The Playground Read online

  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.

  ‘Let’s dance, Mama,’ Addie was standing up in her bed opposite me.

  ‘Shush.’ I whispered, inwardly cursing.

  ‘How about you be a crocodile?’

  ‘Back to sleep now, sweetie.’

  ‘It’s too boring! How about Where’s Wally? That’s a good idea.’

  ‘That’s a very bad idea.’

  ‘Is it morning time?’

  ‘No, it’s the absolute middle of the night.’

  ‘But my tummy says it needs a cartoon.’

  I glanced at the clock; ten past three. I got up, sat on the edge of her bed and sang ‘Mocking Bird’ over and over. Then I rubbed my thumb along her forehead the way she liked me to. I listened to her breathing become deeper, crawled back into my own bed and lay utterly still in the darkness, fighting the urge to scratch an itch on my leg.

  ‘Wakey wakey!’

  ‘Damn! Addie, I mean it. Mama is sleepy.’

  ‘Wake up, Daddy,’ Addie would say, giggling, whenever Joe played dead. And the longer he stayed there, tongue lolling, still, the more she would giggle. ‘Daddy, Daddy, wake up,’ her voice getting thin and sharp with expectation because she knew what was coming. All at once he’d pop his eyes open, sit up, grab her, pull her into his chest, hug her and tickle her and she would roll around screaming with delighted protest while he’d blow hot raspberries on her soft, warm coiled-up little neck.

  As a boy he used to play dead to scare his parents when they went out for an evening. He’d lie just inside the front door in a sort of broken position with ketchup on his head and face for ages until they got home, whereupon his mother, a busy, no-nonsense Women’s Institute woman, would step over him, saying ‘Oh, don’t be so silly, Joseph. For goodness’ sake, get up.’

  ‘Mummy!’

  I was now in a sleep-deprived rage. I was talking in warnings and capital letters. I got up and searched for Calpol in the boxes still to be unpacked in the kitchen and bathroom, not the manufacturer’s intention but it generally made her drowsy. It turned up in an old wine box marked ‘Xmas’. I was only halfway there. I held the bottle under the bedside light to read the dosage, my fingers sticking to its tacky sides.

  ‘Some delicious pink medicine,’ said Ratty – she only obeyed orders when they came from her toys. She whipped her head away just as the spoon reached her mouth, spilling Calpol all over her pyjamas.

  ‘Christ!’ I was lashing out, bri
ttle. I lifted her out to be changed, then settled her back into bed.

  ‘Mummy, mummy, mummy.’ She was upright again.

  Jesus, that sound. That word.

  I got out of bed, stood over her, grabbed her round the waist, forced her little body backwards and held her legs in a lock. She kicked herself free, turned onto her knees and stood straight back up. I shoved her down again on the mattress, this time with such force that she was stunned for a second – we both were – then she howled in disgust and protest.

  ‘I’m going to tell my Dada that you hurted me!’

  ‘I didn’t mean to hurt you. Mama’s just very, very tired and you are doing very bad misbehaving.’

  ‘I want my Dada,’ she howled again and again. I held her until her breathing softened.

  ‘What’s Dada’s favourite colour?’

  ‘Silver, I think.’

  ‘I’m going to make Dada a card with silver sparkles and jewels for his birthday. Is that a good idea?’

  ‘That’s a great idea. Now let’s get you back to bed.’

  ‘But I want to sleep in your bed.’

  ‘Absolutely not.’

  ‘Absolutely yes,’ she said, stumbling a little over the word.

  She won. She always did. I lifted her into my bed. She wanted to share my pillow. Then she wanted to hold my hand. She moved and wriggled beside me – at one point I was lying horizontally across the bottom of the mattress and she was vertically above me – until her movement slowed and I could hear her working her sucky blanket. Then she was still.

  ‘Mummy?’ she whispered, smiling, curled up beside me.

  ‘What is it?’

