The Playground

by Julia Kelly

  Six months later, tired, broke, no longer excited, we embarked on our first round of IVF. Around about the same time, Joe was made Creative Director at Browne & Davison. Now I was going it alone and I was out of bounds. I was bloated, crotchety, hormonal, my thighs covered in square patches where the progesterone was entering my body; the skin underneath pink and sore and itchy as anything. I set alarms that woke me too late at night and too early in the morning, to remind me to take drugs that made me flatulent and swollen and grumpy. There were no bottles of wine together, no runs with the dog. I was on my own with my private obsession. Just me and my maybe baby.

  I went to bed early after each attempt and tried to picture a busy little embryo burrowing into fleshy darkness. Why couldn’t I stretch my head inward, disappear under my polo neck and travel internally down through my throat and on past rubbery tubes and wires and workings of purple, black, rich red, to have a look, one huge upside-down animated eye staring at the fleshy, pulsating womb and see what was in there, if anything, and what it was doing?

  I Googled success stories and waited and waited and purchased endless pregnancy tests. And when the day came I held the little white stick up to the light with shaking hands and turned it and squinted at it and saw – there it was! Was it? Maybe – the faintest of faint pink lines? I checked it and checked it again. With glasses, without, threw it in the bin only to retrieve it ten minutes later, to study it and study it further. And on it would go for hours, all day. Because I must have been. I had all the signs, the drugs mimicking pregnancy symptoms, convincing me that this time, at long last, it had worked. But always my time of the month arrived, as violent and bloody as negative can be, a shouting scream of NEGATIVE, NOT A CHANCE, NO BABY, NO HOPE. I wasn’t just a little bit not pregnant but absolutely un-pregnant, no baby whatsoever. Fresh, streaming, bright-red blood stained the hard, shining white ceramic and crisp layers of toilet tissue.

  *

  Joe would open a bottle of wine; I’d peel the patches off my thighs, their black sticky outlines, so difficult to remove, reminding me of my failure for days after. I’d tell my friends and feel their disappointment, their overly long hugs. ‘I’m so sorry it didn’t work for you. I can only imagine how you feel,’ they’d say as they fed coins into a parking meter and waited for the little ticket to print out.

  But they didn’t know that I’d already moved on. They were still getting over Plan A, whereas I had galloped on to Plan B. A new cycle. A fresh start. Hands over my ears and humming to block out their concern and questions and to fight the gnawing feeling that nothing would ever grow. That at not quite thirty-eight years of age, I was barren, acarpous.

  I’m doing it again, grinding my teeth. Working away on that enamel.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘You have passed,’ the instructor, a very kind man from Germany, told me on the day of my third driving test.

  I beamed at him, disbelieving.

  ‘Not,’ he said then.

  ‘I have passed not?’

  ‘Yes. I’m sorry. You have passed not.’

  It was the single sentence he had to get right in his day.

  *

  ‘She failed,’ I heard Mum say as I sat in her kitchen, quiet that evening. She had stumbled on the stairs on her way to answer the front door, such was her speed, her need, to impart the news to Bella before anyone else. She was girlishly competitive about these things too, always first in line. Like a child, she was energised by drama of any sort.

  After three failed tests (everyone promised I’d pass in an automatic) and five instructors, I had accepted that driving wasn’t for me. I would travel by train, I would walk, cycle, keep trim, become happy with my quirk, happy to be in the passenger seat, reading magazines, my socked feet pressed up against the windscreen, happy to be chauffeured about by Joe for the rest of my days. Then Joe was gone, but his car was still there, moss growing along the rubber sills of the windows. And I was living in Bray, miles from anywhere.

  Little Miss Muffet liked to keep a keen eye on my driving, her head craned forward from where she sat in her throne behind me. Her complaints were varied and continuous: ‘Too fast, Mama!’; ‘Slow down,’; ‘Too bumpy over the bumps.’ ‘That’s better,’ she sometimes said, settling back into her seat, turning her face and thoughts to the window.

