The Playground

by Julia Kelly

  ‘Well, we didn’t have a great night last night. I’m sorry if we kept you awake? But we’ll get used to it. It’s all a bit strange for her.’ She looked down at my child, who was eyeing the girl on the bike with shy intensity.

  ‘Hello, cutie pie,’ the woman said, squatting again, pinching Addie’s cheeks.

  ‘Oh, your mummy hasn’t dressed you right, has she?’ she said then, in a sing-songy voice. ‘You need another top on top of that top. A proper waterproof one – look, see, like Charlotte’s.’

  I tried to defend my sartorial choices, too stunned by her criticism to come up with an appropriate retort. I wanted to tell her to fuck off.

  ‘God, you might be right,’ I said laughing but feeling a tightness in my throat, resenting her and her freckle-faced little brat hermetically sealed in her helmet, all smug on her horrible bike. I wanted to tell her that my child was safe and happy and loved, which of course I didn’t, and that at three and a half years old she had yet to need an antibiotic, which I didn’t say either.

  ‘So, tell me, Eve,’ she moved close up to me, frowning, ‘did those leetal shitheads chase you out? They did, didn’t they? Those leetal pigs.’

  Chapter Six

  There was nothing on. From where I was lying, I could see right under the television set. A layer of soft grey dust was punctuated with small missing things and tufts of dog hair, like little balls of not coping. Joe loved dusting. I didn’t, don’t.

  I slid my hand in and pulled out a flimsy brown thing, now covered on one side by fluff. Ratty. Addie had been crying about Ratty for the past week – a cheap cuddly toy Joe had picked up for her from Ikea, that she now wouldn’t sleep without. ‘I need Ratty,’ she’d plead from her bed when I’d turned out the lights. And each night I’d tell her that I’d look for it. ‘How about Dada’s car?’ she’d shout after me as I closed her door, believing that I was really going to search for it rather than pour myself a large glass of red wine and collapse in front of Coronation Street.

  But one night she was so insistent, so distraught that I did go outside and across the gravel to Joe’s old car: the hearse, my mother called it, a black, low-slung Volvo estate, hunkered down in car parks, sidling along laneways, it always seemed perfect for an affair. He hadn’t even taken his car. His beloved Volvo. ‘You’ll need it more than me, for all your socialising,’ he said the day he left. It always irritated him that I was gone so often, so busy on play-dates and meeting friends.

  I’d turned on the overhead light, stretched and felt under the seats, around the oily runners and rivets. Then I’d lain still for a moment, crouched on the floor behind the driver’s seat. This was how I liked to travel as a child, curled up in my own dark and private universe, aware of, but not listening to, my parents chatter, the shipping news on the radio, watching the upside-down world of electricity poles that we passed on interminable journeys from the West, licking the leather seat, the road bumping below me, being safely returned home.

  I stayed in the shower till the water ran cold, then stood on the weighing scales and immediately stepped off. I bent down, reset the dial to five pounds below zero then stood on it again, this time with one foot only, leaning on the sink and the toilet top until the reading said what I wanted. I didn’t understand how I could be almost half a stone heavier than I’d been when we lived in Sandycove. Surely after all my suffering I deserved at least to be slim?

  I wiped condensation from the mirror above the sink and examined myself. There was a sleep crease running vertically down my left cheek. I put my hands on either side of my face and stretched the skin taut towards my hairline, then let it sag again. There were mornings in the mirror – with my glasses on in particular – when frowning back at me was not Eve at all, but an Irene; an older, jowly version of myself, with insipid grey eyes and librarian hair. At almost forty, my face looked acceptable in fewer and fewer mirrors, always appearing puffier and paler than the last time I checked. One of these days I’d look at my reflection and it will have just collapsed. I sucked in my cheeks and my stomach, yanked my sweater over my bum, bared my gums, stood back to study myself sidelong, groaned with disapproval and turned to go, pulling the door behind me, the vortex created by the open window causing it to slam. I peeped into the bedroom to check on Addie. She was still enjoying her lie-in, face down, backside in the air.

