The Playground Read online

‘OK, be good then, please.’

  ‘But I don’t know how to be good.’

  When she was calm, I crept back into the sitting room. The playground was in darkness. Definitely Dylan, but not Juliette. The little creep. I then spent one hour and fifteen minutes trying to remove the security tag from the bottle of wine I’d bought at Tesco using the self-service till, such was my need for a drink after a very long day with a very short person. It took three screwdrivers, one pair of scissors (now kaput), a pair of pliers and Joe’s Swiss Army knife to remove the plastic.

  I texted Sophie, my fingers still sore and cut, to tell her how much we’d enjoyed our day at the beach. Of course just after I’d sent it, I thought of a joke I could have made about the au pair, but a second text would be a bit needy.

  And then I didn’t hear back from her. I checked my phone every few minutes, feeling a bit put out by her casualness, re-reading my sent message to see if the tone was right. She’d have read it by now for sure. Maybe she didn’t enjoy our time together as much as I had? Maybe the gift was too much after all. Maybe she’d wanted to hang out with Beige Nicola instead, maybe she’d just invited us to be polite.

  And then it happened. My phone rang. ‘Hello?’ I said, heart galloping.

  ‘A disaster striked!’ It wasn’t Sophie, it was flipping Irenka. I could hear her in stereo, on the phone and coming up through the floorboards.

  ‘Those leetal bastards. I’m sorry, Eve, but can’t you not see? They’re burning the bloody rope bridge out there. The leetel shits.’

  I looked out the window, saw the flames.

  ‘Can you come and see me, please?’ she said, sounding like a headmistress. ‘I can’t leave Charlotte, Donal’s out at a Tidy Town’s meeting.’ I knocked on the bathroom door, and called out to Joy in a loud whisper, trying not to wake Addie. No reply. I imagined her like Ophelia, ears under water, swishing her salt-and-pepper hair about, deaf to everything. I grabbed the baby monitor from the hall table, trudged down the stairs.

  ‘You know we have no fire service here in Bray?’ Irenka said, holding her door open. Her hair was standing on end – it looked hacked at, as if she’d taken a pair of scissors to it in a premenstrual rage. ‘It’s bloody dangerous,’ she said, negotiating furniture on her way to the window, her mobile phone in her hand.

  We stood together watching the kids, who were now trying to put out the fire, but I sunk back behind the shutters when one of them turned around, terrified of being spotted. I wasn’t going to tell her about the sex. Her reaction would be exhausting and I couldn’t be certain of what I saw.

  ‘What can we do? We can’t confront them. Two women on their own.’

  ‘What? And why nod?’ The spots flared up between her eyebrows. ‘Should I be afraid in my own home?’ A bit of her spit landed on my lip. This was just what she didn’t want to hear; what everyone had always said to her before. I had hit her Achilles heel, I could feel a rant coming on, but I didn’t have the energy for it. All I wanted to do was to go back upstairs.

  ‘I tell you, Eve, when we get those hedges cut – the council said Monday for sure – we can keep our kids safe and we can keep an eye on those pigs.’

  Her mobile phone began playing ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’.

  ‘Yes, Sergeant. Thanks for returning my call. The boys, the three boys I told you about, they’re back. They’re setting fires in the park. I’m watching them as we speak,’ she said, picking a bit of fluff from my sweater.

  I looked around at her remarkably clean and orderly home. The handles of all the tea cups along the shelves in the kitchen were turned in the same direction; the tea towels lined up at the same length on the rail in front of the cooker. This wasn’t going to be a quick conversation with the police; Irenka had settled on the sofa with the phone and was flipping through the pages of a notebook, looking for something else to complain about to the sergeant, now that she had him. I felt sorry for the police, however ineffectual they had been in sorting out the problems with the playground, Irenka was on to them almost daily; she must have had them on speed dial.

  I was restless; it was difficult to see anything in the park now that the fire had died. I moved away from the window and occupied myself looking at framed photographs of Irenka and her family that were arranged on a mahogany side table. Donal in a mortar board, receiving a degree, everyone huddled together and beaming on a family skiing trip, Charlotte and her grandparents beside a Christmas tree. Something about all of them seemed a little odd, but I couldn’t say precisely what.