  She moved her face closer to mine on the pillow, asked me to lift my head. She slipped her arm under my neck and hugged me.

  ‘My eyelashes sound quite sandy when I do this,’ she said, opening and closing her lids against the pillowcase.

  ‘That’s just what they sound like. Quiet now.’

  ‘Mama, I love your boobies,’ she said in the darkness.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I love your nose,’ she said, touching it.

  ‘Thanks, sweetheart. Now, off to sleep.’

  ‘And I love your ears. I love your muscles. And I love – what are those things?’

  ‘Eyebrows.’

  ‘I love your eyebrows.’

  Chapter Five

  When we arrived at the park that first time, there was no one else there. We had observed it through the railings as we walked around to the gates, Addie on one side of me, tugging at my hand, jumping up and down in anticipation, Alfie on the other, pulling on his lead, panting, wanting to be free. I released him and he bounded ahead of us, round the corner, in through the gates and straight for the bushes, where he found an empty cider bottle and settled under a tree to chew on it.

  Addie and I made our way around the small winding path that skirted the playground, until she could no longer resist. She let go of my hand and ran towards the swings, slowed as she approached them, then turned and waited for me.

  ‘Can I be the leader?’ she said, getting ready for a race.

  ‘See? This is the face I need if I’m going to win.’ She scrunched up her nose, bared her teeth, made her hands claw-like and took off.

  ‘Be careful!’

  ‘I will, Mama. I’ll be very, very, up to the top careful.’

  ‘I winned!’ she said, making the see-saw the finish line.

  What had seemed quite idyllic from the distance of the sitting room window was, I could now see, very shabby: the rope bridge leading to the slide was missing several logs; the picnic table was broken and etched with kids names and Tippex-ed hearts and all around the boundary to the play area, there were dusty bald patches where the grass had given up.

  Unwatched, we played hopscotch; my little girl shadowing me, shrieking as she stomped along the numbered squares, champagne-coloured curls bouncing, chubby arms in the air. Then we moved in a rush from the roundabout to the see-saw to the slide, shouting and singing as we went. I heard myself use that verbal tic of parenthood – ‘Now’ – in a satisfied way, as I settled her into each new thing.

  I held her around the waist, slotted her solid little legs into the bucket swing, bending her knees – my knees – into place. I gave her a push, then swung on the grown-up swing beside her, so that we were moving in unison, singing to ourselves as we glided off the earth and into the air, holding our heads back to stare at the upside-down world.

  ‘Push me. Push me,’ she demanded, swapping to the big swing. ‘Higher,’ she shouted and ‘Again.’ We were having a great time until I pushed her too strongly by mistake. She slid off the seat and fell forwards onto the hard muddy ground underneath. I held her, told her I was silly and sorry and waited through the long inhale that comes before tears. A small piece of skin had come away from her knee. ‘You’re very cheeky,’ she said, between sobs.

  ‘She OK?’

  I turned to see a boy emerge from the slanted roof at the top of the slide: he looked about sixteen, dark hair over his eyes, a Bauhaus T-shirt, black jeans, Converse high tops. His movement seemed to trigger more general activity and now behind him there was a further languorous sense of stirring; glimpses of feet, heads, backsides.

  There were at least eight of them: a group of teenage Goths with tattoos and piercings, purple lipstick, black, kohl-rimmed eyes. A large, ginger-haired boy in a leather car coat jumped down from the slide, wiped dust off the legs of his jeans; a sullen girl in a deodorant-stained chiffon dress clambered over the rope bridge, her friend followed behind her in sleepy resignation, a carton of hair dye in her hands, black paste still in her hair and stained around her forehead.

  ‘Can we play?’ The same dark-haired boy asked politely.

  ‘Of course. Do what you have to do.’ I said, attempting to sound edgy.

