Playground Cool

by Sinclair, Jamie

  ‘Why don’t you leave the poor sod alone? Do you really think you’ve anything to say to him after what you did?’ Fran had said when she walked in last night to find Rhia lying on the bed, staring hopefully at her telephone.

  ‘I have to know he’s alright. That he doesn’t hate me,’ she’d wailed.

  ‘I should say there’s a pretty strong chance he will hate you and who could blame him. All he ever wanted was to be a dad, to start a family and he got lumbered with you.’

  ‘Alright, I know. Must you keep going on at me?’

  ‘I’ll go on all I like in my house. You don’t have to stay if you don’t like it, but then you’re a bit short of places to go at the moment aren’t you?’

  Rhia offered no reply to this and had turned her face to the pillow.

  ‘I’m ashamed to have you as a sister. You’re a disgrace,’ was the final comment, stated quietly and firmly before Fran had walked quickly from the room, slamming the door behind her.

  Rhia picked up the phone again to try Ben’s number when it started to ring. She sprang upright on the bed and looked at the screen. Steve’s name was flashing on the screen. Maybe he had news about Ben, had seen him perhaps? A thousand thoughts of what might have happened raced through her head as she answered the call. The fact that it was only half past six in the morning didn’t strike her troubled mind as strange.

  ‘Hello. Steve?’

  ‘Why didn’t you tell me about the baby?’

  ‘What?’ She was caught off guard.

  ‘The baby. Ben’s gutted. He hit me.’

  ‘You deserve hitting; you’re supposed to be his best mate.’

  ‘I know and I can’t believe I did this to him. Tell me about the kid.’ He was shouting down the phone at her now.

  ‘I meant to tell you, both of you.’ She’d never expected to be having this conversation and had no idea how to play it. All her energy had gone into explaining things to Ben. Steve’s feelings had never entered her head for a moment.

  ‘So go on then. Tell me.’

  ‘I was pregnant. I thought there was no way I could keep it so I thought an abortion was the only way at the time.’

  ‘You heartless cow. Ben’s been dying to be a dad for years. You know that.’

  ‘How could I let him bring up his best mate’s kid? What was I supposed to do? Just turn up on the doorstep and say Hi Ben, I’m back. Oh and look, you get to be a dad now too.’

  ‘What about what I might’ve wanted?’ He fumed, ‘What about my feelings?’

  ‘You should never have happened. I came to you because you were so close to Ben, to get his viewpoint on things without the fights. It should never have gone further, you know that.’

  ‘But it did!’ He insisted. ‘A lot further.’

  ‘So what, you want me and a baby do you? Want us to move in with you and be a family? Give over Steve, I was a passing shag and the fact that I was seeing your mate didn’t matter to you one bit, so don’t get all fucking high and mighty with me now.’ Rhia was suddenly livid with him for what had happened. How could she have thrown away so much for a few nights with him?

  ‘You still should’ve told me,’ he repeated, but with less conviction now, ‘You should’ve at least mentioned it.’

  ‘Oh, I know.’ She sighed and took a deep breath. ‘But this was never about you Steve. It was about Ben, about me and Ben and whether we could sort ourselves out. I’ve never stopped loving him, despite what I did with you.’

  ‘Thanks very much.’ He sounded more like the usual Steve now that she was attacking his sexual pride.

  ‘Fuck off Steve, it meant nothing. To either of us. But as a result I might’ve lost the one thing I wanted to keep and I hate myself for it. He was so upset when I told him.’ She was becoming tearful herself now, picturing Ben’s stunned face.

  ‘Yeah I know; I saw him. Yesterday afternoon.’

  ‘Was he in a real state?’

  ‘He looked shocking. Understandable I suppose.’ His voice trailed off.

  ‘Oh, the poor sod. I’ve been ringing him non-stop, but he won’t answer.’ She suddenly had a thought. ‘You don’t think he’d do anything daft do you?’

