The First Day of Spring

by Nancy Tucker

A baby poked out from a white blanket, screwed up and cross-looking. It was quite a disappointment. I had hoped it might be something really interesting, like a badger.

I did lots of bad things. It felt nice to be held. I liked going limp in their arms and hearing them say, ‘There. Well done for calming down. Good girl, Chrissie. Good girl.’ It was almost like I wasn’t bad at all.

I thought of the cage of high fences within which I had walked without stooping, stood without hunching, because freedom wasn’t the same as feeling free.

When bad things happened to you, people always said things like ‘Poor you’ and ‘You’re so brave’, and it was meant to make you feel better but usually it just made you feel worse, because you didn’t want to be brave and poor, you just wanted the bad thing not to be happening.

The snag of anger caught me in the soft place where my jaw met my neck. I couldn’t think how to articulate that food stopped being food when you didn’t have it, that it swelled and bloated as you shrank. It became the way you ticked off the hours, how you judged a good day from a bad one, something you stored when you had it and mourned when you didn’t.

It would have been mad to say I had killed because I was hungry, but the hunger had been a form of madness. It had driven so much of what I had done back then. Sometimes I wondered if the hunger could have stopped my brain growing the way normal brains grew, because I had never had any sustenance to make into new cells.

‘No one told me either. No one ever told me any of it. But if you want to, you figure it out. And then you figure it out a bit better the next day. And you carry on doing that for all the days. Most of the time it’s really hard and boring, but it’s not impossible. You just have to really want to do it.’

That was what happened to kids like Steven: they got frozen in a state of perfection, ever pure, ever wonderful, because they were only ever two years old. Most kids lived long enough to make mistakes and let people down and do bad things, and they weren’t perfect, they were just living. Kids like Steven didn’t get to carry on living, so they got perfection instead. It was a kind of trade.

these weren’t the grand unburdenings I had rehearsed, but surreal run-ins with people very different from the characters who lived in my head. I thought perhaps that was how it would always feel, even if I talked to them for a month, because I couldn’t be unburdened from something that was mine to carry.

When someone you knew died, you didn’t die with them. You carried on, and you went through phases and chapters so different they felt like whole different lives, but in all of those lives the dead person was still dead. Dead whether you were sad or happy, dead whether you thought about them or didn’t, dead whether you missed them or not.