  ‘You’ll notice a white space in each of them, yes?’

  Irenka had finished her call, without my realising, and was now standing behind me.

  I looked closer. In each photograph there was a strange white space.

  ‘That was where my sister, Jolanta, used to be. She’s no longer part of my family. I had her professionally airbrushed out. They did an excellent job, don’t you think?’

  ‘That was a bit radical,’ I said, laughing but at the same time thinking she was insane. ‘What on earth did she do?’

  ‘That is none of your concern, Eve. You understand me, eh?’

  ‘Diddle, diddle, dumpling!’

  We couldn’t make out his shape in the darkness, but Irenka recognised his voice. There was the chime of a stick on the park railings, the top of his ginger head. Billy Flynn was marching across the road towards us. He stopped and stood still, legs spread, hands on hips, outside our gate, looking in at us. ‘My son John went to bed with his trousers on. One shoe off.’

  And he bent on one knee, yanked off his trainer and hurled it at us. It flew at the window like a strange white bird in the dark of night and thumped against the glass. We both jerked our heads backwards. It fell into the mud below the hydrangea bush. How our faces must have looked, silent and scared, frozen in that moment when he had absolute control over us.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Irenka. I’ll be a good boy now, I promise.’ He said in a mocking tone. He rooted through the bushes to retrieve his shoe and made his way, hobbling, laughing, away from us, down the dark avenue that lead to the seafront and under the dank bridge of the train station where pigeons mate and breed and die under the wheels of jeeps and men from the pub take a piss or a snog or a quick fuck or feel.

  Back upstairs, I closed the shutters and double-locked the front door. And in the next five minutes I undid everything that that very expensive sleep trainer had taught us and Addie about sleep. I not only took her out of bed – and she was at that stage of deep sleep where she wanted to stay there, wasn’t fighting it any more – I carried her up to the sitting room and gave her some ice cream.

  Unable to sleep that night, I got up and logged onto Rollercoaster. Pink Panther was getting her Spanx in a twist. A mother had had such a stressful afternoon with her three children in a supermarket that she had left them sitting on the wall of the car park, reversed out of her space and pretended to drive off without them. They had got such a fright that they had run after her screaming. All the other mothers sympathised, said they had been there. Pink Panther said she would be reporting her to Social Services.

  I logged out, got up, opened the shutters, looked out at the night. Its stillness and quiet was comforting. Then a small flicker of light caught my eye. And there Billy was, standing still in darkness, holding a lighter under his chin, his face lit up by the flame, his satanic, twisted smile broadening and just as soon fading again.

  Chapter Sixteen

  We woke to the sound of chainsaws and opened the sitting room shutters to see men cutting the hedges that lined the park, lunging and retreating as they worked, lifting their snarling guide bars in the air. There were sights and sounds of industry everywhere: teams in Tidy Town T-shirts had begun raking leaves, heaping piles in specified points around the park. Neighbours I’d never seen before, in checked shirts and baseball caps, were working with yard brushes and spades along the south side of the square. Children held bin bags open while others climbed into the
bushes to retrieve things – umbrellas, beer cans, socks, crisp packets – that had blown up the avenue from the sea.

  We got dressed and went across the road to help, me casual in grey sweatshirt and jeans, Addie with a toy rake and her bumble-bee rucksack containing one unicorn, two fairies, a box of princess plasters, in case she had an accident, and her little book of wild flowers. It was worrying that she was expecting misfortune but the book of wild flowers made me happy. She used to potter after Joe around the garden, trying to match things with its black-and-white photos and in the early days after he’d left she had it with her all the time. Soon she abandoned it for some new obsession – her musical jewellery box that she’d filled with ‘sapphires’ or her plastic Fisher Price laptop – but it had left her with a lasting interest in nature (when she wasn’t playing Candy Crush Saga on my phone).

  As soon as we’d reached the gates, Addie let go of my hand and ran across the grass to Dylan who bent and lifted her into his arms, swung her around a couple of times, then carried her back over to me, and got on with edging the borders, Juliette stuffing his hoodie with leaves while he worked. I tried to get the image of his naked backside out of my head.