  ‘Ben? Nah, he’s not the type to top himself.’ He paused and took a long deep breath, contemplating the gravity of the situation. ‘This is such a mess,’ he said finally.

  ‘I know. I don’t know what’s going to happen.’

  ‘I got offered a promotion at work last week, more of a better paid side step actually. It’s out of town. I wasn’t sure, but maybe now might be the time to go.’

  ‘That’s up to you Steve,’ she said without interest, ‘I’m going to try Ben again anyway. I hate him being on his own, although I’m probably the last person he wants to speak to.’

  ‘Okay. Call if you need any help.’

  ‘I think you’ve done enough thanks. But I’m sorry for what I did. For not telling you I mean.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter now flower, it’s done.’ She heard him clear his throat and then hang up. She took a moment to get her attention back on Ben and then dialled his number.

  Ten minutes later she was lying on the bed, having dozed off with the unanswered phone held loosely in her hand. She’d barely slept since leaving the hospital and having to face up to Ben, then Steve, had left her exhausted. If given the choice she would probably have opted for a deep and peaceful sleep to allow her to rest and recharge herself, but even though her body didn’t feel like her own and her mind was straining under the weight of the guilt and pain she’d caused to herself and those around her, within minutes her eyes began to flicker and dreams filled her sleeping head.

  Images of Ben flashed through her mind, variously smiling and happy, images of the two of them together. They were going somewhere; places were coming and going before she could put a name to them. Suddenly Ben was shouting at her, his face was close to hers, his eyes filled with anger. Then she was running after him but found herself in her hallway, back at the house she shared with him. Except that this wasn’t her house and Ben wasn’t here. A figure turned around from nowhere and it was Steve, he was smiling at her, leading her by the hand, showing her something. Then, in another location, the walls a crisp white colour, Steve holding her baby, offering the child to her. She turned and ran, there was Ben up ahead. She ran to him and was catching him. He was holding something in his arms.

  On the bed, her body twitched as she ran in the dream, occasional moans and half formed words escaping her mouth.

  She reached out to Ben and he was giving something to her. He was speaking to her, telling her something, then a melody shattered the peace and she was telling him to wait.

  Her eyes flicked open with a start and for a moment she was unsure where she was. In her hand, the mobile telephone was flashing and playing an mp3 clip of some classical piece. She lifted the phone to answer the call but it fell silent. She looked at the clock on the small screen and realised she’d been sleeping for almost three hours. She selected the missed calls menu on the telephone, hoping she might see Ben’s number listed. Instead, next to the time and date of the call were the words ID withheld.

  Chapter Twenty-three

  After a restless, but unexpectedly cheerful, day at work during which Katie checked her mobile phone for messages every few minutes and charged the battery all day to make sure it didn’t run out, she hurried home to check her home answering machine in case Jack had called.

  She dashed in the front door and dumped her bag in the hallway only to discover that there weren’t any messages at all on her machine, let alone any from Jack. Slightly downhearted, but reasoning that perhaps Simon hadn’t spoken to him yet to inform him that she’d love to see him again, Katie changed out of her suit then stuck some fish fingers under the grill for tea.

  Twenty minutes later, she was sitting cross-legged on the couch, munching fish finger and tomato sauce sandwiches, when the telephone rang. She picked it up from its resting place by her left le
g and answered it on the third ring to give the impression that she wasn’t waiting by the phone.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Katie.’ Yes, it’s him! ‘It’s Jack.’

  ‘Oh hiya.’ She’d tried to sound distracted but felt too excited.

  ‘Simon says he had a word with you this morning. About Saturday night.’

  ‘Ha ha,’ she laughed, causing herself to cough as she choked on a lump of fish finger, ‘Simon says. Nice one. Yeah, I spoke to him in the car park. He said you were sorry. What exactly have you got to be sorry about? I was the one acting like a slag.’

  ‘You sound happy. You are sober I assume?’ He quizzed cheekily. ‘I’m sorry I cleared off so quick for a start. I bet you wondered what you’d done wrong?’

