The Playground (8 page)

The rain was still coming down, sliding off the slates, leaving them black and forming watery tassels from the parapet to the gutter. I could hear it as it gurgled and twisted down into the drains. Since the floods six months earlier that had left two people dead and cars floating head high in basements, heavy rain was no longer something to moan about in Ireland, it presented a real danger. Bella's neighbours had had to swim out of their house to safety. Their sloping garden backed onto the River Poddle and a graveyard beyond and the floodwater had rushed in and crashed through their kitchen window.

Joe had left the house in gum boots and what he called his ‘leesure pants' (adopting American accent) during the subsequent clean-up. He'd offered to help his ex-girlfriend try to salvage some of her belongings from her flooded basement in the city centre. They'd gone in with torches, waded through mud, picked over old photo albums of their lives together, ruined furniture from the flat they had once shared. He was gone too long; it had made me vulnerable – for the first time since Addie was born I was focusing my attention on him. He had enjoyed reassuring me when he got back, wet-eyed and dirty that night. And I had seen him again as I had when we first met. After his bath, we had sex for the first time in weeks.

Outside the wind was picking up. The plastic windmill Addie had stuck in the dead hydrangea pot on the balcony whirled around in
pretty multicoloured spirals, faster than either of us could blow it. It was four-thirty; almost evening; it had been dark since we'd got up.

How I loved days like these. Days when things were cancelled, when fires were lit and shutters closed, when no one was doing anything, when the weather forced us all indoors, providing us with permission to sulk, to not get dressed, to watch
Lady and the Tramp
under a blanket at four in the afternoon if we wanted to.

I squeezed Addie's soft thigh, trying to get her attention.

‘Do you think there could be a little mouse in a little boat sailing down the river outside our house?' No response.

‘Maybe he's in a little matchbox boat,' I carried on, warming to my story.

‘Using teeny tiny matchsticks as oars,' she said, humouring me. She fell back into her television trance and worked on her sucky blanket. There was a whistling sound to her breathing, I'd noticed it a few times lately. Her blanket was so snotty and ragged it looked like something from the Famine – I'd have to sneak it from her one of these days and wash it, get rid of all those germs. I tried to slide it away from her, still wanting to play, but she yanked it back with an irritated little sound and inched away from me. I played instead with her pigtails. Joy had done them for her. There was always something different about her when she'd spent time with Joy; a plait in her hair, her clips adjusted, her scarf rearranged around her neck. Subtle improvements, subtle little criticisms. Once, without saying a word, she took Addie from me, wiped her chocolatey mouth and did up the toggles on her duffle coat.

It felt like a small, silent victory to have the flat and the television to ourselves. When Joy was about, it was either not switched on at all or there as background colour and noise which we talked over and
I was still shy enough around her to feel that I had to comment on everything that we watched.

I looked around me for diversion; I stretched over Addie to grab the
Vanity Fair
from the coffee table, reminding myself to cancel my subscription ASAP. Joy's reading glasses, folded on top of its glossy cover featuring a naked Kate Winslet (also sprawled on a sofa but looking somewhat more seductive) slid off and onto the floor.

Her possessions were everywhere: her walking jacket wedged between the banisters; an alien sheepskin slipper in Alfie's mouth; a brush in the hall, tangled with dead grey hair; her facecloth draped over the bathroom sink.

Addie and I had snuck into the kitchen for breakfast that morning. ‘Let's whisper,' I'd said and she'd walked on tippy-toes beside me along the corridor. I was very much hoping to have our cereal in peace. But she was with us moments later, embracing us and lingering by the toaster to give my back a prolonged rub, telling me, as she caressed my ribcage, that she'd heard me snoring in the night, that I had kept her awake. I imagined her hand ceasing its circular motion, sliding up to my neck and tightening around it.

Joe would have hated all of this. His throat used to constrict when he was forced to eat in front of anyone who wasn't family. Once, badly hungover, he had gagged over his breakfast when Mum was telling him a story about some cousins of hers who had bought a house on a hill and had moved further up the hill, then further up the hill again. He'd had to escape to the back garden to regurgitate.

Joy had gone into the Royal College of Surgeons that afternoon to sketch dead foetuses in jars. Maybe this was where I'd gone wrong. Never in my life would I have chosen to spend a Saturday in the city sketching dead foetuses in jars when I could have been buying jeans
at Topshop. ‘Perhaps I can return with a more soothed spirit and proceed,' she'd said as she'd left.

