The Playground

by Julia Kelly

  Alfie returned, still with the toy between his teeth, to make sure we’d noticed what he’d done. The under-unit light above the sink stammered, blinked, gave up. I waited a few moments and pulled out the bulb. Where the hell would I find another one? It was covered in a layer of that black sticky stuff that is always at the top of things, but I liked the atmosphere it gave the room; it made it more homely; suggested baking and warmth.

  Addie had been quiet for a moment too long. Somehow in the thirty seconds it had taken to remove the broken light, she had become naked aside from her gum boots and was sitting on the floor examining her private parts.

  *

  In the bath I was more in control, at least in my position, by the taps, where beneath me, near the plug hole, I could feel the ragged edge where the paintwork had begun to peel. I had foam alphabet letters positioned on various parts of my chest, arms and legs and a blue plastic colander on my head. ‘No, that’s not the right game,’ she said, cross with me for not understanding. She stood on my stomach, whipped the colander off, folded her arms in a grump. Her bottom was mottled red. I felt behind me for the cold tap and let it run. I sank lower, deeper in the water, letting my knees submerge.

  On the bath’s edge, I held her on my lap, wrapped in a towel. And there we stayed, for a perfect few moments, her heavy, hot, clean little body in my arms, her eyelashes wet, stuck together. I sang Moon River and she hummed along, watching my mouth, wanting to join in but not yet confident of the words.

  I looked around me: the avocado-coloured sink, toilet and bidet were the sort that a house renovation show would have ripped out to give the room ‘a more contemporary feel’. The toilet seat was loose and sticky to the touch. I had scrubbed at the brown rust stain along the back of the bowl to no avail. Tomorrow I’d bleach.

  The water in the bathtub was sucked gurgling away. Addie stood between my feet on the thick pile mat, where they’d flattened and drenched the nap. ‘Hold mine hand,’ she said, moving carefully across the wet bathroom floor.

  ‘Oh no, we forgot Ficus Jute!’ Her tiny eyebrows arched in concern, her little palms upturned. Damn. Another job that would take too long. Addie liked to take life slowly; I needed to get through it fast. She climbed onto the wobbly white chair beside the sink, steadying herself before stretching over, a sponge in her hand, to wipe the bowl in which the plant was sitting. She used to follow Joe from room to room, taking turns with the spray bottle to water the plants, which he would finally turn on her and she’d run from him shrieking for me.

  I filled a glass above her, poured it into the soil.

  ‘No, you’re doing it wrongly! I’m the peoples in charge,’ she said, grabbing the glass from my hand.

  ‘Dada said only dus a tiny bit,’ she said, giving the leaves a quick rub and replacing the glass on the sink.

  Back on the safety of the floor, she let go of my hand and charged away.

  ‘Let’s play hideseek,’ she said, still wound up like a toy, shoving me behind the bedroom door where I’d hung Joe’s old dressing gown, unsure of what else to do with it. She hid behind the curtains – pale-green heavy damask decorated with cream roses. We both counted to five and I pretended I couldn’t find her coiled up like a fat sweet in the twisted fabric. She unwrapped herself. ‘Here I am,’ she shrieked with delight. ‘Close your eyes,’ she said then, and pottered about, moving teddies and dolls and balls. She forced me to lie on my back while she stacked toys on top of me, and put her sucky blanket, with its moist, vomitty smell over my face. I lay in a dull daze of submission. I heard her take a few steps back to get a good run up, then she hurled her compact little body on top of mine, using my face as a launch pad.

  She wriggled and squirmed while I tried to get her into her pyjamas, then she trotted to the far end of the bed giggling, just out of reach. I grabbed her arm, feeling it loosen in its socket and dragged her across the bed towards me. She cried, of course, and I was a hopeless, cruel mother. I couldn’t tolerate another minute of today.

  On the bed we sat close together, her water-heavy curls wetting her pyjama top; the battle to dry it was one I was too tired to fight. We read an adventure of Rupert the Bear where he’d discovered secret stairs in a tree trunk that lead to a treetop nursery, where babies nestled in cradles.

  ‘Why does that sentence have eyelashes?’ she asked, halfway through.

