Everyone told us not to go down by the Thames. Manus said the scaly fish wrapped round the lamp posts would come alive if the water splashed them, they were dredged up from the bottom, that’s why they were black. They had open eyes and fleshy mouths that dripped and glistened in the rain. It made them look like they came from the river. I knew the water was dirty, that you couldn’t swim, you’d get pulled under.
‘Don’t go to the river.’
‘All right, Mum.’
The way down was dank and slippery, and I was always down there where it opened on to a bend in the river. The water came in and out, and slopped with the tide on to the steps, or dropped below a shoulder of mud and shingle. There were old wooden posts sticking out the mud. It smelt old going down, which was one reason for going, it was where you grew up. Everyone said don’t go, but the river pulled you. You just found yourself there, where no one ever looked for you.
At low tide there was a rope slung under the bridge. You could go on the knotted tyre if you felt you could hold on. I didn’t like the green slime on the bricked foreshore, or the slow swing out over the river. I wasn’t going to risk going near the current you felt would drag you under as soon as you touched it. But some did – the brave ones, or the ones you knew something was wrong by the strangled laugh that hung there under the arch as they swung back.
They said there were rats that wee’d on the shingle and gave you diseases, that you could get sucked in the mud, or cut by bits of glass and broken pottery that washed up, that there were ghosts that clung to the steps and no one would hear you if you got into trouble. No one ever said you could watch drowned animals float past, or stone bits of driftwood that turned into table legs.
We were in morning assembly when Thaddeus’s mum came in with the headmaster. She was shaking, the way light does on water, going to and fro unsteadily. He told us she was going to talk to us about not playing down by the river – we all turned to look at her – that Thaddeus had drowned and ... I didn’t hear any more because of the surge of sadness and shock that came out of us. We were all sat there cross-legged on the floor, we knew that river and knew what it meant – I felt the rush of it in my ears and held out against breathing, but we all gulped for air.
I knew Thaddeus hadn’t come home. The police had been round, but that was because he was always in trouble and going off. He was in my class and always getting told off for mucking about and not listening. But he was all right, he had a mop of hair like mine, bushy and reddish, that all got tangled, and made the girls like him because he pulled faces and made them laugh. We got on because we looked like brothers and we knew we weren’t. He had lots of brothers and sisters at home and was always following his mum around, but because he was small he couldn’t always get to her so he’d wander off with a set look in his face like he was going to find her somewhere else.
I watched his mum as she leaned on the headmaster’s arm to speak and nothing came out. She stood there shaking, in floods of tears, coughing and trying to breathe, but no words coming, just the struggle for air going on in front of us. The headmaster slumped in his grey suit and hurried her out of assembly into the corridor. The doors banged shut and we heard a wailing sound as she was being led away that felt like someone being dragged where they didn’t want to go, where there was nothing to hold on to. No one said anything, the teachers moved us quickly back to our classrooms, with the sound of people’s legs moving and the squeal of the chair legs as they sat down.
The next day she was at the school gate. It wasn’t a change, she always brought her children to school and talked to the other mums. It was where she used to tell them she could do childminding. She was always nice to us and chatty, pushing a baby in a pram. I never knew exactly who was hers and who wasn’t because she had lots of children with different dads and they didn’t all look the same. I knew Thaddeus, and he looked like his sister Sandra, but then her house was full of children she was looking after, and you didn’t know who she was just minding. At school she had her hair scraped up in a bun and didn’t smoke, but when she was home she kept looking for a space to put a fag in her mouth and have a smoke so she could get a break. She looked at me once, watching her, and said, ‘You’ve to steal a life sometimes.’
She was there under the black iron gate of the entrance, pushing a pram backwards and forwards with a baby in who was looking up at people with its toe in its mouth. Her face was crumpled and she had lipstick on which made her look even more pale and washed out. The other mums didn’t want to push past her, so they drew their prams up and pulled their toddlers in close.
‘I’ve got too many children to look after,’ she said.
A big crowd was gathering and keeping quiet, and no one was going in. After a while, some of the mums went up and spoke to her, and nodded, and came away. She pulled her pram back and they all started going past into school with the baby looking up at them.
I hung back, and slipped in on the other side of a pram with my head down.