  That afternoon we were on our way over to my mother’s for tea. ‘Thank you,’ Addie whispered, imitating me, holding up her hand as I gestured to a driver who’d let me go ahead of him as I turned onto Bray High Street. It was just after that, that I clunked into the pot hole. The full force of it hit the front left wheel, but we seemed to be still moving and the tyre felt OK and I was now too terrified to stop. I’d been jumpy already, driving Joe’s hearse on my own without a licence, and every time I set out I was convinced that I was going to kill us or someone else.

  We took the back road through Shankill and Killiney to avoid other traffic and the possibility of being stopped by the police. Before we’d reached Dalkey, Addie had begun whining behind me, having dropped my phone during an overly vigorous game of Candy Crush Saga.

  ‘Look at the sea!’ I said, trying to distract her. It was the single thing I’d learnt about being a mother – distraction works. ‘And look at the island. Would you like to take a boat over to that island one day? We could bring a picnic.’

  ‘Is that Dada’s island?’

  ‘No, what do you mean, darling?’

  ‘You said Dada was on an island.’

  I’d told her he was on another island, England, in the early days, when I thought he’d just needed to clear his head, when I thought he was still coming home.

  ‘Oh, no, he’s not there, sweetheart,’ I said smiling, but feeling it physically.

  ‘It’s not funny. I want to see Dada.’

  ‘We can’t, darling. He’s not there.’

  ‘Let’s visit Daddy! Mama, no, this way! You’re going the wrong way.’

  ‘No more shouting or Mama will have a crash.’

  ‘Daddy!’ she began to cry.

  ‘I’m getting cross, Addie.’

  ‘Well, I’m one hundred crosser than you!’

  ‘I’m warning you—’

  I pulled over, found a new game, handed her back my phone and though she was still whimpering, she soon became absorbed by its little beeps and chirps. I put my foot on the accelerator; I couldn’t wait to be with my family – I needed them to sort everything out.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, please find me a parking space,’ I said, entering a car park that was about three miles from my mother’s house but large and quiet and therefore appealing.

  *

  I lifted Addie up to let her press the doorbell. She held her little finger on it. It made its flat drone, like the wrong answer on a quiz show. And then we waited. She turned her face to mine. I rang it again and listened for the sound of footfalls on the stairs, the out-of-tune hum and the indecipherable greetings and apologies that always followed. Nothing. Puzzled by our inaction, Addie shrugged her shoulders, turned her little palms upwards. I bent to peer in through the letter box: fresh lilies on the polished hall table, a brown bag of something waiting to be collected on the chair beside it, a jacket hung across its back, beneath it, a pair of Mum’s tiny, powder blue tennis shoes. An umbrella was still propped over the top of the old, no longer working, grandfather clock to protect it from the leak that had developed in the pipes above. It seemed too still, as if it knew it was being watched. I pressed the bell for a third time and felt that slow heavy dread in my stomach.

  I pulled my phone from my back pocket, dialled her number, heard the click of the answering machine. I turned towards the street. Across the road a suntanned man in unseasonal shorts was lifting a lawn mower from the boot of his car, his Sunday going on just as before. He looked up, gave me a half-wave.

  ‘Are you looking for Dot?’ he shouted over, setting down the machine. He strode across the road towards us, glancing into the distance and the
n down at his own feet to avoid the embarrassment of having to keep meeting my eye.

  ‘She was expecting us at five. She’s not answering. I’ve rung the bell three times. It’s just so unlike her,’ I said, sighing to dissuade tears.

  ‘Maybe she’s just popped down to the shops. Wait there and I’ll have a look round the back.’ I nodded, thanked him and he set off down the gravel path of the adjoining house in a half-run that made me more, not less, concerned.

  So this was how it was going to happen. This was when – a bright Sunday in September. The thing I had feared and dreaded for years, ever since my father had died and even more since Joe, which I had played out in a dozen different scenarios, was now taking place and I needed to be brave. In my mind I was making phone calls, at the funeral already, trying to come to terms with my mother being gone. Her tiny tennis shoes no longer of use.