  ‘They’re not eyelashes; they’re called inverted commas,’ I said, trying not to laugh – she hated it when I laughed at her.

  ‘I’m not listening,’ she said a little later, her cheeky face animated, her one dimple indented.

  I sat on the floor outside the bedroom, my back against the wall, while her bunny rabbit mobile played the opening cords of Swan Lake. I put my head in my hands but tonight, for the first time in months, I didn’t cry.

  Chapter Three

  Alfie was sick in the night. I’d heard him pit-patting up and down the landing, but it was too late, too early, to get up. I could smell it before I saw it: a green puddle of stomach bile near the front door. I carried a bucket and mop through the sitting room, in my grey dressing gown, which the task seemed to suit, cursing as I stepped on a creaky floorboard.

  He was lying low, curled up in his bed, keeping a dark eye on me, seeming somewhat embarrassed by his effluence. I got to work, frowning as I slapped the mop into the vomit and circled it around. There was something solid in its congealing centre. Oh God. I flipped it over in my gloved hands, then lifted it, dry retching, in the air. There, covered in a greasy slime of seaweed, bits of a chewed plastic bottle and twigs, was Addie’s left shoe – sunflowers on the toes – which I’d lost on the beach last Saturday. It was intact; he’d swallowed it whole. My mouth was curled down with self-pity, as if I were being watched, as if Joe could still see me.

  He’d have remembered that today was bin day, but not which colour bin – refuse or recycling – and he wouldn’t have been able to check the printout he’d Sellotaped to the cupboard above the Aga in the old house because he’d have lost his damned glasses again. So upstairs he’d go, cursing, leaving the kitchen door open, allowing the dog to stroll in and eat Addie’s toast, while she rode her tricycle in circles and I chased her with a spoon and that ad for Harvey Norman roared from the radio. Then he’d be back, still without his glasses, whacking his head on the edge of the opened cupboard door. So I’d stand on tippy-toes and read the printout for him. And out he’d go again, this time through the back door, leaving it open, letting the icy morning air rush in. ‘Outside!’ Addie would say, climbing off her bike and ripping off her bib to follow him. ‘Finish your cereal first,’ and that would start her crying but she’d take a break between whines to turn to Joe, who’d just come back in. ‘We’re having a fight, Dada,’ she’d say straight-faced, composed, then turn back to me and continue whimpering.

  Then they’d corner me by the kettle, Joe reaching over me to get something, Addie pulling out the cord of my dressing gown. And when I’d step back the dog would be there too, circling, pacing, thinking all this movement must mean a walk, smells, a piss and a shit at last.

  Back upstairs to do teeth and as I’d wedge a toothbrush between my child’s clamped lips, the barking would begin. Then shouts from all of us at the dog as he snarled at the letterbox, sounding vicious and a bit clichéd as he tried to bite off the postman’s hand.

  Downstairs again; Joe in front of us, walking with one stiff leg swinging out (These were quirks he’d brought with him from the North. Him and his friends used to mimic the physical impediments of the unfortunate souls – the big black foot, the bow-legged – of the town where he grew up). ‘Just practising for old age,’ he’d say, making all three of us laugh.

  Then another search for car keys or wallet or phone and out with Addie, still in my dressing gown and socks over gravel and into the car and a face that looked fine indoors would be filthy in daylight, so back in to get wipes and out again and in the seconds I’d been gone she’d have put the keys in the igni
tion. She’d writhe and complain as I’d pull her away, astonished at her cleverness and my stupidity.

  And into her seat where I’d fuss, pull, stretch, poke, tighten and secure until my child was at last ready, fed, washed, safe and someone else’s responsibility for the next three hours. I’d kiss her, tell her I loved her, that she was my best friend and slam the car door. We’d give each other little waves through the window while the dog dug out some vile fleshy thing in a bag in the bushes or headed up the road to shove his snout in strangers’ bums.

  Then I’d direct Joe out the gate, half looking for the dog, and just when it was clear, there the dog would be, beside the back wheels, and I’d shout and bang on the boot to warn him and he’d swear and jam on the brakes and we’d all shout at Alfie again and then Joe would curse like someone with Tourette’s, this time at the bastards who wouldn’t wait for him to reverse. ‘Fucking cunt, shite hawk,’ I would read his lips say. And I’d whine through the glass, ‘Jesus, Joe, watch your language.’ And he’d mouth something back, something indecipherable, and then they’d be going, almost gone, and in I’d run, calling Alfie behind me. And I’d close the front door but I wouldn’t relax, knowing Joe would be back through it at least once, for some forgotten thing.