She was on her own after that. People stopped sending their children to be with her after school, and her clothes were dirty and her face started to look craggy and thin.
‘She’s drinking,’ my mum said. ‘And who’d want to risk it after what happened to ... you know.’
She came round one evening and asked to borrow some money to tide her over. My dad came straight down to the door and gave it to her.
‘I’ve got no one helping me,’ she said.
After she’d gone, my mum was crying. ‘It’s more than money she’s looking for,’ she said.
My dad shrugged, ‘Life’s let her down.’
Her house was a few doors down on the same side as us, she lived in the rooms on the ground floor. She’d looked after us sometimes – usually just me and Busola who got on with Sandra.
‘Your mum works hard for you,’ she said when I kicked her front door wanting to go out. ‘You have to wait until she gets back.’
I don’t know what happened, usually we played out in the backyard with the others and got on with it, but I was bored and upset and I wanted to go and run outside. Busola joined in and there was a fight with the two of us screaming and shouting that she couldn’t keep us locked up. She had a front door that closed on the top latch and we couldn’t reach it, so we started kicking and thumping against the door. Someone upstairs shouted about the noise so she came out into the hall and tried to talk to us.
‘Where you going? Your mum’s not back from work yet.’
She tried to move us away from the door but we didn’t care, we ganged up on her. Busola scratched her and I kicked out with my feet as we struggled to get past. It felt wrong to be doing it but we were screaming and something came out of us that we couldn’t stop. She was keeping us prisoner and she shouldn’t. We were supposed to be free and our brothers were out. She was a witch and we’d tell our mum. I spat at her. She stopped, swore at me, and walked off saying, ‘Break your fists on the door for all I care.’
We stood there breathing in the hall as the people on the stairs went back up, and Sandra and Thaddeus who were looking at us from the back door with the other children turned away to the backyard where their mum could watch them playing from the kitchen window.
I looked at Busola, and got down to let her climb on my back to open the latch. It clicked, we got out and Busola slammed the door shut behind us.
‘She’s a witch! And she’s got too many children!’ Busola said, but then she looked at me like it was my fault we’d run away in the first place.
‘What we gonna say?’ I said, because I wasn’t sure any more. It didn’t feel right to be out, there was no reason for it, or the reason just drained away. There was no one playing out on the street to tell it to, everyone had gone in. So we wandered around getting our breath back to normal until we came to the river.
A tug boat was making waves along the wall of the embankment. We leaned over to see the splashes reaching up. They were a long way down, but you could feel the thud as they lifted. The lights were on along the river and the water was dark and glittering across to the other side.
‘Shall we go back?’ I said.
Busola shook her head, she was looking out over the water as though I wasn’t there. I got off the wall because it felt too close to the lamp posts and the monster fish even though they weren’t moving.
We didn’t look at each other, then she said, ‘Let’s go and find Mum.’
We knew she worked in the laundry which did the sheets for the hospital, and that we could find it by the brick chimney with the steam coming out the same colour as the sky. It looked like a cloud factory but we knew it was a laundry for getting blood out the sheets and stitches, and it felt a long way off because we hadn’t tried to cross over those roads from the river on our own before. The traffic was busy with all the headlights on. It was because of that we held hands.
Our mum came out to the big doors in the yard. Her arms were red, and she was flushed and sweating as she took a wet bit of hair off her forehead and wiped her hands on a cloth.
‘What’s happened?’ she said.
We said we’d come for her to take us back home over the busy roads. That we’d had to fight to get out and Thaddeus’s mum was too busy to look after us.
She went back in to get her coat and we set off with us holding on to her arms as she buttoned up. We told her we’d run away because there were too many children and it was too rough. That what Thaddeus’s mum gave us to eat was mouldy bread and margarine. She’d made us share a big can of baked beans with one spoon to go round everyone, and one of the children had spat on it to stop us having ours. She’d grabbed us with her bony fingers to stop us getting out the door. We didn’t want to go back, her house was dirty and they had nits –
‘Stop it!’ she said, and shook us off. We’d gone too far. We walked the rest of the way home in silence.
‘Wait now till your father gets home.’
There was a knock on the door. It was Thaddeus’s mum, with Thaddeus and Sandra there. She stood at the door and told my mum what happened, that she’d sent her two out to look for us but they’d come back because we’d gone. And then she apologised to us.
