The Playground

by Julia Kelly

  *

  The next train to Bray was in twenty-seven minutes. This information was almost unbearable; I was cold, I had nothing to read. I put two Euro in the vending machine which it swallowed without giving me the bottle of mineral water I’d wanted. I paced up and down the icy platform doing the things you do to stave off boredom: walking on my heels; not stepping on the lines; looking for mice between the tracks; imagining other passengers naked; checking and rechecking the time on the board.

  When the Dart finally crawled into the station, I pushed forward in an un-lady-like manner, such was my need to get warm and to get a window seat on the sea side. Not that I would see much sea at that time of night. Joe was always astounded at how I couldn’t work out the geography of where I needed to sit to get a seat on the sea side and how ridiculously often I got it wrong. Astounded but charmed, I’d always assumed, by my silly, sweet, lousy sense of direction.

  It was only when I’d found a free newspaper and got comfortable: bag on the floor beside me, coat off, only when I’d brushed against the knee of the person opposite me and had looked up to say sorry, that I realised how attractive my fellow passenger was – dark, large, broad-legged, scruffy-haired.

  I tried my old trick, finishing the complex crossword incredibly quickly, filling in the squares with any old nonsense, to make me appear intelligent. I wasn’t sure if he was watching. His legs were so broad that I had to sit neatly to prevent them from touching, which on two occasions they did.

  Although she wanted me to forget all about Joe, Ruth didn’t want me to rush into anything new either. She had seen this pattern all my adult life – always starting a new relationship as soon as the last one had ended. She never came out and said it, but I knew how she felt from the way she talked about other friends of hers who had done the very same thing: making poor romantic choices, being bad judges of character, going for the wrong men, like Joe, just because they didn’t want to be on their own. ‘It’s good to be single. I was for years.’ She had always been this certain with her advice.

  I slid forward in my seat until our knees touched again. I felt him look up but I didn’t apologise or move. I kept them there as I filled in the final squares.

  Chapter Twelve

  A triumph. Unprecedented. An astonishing result. Adjectives had been tossed around the national airwaves since ballot boxes were opened at the first count centre, in Athlone at seven a.m. that Friday morning. Meltdown, wipe-out, tsunami for the old regime and a record number of seats for the new. They would get down to work straight away. State cars would be abolished. Ministers’ salaries cut. The callers to Joe Duffy on RTE One were not complaining for once.

  All the citizens of Bray, it seemed, were out that sunny afternoon: Old Arthur trundling along the path ahead of us in his motorised wheelchair, off to do errands on the high street. A happy train of red-bibbed toddlers from the Montessori chattering on their way home from ballet class, Pamela pulling weeds from the brickwork of the Cherry Glade. She and her hermaphrodite sibling, Edie, both in their eighties, lived four doors up from us. Pamela was out and about every day with her brush and barrow, sweeping, cleaning, chatting in her Ugg boots and mini-kilt, always tending to others homes while neglecting her own – her way of keeping abreast of developments on the square, and a means of staving off loneliness. Edie was quieter, more reclusive. I’d seen him/her once waiting for a bus outside Bray station – a man from the top in a flat cap, glasses and short white hair, but large breasted under a sweater and hippy in high-waisted slacks.

  Juliette Larson was squatting behind a car parked just outside her house, in last night’s city shorts and diaphanous top, waiting for her father to leave for his Italian class so that she could sneak back indoors. I smiled and sort of winked at her as we passed, hoping to convey from my expression that I’d been there before, that I knew just what it was like and that her secret was safe with me.

  *

  Mr Norman, the unacknowledged head of the residents’ committee, a cheerful, round-faced man who lived in the house directly opposite the park’s entrance, arrived at the playground with two bowls of cocktail sausages. I didn’t know him well but sometimes we would chat on our way to the beach, him with a towel tucked under his arm, Addie tucked under mine. He swam in the sea every day to keep busy, to keep strong, while his wife faded with Alzheimer’s.

  Irenka took the bowls from him and added them to the assortment of refreshments she’d arranged on the picnic bench on top of which she had spread a checked red-and-white tablecloth. Her own contribution was bottles of juice which she had taken some time to individually label in case a child put one down and picked up another by mistake, thereby risking contamination.