  *

  ‘Go away,’ Bossyboots shouted as I approached her bed, but I could see her small smile. She pulled her sucky blanket over her mouth. ‘Numnumnum,’ she whispered in her quiet rhythmic ritual, tiny inflections of teeth, lips, tongue. She rolled away from me, onto her side. ‘I wanted to dream about jellyfish but you kept getting into my dream.’ She was always grumpy in the mornings. I wanted to curl up beside her, keep the curtains drawn, listen to the wind funnelling down the chimney and watch shadows, lines of sunlight, move across the ceiling, until it was evening again.

  We were having the usual wrestle with getting dressed, though I was saner, more robust at the beginning of the day, when the doorbell rang, as promised, at precisely nine o’clock. My mother was obsessive, almost competitive, about punctuality. ‘Coming,’ I shouted, as I went downstairs still in my dressing gown with my naked three-year-old in my arms and the fear, always that fear, of missing my footing, of falling, of letting her go.

  Mum was talking to me from the other side of the door – she knew I couldn’t possibly hear her but she didn’t do silence. Neither did I – I chatted futilely back. I put Addie down to undo the double lock and remove the safety chain, and glanced at the closed door of the ground-floor flat, hoping our new neighbours wouldn’t meet us this way.

  She was standing on the doorstep with the postman. Somehow in those few seconds they had formed a sort of alliance and she was addressing her conversation at him rather than me. She was always polite to strangers; the sort of person who would apologise when someone else stood on her foot. I once heard her thank the speaking clock. And she loved men. She used to trap Joe with her eyes and hold him like a spider with its prey while she spoke to him about Robert the Bruce or Protestants or about Addie, or even about me, though I would be right there beside them.

  She blustered in, all business.

  ‘Still not dressed? Gosh, I’ve been up for hours; been to Mass, read the papers, had a swim in the Forty Foot.’

  ‘Mum, that’s dangerous. It could stop your heart.’

  ‘Nonsense. It’s wonderful,’ she said, rubbing the knuckles of one hand against the palm of the other, eyeing the postman who was still standing at the doorstep with a registered letter for me to sign.

  I could see her exhale as she lowered herself into the Irish Sea, stunned by its coldness but determined not to let it show. ‘This is heavenly,’ she’d say, when she was able to move her mouth again, making small, swift breaststrokes that somehow propelled her forward. And then, with a proficient flip, she’d be on her back, eying her bobbing toes, her bathing cap of white roses high on her head and everything still, aside from her hands gently weaving water.

  The postman said something I missed. Off he went and back up the stairs we went, Estée Lauder’s Knowing filtering through my nostrils. It was the scent Mum had settled on after years of experiments. ‘Well, it just seems to suit me,’ she said.

  ‘So how are you settling in, pet?’ she asked, looking around her, silently evaluating for herself. The sitting room, which had appeared vast and bright in its emptiness on the day we moved in, now seemed small and grubby with our few ill-fitting possessions apologetically positioned about the place. The sofa which had settled so well in Sandycove, looked sunken and scruffy beneath the bay window.

  ‘OK. I’m just tired,’ I said, sighing, feeling sorry for myself and feeling my bottom lip tremble – Mum’s presence was always unburdening. We moved into the kitchen. I rooted through a box labelled ‘miscellaneous’ for a second tea cup. ‘And I need to get this place clean.’ I felt like the addled woman in an advert before Mr Muscle appears to sort out everything. ‘Well, yes, you could really do with more storage,’ she said, meaning that the flat was a mess.

  Though we didn’t meet eyes – we knew each other too well for that sort of intimacy – I could see from them that she was also tired; they were pink-rimmed and small from insomnia, but now she forced them wide to talk to her little grandchild, bending to her level with questions and exclamations. ‘And where are your clothes, cheeky monkey? You can’t feed the swans with no clothes on.’

