The First Day of Spring

other people barely noticed we were there. Church was the only time Mam was really happy—when she was singing “Lord of the Dance” and “Morning Has Broken” and “Bread of Heaven” with her eyes closed and her face tilted toward the sky. Her singing didn’t fit with the rest of her. It was high and pretty. I quite liked church, because sometimes I could steal some coins off the collection plates at the back, and I liked the vicar touching my head when I went to the front to get blessed. When we got back to the house Mam usually slithered into a lump on the doormat. I tried to make her come into the lounge but she wouldn’t move, and she was too heavy to lift. In the end I usually lay down beside her in the hallway, took a piece of her hair in my fingers and ran it around my mouth. It felt like a feather. I didn’t know why she got so sad after church, but I thought it was probably because she knew she wasn’t going to get to sing any more hymns for a whole week.

The only person who still didn’t come out to play was Susan. She didn’t even come to school. I only saw her in the evenings, when she stood at her bedroom window with her hands pressed against the glass. I never knew if she saw me. When she hadn’t been at school for two whole weeks I went up to one of the Class Six girls at playtime and asked where she was.

“Susan?” she said. “You mean the one with the dead brother?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Don’t know,” she said. “At home, probably.” Then she ran off, because Class Six girls weren’t meant to talk to Class Four girls. I turned it over in my head—“Susan, the one with the dead brother.” Before it had always been “Susan, the one with the long hair.”

Betty wasn’t at school either, but she had mumps, not a dead brother. Miss White said we had to tell her straightaway if we thought we might have mumps too. I told her every day, lots of times, but she just said, “Stop being silly and get on with your worksheet, Chrissie.” At afternoon play I snuck back into the classroom and broke all the coloring pencils in the coloring pencil tray. Snap-snap-snap-snap. I-hate-Miss-White.

On Tuesday I went bottle collecting with Linda after school. Lots of people threw their glass bottles in the bin like they weren’t worth anything, but we fished them out and swapped them for sweets. Sometimes the bottles had dark drops of Coca-Cola at the bottom, and I shook them onto my tongue. Linda said that was gross. The bad Coca-Cola drops were gross, tasted rotten, but the good ones were like sugar syrup. It was worth the risk. On Monday we took Linda’s cousins with us, but they didn’t really help with the bottle collecting. They were just silly little boys. It wasn’t a good bottle day, because the bins had just been emptied and no one had had time to drink any Coca-Cola. I always asked Miss White if I could have the crates of empty milk bottles from school but she always said no, which was typical Miss White. If I’d had the milk bottles I would probably have been a millionaire by the time I was nine. I found two cream soda bottles in the gutter but one of them was smashed in half. I took it anyway. Linda just found one and the boys just made fire engine noises.

“This is rubbish,” said Linda as we walked to the shop. “We never get this little of bottles.”

“Well it’s not my fault,” I said.

“Whose fault is it?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Probably Prime Minister’s.”

“Why’s it his fault?” she asked.

“Linda,” I said. “Everything is his fault.” Sometimes it was tiring having a best friend who was thick.

When we got to the shop Mrs. Bunty said she would only give us a quarter pound of sweets, which wasn’t nearly as much as we deserved, but that was typical Mrs. Bunty. She was mean, mean, mean. Whenever she weighed out sweets she dropped them into the silver bowl of the scales one by one, until the needle was just brushing the right number, then screwed the lid of the jar on tight. When Mrs. Bunty’s bad knee was too bad, Mrs. Harold worked in the shop, and you could tell she wasn’t mean because she poured the sweets into the scales until the needle was way over the right number, and then she said, “Ah well, a few extra sweeties can’t hurt a kiddie.” Mrs. Bunty never did that. Mean, mean, mean, mean.

Me and Linda couldn’t agree on what sweets we wanted for a long time. In the end we got licorice allsorts because that was what I wanted and I was the one who had found two bottles (including the smashed one, even though Mrs. Bunty wouldn’t take it). Also we basically always did what I wanted in the end. Mrs. Bunty weighed them out and poured them into a white paper bag.

“That’s barely any,” I said. She twisted the bag shut at the top.

“You can be grateful or you can go without, Chrissie Banks,” she said. “Honestly. You kids don’t know you’re born, do you? Things weren’t always easy like this, you know. Not when I was a kid. There was a war on.”

“Ugh,” I said. “Why does no one ever talk about anything except the stupid old war?”

We went to the playground after the shop. Me and Linda sat on the roundabout and the boys ran around. Every few minutes they came to me with their hands held out for sweets and I bit one in half and split it between them. They were only little, so they only needed a little bit of sweet.

I was lying on my back when Linda whispered, “Look,” and hit me on the arm.