  ‘Not at all. I just chalked it down as another hopeless one nighter. I’m sorry I was a bit of a mess. I’m not usually like that,’ she explained.

  ‘Neither am I. I was going to go during the night but I thought that’d look really sleazy.’

  ‘I hear you assisted me to the bathroom when I was feeling a touch unwell.’

  He let out a little half laugh which became an extension of his words, ‘Hehyeah. That was quite funny actually, now I think about it. You suddenly lurched up and decided you were gonna be sick so I grabbed you and pulled you to the bathroom.’

  ‘So you tied my hair back with that bobble?’ She was smiling, charmed by his behaviour.

  ‘Yeah, it was on the edge of the sink. Then I carried you back to bed. You kept thinking I was trying to do things to you though. You big dope.’

  ‘Oh shit,’ Katie cringed. ‘What was I saying?’

  ‘Oh nothing, just that I was forward and that my hands were everywhere. Which was a bit rich bearing in mind how hands on you’d been until you conked out. I was only trying to keep you up; you were the one who’d taken your clothes off.’

  ‘Don’t remind me. Was I that bad?’ Katie was desperate to change the subject since, the more she found out about her behaviour, the more embarrassing it became.

  ‘I was having a great time until you passed out on me. Things were just getting interesting too,’ he said, teasing her.

  They talked and discussed their drunken encounter for a further ten minutes and Katie was surprised at how easy the conversation came. She felt relaxed and comfortable talking to Jack. He’d seen her at her worst and wasn’t put off; that meant he was either extremely desperate for sex or that he actually liked her. Her fingers were crossed for the latter as they made plans to go and see a film together the following evening.

  * * * * * *

  Jen put down the phone and felt unsure whether she’d done the right thing. The man she’d been out with, and had slept with, the night that Norman had introduced himself at the party, had just called to see if she fancied going out at the weekend. Without thinking she’d declined, because she was seeing Norm. Despite what she kept telling her friends about not sticking to one man, Jen had been seeing Norm, and only Norm, for a couple of weeks. He made her laugh and was wonderfully considerate and, even though she kept telling herself she wasn’t bothered about him, that he was just another name on the list, she definitely had feelings for him and it scared her.

  * * * * * *

  Ben had reached rock bottom, not merely a low point, but absolute ground zero, and felt he was faced with two choices. He could either give up and be consumed by the Tits-up Tuesday affair that had almost crushed him; choosing to hide from the world in bed, drink even more, ending up trying to top himself. Or he could accept that things couldn’t possibly get any worse because they’re already that bad and therefore, things must improve if he kept plugging away.

  Ben stood in the bathroom looking at his face in the cabinet mirror. He looked tired and drawn; pale with large, dark bags under his red-rimmed eyes, his lips a rosy red colour due to their soreness owing to a lack of sleep. All in all he looked exactly how he felt, a wreck of a man. Despite this, and in spite of every pore of his being telling him to give up, that he’d lost everything, love, friends, a child, there was something deeper which forced him to get out of bed, put on a suit and face the world head on. He was going in to work where he’d sit behind his desk and complete pointless tasks until five o’ clock, in order to keep J.D. King, his employer, happy.

  He’d been up practically all night, in a real mess, unable to stop crying and barely able to think coherently, sitting on the floor in the hallway watching the number of missed calls rise steadily through the night as Rhia rang him over and over. To break the pattern, he’d repeatedly listened to the four messages she’d left on the machine until the sound of her voice made him so angry that he’d yanked the plug from the socket and pummelled the device against the wall until it shattered.

  Finally, at dawn, after dozing sporadically and fitfully, he’d decided to ring her, with no thought as to the time or any idea what he might say, or even if he’d speak at all. He chose to withhold his number so that she wouldn’t have any advantage over him. After letting it ring for what seemed like an age, he’d hung up, unaware that she would’ve answered the call half a ring later.

