had a strange face, unlike theirs. It cried incessantly, like an animal shut up in a shed. I’m afraid it’s worse than I thought, Mother said.
On the third day she broke it to her: it’s not human. It’s a changeling, Muriel; you’ve been duped.
But Mother was never at a loss. She had a theory, and her theory was this: you take a firm line, stand no nonsense, and arrange to get a human child back. How?
You find some water, a river; but there was no river, not without taking the bus. Luckily there was the canal, and the canal would do. Float off the wastrel, the substitute; wait a bit, and the chances are you’ll get another in return. It’s the recommended method.
Hearing this theory, Muriel had laughed. The Welfare never told me that, she said, and you get to know things from the Welfare. Such as? Mother demanded. Such as supplementary benefit, rebate on your rent. Mother gave her a slap. It was tried and tested, she said. Desperate diseases require desperate remedies, is that a proverb with which you are unfamiliar? Muriel saw by the quivering of her mother’s face that she was at the end of her tether. She was afraid of the changeling and would not have it in the house. I could telephone the authorities, she said, and have you both locked up.
Of course Mother knew more than she did; she had years of experience, with the living and the dead. “All right,” Muriel said. She was persuaded.
And so the day came to try the substitution. It was a raw winter’s day, with a smell of earth and water. They walked over the fields to the canal bank, meeting no one. They set the box carefully on the surface of the water, the cardboard box with the baby inside. “Sink or swim,” Mother said. The baby had not made a sound; it had given up crying by then, and they had put a blanket over its face and folded over the flaps of the box. It was not cruelty,
