The Playground (24 page)

‘He's after eating two good-sized holes,' he said, bending to examine the sofa.

‘Ah Jesus, Billy. I'm only after getting that upholstered.'

‘Must have used the stuffing to make a nest for himself. Now don't be doing that again, do you hear me?' he said, dropping him back into his cage.

‘You should have seen you! It was classic,' he said, laughing at me and doing an impression of my fright. And then, ‘I think I'm going to be sick.'

He stood up from the sofa, went to the kitchen sink. Belinda followed him, waited. He burped a few times. ‘Sorry, false alarm,' he said, then farted heavily.

She poured him a glass of water, rested her hand on his back. She said something to him in a whisper.

‘No I feckin' didn't, OK? Stop asking me, will you?'

‘There's a child very sick in hospital.'

The sound of more retching into the kitchen sink.

‘To your very good health.'

‘Very good health.'

‘Very good health.'

‘Very good health.'

Murmur, Murmur. Clink. Clink, Clink. Bella said something that made the small group of guests around her chuckle. A child shouted. And then, somehow – who saw it? How did it happen? – my mother's champagne glass slipped out of her hand. It fell onto the drawing room floor and shattered into tiny fragments.

My aunt stepped down from where she'd been standing on the tile border of the fireplace. This was where she traditionally stood to tap her glass for the toast, balancing in a youthful way, to make her taller and to command attention. And all the other women swept into action, children were scooped up and away, furniture was pushed back, a hoover appeared, the lights were turned from dim to full. Mum stood by the drinks cabinet, shaking her head, red-faced, apologising. A few of the men bent on their hunkers and began picking up the shards of glass with their hands, their wives standing over them, cautioning and assisting: ‘There's another bit there. Oh be careful! Now, I'd hoover the rest.' The party was paused, some guests shuffled around trying to look helpful; others stood quiet and still.

‘Well, I must say, the tree is magnificent,' one of the women said, attempting to lift the mood.

‘Yes, I'm delighted with this one. And do you know that it sings?' my aunt said, grabbing at a branch to get it going. ‘Rather silly, I know. For the children, of course.' Then she turned to my mother who was still apologising, ‘Oh, don't worry, Dot, it wasn't a good one, just one belonging to Bruce's great-great-grandmother,' she said and clomped away and down into the kitchen where the hired help – a Mexican brother and sister – were loading the dishwasher. She'd used them before and had found them very good, ‘the boy in particular'.

‘You stupid little man! Haven't I told you before? Don't put bone-handled knives in the dishwasher,' she roared, not quite out of earshot of her guests.

*

The ‘adults', as we called them and as they happily referred to themselves, no longer enjoyed this party. It was an annual tradition between my parents and their relatives and oldest friends whose own children, flushed and awkward, neither knew each other or got along especially well, but felt obliged to be there, year after year, for the sake of their ageing parents. Rather than heralding Christmas, and what had once for them been two weeks of parties and drunken flirtations, it was now a sad reminder of all that they had lost. Almost all the men had gone or gone to seed, and the last one standing – who everyone, including himself, seemed a little surprised to find still alive – flushed-cheeked, stomach bulging against the belt of his high-waisted flannel trousers, was now so deaf that he only spoke in monologues because he couldn't hear what the other person was saying but was still determined to get his story told.

So this year, for the first time, the party was made up of women, the not-so-merry widows, with their arthritis, cataracts, hip-replacements, homes too big to live in but impossible to sell, catering, coping, laughing the loud laughs that once were their husbands, resplendent in purples and soft blues. They were now less characters, more caricatures of themselves: the barky, eccentric one, unsteady in heels, even before lunch had been served. The sporty, practical one, with her permanently suntanned legs, comfortable shoes, who had given up dieting, finally accepting her shape. The one with the new teeth that were a definite improvement on the yellow ivories she'd tolerated for so many years but that had yet to settle into her face. They were all here with the things they'd promised to bring: quiches wrapped in cellophane for the tricky vegetarians, a chocolate biscuit pudding for the kids.

