RIVERHEAD BOOKS
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Copyright © 2021 by Nancy Tucker
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Tucker, Nancy, 1993– author.
Title: The first day of spring / Nancy Tucker.
Description: New York: Riverhead Books, 2021.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020036859 (print) | LCCN 2020036860 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593191569 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593191583 (ebook)
Subjects: GSAFD: Suspense fiction. | LCGFT: Psychological fiction.
Classification: LCC PR6120.U256 F57 2021 (print) | LCC PR6120.U256 (ebook) | DDC 823/.92—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036859
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020036860
International edition ISBN: 9780593419083
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Grace Han
pid_prh_5.6.1_c0_r0
For my mum
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Chrissie
Julia
Molly
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Chrissie
I killed a little boy today. Held my hands around his throat, felt his blood pump hard against my thumbs. He wriggled and kicked and one of his knees caught me in the belly, a sharp lasso of pain. I roared. I squeezed. Sweat made it slippy between our skins but I didn’t let go, pressed and pressed until my nails were white. It was easier than I thought it would be. Didn’t take long for him to stop kicking. When his face was the color of milk jelly I sat back on my heels and shook my hands. They had seized up. I put them on my own neck, above the place where the twin doorknob bones stuck out. Blood pumped hard against my thumbs. I am here, I am here, I am here.
I went to knock for Linda afterward, because it was hours before tea. We walked to the top of the hill and turned ourselves upside down against the handstand wall, gritting our palms with smoke ends and sparkles of glass. Our dresses fell over our faces. The wind blew cool on our legs. A woman ran past us, Donna’s mammy, ran past with her fat breasts bumping up and down. Linda pushed herself off the wall to stand beside me, and we watched Donna’s mammy run down the street together. She was making noises that sounded like cat howls. They ripped up the quiet of the afternoon.
“What’s she crying for?” asked Linda.
“Don’t know,” I said. I knew.
Donna’s mammy disappeared round the corner at the end of the street and we heard faraway gasps. When she came back there was a lump of mammies around her, all of them hurrying, brown shoes slapping the road in a thrum-thrum-thrum beat. Michael was with them but he couldn’t keep up. By the time they passed us he was hanging a long way behind, panting in a crackling shudder, and his mammy tugged his hand and he fell. We saw the raspberry-ripple splash of blood, heard the yowl slice through the air. His mammy hauled him up and clamped him on her hip. She kept on running, running, running.
When the mammies were just past us, so we were looking at a herd of cardigan backs and wide, jiggling bottoms, I pulled Linda’s arm and we followed. At the end of the road we saw Richard coming out of the shop with a toffee chew in one hand and Paula in the other. He saw us running with the mammies and he followed. Paula didn’t like Richard pulling her, started grizzling, so Linda picked her up and clutched her round the middle. Her legs were striped where her fat folded in on itself. They hung out of a swollen nappy that dropped lower and lower with every step.
We heard the crowd before we saw it: a rumbling blanket of sighs and swears, wrinkled by women crying. Girls crying. Babies crying. Round the corner and there it was, a cloud of people standing around the blue house. Linda wasn’t next to me anymore because Paula’s nappy had fallen off at the end of Copley Street and she had stopped to try to put it back on her. I didn’t wait. I ran forward, away from the lump of twittering mammies, into the cloud. When I got to the middle I had to squat down small and wind between the hot bodies, and when there were no more bodies to wind through I saw it. The great big man standing in the doorway, the little dead boy in his arms.
A noise came from the back of the crowd and I looked on the ground for a fox, because it was the noise a fox makes when a thorn gets stuck in its paw, the noise of something’s insides coming out through its mouth. Then the cloud was breaking, disintegrating, people falling into one another. I got pushed over, and I watched through legs as Steven’s mammy went to the man at the door. Her insides were coming out of her mouth in a howl. She took Steven from him and the howl turned to words: “My boy, my boy, my boy.” Then she sat down on the ground, not caring that her skirt was around her middle and everyone could see her underpants. Steven was clutched against her, and I thought how it was a good job he was dead already, because if he hadn’t already been dead he would have got suffocated by her rolls of breast and belly. I couldn’t see
