The Playground Page 17

  I pulled into the test centre and parked. Was my examiner standing at some unseen window, picking at his teeth, draining his coffee, pulling at the crotch of his slacks, waiting for his two-thirty? A time, not a name. One of ten to get through in the day.

  OK, what did I need? I leant over, opened the glove compartment and fished around for my learner’s permit, my hand shaky as anything. Not there. Cursing I pulled everything out: the boring old car manual that Joe was always trying to get me to read, two pairs of sunglasses, one with a broken arm, Joe’s gym membership for the Riverview Club. I turned the laminated card over in my hand. He looked tired in the photo, his eye bags, a family trait, very pronounced. It had expired of course. I think he went about twice, then pulled a muscle in his chest when lifting a too-heavy weight after not warming up. He blamed his trainer and never went back after that. That was so like Joe. He gave up on everything as soon as it got hard, just like he gave up on us. My permit was stuck to the underside of the card, the adhesive between them an ancient, fluff-covered Chupa Chups lollipop. I wiped the permit as best I could, stuffed it in my back pocket, took five deep breaths, checked my teeth for lipstick, got out and slammed the car door. I was going to get this, I was different from Joe, I was going to see this through.

  I sat in the waiting room that brought to mind failed Irish exams, the bitten lips of disappointed teachers and parents, slammed doors, tears of not understanding, and then sought out the toilets, always the toilets before the terrifying thing.

  I watched the swing doors to the interrogation room and when he appeared I could not believe my bad luck. The German. Not the damned German! The one who’d failed me the third time, when I’d been convinced that I’d driven beautifully. When I’d had to hold my fingers over the edges of my lips to suppress my smile as I’d followed him back into the test centre with warm thoughts of telling Joe, my mum, my sister. When I could just see myself emerging triumphant, punching my hands in the air, like that man on the Rules of the Road DVD.

  He didn’t seem to recognise me. This was probably a good thing. I resisted the temptation to remind him. We were the last of five cars to pull out. I followed the others, all terrified, all cautious, along the main road, feeling like a cartoon character of a perfect driver, looking in the mirror, indicating to change lanes, hands correctly positioned at ten to two. Observation, observation, observation. I wanted to talk to him, to get him on my side, but I knew that was against the rules. The air in the car was too sweet, too close.

  At the end of the street, there was a roundabout, a peculiar one with a church in the middle of it, one that had confused me before. It was a busy Saturday afternoon. Qualified, mature, sensible people were driving into town to shop or picking up their children from playdates. We all slowed, prepared to stop. A neat row of driving school cars, the drivers behind us, tutting at their misfortune.

  There was a break in the traffic. The first car, five ahead of mine, nudged forward and out, but instead of driving clockwise around the roundabout they indicated to the right and moved on. The next car did the very same thing. As did the three cars behind them.

  ‘What’s happening? Why are they all driving the wrong way?’

  ‘Drive on, please,’ said the German, his expression giving nothing away. Were some roundabouts different to others? Oh, God, what should I do? I followed my instincts and turned left. I did my own thing and went the right, correct way around the roundabout and when I reached the other side, the German settled back in his seat. The four driving school cars were in an untidy arrangement along the road ahead of us, doing three-point turns, not as part of the exam but in order to get their cars facing the right way to drive back to the test centre having all clearly failed. The German told me to overtake. I indicated to the right, pulled out and well clear of them, put my foot on the accelerator, drove over a speed bump and on into the traffic, confident, watchful, a taste of freedom in my mouth.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Simply Delicious Carrot and Courgette Muffins

  We stood over the recipe, reading it together, me in my Avoca apron, clean hands, hair tied up; Mum with the sleeves of her cardigan rolled to the elbow, eyebrows arched. She was reading aloud to herself, using the little finger of her left hand to keep her place in the text. Addie had her apron on too but was taking a break, sitting on her little red horse, sharing her grapes with Alfie and watching Charlie and Lola in Spanish. Joy had shown me an article about a mother who only let her kids watch cartoons in foreign languages – better for their brains apparently, so I thought I’d give it a go. Not that there was much wrong with her brain. She had stood beside me moments earlier as I’d tried to remove the plastic cellophane wrapper from the DVD. First with my fingers, then with my teeth. ‘No, Mama, you’re doing it wrongly. How about scissors?’ she’d said.