But life in general was much better with Joy. She put out the bins every Tuesday, Joe's old job, and took Alfie for long walks on the beach and up to the top of Bray Head – he'd return so exhausted and happy that he was a dead dog for the rest of the day. She filled the fridge with healthy, organic food. She baked pies. She lit scented candles in the evenings. ‘Shut
up
!' she said one day in disbelief, when I told her the washing machine was broken. She took her domestic duties seriously. She gave me shoulder massages, did arts and crafts with Addie and took her to the beach to collect shells and stones. She was calm. She was even-tempered. She was a homemaker. She was so much easier than Joe.

*

‘We needed some rain and now the spirit needs a little shelter,' Joy said as she towel-dried her hair in the sitting room that evening, having returned from her afternoon of sketching dead babies.

‘Now this is the sort of cupboard you'd expect to find a skeleton in,' she said, referring to the Indian cabinet in the corner of the room, though she had surely noticed it before. She leapt two feet in the air when she opened it to find a human skull leering back at her.

It had been given to Joe by a friend who was moving to Australia and didn't want to chance taking it through Customs. Joe was fascinated by the sensation of holding the head of someone who had passed away – someone he never knew and never would. There was a power to it he said; the inner sanctum of someone's existence. He suspected keeping someone else's skull was illegal, which made him even more delighted to have it.

‘I can tell you miss your dear husband terribly. Would you like to share what happened?' I didn't think real-life people said things like
this, but this was how Joy spoke. She was curled beside me on the sofa now, her kind, small eyes regarding me with intensity. She had made us a snack of hummus on gluten-free crackers which I wasn't looking forward to. I'd watched as she'd licked her thumb liberally after coating each one. She gave her fingers one final sticky lick and rested her hand on my knee.

‘You know I was once married to a wonderful man. Our wedding was so unique. Akihiko danced down the aisle towards me, naked aside from a fig leaf. Don't you think that's amazing? We're still very close. He helps to run the gallery I show in. I still love him and I still get sentimental,' – she said, emphasising each syllable as if it were a word she didn't often use – ‘when I think of our past together.' I tried to listen to this with a straight face, wondering what on earth I was going to say in response. ‘You said Joe was in advertising?'

‘Yes. He was a creative at Browne & Davison. He was good at his job but bored. He said he found the superficiality of what it was about a little soul-destroying. What he really wanted to do was make films – he'd made a few short ones and was working on scripts for some feature-length ones. Then his advertising work dried up and he couldn't get funding from anyone for his ideas.'

‘Oh, don't I just know all about it? It's so tough for us creative souls.'

‘Well, he wasn't being one bit creative in the weeks before he left. He was just hanging around the house playing computer games, searching for lost glasses, chopping wood. And then he got his mushroom idea. He started growing mushrooms everywhere, in every cupboard I opened, on every shelf. He said it was a business that could really take off, he just needed a year to get it started.'

‘Oh, my! How enterprising of him. What kind of mushrooms were they?' Joy loved the sound of this. Perhaps I should have shown a little more enthusiasm for the venture.

‘I don't know – shiitake, I think. Anyway, he was upset that I didn't believe in his mushrooms and I got fed up finding them everywhere. They were rooting all over the place, swollen, useless fungi.'

‘He was just trying to find his way out of the recession. I admire him for that. It is a tough puzzle indeed that we face in these times.'

Joy had a way of making me tell her too much; I found myself revealing things that I hadn't even been honest about to myself. Our intimacy was making me uncomfortable, as if we'd shown each other our private parts. I didn't want to think about private parts, but trying not to think about them made me think about them more. I thought for a moment that she was going to kiss me.

I tried to explain what had gone wrong between us. I told her how our evenings had once been about books and art, wine and long beach walks, and always home in time for
Coronation Street
. And then when Addie arrived how all my emotional energy was used up by my curly-topped, cherry-lipped, glassy-eyed, rubber-thighed little leech; I became a shrivelled old carcass, a muslin cloth between my boobs where my cleavage used to be, and Joe a stranger I'd sometimes pass in the night on my way downstairs for bottles.

I told her how I used to get irritated with him in the evenings when all I wanted to do was relax. He had a habit of bringing up some topic of conversation, often a continuation of one we'd had maybe three or four weeks earlier. ‘So what did your Mum do?' ‘Do about what?' ‘Did she buy that table at the auction?' he'd ask, when I was just about to discover who the murderer was. ‘You'll think I'm mad but isn't he quite like your sister Bella?' he'd say about some middle-aged black man he'd see on TV. ‘No, I mean how? In what way?' I'd ask, intensely irritated. He'd happily talk through an entire thriller and stay quiet for the adverts, never the other way around. He was silent at breakfast, or at restaurants or at parties or on long car
journeys but talkative when Addie wanted my attention or last thing at night, in bed, where he liked to read whole passages of his book aloud.