It was our generation who supplied the men, but they were a less confident, less cohesive group. One of the husbands feigned a flat tyre because his carpet business was about to be wound up and he didn't want to handle awkward questions. He'd never liked the party in the first place, found it too stuck up. Another's partner couldn't get back from England because of a plane strike. There was much quiet tutting over the cocktail sausages about this (‘Don't you think he would have come home to see his children? He said the ferry was for students, imagine that?') The shy one, who wasn't in fact shy at all but just couldn't be bothered to talk, was there as always, his silent and sullen presence making everyone uncomfortable; he was the kind of person who had to leave before a party could begin. And then there was the dashing West Brit amateur sailor who'd just come in from the sleet in his Barbour jacket, suntanned skin and thick hair. He examined the females in the room with great discretion, the girls
who had become women in the year since he'd last seen them, the ones who'd put on weight, the ones that were looking radiant, all the while keeping his hand on the small of his wife's back.

*

I was not in party humour. Before we'd set off, I'd seen Ben arrive home. Sophie had held him in her arms, her hand protectively over his head as she'd lifted him out of the car and carried him down the steps to the basement of their house. I'd found and wrapped the snow globe, stuck the card Addie had made for him on top and had run across the square to drop it in, leaving Addie at home playing school with her new imaginary friends, Poppy, and her big sister, Serena. Joy had answered the door, told me Ben was resting. I'd handed her the gift and asked her to give it to him. ‘I don't think so, dear heart,' she'd said, handing it straight back to me.

On our way I'd made the fatal decision to take Addie to a vast urban shopping centre. I'd wanted her to see Santa Claus and I'd still had three presents to get. We'd sat in a queue of cars stretching back to the M50 for an hour, parked illegally in a disabled spot and were then sucked into an overly warm world of materialism: waving polar bears in Tommy Hilfiger sweaters, hoards of addled parents, over-stimulated kids and endless Frappuccino-sucking teenagers and bewildered older people, stopping, standing for a moment, turning back in the other direction,
‘So here it is, Merry Christmas'
hurting everyone's ears. The queue for Santa would have been another two hours in the sleet; we'd gone on the little Christmas train instead, Addie waving at shoppers too preoccupied to notice her.

We'd bumped into one of the old sisters, Pamela, in Urban Outfitters where I'd been attempting to find something to wear for Christmas day and Addie was pulling hands off mannequins.

‘What do you think?' she'd asked me, this tiny woman in her eighties
with freshly-dyed blue-black hair, a white made-up face and ruby lips, holding a sweatshirt decorated with a large red rose in front of her.

‘I like it. Who's it for?'

‘Me.'

‘It's cute.'

‘Really? But not too cute?'

‘No. I like it.'

‘Any news on that boy burnt by the lantern?' she'd asked, her voice travelling under the wall dividing our two changing rooms.

‘He's at home. He's going to be OK,' I'd said, trying to escape from a too-tight white dress, getting make-up all over its neck.

I'd slumped to the floor of the changing room and replayed it for the millionth time in my head. If I told everyone what I saw that night, told them how I was sure it was Billy who deliberately set the tree house on fire, he would go back to being vilified by the community and I would lose the only proper friend I'd made since we'd moved to Bray. Belinda would do what any mother would do – she would always protect her own child.

‘Is she very, very old?' Addie had asked about Pamela from where she was lying on her belly on the floor, straining to get a glimpse of her under the divider wall. Then I'd heard Pamela ask the sales assistant about the best place to get a tattoo.

‘It's now or never,' she'd said.

On our way out, Addie had wanted to jump over the edge of the up escalator by herself but at the last moment she'd lost her nerve. She'd stood howling and frozen as I'd travelled away from her. I'd been damn tempted to keep on travelling – she'd just punched me on the nose in Starbucks because I wouldn't buy her a third chocolate coin. I'd had to let go of the buggy to grab hold of her and pull her towards me, feeling alarmed eyes all around me. The buggy had
tipped backwards with the weight of the bottle of wine in a plastic bag that I'd hooked over the handle. I'd managed to get my child into my arms but the bottle had clunked out and rolled back down the escalator with no way for us to retrieve it.