‘I’m sorry it hasn’t worked out. I didn’t know what I could do.’
Sandra was pulling on her mum’s coat to make her come away and Thaddeus kept looking off down the street. Their mum was worried because she was biting her nails, some of her teeth were missing and her fingers were shaking.
My mum said she’d got a shock when she saw us, but now she understood and it wasn’t anything to worry about, we were safe.
She told my mum she’d had to wait until the other children had gone before she could put on her coat and come out, and she’d left some of her own alone so she’d have to get back. She asked Busola and me not to be upset with her.
My mum told us to say sorry. Busola nodded and said, ‘See ya tomorrow.’ to Sandra who nodded back. I couldn’t look at Thaddeus because he wouldn’t look at me. I couldn’t look at his mum because I was ashamed, so I just looked down and mumbled, ‘Sorry.’
‘No, you’re not.’
I looked up, Thaddeus was looking at me. His face was blank – it was pale and red at the same time – his eyes were dark and glossy, almost crying.
‘Come on, Mum,’ he said, and pulled her away by the hand. He loved his mum and I’d got her in trouble. It was my fault she had to stand at the door and say sorry. It was all bottled up and something broke in his voice. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said.
‘My children are waiting for me,’ his mum said, and they went.
My dad heard us out. My mum said we’d told her a pack of lies. Busola blamed me and I blamed her. He asked if Thaddeus’s mum had looked after us properly, or if anyone had hurt us. I said yes and Busola said no, and we both hung our heads.
He made us stoop down, balancing on one finger and one leg until the snot came down and we fell over, so we could change legs and he wouldn’t notice. When both our legs were dead and the tears were burning our eyes because our heads were upside down, he told us off for trying to balance on more than one finger and waved the wooden stick over us as our legs collapsed under the weight on to our knees. After that, our mum asked him please let us up, we’d been stupid but enough was enough, she forgave us, we were only children and we’d learnt our lesson, it was crowded at Thaddeus’s mum’s and she couldn’t really cope.
We could tell he was angry because he told her off for coming between him and dealing with us. He told us to get up and wipe our faces. When our mum had given us something to eat, he told us to come back in and face him.
‘False report,’ he said, ‘is no child of mine.’ He looked at us like he didn’t know who we were, and didn’t like us. ‘Are you listening?’
I nodded, and burst into tears.
‘Shut up,’ he said, and I stifled them. ‘Never let me hear you spreading lies. The woman is trying to feed her family. If you think you can run wild in the street and I won’t find out, if you ever do anything so stupid again, I will break your head! Do you hear me?’
We nodded. Busola gave me a sideways look so he could see she still blamed me, but I didn’t look back.
‘Now get out before I punish you!’ he said.
The next day at school, Thaddeus wouldn’t speak to me, but with Sandra and Busola it didn’t seem to make any difference. They still played cat’s cradle with the string passing backwards and forwards between their hands and fingers. I saw him digging in the playground on his own because he’d been told off in class for not paying attention and wandering off, but I avoided him. I didn’t know what to say. He kept digging his hand in the sand and flicking, digging and letting it run out through his fingers, like he was trying to dig his way out of having to talk to anyone. I left him alone. He dug down, crouched in the sandpit holding on to sand, and never spoke to me again.
The Thames was flooding and the sirens opened. The sound came in waves, we’d never heard them before. There were the dark air-raid shelters by the flats that were full of rubble, and we played on the bomb sites, but we didn’t know that warning sound that came from everywhere and emptied the streets. The school closed and they told us to run home with the wailing sound following us all the way.
I was one of the fastest. There wasn’t any traffic past the London City Mission, past the shut-up shops, down Auckland Street which was empty of cars, around by the main road, under the railway arch and across to the silence of the embankment.
I got up to the river and put my foot on to the ledge to look over and see the flood. It was at the top of the wall, running level with my eyes all the way across to the other side. A slop of water splashed on to my face. It lapped at the monster fish round the lamp posts. I felt the pull of the water, the swirl of the current – that I was being dragged away.
I stood down, and I was alone on the pavement. No one else was coming. The sirens were sounding like slow panic, the river was above me and Thaddeus’s voice was pounding in my chest, telling me run!