  ‘OK, listen up, everyone.’ Frank, the youth worker, was balancing on the see-saw, the residents of the square and their children in an attentive group around him.

  ‘No child is to be excluded from joining in any game,’ he said, following his finger along the line of rules which Irenka had typed up, trying to keep the sheet from folding over in the wind. ‘So, none of that crap, OK?’ he said, looking over at the teenagers. The girls were giddy and identical in fashion, blonde hair extensions, fake tan, pink tracksuits, lip-glossed and giggling about something so ‘random’ it was ‘super embarrassing’. The boys had their hoods up, were chewing gum and spittle, or sucking on cigarettes, not sure of anything, wanting a grab at something fleshy or a glimpse down a top.

  ‘Where was I? OK, so any attempt at excluding a child will not be tolerated. And piggy-backs are forbidden. As is play-fighting. Any questions?’

  ‘Sorry, Frank, can I just add a rider to that please?’ Joy said, reaching out for his hand, forcing him to pull her up onto the see-saw beside him. She laughed as she wobbled; he held her around the waist till she’d steadied herself.

  Irenka wasn’t looking one bit happy about these adults’ flagrant violation of park rules (no child over twelve was permitted to use playground equipment) and she had no room left on the table for Joy’s gluten-free vegetarian dumplings. Her husband, Donal, a swivel-eyed, curly-haired, furtive little man, was a fat lot of use. He was kneeling on the ground beside her deliberating over whether to sort through a pile of luminous bibs first or to separate plastic cones. He’d been reeled in by Irenka’s foreign accent when they’d first met and had been paying the price ever since.

  ‘Hide and seek is not permitted,’ Joy said, hands on copious hips.

  Oh, for crying out loud.

  ‘It promotes secretive play. The nature of the game is to not tell anyone where you are or what you are doing and that’s plain wrong, isn’t it?’ she said, asking the children. And then looking for adult agreement, ‘Hide and seek asks children to hide and not come out; telling children to hide so they can’t be found. That is not what we want, is it?’

  We were all too bemused to argue. Sophie and I shot conspiratorial glances at each other, then she was pulled away by Ben – a beautiful, white-haired, brown-eyed little chap. I had never seen him still, he was always running, his parents always tearing after him, trying to catch him and keep him safe. He was forever trying to escape and they were forever in pursuit. Sophie grabbed hold of the hood of his coat as he took off down the hill. Once again I examined with envy the perfectness of her figure. The curves and lines, the way her jeans were a little loose around the thighs. She had buttoned them with ease – no squeezed in flabby skin, no red indentation marks – and as she grabbed Ben before he scooted out of the park and under the wheels of a passing jeep, I could see there was even a shadowy space at the top, between the material and her concave stomach.

  ‘OK, everyone into two teams! Let’s go!’ Frank said, resting his hand for a moment on Joy’s shoulder then jumping down and jogging into the centre of the park. ‘You going to join us?’ he shouted at Billy who was watching from the far side of the railings.

  ‘You’re all right,’ Billy said, sitting up on his saddle and cycling away. Belinda was working late at the librar
y that evening and had warned him to keep out of trouble.

  *

  ‘Red Rover, Red Rover, we call Addie over!’ Frank shouted, winking at my little girl.

  ‘Mama, Mama! Come with me!’ She was beaming, frightened and excited at the same time.

  We took off running, hand in hand, Addie and me against the playground, against the world, her little face animated, looking ahead and then every few seconds up at me, her hand rigid with determination in mine. We pushed against the linked arms of Frank and Dylan and we made it, or at least they let us through, knowing that defeat would make Addie cry. We landed on the ground on the other side of the human wall, giggling, victorious.

  ‘You run just like your little girl.’ This was Dylan’s mother, Mimi, standing beside me, cleaning the inside of her thumbnail between her teeth. I’d caught my breath and was back by the swings. She was a raspy-voiced, sexy woman with cropped blonde hair, in a fake fur coat. I’d only met her a couple of times, and on each occasion she hadn’t remembered me. I considered my running style, recalling the slight limp I used to affect when I was a child; I thought it made me appear boyish, tough, suggested I’d been through a lot.