  I felt a small rush of excitement when my phone rang, always expecting Joe, even though it was me who was ringing it from the landline because I couldn’t remember where I’d left it the night before. What was happening to me? I had become the sort of person whose phone only rang when they’d rung it themselves. Still, some introverted part of me was enjoying this shadowy existence – seldom leaving the house, ordering my groceries online and getting them delivered and, even on the odd occasion that we did venture out, we moved through the streets of Bray invisibly, recognised by nobody; at home we lived behind blinds and walked in socks on wooden floors.

  Emma O’Byrne wanted to be friends on Facebook. Emma O’Byrne. Emma O’Byrne. And then there she was, sitting beside me in sixth class with her lisp and Swiss-roll rubber – it looked and smelt like a real Swiss roll – which I coveted and later ate. Her profile photo was Kermit the Frog. I accepted her friendship, though we were never especially keen on each other; it wasn’t just the rubber, I also lost her hockey stick by accident. I had a snoop around her photos: three children in a swimming pool on holidays somewhere. All red-heads. A poorly taken shot of her husband holding a prize-winning fish. And Emma herself, all her childish features now huddled into the middle of her round face, in between two other beaming girls, concealer caked around crow’s feet, so close to each other and to the camera you could almost hear the giddiness of their girls’ night out.

  Joe hated me being on Facebook. He just didn’t get it. ‘Why would you tell the world what you had for dinner? That your child has diarrhoea?’ That’s another thing I should have done. I should have switched it off in the evenings and talked to him the way we used to. ‘Who are you on to?’ he would always say. Now I could surf with happy abandon.

  I Googled ‘sudden, sharp, shooting pain in head’, put three new tops in my shopping basket at Zara Kids but stopped short of buying them when I saw the total add up. I believed for a while after Addie’s birth that maternity had made me less materialistic because I had lost all interest in buying clothes for myself, but all I had done was to transfer this materialism to my daughter; I bought endless outfits I couldn’t afford for her instead. I logged out and logged onto Rollercoaster.ie:

  Hi all, just wondering if you have any good ideas for entertaining DD between the hours of five and seven? All suggestions welcome. Am on steep learning curve! XX

  Responses pinged into my mailbox, lots of helpful suggestions, some with bullet points, others with no new ideas but lots of empathy and sympathy. And then one from the Pink Panther:

  What sort of mother are you that you need to ask strangers how to entertain your child?

  I formulated all kinds of vitriolic responses in my head, all sorts of justifications, fuelled by a flood of supportive reactions:

  Don’t mind her.

  What a bitch!

  She obviously doesn’t have kids.

  The Pink Panther strikes again.

  I logged out, got up, clicked on the kettle.

  How much time and energy did I waste every day boiling and re-boiling the kettle? I did it without thinking, finding comfort in the hissing sound of its building. I liked that it was something with a very definite start and finish. And that for those few moments of the day nothing else was expected of me. I could just exist. It was always in this position that I fell into a sort of mesmerised daze, capable of hearing and responding to things around me but unwilling to click out of it, enjoying its soporific nothingness. Virginia Creeper curled round the edges of the kitchen window, its virescent leaves wet after rainfall. It was eating into the brickwork and overtaking everything. A gate was banging against the
fence of the Cherry Glade next door. There was the sound of a spade being dug into the earth, the screech of children in a playground somewhere nearby, the Tannoy and rumble from the train station.

  On the road below me, the morning commute of oddness had begun. I didn’t know where they came from or where they were going, but they were a group of individuals who passed by under our kitchen window at this time every day: the sad, solemn man, his head permanently tilted towards his shoulder, who always stopped to check the sole of his shoes for dog dirt just outside our gate. He must have stood on some once, months or years before, and had been checking his shoes ever since. The one who strode along in his military-style cap and jacket, thumbs hooked round his rucksack, as if he were setting off for Camp Bastion to sort things out. A Roy Orbison lookalike in studs and leather – a brush of greased black hair, just when you thought you’d seen the last of Brylcreem. The middle-aged woman with the tartan trolley. She looked livid as usual, hating life, hating human beings. ‘Go back to England, you stupid cunt,’ she shouted at me the other morning when I caught her furious eye on the high street. Their trousers were always just that bit too short, their caps pulled too far down, there was a wildness or blankness in their eyes. Something was somehow just wrong.