  Addie giggled, grabbed Alfie’s lead, ran out of the kitchen, both of us smiling at her perfect, peach-downy little bum. Then she was straight back in with a brilliant idea. ‘You be the doggie, Mummy, all right?’ This was another of her favourite games, me on all fours being a dog, while she ‘walked’ me on a lead. Alfie was never considered for this sort of task – she didn’t consider him a dog at all.

  When she’d tired of this game and everything seemed organised, we sat down at the kitchen table, my mother still making tiny adjustments to the position of things: her placemat, saucer, spoon. Although she was always moving, patting, prodding, organising and straightening, rooting and fixing, her presence made us calm and within minutes of her arrival, my little girl was content on her knee, the dog asleep at her feet.

  She looped her bag over the side of the chair and immediately un-looped it again, remembering the gift she had for me. She often brought back loose, brightly coloured garments from her travels that she genuinely expected me to wear. Her latest trip had been to Peru – a trek across the Andes to Machu Picchu with a nomadic assortment of widows, gay men and always the one unfathomable (no one was sure why she was there), all partaking in a frantic ticking off of antiquities and places and events that they felt were essential to a life fully lived. I braced myself. Today’s gift was altogether more practical: a hand blender – one that she didn’t use any more – ‘great for soups,’ she said, as she looked for somewhere to put it, knowing that I’d never even attempted soup before but that now as a single mother of a small child I would jolly well have to learn.

  ‘Milk?’ she asked, sitting again, sounding a little weary, the carton hovering over my cup. Something about this question had always irritated her. A tedious thing that had to be got through, an interruption. Or perhaps it was because it was something she should remember (does my daughter take milk in her tea?) but couldn’t seem to. And then another small irritation as she poured, her hand trembling as she tilted the carton. ‘Say when, will you? Say when.’

  ‘Anything interesting?’ she asked, watching my fingers as they sifted through the post, ripping open each envelope. When I didn’t reply she lifted her feet off the ground and began to do small scissoring exercises. ‘I had my dancing last night. I’m pretty stiff this morning, I can tell you.’ I could see her in the evenings as she waited for the milk in the saucepan to warm, practising what she’d learnt at ballroom dancing that week with her invisible partner, slippered feet skimming across the kitchen floor.

  ‘You should come along one evening, it’s terrific fun.’

  ‘You know I hate dancing. I’m far too
self-conscious.’

  She threw her eyes to the ceiling, bored by my vanity and lack of daring. Then her expression softened and became wistful. I could tell she was remembering her own agility at my age, seeing herself once again waltzing across a room with grace.

  ‘So, anything from Joe?’

  ‘No, Mum, I think I might have mentioned if I’d heard from him,’ I said, sounding repulsive. ‘Sorry, I’m just so stressed.’

  ‘Well of course you are, pet. I mean what mother of a toddler isn’t? And you’ve just moved house, for goodness’ sake. I think you’re coping admirably.’

  ‘I’m not really, Mum, it’s all going round and round in my head and I’m still not sleeping,’ I said, feeling my throat constrict.

  ‘Well, what about a nice hot bath in the evenings?’

  A nice hot bath. My family’s solution to everything. An eye mask, thirty drops of Valerian washed down with Chamomile tea, soaking my pillow with lavender oil and an emergency pink Xanax at two-thirty in the morning hadn’t made the slightest difference, so I was pretty damn certain a bubble bath wasn’t going to get me through.

  ‘And I’m lonely.’

  ‘I know you are, sweetheart. I remember those first few months without your dad. I’m afraid you are just going to have to get on with it.’ And her expression then was exactly as it had been at my father’s funeral – eyes lowered, stoical, serene.

  His death, twenty years earlier, had given her a new lease of life. He used to drive her demented. She’d lock herself in her room in the evenings when he came home from the bank, with her Readers Digest, the Teasmade and a view of the ocean which she loved, unable to hear his rants about the meat not being hung for long enough or there being too much coal on the fire, because she’d put her ear plugs in. When he died, she found some letters inside socks that confirmed what she had always suspected: he’d had a ‘fancy woman’ in London for years.

  ‘I’m worried that he doesn’t have a forwarding address for us – whatever about me, I really thought he’d make some effort to keep in touch with Addie.’