The Playground (3 page)

I crumpled. She moved her chair closer to mine, put her arm around my shoulder and said more softly, ‘Please don't get upset.'

This only encouraged tears. ‘I honestly, honestly think you've done the right thing. Honestly, love. You could never have afforded that big house on your own. I'm sure you'll make friends here – what are the people like downstairs?'

‘Don't know, haven't met them yet.'

‘Why don't you pop down? Introduce yourself. You might find you have all sorts of things in common.' She rubbed her hands together at the prospect of this burgeoning friendship.

‘OK, I will. Later.'

‘Good girl. And I do think it would be very sensible to get a lodger.' My sister, Bella, had come up with this suggestion. ‘Though be sure to tell your landlord first.'

‘Maybe. But I'm just not like you, Mum. I'm not as social or as tolerant. And, anyway, I've sort of gone off the idea. I don't know. I'm worried about Addie. First Joe, now this. And then a complete stranger moving in. It's too much change for her.'

Mum held me. How often had she held me like this over the years? Rocking me as I shed snotty, mascara-stained, bitten-nail tears about having no friends, or no boyfriends or failing exams or being broke or fat.

‘Addie is doing wonderfully. You mustn't worry about her so much. She'll be fine. Honestly,' she said, stroking my hair and kissing me on the ear.

‘But how will he know how to contact Addie?'

‘You told that neighbour of yours, didn't you? Annette, Andrea—'

‘Anna.' She always got this wrong. She seemed to have refused to memorise her name purely because she wasn't keen on her, always found her a little aloof.

‘You gave Anna your forwarding address, didn't you? If he wants to find you, he will.'

‘He didn't even like Anna and he's not that resourceful – I need to think of something else.'

‘He's an adult, for Pete's sake. It's jolly well up to him.' And tender
again, ‘You'll be OK, sweetheart. I promise.' This was the rhythm of our relationship.

*

She had gone from saying ‘Joe is marvellous, and really quite charming when you get to know him,' to her friends to ‘He just abandoned them. I can't understand how he could walk out on his family like that.' She felt personally abandoned too because they had been quite close – Joe would often do little jobs for her, cut the grass, hang paintings in her home. She thought he was just in ‘poor form' when he left, suggested that I give him some space.

‘You'll just have to accept that he's not coming back,' she said, stroking my arm as she delivered the blow. She'd become blunter as she'd got older.

‘I
have
accepted he's not coming back. It's just—'

‘Who's not coming back?' Addie said, eying me with concern.

‘Me, if you don't get your clothes on this minute!' Mum was up, animated, taking her grandchild by the hand. ‘Now, I want to see your new room!'

‘Go on, show Granny your special magic curtains.'

‘Come on, Granny! And do you know what …' I heard her voice trail away, then her little footsteps charging back.

She gave me a toothy smile – the forced sort she uses when having her photo taken – handed me her sucky blanket for comfort, hugged my leg, kissed my knee.

‘Be happy, Mama.'

*

‘Omnia transeunt.'

They were back from their tour of Addie's room.

‘I'm sorry?' Addie was on my knee now, wriggling as I tried to put on her socks.

‘Ah, pet, you've heard that expression, haven't you? Didn't you learn it at school? Omnia transeunt,' she said it again, liking how the words sounded on her lips. ‘This too shall pass.'

‘I know. I'll be – we'll be – fine but it's just the practical things. I think the immersion heater's broken for starters. I can't get any hot water this morning.'

‘You've probably just tripped a switch.'

With that, she was up a ladder on the landing, peering into the fuse box. I watched her flesh-coloured tights straighten and gather around her ankles as she stretched and lowered herself.

‘But you're fine,' she said, face a little flushed as she landed on solid ground again, problem solved.

‘I mean, you've got your monies sorted?' she asked, on our way back to the kitchen.

‘Yes and no.'

‘How much do you need?' she asked, exhaling as she sat back down, her voice a little weary.

‘Oh, Mum, I absolutely hate this.'