  ‘Maybe you could beat the eggs, pet?’

  We had the kitchen to ourselves for my cookery lesson; Joy was down on the promenade with Solly sticking crudely created plaster casts they’d made of people’s faces along the harbour wall with the strong sense that they were giving to the community rather than taking from it, by defacing the pretty harbour with ugly effigies.

  I shadowed my mother as she worked, sniffle-nosed and simple, following her around like a useless sous chef, getting in her way, asking silly questions. Cooking was so instinctive to her that she didn’t understand how I hadn’t picked up these skills by osmosis, particularly considering I’d been under her feet in the kitchen for most of my childhood, licking the mixing spoon of her chocolate cakes, cutting myself huge, jagged heels of Ballymaloe bread, which she’d have left to cool for a dinner party, standing tent-like on the breadboard, slathering them with butter I’d shaped with my fingers into ornate curls in the silver dishes with the blue inners that only came out when we had guests and made me think of priests and Mass.

  Addie and I had begun to bake most afternoons. This was how I was learning; Addie was teaching me to cook. The other afternoon we tried some Annabel Karmel veggie burgers. The recipe said twenty-five minutes preparation time – we were still grating carrots three hours later, but she loved it and even tried two mouthfuls for tea that evening before saying they were yuck.

  I broke three eggs into a bowl and tried to drag small fragments of shell out along its side using a teaspoon and, when that didn’t work, my fingers. I dropped a great lump of butter into a Pyrex dish filled with cool flour. If all my ingredients had been laid out in front of me in clean little Pyrex dishes, all measured and ready to go like on an old TV show, I think I might have been quite a good cook. It was the measurements that confused me – you’ll need maths all your life, my mammoth-breasted teacher had warned me – and then the ingredients. I was nervous of going into delis or organic stores where mothers who knew all about food queued behind me, stretched over me, asking about sweet potatoes and organic yams.

  Someone left the cake out in the rain. I don’t think that I can take it cos it took so long to bake it and I’ll never have that recipe again. Ohhhh noooo! Joe’s mother baked. Joe’s mother sewed. Joe’s mother made a needlepoint tapestry to mark the queen’s visit to Northern Ireland. He was disappointed to find that I didn’t possess any of these skills. ‘You weren’t brought up proper,’ he used to say.

  Mum stood up from the oven, having slid the muffins in on a baking tray, her face red from being upside down and from the heat coming from the opened door. ‘So now we just leave them for twenty minutes,’ she said, wiping flour from her sweater, retrieving a tissue from up her sleeve, dashing it across her nose.

  ‘I want another cartoon but in Bray language,’ Addie said, and then seeing that she had our attention, she changed her mind.

  ‘Watch this!’ she said, up from her seat, slamming down the lid of my laptop. She twirled around on the kitchen floor.

  We whooped and applauded.

  ‘That’s why because I’ve got so much energy!’ she said, giving us an encore.

  We carried
cups of tea out onto the balcony, along with a couple of deckchairs and a tin watering can for Addie that I’d bought in the two Euro shop. It had immediately leaked, leaving a trail of water from the kitchen sink to the sitting room window.

  ‘Ah, this is wonderful,’ Mum said, holding her head up to the sun, her chair sinking a little beneath her in the uneven Tarmac.

  It was one of those lovely October days, bright and cold, when you could see your own breath; the sky was cloudless and everything was clean-edged and cartoon-coloured. Mum was talking but I had gone, back to college classes I’d never taken in Oxford, with my black bicycle and striped scarf, past the steamy-windowed cafe on campus and the lamp-lit library behind ivy-covered walls and on to meet an imaginary man for a walk by the river and then, when it got dark, to a fireworks display on some misty old heath or hill.

  ‘Do you know what might look rather fun there?’ Mum was up off her seat peering over the balcony’s stone edge.

  ‘Ivy?’

  ‘Yop. But no. I was thinking more of something like a clematis – you could start to train one up along the pillars,’ she said, excited that she’d had a better idea than the one I’d suggested.