*

My cousin was sent down to the shops for more wine and I snuck upstairs to the playroom with Addie, where an assortment of various-aged, awkward and silent children had been shoved together. They were all sitting around the TV, watching
The Wizard of Oz
. I'd handled several questions about the accident and now I was taking some respite. One of the women had come up and said, ‘How
are
you?' looking me in the eye as she waited for a reply. So far this year no one had got my name wrong. The boy who'd grown a moustache since last Christmas, making him look younger than he was, had given me a hug that had lasted for far too long. Even my aunt who traditionally addressed me by my sister's name had got it right first time.

Children were a great social camouflage; you could arrive late, leave early, weren't expected to help or to provide stimulating conversation. You could sit in the playroom where you'd much rather be in the first place; where the magic started all those years ago in the big house at the big party with the dumb-waiter in the wall and the old black-and-white TV and the godfather who always gave you the most exciting presents – roller skates, that's what I got that year – breathing in all the delicious firewood, perfumey smells, the confusion and magic of it all and heavy black overcoats and things you saw that you shouldn't have seen. And trying again to understand why Christmas Eve – the evening of Christmas – came before Christmas day.

*

‘I'm a little worried about your mother,' I heard my aunt say to her friend's daughter, as I passed them in the hall on my way to the toilet.

‘Oh no, don't be. She's fine. She's doing much better in fact,' the daughter said, referring to her mother's recent hip-replacement. ‘I mean she was a little grumpy for the first few days, but that was to be expected after the general anesthetic.'

‘Well no, it's not that. It's just that she's meant to be bringing the fizzy drinks. She said she'd be here at two.'

And when she at last arrived at the door, my aunt gave her only the most cursory of welcomes and dived for what she'd been waiting for: two litre bottles of 7Up that were bulging from a plastic bag looped around her wrist, the handles strained and stretched and digging into her skin.

*

Our cousins were busy hosting and too many others were away from their seats helping them – never the sign of a successful party – or tending to a child and I always seemed to be the person with an empty seat beside me. I leant across a large bowl of uneaten Brussels sprouts to try and join a conversation Bella was having with another cousin, pretending to have read the book under discussion when I'd only seen the TV series. I said hello in a very animated way to a breastfeeding woman I'd had quite a long and intimate chat with about leaking boobs the previous year, but she seemed to have no idea who I was and just nodded and carried on the conversation she was having. I attempted it again a few moments later. This time she smiled in a detached, vague manner and even looked a little irritated. Then severing her nipple from her toddler's mouth with her thumb and forefinger, she told her child to say hello. Ruddy-cheeked, with a messy mop of brown curls, she was at least three and had a full set of first teeth. She looked up, surveyed her surroundings and finding nothing to amuse her, she whipped her head away and nuzzled back into the dark and moist comfort of her mother's breast. Bella and
I shot a glance at each other; we'd discussed this before. It just looked all wrong, like an Alice band on an old woman.

Ordinarily I would seek out the solace of my sister in these situations but I was a bit annoyed with her that day. She had already said that I looked exhausted – something I always hate being told; it's just another way of saying you look rough. Then the subject had somehow moved on to Joe. ‘You really weren't well suited. It was always so volatile in their house,' she said to some of the other women in front of me just after Mum dropped the champagne glass.

‘Was it?' I said, hurt and denying it – but then I recalled this day last year and the red toy kitchen for Addie from Santa that had taken me four hours to assemble with its tiny saucepans and microwave and little apron and telephone. That night, Joe had kicked and damaged it in a rage about me going to too many Christmas parties.

I felt out of sync with everyone in the room; the cadence of my voice was off-kilter. For an alarming half an hour I lost all sense of self-awareness or self-censoring – I couldn't judge whether I was being interesting or tedious. I was talking about an article I'd read about fizzy drinks and brain development and I wasn't sure if I was rambling on without making any real points or drawing any conclusions, and my audience weren't giving me any clues; they just nodded and smiled and picked bits of rocket from between their teeth.

‘That is fascinating!' I said every so often, when I couldn't think of anything to say. And I made an inane comment about foie gras. The woman opposite was adamant that it was the liver fat of geese. No, I was the only vegetarian in the room. I was the one who should know. ‘It definitely isn't geese. It's goose.'

There was a sudden loud thumping from the playroom above us,
causing the lamp over the kitchen table to tremble. I pushed my chair back a few inches, waiting for tears and the yell of
Mummy
but nothing. Then there was a further series of small bangs.