In the hallway I had to watch my feet so I didn’t tread on any of the things spilling out of the boxes. One was stuffed with flower-patterned plates, another with cloth napkins and tea towels, but all the rest were full of kid things. Hardcover picture books without chewed corners or missing pages. A doctor’s set in a square red case, the same as Donna’s but newer, shinier, and without the broken clasp. The puffy pink baby doll was in a box with a baby-doll pram and a baby-doll crib and a baby-doll high chair. I leaned forward to see better, and the beautiful woman laughed and put her hand on my shoulder.
“Mad really, aren’t we? All these toys for one little girl. I’m sure we spoil her. But I expect your mammy’s the same with you.” She crossed to open the door at the side of the hallway, so she didn’t see me shake my head. She didn’t see me reach up to stroke the patch of warm left on my shoulder where she had touched. She picked up the box of baby-doll things and walked into a room I knew would be the lounge, because all the houses on the street had the same rooms in the same places.
“Sweetheart!” she said. “A special surprise for you! Look—a girl’s come to see you! A big girl who lives down the street!”
A big girl. A too-big girl. A girl too big to love.
She beckoned and I picked my way through the boxes to the door. The lounge was bare, but there was a new-looking couch against one wall and a telly on a telly table against the other. The little girl was sitting in the middle of a round white rug on the floor. She had tiger-colored hair. She was Ruthie.
The beautiful woman knelt down and beckoned me to come closer. I felt like I was being beckoned toward an expensive puppy, and I wanted to tell her I didn’t need to be beckoned, because I knew Ruthie already. I knew all about Ruthie and her hundreds of toys and her mammy who dressed her like a doll and bought her everything she wanted. I just hadn’t known that that mammy was the beautiful woman who should have been my mammy.
“How old is she?” I asked.
“You’re three, aren’t you, angel?” said the beautiful woman, leaning over to cup Ruthie’s cheek. Her hair had been gathered into bunches either side of her head and tied with ribbons the same pink as her dress. She looked the same as she had when I had seen her in the playground with Donna: neat and smooth as the dolls Linda’s mammy kept in cabinets in their lounge. Ruthie looked like she was made of china, and the beautiful woman touched her the same way Linda’s mammy touched her dolls, slowly, with her fingers, not her hands. I wanted to ask the beautiful woman whether she had chosen Ruthie and not me because Ruthie was pretty and I was ugly, or whether it was because she was three and I was eight, and at what point between three and eight a kid got too old to love.
Ruthie ignored all the cupping and cuddling. She didn’t tell the beautiful woman she had met me before, or that I had slapped her arm and pulled her off the roundabout. She didn’t seem very interested in me at all, only in the metal xylophone she was bashing.
“Clever girl, Ruthie!” said the beautiful woman. “You’re showing Chrissie how well you can play your xylophone, aren’t you?” Ruthie scowled and did some more bashing. I thought if that was playing the xylophone well, I really didn’t want to hear someone play the xylophone badly. It sounded like tin cans being thrown in a dustbin. I knew I was meant to be watching Ruthie, but I watched the beautiful woman watching Ruthie instead. She was drinking her in, letting her flood into her bones, as if Ruthie was a peppermint humbug turned over on her tongue or a can of cream soda made salty by sweaty lips.
“Well, who’d like a slice of cake?” the beautiful woman asked. She rubbed her hands together, and they didn’t make the scritch-scratch noise mam’s hands made when they rubbed. The skin was soft and the sound was smooth. I nodded that I did want some cake, and Ruthie nodded too, but as the beautiful woman turned to go to the kitchen Ruthie screamed, “Mammy, I only want choccy cake, not yucky raisin cake.”
The beautiful woman laughed her tinkle-bell laugh. “Honestly, Chrissie. I spend a whole afternoon making a lovely fruitcake and as I’m taking it out of the oven Ruthie tells me she doesn’t like raisins! But luckily the nice lady in the corner shop found us a choccy cake, didn’t she, Ruthie?”
“Was it Mrs. Bunty?” I asked.
“The lady in the corner shop?” said the beautiful woman. “I don’t know. Why?”
“Just that if it was Mrs. Bunty, she’s not nice,” I said. “She’s actually really horrid and mean.”
“Really?” said the beautiful woman. “Well, this lady certainly seemed very nice. She loved you, didn’t she, Ruthie?”
Ruthie nodded, and it was like she was saying, “The thing is, I’m little and pretty and my clothes match, and that means everyone likes me, even mean old women who don’t normally like anyone except God.”
“Which would you like, pet?” the beautiful woman asked me. “Fruit or chocolate?”
“Both,” I said. And then, when I remembered, “Please.”
She laughed again. “Now there’s a girl who knows what’s what, eh? Of course you can have both.”
When she went to get the cake Ruthie took the baby doll out of the box and laid a blanket over it.
“Baby’s going to sleep now,” she screamed, not particularly