  ‘I’m just renting, Mum.’

  ‘Of course you are. I’d rather forgotten that. You could always mention it to your landlord …’

  Mum paused, gazed at the ground, the way people do when they’re trying to recall something, as if the answer will come from there.

  ‘To Mr Lyons.’

  ‘Maybe – look, there he is now.’ Nathan had just got out of his filthy jeep across the road, and was on the phone, surveying the house. He was wearing a luminous bib and holding a hard hat in his hand. The concrete, walls and roof were all in. It looked like they were fitting the windows that day.

  ‘Oh, he’s quite dishy, isn’t he?’

  ‘Do you think?’ I said, as if it hadn’t even occurred to me.

  ‘Well, I must say, I think it’s wonderfully optimistic to be building a house in the middle of a recession,’ Mum said, rooting in her bag for her sunglasses.

  ‘Isn’t it just?’ I said, sounding exactly like her. ‘And he was so sweet about me having got a lodger.’ As soon as I’d said it I remembered I’d told her a little lie. I’d said that I’d cleared it with him before I’d placed the advert. It was the sort of harmless untruth you tell your mother so she won’t worry about you, or worry about you a little less.

  She let it go. ‘Well, I’m jolly glad you’ve got that straightened out.’

  ‘Though now that it’s all above board, I’m having a few doubts about Joy.’

  This was not what she wanted to hear. Why do you do it, Bella would say. Why do you say things that you know will annoy her?

  I told her how she had taken over with Addie and about how I was starting to find her a little bit creepy.

  ‘Ah, listen, pet, it’s too late for that now. I really wouldn’t bring up anything that might offend her.’ She approved of Joy, she was older and more sensible and, most of all, Mum liked that someone else was looking after me so that she could have a little more peace.

  ‘I’ve got the best idea for Addie’s birthday,’ I said to distract her.

  ‘I feel desperate about this, love, but actually I’ll be in Cephalonia that week,’ she said, her voice rising a little towards the end of the sentence with happy thoughts of her trip.

  ‘Ah, Mum, that’s the second time you’ve missed her birthday in three years.’

  ‘But I’m sure I told you?’

  I shook my head, though no doubt she had. ‘And what about Maud?’ She was an old school friend of Mum’s who was on her way out. ‘You’ll probably miss her funeral if you go.’

  ‘Well yes, but I’m no good at funerals.’

  ‘It’s not a matter of being good, Mum, you don’t need to say anything, you just need to be there.’

  ‘But I can’t possibly let Vivienne down; it’s all booked and paid for and she’s expecting me and I go every year and—’

  ‘Mum, please don’t go. It’s just one holiday. Why are you always travelling? Don’t you like being at home with us?’

  ‘Now stop that! I’m perfectly happy at home. Addie will have lots of other birthdays and I’ll bring her back a surprise. I do feel awful about it, sweetheart, please don’t go on.’

  ‘My turn,’ Addie said, noticing Mum’s sunglasses for the first time. She abandoned her watering can and stretched out to grab them from her face.

  Mum obliged, bent down, helped slot them onto her grandchild’s little snub of a nose. Addie held her head high and jutted out her chin to hold them in place. ‘Look at me, Mummy,’ she said, walking straight into the wall.

  She whimpered, we reassured her, watched her, admired her and returned to our disjointed conversation. ‘And you can just about make out the sea.’ We stood together so that I could show her the triangle of blue that was visible between the two chimneys of the house opposite. ‘Yes, and when those leaves have gone, you’ll have a great view of it.’

  When Mum sat again, exhaling as she lowered herself, the way older people do, Addie was beside her chair. She’d become bored of the sunglasses game and was trying to hand them back to her.

  ‘Oh, thank you very much,’ Mum said, bending to retrieve them. Then somehow they slipped out of her hand. ‘Let me do it,’ Addie said as Mum felt around for them beneath her seat. It was at that moment, as she tilted sideways, feeling for them blindly with her fingers, that she lost balance and toppled over, still in the chair, trapping Addie beneath her.

  ‘Oh God! Mum! Addie!’