We'd had a fight on the day he left. I hadn't said anything about him putting Addie's clothes on over her pyjamas, but I couldn't stop myself when he gave her the saliva-stained cup with the cruddy black grime at its base – the one which held our toothbrushes – to rinse out her perfect pink bud mouth.

He'd flung the cup across the room. Then he'd called us cunts. Five minutes later he'd climbed down the stairs on all fours because he wanted to see what it felt like to be Alfie. I thought that meant that everything was OK.

‘And you have no clue where he's gone?'

‘England, I've heard.'

‘And what about Addie?'

‘Nothing.'

‘Really? But what do you tell her when she asks for her Daddy?

‘I tell her how many other people love her.'

‘Oh, my. You poor, poor dear.' She leant forward and gave me a hug, flattening herself against me, her wiry grey hair tickling my chin.

‘You know what you need?'

‘A good shag,' I waited for her to say.

‘Faith, trust and a sense of humour.' She held me and I sobbed in her arms, cameras panned away and above us and out through the skylight window, sad music played, credits rolled.

I walked over to the sitting room window in a somnambulant daze. Why did Joy keep leaving the windows open? I liked them shut. I kept the blinds down; she pulled them up. It was cold and foggy and not yet light: the great chestnut tree opposite us was still in shadow, street lamps still shone. A shift worker, head down, rucksack on, walked along the empty street below, echoing; a Filipino nurse from the Cherry Glade dragged a wheelie bin across the gravel next door.

Joy was up and out and in the playground already, setting up for the first day of her boot camp. The idea had come from a woman she'd met at a one-day yoga workshop called ‘Winds of Change'. She'd returned home breathless and buoyant declaring that it had been an ‘awesome' day. God, how I hated that word.

She was kneeling on the grass near the gardener's shed unpacking Swiss balls and resistance bands from a box. Juliette Larson was on her way round the corner, in a pink Juicy Couture tracksuit, all wiggly bum and jiggly breasts, her yoga mat rolled up under her arm, looking somewhat tentative about the whole idea and the location. Solly from the drug dealer's house on the corner was carrying dumbbells back and forth on the grass; Irenka was doing hamstring stretches by the cherry tree. Soon Joy had them all lined up on the grass in front of her, demanding sit-ups, push-ups, jumping jacks, five laps around the path. Outside the park, watching them, holding
the railings while balancing on his unicycle was Billy Flynn, the boy I'd seen burning the butterfly, resident bastard, ne'er do well.

It hadn't been difficult to enlist the locals. In the month that we'd been living together, Joy had got to know everyone, the way Americans do. Juliette, a big-eyed, blonde and giggly teenager, who lived next door to us with her father, Mr Larson; Dylan Freeney, who Juliette had begun seeing, without Mr Larson's permission. He was the boy we'd met that first day in the playground – chatty, confident, handsome. ‘Such a sweet child,' Joy said about him, everyone did. Solly, full-time dope-head, part-time sculptor, who was squatting in the derelict house on the corner – overtaken by weeds, concealed by leylandii – full of ideas that would never be realised; he was a dreamer, not a doer. Joy had also signed up with a local volunteering group and the first job she'd been given was to help residents of the Cherry Glade to cross the road to the park, whether they wanted to or not. And she'd discovered a much handier shop two streets away, outside which a homeless man stood silent, head bowed, all day. She'd begun taking sandwiches and snacks down to him.

‘We are privileged and we are blessed,' she said to me the other evening, placing a single stone from Bray beach on her bedside table. She had just returned from an afternoon of painting on the promenade and declared herself to be ‘filled with art and with the sound of water and boats'.

From the safety of his position at the other side of the railings, Billy began shouting military commands at Irenka who was attempting star jumps, all stiff and out of time. ‘Up two three four, round the park and ask for more. Up two three four. Up your arse, you little whore.'

Irenka curled her lip at him, tugged her knickers out of her bum, told him to get a life. I thought his dad would thump him when he
came up and stood behind him; instead he put his hand on Billy's shoulder and encouraged him away. I hadn't met his father yet but I'd seen him in the playground, chatting to the local teenagers – he seemed to have a way with them, they listened when he spoke.

*

‘Dus kicking down the cobblestones, looking for fun and feeling groooovy …'

Addie was behind me in the kitchen, standing on a chair by the sink, refilling the dog's bowl. He slid off the sofa, stretched, paws extended on the carpet, walked a few paces, stopped for a frenetic bit of scratching and wandered over to us.