  Assiduous as ever, Irenka was on her knees by the flower bed, her slim, dexterous hands planting bulbs of daffodils and tulips. ‘Flowers uplift our spirit, well at least mine, anyway,’ she was saying, though no one was listening. She didn’t need a second person in order to have a conversation.

  Donal was standing above her, handing out trays of bulbs to the other volunteers. No one whistles any more, Joe used to say, but Donal was whistling that day, and there was even singing: Mr Norman in his high, tenor voice as he cleaned graffiti from the slide with his special ‘graffiti attack pack’.

  The local kids were raking with such enthusiasm that they were ripping out grass, leaving patches of dirt where they worked. Around the playground mothers hovered over their offspring, trying to keep them out of trouble.

  Joy had wheeled Arthur over from the Cherry Glade and had propped him beside the slide, the Yankees baseball cap on his head askew, the blue-white sheen of his shins exposed. Now she was up in the tree house attaching a homemade American flag above the wooden door. Billy was watching her from outside the park, a brown paper bag over his head, Ned Kelly-style, holes cut out at the eyes. Lars was there in his usual red-and-white striped top, settling on his bench beneath the oak tree. ‘There’s Wally,’ Addie always said when she saw him.

  ‘Come on, ladies, Sumita, Eve, let’s get to work!’ Irenka said, striding over to us. We’d been looking for an excuse to escape; we’d got stuck in the middle of a conversation with Beige Nicola and the mother who was always in riding boots and was too tall for me to consider making friends with.

  ‘I mean, at the end of the day, I personally feel there’s absolutely no point in buying environmentally friendly nappies if you’re going to dispose of them in a Tommy Tippee bin bag which takes about one hundred years to decompose,’ Beige Nicola said.

  ‘You could always buy some recycled nappy sacks,’ the horsey one said. Sumita listened, keeping her head down with a small repertoire of interjections which alternated between ‘Oh my gosh!’ and ‘really?’ with a roll in the ‘r’, using both often. I had nothing to add.

  Irenka grabbed Addie round the waist, watching as she escaped her and ran away. ‘Look, see. I still think she is walking a bit funny, on the inside of her feet. Her weight is not balanced, it’s not good for her spine. She needs better shoes, like Charlotte’s,’ she said, pointing at her own child’s feet. It sounded like she had done a lot of thinking about it. ‘They’re from Ecco. They have very good elasticity. Very good for their developing bones.’

  I took this with a nod and a smile. She wasn’t going to get to me that day. Also I’d asked her to mind Addie while I took my driving test that afternoon so I couldn’t fall out with her before then.

  ‘This is a public park. Open up, you spaz!’ It had been Mr Norman’s decision to lock the gates while we worked. Billy had hoiked himself up onto the railings and crossed to the chestnut tree beside them, where Mr Norman had nailed a sign with the new opening and closing times. He tried to yank it free.

  ‘If you don’t get out of that effing tree now, I’m going to come after you with my shoe,’ Belinda said, reaching over her solid midriff towards her foot, to show she meant business.

  ‘And you watch your language, young man. There are small children here,’ Irenka said, striding towards him.

  ‘That woman’s a pain in the arse.’ Nathan had come up beside me. ‘She deserves a slap. I saw her chase a kid round here the other day with a Twix wrapper in her hand. I mean, for fuck’s sake. She needs to wise up.’

  I was finding it hard to meet his eye, as if he really had had sex with me recently.

  ‘Your house is coming on. You know we’re so close, I can see right into your bedroom. Oh, sorry, that sounds a bit strange.’

  ‘No it doesn’t. It sounds very exciting,’ he said, leaning over and squeezing my arm.

  ‘Mama, can I make an apple tree with these? I know how to do it. Barney showed me,’ Addie said, holding an apple core in her hand.

  ‘Would you like me to help you with that, little lady?’ Belinda asked, rocking back on her heels, her cheeks flushed from digging. Addie handed her the apple and watched, mesmerised, as she teased the seeds out of the core, then the two of them knelt together and planted the seeds.