  He smiled at us and began swinging on the monkey bars, his T-shirt riding up, revealing an adult line of hair from his belly button down. A blonde girl chewed on her lip and tugged her T-shirt over her bum as she passed us and went over to him. I breathed in the hormonal reek of her early adolescence. He swung his legs forward and gripped her round the waist, then they both fell to the ground, laughing. ‘Get off me, Dylan. I mean it!’ she said as he writhed around on top of her. I felt a jolt of jealousy watching them: their young bodies; the drama of all they had ahead of them; the darkest, loneliest lows of course but also the extreme emotional highs.

  ‘I want to go home,’ Addie said, still whimpering in my arms after her fall. I was feeling a little intimidated too but I didn’t want it to show, so we lingered for a few moments, her neck craned with a child’s curiosity as a group of them stood on the net swing together and began setting it in motion.

  ‘Your dog stole my drink.’ This came from a tall, Nordic-looking man who was standing outside the park railings near the climbing frame. I’d seen him pass our gate before. ‘Oh, God, I’m sorry. Drop, Alfie! Drop.’ I said, yanking the bottle from his clamped teeth. The man watched us for a moment, laughed and walked away.

  ‘What’s her doing?’ Addie asked on our way out, pointing at a boy lying prone on the grass by the bushes, his head bent low – he seemed the same sort of age as the others but wasn’t part of their gang. He looked like he was searching for something, or maybe he was unwell. We walked towards him; he didn’t seem to notice us, or if he did, he didn’t turn around. We moved a little closer. He was holding a magnifying glass in one hand, a jam jar in the other, burning the wings of a trapped butterfly through the rays of the early morning sun. I pulled Addie away. ‘Stop that, it’s cruel.’ He turned around. He had a pale, flabby face, red rings circling his eyes.

  ‘Ah, bugger off, barge-arse!’ he said, grabbing the jar and moving on.

  With a lump in my throat, we left the park and walked towards home past the high hedges and electric gates of the villa-style houses opposite the entrance, Addie behind me, side-stepping along the railings. Most had been given mod
ern extensions and facades, bay trees on either side of their freshly-painted front doors, fat polished people carriers in the driveways. On the other, dark side of the park, were several grand Victorian homes that looked as grey and as worn-out as their owners, who I’d seen tread daily to Mass, the library, the butcher’s; old-fashioned things like fuchsia and nettles still thrived in their front gardens, Virgin Marys and Children of Prague stood forever over fanlights. At the new house on the corner, a modern, energy-efficient replica of the old red bricks, coils of turf had been stacked into a pyramid, waiting to be rolled out to make an instant lawn. My landlord, Nathan Lyons, also owned this site. There was no sign of him today or of any work being done. Beside a stationary JCB, there was a carton of milk, a bag of sugar, and what looked like an old pair of boxer shorts – the usual debris of builders.

  Addie offered me her hand as we approached the road back to our flat. I took her small, warm fingers in mine and when it was safe, we crossed together, me and my perfect companion, her little head turning as we walked, eyebrows arched, watching everything.

  Why hadn’t I investigated the playground before agreeing to rent the flat? When we bought the house in Sandycove, we had driven round the area at different times of day to see if there were other children living there and to see if there was somewhere our imaginary child could safely play. Why was I so untogether now that we were on our own?

  On the gravel of our front drive, a young girl, the owner of the Barbie bike we’d seen in the hall, was being attended to by her mother, who was squatting, strapping a pink helmet under her chin, unaware that she was exposing her sensible knickers to her new neighbours. The girl scowled at Addie and inched backwards, still straddling the crossbar.

  ‘Stay still,’ her mother said, looking around at the same moment, then getting to her feet. We exchanged compliments, ages, names, though I didn’t quite catch hers. She repeated it but I still didn’t get it. I knew I couldn’t ask her a third time.

  ‘You’re the new people upstairs, right? You settling in OK?’ Her accent was Eastern European, her hair crew-cut. There were several angry-looking spots between her eyebrows.