  Now Dylan was playing five-a-side with his dad and some of his friends. When the ball rolled off course, across the path and down towards the flowerbeds, he let Addie get it for him. She ran down the muddy slope and straight into the daffodils that had been planted the previous week, picked it up and kicked it a few inches and not in his direction, but she shrieked with her sense of achievement and he cheered at her.

  ‘He’s very sweet,’ I said to Mimi.

  ‘Dylan’s a dream child, so he is. Never given me a day’s worry, not like that little minx,’ she said, referring to her toddler who was coming down the slide head first; a cut above her right eye and holding a filthy toy dog.

  ‘It’s good to see him down here to be honest. He doesn’t seem to be interested in football any more, it’s all about girls now; all about Juliette.’

  ‘I just saw her,’ I said, stopping myself before I gave anything away. ‘Is it quite serious between them?’

  ‘As serious as anything can be when you’re seventeen. Doesn’t seem that long since he vomited when they played a video of a couple having intercourse in his biology class at his school. He was so innocent. I had to leave work early and take him home.’

  I laughed. I liked her.

  ‘But, God, it’s causing a lot of strife – Billy Flynn is wild about her too, always has been. They were going together for a little while, but thank God she broke it off.’

  ‘Really? I can’t picture them together, the pretty, popular girl with someone like Billy?’

  ‘I know, it’s a strange one, isn’t it? I think they got close when both their mams had cancer at the same time. They used to hang out together at the hospital while they had their treatment.’

  Belinda had had cancer. Why had she not told me? Had she told anyone? Even Joy didn’t appear to know.

  ‘What sort of cancer was it?’

  ‘Of the breast, for them both. You wouldn’t have met Christina, would you? Well, she passed away when Juliette was only thirteen. Belinda beat it, but now it’s back. The poor woman.’

  I was still reeling from this, as Mimi went on. She was ‘over-sharing’ a little now, as Joy would say.

  ‘It was sweet seeing them together, so it was, Billy and Juliette, playing Monopoly, cards, you know, that kind of thing, but I’m going back five years now, they were only kids. Then Juliette grew up overnight, the way girls do, and didn’t want anything more to do with Billy. And when her mam died she went off the rails altogether, riding all around her, so she was. But this will make you laugh,’ she said, moving nearer and clutching my elbow, ‘Belinda phoned Juliette’s dad one day, a few months after her mam had passed, and said Billy was crying himself to sleep at night he was that in love with Juliette and did he think they could maybe go out for dinner together? They were both only thirteen years old, for Christ’s sake!’

  Her phone rang then and I heard a tiny disembodied voice say, ‘Hey, Mam, can you call me back?’

  ‘Sorry. That’s the other one. No credit. The usual! Excuse me.’

  I looked about for Addie. She was running across the playground, shouting at Ben who was charging the other way. ‘No, let’s go back to the sandpit!’

  ‘Where?’ Ben said. He stopped, changed route, ran after her.

  ‘The sandpit, where we first met.’

  She sounded just like an old movie. ‘You wore blue,’ I said to Sophie, seeing her laugh.

  ‘All those years ago,’ she said and we stood side by side watching our children in the autumn sunshine.

  *

  Irenka was clearing up the picnic table while talking to the bicycle-mounted policeman who’d just done a circuit of the park. She held her hand out towards me to let me know she wanted a word when she’d finished with him. Now she was striding towards us. That day there was not a single thing she could criticise about my mothering: no sucky blanket, hair clips in, fleece top and padded coat, new shoes.

  ‘Excuse me, Sophie,’ she said, while gripping me by the forearm. ‘Listen, Eve, I need a big favour. Donal and I are going to London in the morning, he has a job interview. Could you please open the park for me?’ I was a little surprised that she trusted me to do this job, but I agreed – I couldn’t wait to tell Addie. ‘You are my superstar,’ she said. She hugged me, handed me the keys and explained the procedure in too much detail. She and Mr Norman were the only residents of the square who possessed keys to the park. Quite how this had come about, no one was sure. They liked the control but not the tiresome responsibility, so between them they had drawn up a new opening and closing rota and had asked the council for more sets of keys. Residents of the square would from now on take turns with this duty – women in the mornings, men doing the more challenging night shift – picking up rubbish and keeping an eye on the teenagers. My name hadn’t been included on the official list, perhaps they were seeing if I were up to it.