  We’d been on a ship together in a dream I’d had a few nights before. Her face was sketchy, unsmiling, distant, her eyes sort of scratchy and vague. I’d shown her my cabin at bedtime and she’d pointed to where she would be sleeping – in an enormous shiny white coffin. I’d begged her not to get in. I needed her not to be dead because, then, who would look after me?

  Sean – I remembered him now from my mother’s drinks party last Christmas – was striding back towards me, shouting, ‘It’s fine. She’s fine. Her bathroom window’s open. Elaine said it was closed five minutes ago.’ I didn’t see how this was proof of anything but we crunched back up the gravel path together. I gave the bell another long ring, Sean rapped on the knocker. Seconds later my mother was standing before us, a garden spade in her hand, bringing with her that particular, comforting but impossible-to-define, smell of home.

  She’d been putting cuttings on the compost heap and hadn’t heard the bell. ‘And you’re not normally that punctual,’ she said, pulling me towards her and kissing me on the head, apologising and blaming me at the same time. She thanked and excused Sean, both of them amused by my neurosis.

  The kitchen floor was slippery with grease. The two chickens in the oven needed to come out. Still suffused with the relief of her being not dead, I watched Mum work around us, confident but rather irritable. She was trying to locate the oven glove the cleaner had tidied away, settled for a T-towel, put the peas on to boil, then lifted the heavy, ancient oven dish containing the chickens – ‘Ay yi yi’ – from the top to the bottom oven shelf. ‘I really don’t need little people under my feet right now,’ she said, encouraging Addie out of the way.

  Bella arrived just after us, with a litre bottle of 7UP, ‘the worst PMT’ and without her husband Sean who’d stayed at home to watch the match. She warmed her backside against the Dimplex heater in the kitchen, which wasn’t in fact on. Her two children, Emma and Jack, were slumped in the sitting room, legs lolling over sofa arms, eating tortilla chips, bored, whiffy-socked, half-watching The Simpsons.

  Older than me, more practical, more sensible, more dependable, and more like my mother in every way, Bella was Mum’s perfect company and comfort. They moved about the kitchen in sync as they spoke – Bella in her Sunday best: navy hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, hair scooped back into a bun; Mum more formal in cashmere, pearls and tapered slacks – knowing what to do, how to do it and when, whereas I just got in the way. I was an irritant, a tsetse fly, as Joe used to say.

  The table which Mum had set minutes earlier was already in a state of disarray; a brush matted with brown hair and a copy of I Can Make You Thin had somehow made their way on to it, and Addie was rearranging the table settings, moving along the bench on her knees, putting one fork at a time in her mouth as part of her quiet game of make-believe. Mum tried to clear some space for the roast potatoes and broccoli. Rosacea had flared up in a butterfly pattern around her nose as it did when she’d been rushing. ‘Gosh, it’s like an oven in here,’ she said, when I complained of feeling cold, using the back of her hand to brush a stray hair from her eye. She always suggested Sunday dinner but you could tell that she had begun to find it too much work. She’d have been far happier snoozing in front of Midsomer Murders.

  I tried to divert Addie by making rather unconvincing noises of pretend interest when she handed me several small dull objects to admire. I wondered if there could have been someone somewhere in the world sitting, as I was then, holding an acorn, a small plastic fish and a toy shark. When you spend a lot of time on your own and in your own head, you contemplate such things.

  Emma joined us in the kitchen. She slid along the bench seat, punching her chewed, half-varnished nails on the keyboard of her iPad, her pale face concealed by her unwashed hair. She kicked her legs against the table leg in a zombie daze, but a slight grin was detectable on her face as she knew she had our attention. She wanted to look miserable. She hated being thirteen. She wanted her parents to be divorced. She dreamt of being an orphan.

  Bella disappeared with a plate of chicken for Jack who was still watching TV.

  ‘Did you hear that Wendy O’Brien had a baby boy?’ Mum asked, picking at some broccoli.

  ‘Mum. Yes. I was the one who told you,’ I said, then tried to soften my tone by smiling. I was irritated by other people’s good fortune when I was having such a miserable time and further irritated by my mother reminding me of their happiness.

  ‘Oh, yes. Well it’s great news, isn’t it? Though I’m not at all sure about the name.’