  After this he’d run out of ideas and so went upstairs to bed, leaving the fragmented remains of the answer machine strewn around the hallway and the telephone on the floor. He slept on top of the bed, fully clothed and managed no more than an hour or so of uneasy sleep. It was then that somewhere inside him the decision had been made to try and carry on as normally as possible, to find something to cling to. This in mind, he staggered to his feet and into the shower and was now standing looking at his miserable face in the bathroom mirror.

  So keen was Ben to act on his new found momentum before either exhaustion or despair caught up with him and dragged him back into that dark, warm place that was now so familiar and had proved so hard to leave, he decided to take the Metro to work.

  The thought of sitting, stationary, in his car for minutes at a time in the morning rush hour traffic, filled him with dread. His resolve and patience were so battered that he felt any delay would provide all the excuse he needed to turn around and go home again. Besides, any spare time for his brain to engage and mull over recent events might bring him to an emotional standstill and result in him not just going home, but finding himself in bed with a hangover, struggling to remember the preceding hours and unable to think of reasons to get up.

  He stepped out of the front door and took a couple of lungfuls of air to try and clear his foggy head; the slight edge to the morning providing the perfect remedy to his tired eyes and heavy feet as he walked to Stretford station. On the way he hummed the tune from The Italian Job, the one about self-preservation, to occupy his mind. He knew that he’d have to keep himself busy all day, not just to keep awake, but also to divert his troubled mind from all the thoughts of the double betrayal he’d suffered at the hands of the two people closest to him.

  He bought a ticket from the vending machine at the station and took his seat on the tram for the six stop journey to work, filled with a mixture of nervous anticipation about the day ahead, but also fear. Fear that he might not be strong enough to keep himself together, that the slightest thing, the most minor setback, may cause him to give up and admit defeat.

  He looked silently out of the window, trying to engross himself in the novelty of the journey he rarely made, taking in the G-Mex centre, the library and the impressive town hall, buildings he never even noticed when driving into the city. Twenty minutes later he alighted the tram at Market Street and walked around the corner to his offices opposite Piccadilly Gardens.

  ‘On my God!’ Were Em’s first words when Ben walked past her desk on the way to his own. ‘You must have had a very, very big weekend to be looking like that on a Monday morning.’

  ‘Morning Em. I trust you’re feeling switched on because we have plenty to do,’ he replied, ignoring her remark and trying to sound professional even if he didn’t look or feel it.

  She followed him to his desk to begi
n their morning ritual of checking emails and opening internal post before discussing how best to organise the days tasks. As they concluded and Em prepared to go back to her desk with the necessary files and papers to distribute to the rest of Ben’s team, he yawned loudly. She stopped and looked back.

  ‘So does it pay well then?’

  ‘You what?’ He asked, spinning around on his chair to face her.

  ‘You are moonlighting as a cadaver at the hospital aren’t you?’ She tried to look serious but a smile was pulling at the edges of her mouth.

  ‘Fuck off Em.’ He smiled wearily; he didn’t have the energy for her to question him and hoped she’d take the hint.

  ‘If you want to tell me…’ She offered, deciding not to press him further.

  ‘I know, thanks. But I’ll be alright I think. Fingers crossed eh?’ That’s it, convincing yourself is half the battle.

  The day wore on; Ben discovering that it was going to be as hard as he’d anticipated concentrating on anything other than feeling sorry for himself. He’d find himself listening to a colleague complaining about how tired they were, or how crap their weekend had been and thinking to himself how pathetic they were. He wanted to grab them and scream in their faces. To tell them in graphic detail exactly what a crap weekend was. To let them see the video that was playing constantly in his head and then pause it for them so they could pinpoint the exact moment that his heart was broken.

  While briefing members of his team, he could hear his voice saying the words, relaying the information; but it seemed to be coming from somewhere else. As if he were watching along with everyone else. He could hear what was being said and all the while he was thinking, how utterly pointless. Not one of these people gives a damn whether or not we meet these targets, except perhaps for the brown-noser sitting at the back, furiously scribbling down anything he thinks relevant. He felt like saying to them,