I helped Addie off the chair and offered to carry the bowl but she wanted to do it by herself. ‘I'm the persons in charge of Alfie, bemember you promised?' I didn't but I probably had, I promised her a thousand things daily.

The glint of the metal made it difficult to judge water depth and as soon as she started to move she knew she had filled it too high. She held it with both hands and carried it with the careful concentration of a child, the short distance from the sink to the sitting room floor.

She dropped the dish down on the carpet, causing a slurp of water to rise over its lip. It splashed against her hand and soaked the layers of newspaper beneath.

‘Help, Mama!'

‘What do you say?'

‘Joy says I actually don't need to say please. That's why because it's not rude.'

‘It is terribly rude!'

‘And Joy says I don't need to say thank you or hello to each others if I don't want to as well.'

Things between Joy and I had begun to get a bit bumpy. The other day when Addie said she said needed a pee, Joy took her – didn't ask
me or anything, she just took her by the hand and led her away. ‘If it's yellow, let it mellow.' I heard her say as they re-emerged. ‘But Mama says that's disgusting,' ‘Oh, baloney!' Alfie pit-patted in after them and had a lovely long drink from the bowl. Later that same day she told me off for shouting at Alfie, who'd just eaten the family-size bar of Green & Black's chocolate I'd been looking forward to having with my cup of tea. ‘I assume you'd never shout at your child that way,' she'd said, as she strung monkey nuts onto a thread for Addie to hang from the balcony to encourage birds – ‘or maybe even squirrels from the park,' she'd added, getting the child excited.

One Monday I was under my bed, searching for my missing ring – a ten-euro one bought by Joe from a stall in Mexico five years earlier. And what did I find? A pair of Joy's Camper walking shoes. What were Joy's shoes doing deep under my bed? And yesterday she ordered a book on Amazon called
Do I have a Daddy?
for me to give to Addie when the time was right.

But the biggest problem we had was around food. After a few uneasy weeks of parallel cooking or looking after ourselves, we had come to an agreement about meals. Joy would cook every other night: healthy vegetarian dinners such as ‘Joy's lentil surprise' which bubbled with unidentifiable things and made everyone flatulent for the evening and on through the night. Cheese is bad for children, Joy said. As is milk in porridge. And yogurts – ‘You know you should really wean her off them. And I wouldn't give her tap water, if she were my child. There's too much fluoride in it, in this country.' A little later while they were doing yoga together on the floor, she rubbed the BCG scar on Addie's arm and said, ‘In America, they don't leave marks.'

And yet here I was, two-faced as anything, lying on the sofa trying not to giggle as Joy sat over me, still flushed from the success and
exertion of her boot camp, performing what she called the Bowen manoeuvre, to help me relax. ‘It's a simple yet incredibly powerful technique that helps relieve all kinds of pain,' she said, as she prodded different parts of my back with her fingers and thumbs.

After the first set of moves, she strode out of the room, slamming the door behind her. She was gone a long time; I started to wonder if she was coming back. Ten minutes later, she was thundering towards me. I felt another nudge of her finger on my ribs and off she went again. And so on it went, for at least forty minutes.

‘Oh, my, but you're uptight!'

‘Am I? Maybe I am. My neck feels a little stiff.'

‘You're tight all over, dear heart.'

‘Addie had me up early, I probably just need some sleep.'

‘What you need is to get outdoors. Breathe in that glorious sea air! Loosen up. Relax. Join my boot camp.'

I nodded and tried to reply though my mouth was sunken into the velvet seat.

‘Oh, it's splendid out there today. It's like fall in Vermont. The chestnut trees are turning gold and red gold and just look at that deep, deep-blue sky – it's almost too much.'

I attempted to sit up to see for myself, but her hand was firm on my back so I mumbled consentingly from where I was lying.

‘You know there are some awesome women in this community,' Joy said, as she pressed her finger into my skin. ‘You should really take the time to get to know them. Irenka was just talking about having a meeting to clean up the playground for the kids, why don't you join her? Ask her about it? Look.' This time she let me move. I sat up. We both stared out the window.

‘She's still over there, why don't you go on over and talk to her?'

I considered this the next time she left the room. The day was
beautiful and I needed a reason to escape from my therapist. The next thing she had planned was a sinus drainage massage.

‘Trust me. I am part of your path,' she said, hugging me like a proud parent as I put on my coat.