  Beyond them, in the park, the Nordic-looking man I’d seen on that first visit to the playground – the one who said Alfie had stolen his drink – settled down on his bench, as he did every day, with his rucksack and bottle of something.

  ‘Jesus Christ, Alfie, don’t do that. You’ll give me cardiac arrest.’ The postman had fled with his hand intact, leaving a chewed flier for Soon Fatt take-away on the hall floor and a final demand from Airtricity. I ushered the dog back to his bed where I found what was left of my glasses. ‘See this? No,’ I said in the deep, growly voice the dog behaviourist had taught me. ‘What pleasure could you possibly get from chewing glass?’ Then I sat at the kitchen table feeling homesick, waiting for Addie to call me.

  *

  ‘We’d like to make an offer,’ Joe said to the pretty estate agent as she stood with her clipboard, neat trouser suit and clenched buttocks at the doorstep of our house, our first home.

  ‘It really is a trophy home. The aspect, the original features. Stunning!’ she said, casting her eyes towards the cornicing, ‘And the garden is to die for.’ It was the first day of viewings and seven or eight other families had stomped up and down the stairs, inspecting things, taking rough measurements, making plans, but we knew it was ours from the offset and the presence of these strangers in our home was making us tense. Even so, we did what they did, looked under things, turned taps, knocked on walls, switched switches, stared out the windows. And then we did something that no one else did – went in at ten thousand over the asking price – neither of us had any experience of these things and though I panicked later when our offer was accepted, it was a perfect home: a Victorian house with high ceilings near the sea, with three bedrooms and a secluded, walled garden. The attractiveness of the estate agent, all wet-lipped and shiny-haired, made it seem more perfect still. I saw us sitting by the fire in the cream, lamp-lit sitting room. The tiny third bedroom would become the nursery, which I would decorate with cloud wallpaper like the little boy’s room in Kramer vs. Kramer, a jellyfish growth chart on the wall by the door – or maybe not – wooden bookshelves at toddler height, wicker baskets full of toys. And I’d paint the floorboards white.

  ‘That’s what swans do,’ Joe said. ‘They build their nests, line them with their own down and grasses and anything soft, so the eggs won’t break or get crushed. They get everything ready and then they have their babies.’

  ‘Did you know that a swan can also break your arm?’ He thought this was ridiculous.

  We began trying about a year in. Our new home was still not organised, the spare room was full of boxes yet to be emptied, but all our friends said it was the perfect house for a family. Joe’s best friend said he felt a bit of sick rise in his throat when he came through the front door because it was so great: the garden with its tree house waiting to be discovered, the rope ladder, the old wooden-seated swing, and the yellow gate, under an arch of white clematis, that led down to the sea. ‘Wonderful for children,’ his wife said, peering out the kitchen window, a child at her breast. And so idle discussions about baby names began in the ad breaks between Coronation Street.

  After a few months of happy and energetic effort, I knew we must have been doing something wrong. I poured through books about fertility and began to monitor my monthly cycle. I kept a thermometer on the bedside table and took my temperature every morning, him in bed beside me, snorting at my eccentricity. We started timing ‘intimacy’ (Dr Percy’s word for the act) around my most fertile days of the month.

  I explored bits of my body I’d never thought about or visited before. My cervix, was it low and hard? Or high and soft? And could I describe my cervical mucus as having the consistency of egg white? After ‘intimacy’ I held my legs in the air and kept them there for as long as tolerable, and slept through the night with a pillow under my bum, fighting the pressure in my bladder till the following morning. Joe watched, waited, suffered, drew back.