‘I know you do. Go on, how much?' She flattened the ancient, curled-up cheque book and held her pen poised above the amount field, no longer bothering to fill in the little stub opposite as she used to do so meticulously, before my endless requests for help. Her eyes went vacant, dazed-like as she filled it in and signed her name.

‘Will that do you?' she asked, handing it to me. I thanked her, hugged her and slipped the cheque into the back pocket of my jeans.

Difficult stuff out of the way, we both scurried in the other direction.

‘Are you ready to feed those swans?' Mum said, smiling again, turning to face her granddaughter.

‘No. I want to stay with Mama.'

‘No meaning yes?' I said, sweeping her up round the belly and putting her, protesting, into her coat, hat, buggy.

‘Listen, thanks a million, Mum. You look lovely, by the way. That colour really suits you.' I was doing what she did, that subtle but frantic scrabbling back when I'd offended or been short with her or when I just felt guilty.

‘Good colour, isn't it?'

‘Lovely. Where's it from?'

‘It's an odd label, something like “prison” or “empathy” or …' She stretched her arm over her shoulder and tried to fish for the tag. She turned her back to me, gathered her hair, held it in her hands and stood still. I separated some strands caught up in her necklace and felt for the label, fighting sadness as I imagined her standing just like this while my father, or some boyfriend before, closed the clasp on a piece of jewellery or fastened a zip on an evening dress. Now she had to struggle with the wretched, fiddly things herself. I turned the label in my fingers: ‘Therapy,' I said, knowing I could never say that I didn't intend buying one, that I was just admiring it to be nice to make up for not being nice moments earlier and that I was surely too young to be wearing the same clothes as my mother. But this had happened several times lately – older women giving me fashion tips. Somehow I had caught up with her and her friends. For so much of my life they had been old while we were young but we'd begun to seek each other out and now when both generations were together it wasn't the awkward or bored imbalance it used to be. I would find myself listening, nodding, interested and impatient to get my point across.

My mother put her hand round my neck, drew me close to her, kissed me on the forehead.

I watched them leave from the sitting room window: my child cocooned in her granny's care; Mum puffing her cheeks out, singing
off-key, eyes to the ground, trusting neither the uneven pavement nor her own increasingly unreliable feet.

I opened the window and climbed out onto the balcony. I was still excited by the novelty of having one. When we first moved in I'd spent a good deal of time ducking and bending as I clambered in and out of it, organising things. I'd put the potted Windmill fern I'd brought with me from the old house in a corner to hide an ugly and hazardous cracked Doric pillar. This was the third flat we'd looked at. The first, a basement two-bed below a doctor's surgery, had no garden and felt subterranean. In the second – a chintzy new development with candy-striped wallpaper, free gifts of honey and waving, life-sized teddy bears – Addie had used the facilities, yet to be plumbed, sullying the aroma of fresh hydrangeas in the hall and colouring everyone's first impressions of the place. We'd got out of there quick.

I looked around me in the cool morning air. Beyond where I stood, the chestnut and elm trees in the park were house-high and glorious in the early morning light. The one good thing about the flat was that it overlooked this little park, which had a playground at its centre and was hedged on all sides behind high Victorian railings. I would take Addie to visit it in the morning. From where I stood, I could see there was a swing and a slide. An old woman walked and smoked along the curled path with her even older dog; a man kicked a ball to a little boy.

The traffic on the road that separated the house from the park was another worry. Sporadic but fast, it swept around a blind corner. I could see a child charging across, not looking, excited by the sight of a friend. And then the memory of the solitary plimsoll, left on the roundabout after the accident, belonging to the little boy I used to play Cowboys and Indians with. Lesley French, almost six.

I liked the idea of living beside a home for the elderly. I imagined happy little trips in to visit them with still warm homemade buns and small gifts at Christmas and Easter, but the skip in the front drive was ugly: overfull with the flotsam and jetsam of the dying and the dead – old armchairs, soiled cushions, surgical gloves and incontinence pads and needles that surely brought sniffing dogs and snippy complaints from the neighbours who did not wish to be reminded, as they walked along Altona Avenue, that the sea was not all that lay ahead of them.