  Mum couldn’t move and I couldn’t move her. I tried to pull my child free but she was stuck under my mother and under the chair legs. Addie was screaming. I was screaming. Mum was telling me not to panic as she tried to hoist herself up, away from Addie, but the weight of her own body and the chair was too great. I had no choice but to push her backwards. I shoved against her soft, padded skin; I shoved as hard as I could to get her off my child, and she tried to assist me, jolting backward, trying to get into a rhythm where she could launch herself upright again. ‘Sorry, Mum,’ I heard myself whimper. I pushed, I flailed, I screamed, until together we made her fall backwards, still in the chair, with her back on the ground and her legs and arms in the air, the ridges of the wicker chair imprinted on the underside of her thighs. I cried with fright and relief, hugged Addie in my arms and checked her for damage. ‘Everything’s fine, she’s fine, I’m fine,’ Mum said, trying to comfort us from her position upside-down in the air.

  ‘It’s OK. Honestly,’ she said when she was upright again, though I could see that she’d snagged her skirt on the chair leg and that the skin beneath was bleeding. I sat down beside her, holding Addie, still trembling. Mum rubbed her hand along my leg, then wrapped her arms around both of us.

  ‘That’s my favourite smell. Firewood burning in the autumn. Can you get it?’

  ‘Not really. Though I do smell burning coming from somewhere.’

  ‘Oh dash it. The buns.’

  In a few seconds we heard Irenka’s quick footfalls on the carpet and her questioning call of my name, smoke travelling up nostrils as flared and keen as a dog’s. I anticipated her knock before she’d had a chance, opened the door and sent her on her way.

  Help! Advice needed!

  I typed into Rollercoaster as Addie sat beside me not eating her pasta that evening.

  My mum fell on DD today. She seems to be OK but she’s not eating and she’s a little bit wheezy. Do you think there could be internal damage? What should I do?

  There was a plethora of responses, most of them reassuring:

  OMG, you poor thing!

  How frightening!

  Hugs and xxxxxx!

  Then one pinged in from the Pink Panther:

  What sort of mother are you, wasting your time posting on here instead of bringing your child to Casualty?

  How dare she? I was still thinking as I bundled Addie into the car
.

  The hospital was an awful Victorian institution, the sort of place that makes you feel frail, with threadbare seats and walls the colour of panty pad packages and grey-faced, pyjamaed people in wheelchairs tugging at cigarettes outside the automatic doors and the Virgin looking down on us by the vending machine that didn’t work. And the smell, of illness, of death, sprayed over with antiseptic, made my limbs weak and made me want to take my beautiful, healthy, strong-hearted child home again to keep her safe and uninfected.

  The waiting room was full of people who looked like they’d been waiting forever: a large woman in a pink nightie in a wheelchair by the door, a packet of cigarettes on her lap; a bristle-haired rat boy walking in and out of the automatic doors, one eye so swollen he couldn’t open it. A woman who’d swallowed a fishbone that had got stuck in her throat, an elderly lady with her mother – sticks and bandages and plastic bags of belongings. I watched with envy and pity the people who were called to be seen by the triage nurse, while Addie lay listless in my arms.

  ‘Be brave, Mama, hold my hand.’

  It seemed impossibly small and soft in mine.

  ‘Now do this,’ she said, lightly stroking the top of my own hand with her finger to show me how.

  ‘Sorry, Mama,’ she wheezed, when she saw me sitting with my head in my hands, half an hour later. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered again, leaning forward to kiss me. Sometimes she would lean too hard on my shoulder as I tried to dress her, digging her sharp little nails into my skin, and I’d feel irritated by her physical closeness. At times our games, so exciting to her, were tedious to me. Some mornings, tired, hung-over, worried, I wouldn’t be with her at all. ‘OK, last time,’ I’d say, always hurrying her up, always with something more important to do. Or I’d yank her out of her chair when she’d spilt her milk by mistake, and squeeze that top over her head when it was six months too small for her, because we were in a hurry and because she looked cute in it, even if she wanted to wear the sparkly one. And then I’d sit her in front of yet another episode of Peppa Pig, because I wanted to do a workout, text someone, make up my face. I held her tight in my arms and nuzzled my nose in her hair, drifting in and out of conversations around me.