I waved at Irenka through the railings but she didn't see me. I quickened my pace to be sure I would catch her while she was still there – she was not the sort to linger, she moved swiftly from one task to the next. As I came in through the gate, she set off in the opposite direction. I passed a group of teenagers in a dark huddle around the picnic bench, lank-haired, hunched shoulders, rolling up cigarettes, and followed her, embarrassed, as she pursued a small boy on a bike.

‘You've dropped something, young man!' she shouted, catching up with him, eyebrows fierce.

The boy stared at her, then at the ground. He checked his pockets for his pellet gun and pocket money, then looked back at her, confused.

She took the Kit Kat wrapper from behind her back and held it up in front of him.

‘Is these not yours, eh?'

He shrugged, held out his hand.

‘In the bin, please.'

‘Erm, sorry, Irenka?' I said, a little out of breath having followed her all this way.

‘See? Look at this, Eve,' she said. We watched the boy drop his bike, schlep off to the bin with his sweet wrapper, lift its wooden lid and toss it in. ‘I get very happy when I see that. And what about you? You missed the boot camp, you lazy girl!'

I made the usual excuses about Alfie, bad knees, Addie.

‘Oh, and what are the swings for? Can't she not play while you
work out? Come on, Eve, you could do with some!' She gave my backside a sudden, sharp, quite painful slap. Then she hooked her arm around my shoulder to embrace me. ‘I'm joking with you!' I smiled, reddened, got myself free.

‘I just wanted to say that I might join you tonight, if that's OK? Joy said you were having a drink to discuss the problems with the playground?'

She clapped her hands. ‘Excellent! For our ladies' night out! Oh, it will be fun! And not all work, eh?' She dug her elbow into my ribs.

‘Sumita, you know Sumita?' she said, counting on her fingers, ‘She will be joining us.' I had seen Sumita before, a small, round Indian woman who came to the playground every afternoon, always dressed for the cold in woollen hats and scarves and oversized coats, and always with a blanket, a rucksack of food and flask of coffee. She'd settle on the grass till closing time, trying to exhaust her hyperactive child, smiling and chatting to everyone.

‘And Sophie said she'll be there,' she said pointing at her house, my favourite on the square, a lovely villa-style home with pillars, raked gravel and a duck egg front door. Sophie was the beautiful mum – shiny-haired, glossy-lipped, long-limbed – I'd watched with envy from the sitting room window, arriving and leaving with two blonde children and endless shopping bags. ‘And Belinda,' this time Irenka gestured with her hands over her stomach to show that she was a large woman. ‘Billy the Bastard's mum, you know her? Works in the library, she's a nice lady. Don't know how she manages with that boy.' Then she listed off a dozen other local women I didn't know who had all promised to be there.

*

I got out of the bath that evening. Joy's dressing gown was hanging over the frosted door. Something like knickers or tights were stuffed
in its pocket. Something too intimate; it made me hold my breath. God, I was silly about this stuff. She was right, I needed to relax. I did two hundred squats in front of the mirror. Joe always smiled at this, looking like a skinny sailor as he bobbed up and down, mimicking me. And my Facercise exercises, my futile battle with age. Then I changed into my Spanx, put on my face and my dress, and tottered into the sitting room.

Joy was on the floor with Addie, both of them were leaning back against the sofa, Joy with her long, bony, high-arched feet crossed on top of the coffee table, Addie's tiny ones crossed identically beside hers. Joy was folding white printer paper to demonstrate how to make an Origami swan. Her student was wide-eyed, riveted.

‘Oh, my dear! But don't you look pretty?' she said, admiring me as I clip-clopped self-consciously into the room, fiddling with my hair and tugging at my too-tight dress.

‘Don't worry, Mama.' Addie was up, art abandoned, and straight over. ‘I'll hold your hand so you don't fall off your high shoes.'

I lifted her into my arms and carried her over to the fireplace where we looked in the mirror together. ‘When I'm a big lady and you're small can I have that sparkly dress?'

‘OK, sweetie, now don't pull at it.'

‘And can I stay up early to watch a cartoon?' I nodded, touched the tip of her nose with my finger.

‘Thank you, Mama,' she said, delighted with herself. ‘You can borrow one of my broken pencils if you like?'

Seeing me pull on my leather jacket, Alfie perked up, skittered after me, scratching the wooden floor. His nails had scraped into the wood everywhere, leaving indelible crisscross patterns. Nathan wouldn't be happy. I told him ‘No' and he lowered his head, took a
few steps backward – the poor old mutt was used to this sort of rejection. I pulled the front door behind me.

*