  I sought out Sumita. I had some drugs for her. She was talking to Jayani, a plump Sri Lankan ten year old, while eating the wax from a Babybel cheese that Irenka had just given her, having never seen one before.

  Beside them, two little boys had buried themselves beneath a pile of leaves with just enough space for their serious faces and ginger hair. They were perfectly camouflaged in autumn shades of russet, saffron, gold. Rashi was busy covering their faces, making tiny exhales of effort as she did. This frightened the boys and made them cough and soon the three of them were bickering. Park diplomat Jayani went to sort it out. ‘And wad did you say to heem?’ she asked, serious and cross, before taking three lollipops from her pocket and distributing them.

  I waited till then to pass Sumita the small cellophane package I’d been fingering in my pocket. ‘These will help you sleep – they’ll make you feel so calm. I’d take them every day if I could.’

  She examined the pink capsules in her hand. ‘Thank you, but I cannot take them. My doctor says these are very bad thing. Now I am thinking what we need is bunk beds.’

  ‘Bunk beds? Maybe I could find some for you, I could email around my friends if you’d like?’ I said, putting the Xanax back in my pocket, feeling a little hurt by her rejection and also a little addicted and unstable. Never mind, all the more for me.

  ‘That would be very great,’ she said, then she told me about her three goals. She wanted to one day buy a house – she had told her husband that this was a good time – she wanted to learn how to drive and she wanted to have another baby. I told her as much as I could remember about our attempts, tried to reassure her.

  The little bugger from number three had found a branch and was trailing it around the path in one hand, holding onto his scooter with the other. He collided with Rashi and knocked her to the ground. ‘Sinita,’ one of the other mums shouted. They all seemed to have problems pronouncing her name. Rashi had slipped on the dried mu
d edge of the playground and was bleeding; a group of older boys, including the little bugger, stood over her pointing and laughing.

  ‘They always give her a bad time. It’s the same at school; she’s not happy there,’ Sumita said.

  ‘You should hear what the older ones call me sometimes!’ It was Lars, the German, up off his bench, helping Rashi to her feet. ‘Nazi, Kraut, Adolf.’

  I breathed in his whiskey breath. He was more buoyant than usual today, he’d just been offered some extra work up in Ardmore Studios.

  Frank and Joy wound up the games with clapping and shouting and orders to clean up. It was dark and starting to rain and the kids were sweaty and exhausted. Addie bit me because I wouldn’t do roly-poly down the hill beyond the gardener’s shed. ‘Joy said it’s a good thing to keep crying and crying,’ she said when I told her to quit her crocodile tears. ‘That’s why because you have to get it all out.’

  As we waited to cross the road for home, I noticed Arthur outside our front gate. He was sitting in his motorised wheelchair, his neck leant over to one side. One cloudy eye was watching us from under his woollen hat, too high on his head, exposing a bald bit above his ears. He looked like he needed our help.

  ‘Could you give me a push, missus?’ he asked, talking into his chest.

  I’d met him before though I wasn’t sure he recognised me. My favourite part of my job in the library was travelling in a van, driven by Pete, the head librarian, once a week to deliver books to nursing homes around the area. The residents of the Cherry Glade liked large-print romance and audio books best, but Arthur loved Westerns – ‘better than the telly,’ he said. ‘John Wayne, Laramie, the Lone Ranger.’

  Pete said he smoked one hundred cigarettes a day. ‘He must get up early for that. One hundred a day, sure that would kill you dead. Bang-bang.’

  ‘The battery’s gone on my cart. Could you get them to open the door?’ Arthur said, gesturing with his head. His hands were purplish around the knuckles and looked very cold. A large translucent droplet was hanging from his left nostril. I didn’t know many elderly people, aside from the one my mother had become, but Joy had told me all about Arthur, about how he’d been born into a broken family and had been in care homes ever since.