From a distance and from the waist up, Bray appeared to be a pretty seaside town: the humpback bridge over the pewter water of the Dargle; the clusters of red brick houses rising up into the green; tall chimneys and village spires; the domed church at the hill top and the breast of the sugarloaf with its perfect nipple visible through mist beyond. It was only at street level that things got ugly.

Most of the shops on the high street had yet to open, or had shut down for good, padlocked behind graffitied shutters, except for Shoe Zone which had wearily begun trading – Scholl sandals for nothing in a wire basket by the door.

There were a few early risers on the street, most of them aimless, just standing and watching. A pink-track-suited woman, ‘Babe' emblazoned across her bum, pushed a buggy full of groceries towards the golden arches of McDonalds, which glowed from the Tudor beams of the once-magnificent town hall. An old woman with nicotine hair, a red raincoat and rash-red face, and arms over-stretched from a lifetime of carrying heavy bags, hacked her way along the road ahead of me, head lolling to the side. She stopped for a cigarette outside the chemist on the corner. ‘Blahhh!' she shouted as I passed, making me jump, her gaping rubber lips exposing the rottenness of her gums. If the old men weren't limping, they were dripping from the nose, blue-faced and defeated on a long uphill walk.

It was cold that morning; the sky cinderblock grey and threatening. I was glad of it. Recently the sunshine had been rubbing it in, making me feel that everyone else was happy which made me all more miserable.

On the pavement outside the church, where people were gathered waiting for a hearse, pigeons picked over vomit the colour of Pepto-Bismol. I bent my head and braced myself for insults or wolf whistles as I walked by a group of teenage boys squatting on a wall outside the train station, all spunk and angst, their faces pale and papuliferous from a strict diet of chips and burgers. Nothing happened. They were silent. There was nothing to say. I had reached an age where I'd become invisible to a large section of the male population. They simply didn't see me any more. In fact, a weird, more worrying thing had begun happening. Elderly men had started staring at me. Not just saying hello to the nice young girl as we passed on the street, but stopping and turning and giving me the eye, as if there might be a chance.

I had period pain. I missed Joe. I didn't want to live in Bray. The town had always seemed out of focus and out of fashion to us; in a time warp of its own, a bit like an episode of
Coronation Street
. It was too far from the city, we had said in the days when we had money, too far from friends, a bit parochial, a little bit rough.

I caught my reflection in the window of Fab Framing. Here was me being snobby about the locals but actually I fitted right in, in my too-high heels, too-short leather jacket and skinny jeans, too tight on solid thighs. I'd tied my hair up – Joe always loved me with it tied up, until I told him that women only did that when it needed a good wash.

*

‘Why are you looking at me?' I'd snap when I felt him watching.

‘Because you're so beautiful.'

‘Why are you being nice?' I'd ask if he put a blanket around me in the evenings or brought me up a hot drink.

‘Because I love you more than life itself.'

I nodded while a man, who was clearly not from Bray, possibly Spanish, gave me a long and complex set of directions to the supermarket, which I knew I was never going to follow. I was hopeless with directions, always drifting off after the first left, and his voice was being drowned out by a torrent of incomprehensible gibberish coming from the loudspeaker of a car with a Sinn Fein banner on its roof. I thanked him and decided to go downhill in search of sponges and bleach.

Outside the supermarket, which I somehow stumbled upon, there was a tangle of wriggling limbs between cars and a woman's backside in the air. A child – too old to be naked from the waist down – was being held under the arms, encouraged to have a pee or worse. By the door where baskets were stacked in a careless heap, a sign, scrawled in Biro and Sellotaped to the inside of the window, read: ‘No Messers' as if Bray had more than enough of them.

I found a tub of lethal-looking bleach and some sponges in a dark corner of the shop where boxes and delivery trolleys had been abandoned, and smiled at the thought of Joe and the phobia he'd had about them. He couldn't even be in the same room as a sponge – I suggested that he must have had a bad experience with one once, though I couldn't imagine what this bad experience would have been.

The girl at the till was worrying a nail that she'd bitten down to bleeding skin, and our transaction, me handing her money, her packing my bag and giving me change, was completed without her looking up or saying anything. I felt even lonelier when I heard, as I
walked away, her greet the woman who'd been queuing behind me. ‘How are you, Mrs O'Malley? How's Sean getting on in the States?'