  I smiled at people whose names I didn’t yet know but whose faces had become familiar and I met some more neighbours that morning: a Chinese couple whose little boy was the same age as my girl, a homesick South African woman who worked for the bank and was always getting abuse from customers, and the lady from number fourteen who told me about a cookery course up the road.

  ‘Why does your mummy never put clips in your hair?’ Irenka asked Addie, as she led her away and I went home to get ready for my driving test.

  *

  ‘What’s the minimum tyre tread depth?’ Nathan shouted over to where I was standing in the front drive. He was on the other side of the park railings, above a row of daffodil bulbs he’d just planted, leaning on his spade. I hadn’t realised he’d been watching me. I hoped he hadn’t seen me wave up at the sitting room window, as was my habit, to pretend we didn’t live alone.

  ‘Erm … one point six millimetres?’

  ‘Very good. And name three people in authority for whom you should stop.’

  ‘Garda, school warden, person in charge of animals.’ I knew the answers to all these questions, Joe had asked me them a thousand times, it was like reeling off prayers at Mass. In theory I was great, in practice, a little less so. He’d tell me ten reasons I’d failed before I’d turned the engine on and the tensest of hours would follow, Joe jamming his foot on an imaginary brake every few seconds, gripping the handle above him, not daring to look away from the road ahead. We’d always finish early, swapping places in silence so he could do the tricky parallel parking bit. I’d slam the garden gate on him with my L plates in my sweaty hands and we’d both swear never again. I was going to pass this test all by myself.

  ‘You’re all set, best of luck.’

  ‘Bye!’ OK, I couldn’t mess this up. I got into the car, began reversing out the gate. Concentrate. Concentrate. Not only was Nathan watching, but there was a car idling on the road waiting for me to exit. Back I reversed, but too far, forcing the other car to reverse a few yards as well. Then I stalled. And stalled again, pulled myself together, ploughed on and grabbed for the indicator to thank him – that quick, confident flash of competent drivers – but turned on the windscreen wipers instead. I put my foot down hard on the accelerator not wanting to delay him further and also maybe to show off a little bit. On I went through sun bright streets, picking up speed, passing a sweet old man and his little grandson. The old man, though I didn’t recognise him, held his hand up as I passed him. I waved back, it was like Sesame Street. This really was a wonderful
neighbourhood.

  As I approached the junction where our road and the main road out of Bray met, there was a sudden sound of sirens. I tried to recall what you’re meant to do when an ambulance is behind you; it always made me emotional when I saw cars pulling over to let a sick person through. The siren was getting nearer and nearer. I looked in the overhead mirror but all I could see was myself: my arched eyebrows, my shower-wet hair. I readjusted it, and saw that it wasn’t an ambulance after all, but the car that had been behind me, now with a rotating light on its roof, and it didn’t seem to want to pass. It pulled up alongside me.

  ‘Do you know what you just did?’ He was a policeman. He wasn’t smiling, he had soft brown eyes that were not looking softly at me. I had no idea what he was upset about. Oh God, please don’t ask to see my licence.

  ‘Do you have any idea how dangerous that was?’

  ‘What was?’

  ‘You just went straight through a red light.’

  ‘Did I? No I didn’t. When? Where?’

  ‘At the pedestrian crossing behind you. And they hadn’t just turned red either. You could have killed that old man and the child.’

  ‘I had no idea. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry.’

  The old man’s outstretched hand – not a wave at all but a warning – telling me to slow down. To stop. To take heed. His other arm had been held over the little boy on his tricycle with his helmet, having learnt all about the green man.

  ‘Just show a little more consideration in future.’

  He was letting me go. I was not just reckless. I was selfish. And I was breaking the law.

  I drove on, still shaking, feeling like an admonished child. Everyone I passed on the high street, every single resident of Bray; Mrs Dicker always in soft focus in her bottle-thick glasses and beiges and creams and the folds of flesh of her fallen face, outside her bits and bobs shop; the school kids waiting below the graveyard for a bus, on the kerb, not out on the road, not about to kill anyone, not doing anything illegal, or reckless, seemed sane, more sensible, less selfish than me.