  ‘Hector.’ We said in unison to Bella, returning now with Jack who had his hand between his legs, but insisted he didn’t need a pee.

  ‘Such a strange choice. Hector. Sounds like a bad cough.’

  ‘Do a down dog,’ I said, cajoling my child who, bored of eating, had slipped down from the table. Of course she refused, only assuming the position, shooting her little bum in the air, when we’d all given up looking at her. Then she cried because no one was watching.

  There had been a time, pre-children, when family dinners were for adult conversation and politics and great howls of laughter, but now they were always halting and disjointed and no one was ever sitting at the same time.

  Mum was trying to tell us about the itinerary for her next trip, a five-night break in Paris with a few girlfriends to see a special exhibition at the Louvre. Her children and grandchildren were continually interrupting her, not listening and even leaving the room as she read, but she was used to this sort of distraction and it never deterred her. ‘So then on the Friday evening we’re going to a restaurant in the Latin Quarter that I’ve never heard of, oddly enough.’ This was rather odd for someone so ridiculously well travelled.

  ‘What’s it called?’ Bella asked; she’d stayed in that area before.

  ‘TBC,’ Mum said, showing us where it was printed on her itinerary.

  ‘Restaurant TBC – Mum, that means to be confirmed.’ We all giggled about this, even Mum, while shaking her head and benating herself for making such a silly mistake.

  *

  ‘I’ve been so bad this week,’ Bella said, picking a walnut from the top of the coffee cake, popping it into her mouth, clearly suffering a combination of Sunday evening melancholy and postprandial guilt.

  ‘Me too. You know I’ve put on half a stone since Joe left.’ Both Bella and my mother regarded me as slim and were therefore affronted whenever I mentioned weight or diets in front of them.

  ‘Never mind. Tomorrow’s another day,’ Mum said, drumming the flesh on her thighs with her hands then flinging her head back, shaking her hair behind her.

  She was up again and looking for teacups in the cupboard when I started feeling sorry for myself. I knew that she was deliberately making as much noise as possible because she was irritated by the sound of my voice and was attempting to drown me out. Bella’s expression was compassionate but she had one sneaky eye on her iPhone. Actually I didn’t blame either of them. By now I was boring myself.

  This was the time of the evening when Bella and Mum would take out their diaries and begin discussing childcare arrangements for the com
ing week.

  What had always, for me, been a tedious half hour of checking and scribbling in and crossing out, now had an added dimension. Mum’s travel plans had become ever more frequent and adventurous, making us feel rudderless without her and a tiny bit resentful, never acknowledging that as two hefty middle-aged women, we should be quite capable of looking after ourselves. And sensing how bereft we still felt whenever she was gone, she couldn’t help feeling guilty and neglectful though it didn’t dampen her excitement about her next trip. So, on they both went, chewing pens, flicking through pages writings things in, crossing things out.

  ‘Leave that. Honestly, pet,’ Mum said as I loaded the dishwasher, trudging from table to sink, to bin, scraping leftovers, earning silent brownie points over my sister because for once I was helping and she wasn’t.

  ‘You know what you should do?’ Bella was advising me as she struggled into her coat and tried to motivate her kids into action.

  ‘I know what you’re going to say – get a lodger and get rid of the dog.’

  ‘No, actually I was going to say join a toddler group in your area.’ I pulled a face. The thought filled me with dread – it was dull enough talking about kids with my own friends – how much duller with people I didn’t even know. ‘Or go to a cafe in the mornings.’

  ‘Yes,’ Mum said. ‘That’s a great idea. Get Addie to take a nap in her buggy, get a coffee, a quiet corner, a book.’ They had clearly been discussing my situation, were concerned about my growing reclusiveness, but they weren’t letting on.

  I tried to visualise this suggestion. What sort of cafe did they mean? I felt tense at the thought of self-service, of waiting in a queue, under pressure to order using the correct terminology (tall for small, light for less coffee) then to find a table that was clean and well away from the toilets and other human beings, somewhere I wouldn’t be knocked into or pushed against, and what book to read? Or maybe a magazine?