It will take you a year. Give it a year, everyone said. A year would sort everything out.

Out again in the open air, I crossed the road and strode back up the hill towards home. The sinister, Pied Piper melody of an ice cream van clashed with the sound of an Irish reel coming from the scout hall. I peered in through the window: leaping shadows of little Irish dancing girls reflected in stained glass, backs and arms stiff and rod-straight, circling, following the barked orders of their teacher. I watched as they thumped their soft-shoed feet on plywood; one over-zealous young dancer high-kicked across the floor at such speed that she almost collided with a stout, ginger-haired girl jigging and reeling over to her glass of orange. She took a few gulps and a mouthful of Tayto, then skipped back into the fold, ringlets bouncing, teeth munching. It would be ballet for Addie. No ringlets, red knees or fake tan.

At the level crossing by the train station, an election poster had blown off its pole; the hopeful candidate grinned from where he was lying, in pinstriped suit and red tie, in the middle of the road. When the green man appeared, how people approached this obstacle seemed to depend on their political preference: some veered off course to walk around it; others marched straight over it, leaving muddy footprints on the candidate's poised, neat-haired face.

*

Back in the flat I was a whirlwind of domestic activity. I scrubbed every corner of the kitchen, even the oven, leaving great brown streaks up my arms. I pulled out and washed all the shelves of the fridge, ran a J-cloth along the cruddy rubber. I mopped and cleaned
the old lino floor. I hoovered up enough of Alfie's fur to make a sweater. I pulled out a tangle of the last tenant's black hair that had been clogging up the plughole in the shower and used an old toothbrush to clean the grouting between the tiles. Then I wiped down the mildewed bathroom cabinet, and began to sort through the plastic bag into which I'd intended, when packing up the old house, to put only viable medicines that were of use and still in date. But I'd got bored five minutes into this job, had given up and shelved everything in: an ancient jar of Vicks VapoRub, gouged to its midnight blue base, some indigestion tablets, a packet of Beano plasters, one sachet of Alka-Seltzer, the stub from a Van Morrison concert, a Boots voucher expiring in November 2002, a little Playmobil man, two of Joe's rusty Gillette razors.

I dragged the first bin bag of clothes into the bedroom and emptied them out on the unmade bed. It was ridiculous how many bras I didn't own. Other women had pretty lace ones, expensive ones they would only ever hand wash, ones given to them by a boyfriend in fabrics that caressed the skin, that made them feel wonderful; I had just two: both ancient, black, gel-filled.

I folded Addie's baby clothes and put them into the bottom drawer of the cupboard, hoping to use them again one day but not now sure how that would ever come about. I stuffed the shelves above with my own bally sweaters, unmatched slippers, things I would never wear again but was not quite able to throw out.

He could never throw anything away. Even when he left, he left everything behind. Whenever we'd have clear-outs, he'd get distracted by some old jacket or hat he used to wear and he'd put them on and adopt poses like those men in Damart catalogues and I would giggle but at the same time whine at him to hurry up. Now his empty suits hung in the wardrobe like ghosts in a queue.

The American one, black with a purplish sheen to it, still had a stain on the lapel from the night of that disastrous dinner party. It had been conceived, and guests invited, six months before it took place. The host was his boss at Browne & Davison. Joe had gone to the Dockers with one of his clients that day and after too many Jack Daniels, had ridden home on his motorbike to freshen up. He already had a hangover at five in the afternoon.

Small boys in white shirts and grey flannel trousers, hair brushed and shining, opened the door to us and collected our coats. The house was merry and filling up with lots of faces that Joe should have known but couldn't put names to. I smiled beside him feeling childishly shy and unsure of what to do with my hands. He was still a little unsteady from the whiskey but thought another drink would perk him up. And as he went to have a glass of wine, his boss said I have your favourite tipple here and produced a bottle of Patrón Tequila.

