The Ice is Singing by Jane Rogers Page A

medical report stated that she was of average intelligence, but suffering from severe depression. It was at this early stage in the
trial that the murder charge was dropped, and replaced with a charge of manslaughter by reason of diminished responsibility. In court she never spoke more than five words together; in the safety of
a cell, she talked freely to her social worker, whom she had known for fourteen years.
    Leonie Doyle had lived on Blackhill Estate since it was built in 1961. She had been seven months gone with Donna, when they offered her and Des a twelfth-floor flat. Ten years later she was
living in a bigger, fifth-floor flat, with her six kids and no Des. Good riddance, as far as Leonie was concerned. He was rough when he’d been drinking, and one time he broke her arm. That
was when she was expecting Gary, the youngest. A few months after the kid was born he left. The Social traced him to Blackpool, trying to get maintenance out of him, but then even they lost track
of him. He never had any money anyway. He drank it all. She was better off without him.
    Her babies were all born perfect. Not even a birthmark on them, she was proud of that. Gary didn’t get ill till he was nearly one.
    Something’s wrong. It’s light. It shouldn’t be light. He’s never slept through – till eight o’clock? No. They’re yelling and
screaming next door, enough to wake the dead. That’s how it starts, I remember. He’s lying in the bottom of his cot, lips blue, back arched. It’s that what woke me, not the
screaming,
the light. And that little gasp of his. His eyes’re rolled up till the pupils’re nearly out of sight. I’m fumbling, letting the cotside down, quick, reaching
for him – he moves. He’s curling. Crisping. Like a strip of bacon under the grill. I’ll never not see that again. Crisping. When I wake nights I see it. I see it when I look in
his face sometimes. His little body crisping with pain. Don’t talk to me about God.
    Unlike many babies, Gary did not die from the acute meningitis he suffered at the age of eleven months. The infection responded to treatment, and after three weeks Leonie was
told she could fetch him home. She had to take Darren and Tracey (the others were at school) and they ran around the consultant’s room screaming, while he explained to Leonie that Gary had
suffered a certain amount of irreversible brain damage, due to lack of oxygen during the convulsions.
    He’s a little baby again now. His mouth’s gone slack, he’s dribbling again. He’s no more better than I am, he’s going backwards. He was
crawling three months ago. Look at him now. As if I haven’t got enough to do. And he feels different. Heavier; he’s not helping himself. Poor little sod. It’d be better if
he’d’ve died.
    Gradually she stopped noticing the difference. He was just the youngest – always, by a long way, the youngest. When they started taking him to that special school by taxi
it was all right; for the first time, they were all off her hands during the day. There was time to sweep the floor, wash up, stuff a couple of bin liners with dirty washing and set off for the
launderette where there were other women to talk to, and no sense of guilt in taking the weight off her feet for an hour while the wet clothes slopped round and round in a grey froth on the other
side of the thick glass.
    Days and nights and days and nights of them getting older, getting out from underfoot. Fewer of them in her bed at night, though no extra sleep because they still fought morning, noon and night,
scrapping and yelling and breaking the furniture, shrieking and giggling in their bedrooms till the small hours – or out with the other kids, running up and down the walkways and dropping
things off, trapping each other in the lifts, getting stoned on glue and cider, fighting. They ran wild. She didn’t want them to, didn’t intend it – but there were too many of
them, and as each one grew older