  Another few months passed and still there was no baby, nothing to get excited about. I started to worry, went back to Dr Percy who told me to stop worrying, start exercising and give up alcohol and caffeine. I teased Joe about his swimmers being lazy; we laughed as we imagined them with snorkels, treading water or floating on their backs, taking it easy. Then I stopped laughing and started to look for answers elsewhere; I went online and tried all the things that had worked for other women. Doggedly I followed each of them. They didn’t work. We got a dog.

  I started eating almonds though I’d never liked them, and bought ice creams – excellent for female fertility according to the books – from Teddy’s after work each evening. Joe would cycle along Sandycove seafront to meet me on the days he worked from home; eating ice cream is something you really can’t do on your own.

  I became fascinated and resentful of other women who seemed to possess an ability that I appeared not to have, like Anna who lived next door, the one Mum wasn’t sure about, an introverted woman who I never got to know, who always seemed to be obscured by an open boot, or half inside her car sorting out her babies. Their cries used to travel down the chimney in the night, along the wall that the two houses shared, taunting me, infiltrating my dreams.

  While we were in this nothing time, I sometimes caught glimpses of her from the window of the utility room – we had a house with a separate utility room for goodness sake, we were clearly ready for kids. I’d watch her and her husband and their rowdy get-togethers in the back garden with their friends and their children, their endless laughter heightening my loneliness, my exclusion from an exclusive family club: her husband, Lee, in knee-length shorts, muscular, sun-tanned legs and feet in ugly Crocs, stretching and scratching the hair above his belly, pulling on a polo shirt that he’d pull off just as easily to fuck his wife, to make more babies, when he was drunk and all the guests had gone home.

  I carried pineapples, like tufty-haired cartoon characters, back from the local Spar and ate them each evening, but only around weeks three and four, as instructed, and took a tablespoon of cough mixture daily to make things more sticky downstairs. And I prayed and prayed and prayed to Saint Martha around the second half of each month and dropped in to light a candle for my baby whenever I passed a church.

  We visited Dr Percy together. She told me I talked too fast, that I needed to calm down, that it often took couples a year. Joe started to get a bit bored of it all, became sort of Buddhist. ‘Maybe you just can’t have kids,’ he said, one evening, and I lay in the shadowy dark of our bedroom stunned and sobbing, staring at the height chart of the previous owner’s children, etched into the door frame. This was unthinkable. I was good with kids. I could do a Donald Duck impression.

  Joe began to resent organised sex. And I resented him when he couldn’t or w
ouldn’t perform on the most important night of the month. Then I caught him looking at porn. It was late; I’d been on my way to the loo when I saw a sliver of light beneath the door of his office. I opened it to find him in a panic, thumping Ctrl Alt Delete and Escape. On his screen were a dozen frozen images of ‘mature women’ in compromising positions. ‘I don’t know how any of it got there,’ he said. The mature women part was what worried me most.

  I took up yoga to help me relax, acupuncture to sort out any blockages – my chi was all wrong according to my therapist. I bought and boiled foul-smelling herbal concoctions. I exercised, but only at the right time of the month (the first half) and not the wrong sort (running, horse riding) and always gentle, not too much. I bought more books, endless books, relaxation tapes, meditation CDs and month after month after month I purchased pregnancy tests, convinced that my early symptoms – stuffy nose, sore boobs, frequent urination, stomach pains, blurry vision, increased appetite, slight nausea, tiredness – were real rather than imagined. And each time I got a negative, I got more bewildered, angrier, more determined.

  It had been over a year of trying and babies now filled my every waking thought. I leafed through magazines with a pair of scissors and cut out anything baby related. I created baby collages, pinned them to a cork board and kept it hidden in the wardrobe in our room. I thought only positive baby thoughts; I saw mothers and babies and buggies and swollen bellies everywhere. The mums so smug in their happiness, so damned lucky. How come they could do something I couldn’t? Look at their faces, my sister used to say, trying to make me feel better. Do they really look so happy? Are they not exhausted and stressed? But all I could see were perfect babies, big fertile bodies, huge motherly breasts. I held my friends’ newborns, breathed in their delicious new smell. We returned to Dr Percy. She looked a little more concerned this time and agreed to send us for tests.