At the dinner table, Joe sat doing his best, beside a big Beryl-Reid-type woman who asked for a taste of his tequila. I had been seated opposite him, beside a funny little man with a moustache who was fascinated by the forthcoming election and wanted to talk of nothing else, gesticulating wildly with his thin, womanly hands when he spoke about what needed to be done to save the country. I was still in that phase of besottedness where talking to anyone aside from Joe, or talking about anything other than Joe, was a little tedious. Bella said that I was too into him; that it just wasn't normal or healthy.

So I wasn't listening to the little man beside me that evening, I was watching Joe as he poured the Beryl-Reid-type woman a glass of tequila. She took a gulp, then Joe got up and stood behind her. ‘You do it like this,' he said. He put his hands on either side of her head, pulled it back and rocked it from side to side like a cocktail shaker.
Inspired by her enthusiasm, he forced this trick on other guests: the ladies seemed to quite enjoy it; their partners glowered at him. I squirmed in my seat. Then out came the white wine, red wine, cigarettes. And after a short respite on the journey over, Joe plunged back into drunkenness.

I suggested that he take some air. He went out to the back garden and I forgot about him for a little while, becoming great friends with an accountant and part-time fortune teller. She said that I was going to have three babies and that we'd live in a house with high ceilings by the sea. I spotted him once through the bathroom window. He was slumped on a child's swing in the sleet but I didn't dare gesture, I was quite happy for him to be there, away from potential trouble. I hadn't seen when, seconds later, he'd fallen backwards off it, banged his head, tried to stand up and had fallen again, this time into the flowerbed. Or the moment when his boss's wife, Brenda, had come out to try and help him up and he had told her to fuck off. It was the drunkest he had ever imagined or been.

When he fell back in through the sliding doors, wet, bleeding, covered in coal, having mistaken the bunker for the back door, people were already leaving. The woman who'd sat beside him at dinner was being helped into her coat by her husband. Joe made a lunge at her, to say goodbye and sorry and they'd both toppled over. Joe fell on top of her; she kicked and struggled beneath him like a capsized beetle. Her furious husband lifted him off her and onto his tiptoes. I pleaded with him to go home.

I apologised to everyone and put him in a taxi, begging him not to throw up. He held his hand over his mouth, got sick into his shirt. Then he told me he thought he was dying, said he wanted to be dropped off at the hospital.

When we got home I told him to stay outside while I went to get the garden hose. It was four in the morning, freezing cold. I returned to find him naked, waiting to be hosed down. I got him inside with great effort and up the stairs into the shower. Then he refused to get out.

So I left him there. I locked the door because I didn't want him in the bedroom. I heard him groaning, rolling about all night. In the morning he had carpet burns on his elbows and backside. He couldn't do anything for the next two days. He just stared at the TV, understanding nothing.

*

I double checked that the front door was locked (it was), that the iron was unplugged (it was) and that Addie was still breathing (she was) and climbed into bed.

The silence was ringing in my ears like tinnitus. Then I heard something. I hadn't got used to the sounds of this house. I slid out of bed and locked the bedroom door. This caused Addie to sit up in her sleep; she felt for her sucky blanket, found it, turned the other way and lay down again. I slipped back in under my duvet and tried to soothe myself with the statistic I'd read that houses with dogs are rarely targeted by thieves. I counted backwards from a hundred in sevens. Just knowing I had to stay still made me desperate to move. I wanted to cough and to turn onto my other side – into the recovery position – but resisted in case the rustle of sheets would wake her.

In my half-sleep I was a child again, back on the wooden changing bench of our local pool, whimpering as Mum pulled a brush through my hair; the girl sitting beside me had a verruca on the underside of her foot that she was examining with great concentration; the large
woman opposite us was towelling herself, one leg propped on the bench, a talc-y imprint of her foot on the tiles, too many wobbly bits on view. ‘No running. No diving. No jumping. No petting' the laminated poster above the pool had read. I'd obeyed the first three, and the fourth, though I wasn't sure what it meant. An older boy had told me that the shallow end was where the deep end was, just for a joke, and I had sat on the edge and slipped in and down and underwater for too long, limbs flailing, my screams unheard and unseen.