The Playground

by Jane Shemilt

  “We should get back.” She stands up, jolting the table. Her teacup tips over and the dregs spill, a dark stain spreading quickly on the white cloth. She pays at the register then they drive to Eve’s road in silence. She parks a short distance from the entrance to Eve’s drive.

  “Now we’re on our own, we need to talk properly about what the teacher didn’t find,” she begins, “because I know there’s something you aren’t telling me.”

  Beside her, Blake has become completely still. Only his fist moves, opening and closing, opening and closing.

  12. November

  Melissa

  Melissa steers the car carefully into their driveway and switches off the ignition. She leans back, exhausted. The drive from Salisbury took longer than the journey there and now it’s early afternoon. Paul will be safely at work, albeit fuming about the temporary absence of his car. She must find clothes for herself and some for Izzy, assemble the material for the Wiltshire project, call a real estate agent to arrange viewings of available flats to rent, and then leave by taxi to pick Izzy up from Eve’s house, all before he comes home. She doesn’t even want to get out of the car. If it hadn’t been for Izzy, it would have been hard to leave the shelter this morning. It had felt safe, far safer than the home she is about to enter.

  The heat had bellied out as the door had opened. They’d felt the warmth on their cold faces. They’d stepped inside, squeezing past strollers crammed in the narrow lobby. A teddy lay on the bottom step of the stairs. Faint strains of music floated down from higher in the house and the smell of toast came up the hall to meet them.

  The woman who let them in was in her thirties with a thick braid of brown hair over her shoulder; her arms were looped around a pile of clothes. She looked tired though her smile was wide.

  “I’m Karen,” she introduced herself, dumping the clothes on the hall table; the flicker of concern in her eyes was quickly masked. “Come and have some coffee, you must be tired after your journey.”

  Melissa’s reflection in the hall mirror surprised even her. The bruise had spread into her left eye socket and the cut across her cheek had widened; it might need stitches. There will be a scar. Karen tactfully refrained from asking questions and they sat together in the warm kitchen where a young girl was stacking dishes. The curly-haired toddler at her feet was attempting to pull the head off a Barbie doll. An older woman, her right arm in a cast, was reading the paper at the table; she ignored them at first. Karen gave them a plate of hot toast and mugs of coffee. Lina took a slice, ate it quickly, and took another. The woman with the cast looked up and flashed Lina a smile, then the toddler approached, holding out her doll for inspection. Melissa relaxed. Lina would be all right here; she would make friends. Karen talked about the house and how it was run, the mealtimes and washing-up routines. Lina’s eyes tracked Karen’s, listening and learning. They were taken to the bedroom she’d been allocated: a simple room with a bed, a wardrobe, and a chair. There was a view of other houses, neat gardens, the cathedral spire in the distance, and a door you could lock from inside. When Karen left them, Lina turned to her. Melissa had never seen Lina smile properly before, with a smile that reached her eyes. She hugged her; as she drove away, tears of relief and sadness stung the cut in her cheek. She’d miss her friend.

  Now she unlocks her own front door quietly and stands in the hall, listening. The house is silent. She begins to climb the stairs, but as she nears the top, she hears the noise of the shower. Her heart sinks. Paul hasn’t left for work after all. The empty vodka bottle by the sink last night flits into her mind; already intoxicated, he must have attacked Lina as well as her, then drunk himself into oblivion. He was lucky to survive that amount of alcohol; she might have guessed he would only be surfacing now. He’s late for work, but she won’t comment; he could hurt her again. She’ll have to wait until he goes out to make her escape or put it off until tomorrow. She returns to the kitchen and destroys the note she left earlier before he sees it. She makes coffee and feeds the cat. Paul comes downstairs with heavy footsteps; he avoids the kitchen and goes straight to his study without a word.

  She clears her desk in the studio, rapidly shredding old papers, conscious that she is shredding her old life, beginning anew. Her hands tremble with anticipation; all the time she is aware of Paul in the house beneath her. He bellows once for Lina and then she hears him swearing, tugging open the fridge. Soon it’s quiet, he must have left. She begins to slot blueprints and designs into her large portfolio case and doesn’t hear him enter the room. She jolts when his fingers slide around her arm.

  “Take your hand off my arm, please,” she says as calmly as she can, turning around.

  At the sight of her face, Paul flinches and steps back.

  “You shut the car door on me last night, it caught my face. Then you hit me, remember?”

  He frowns and looks away. Whether he remembers or not, she’s breaking a rule. He’s not used to her telling him what he’s done. “Where is she?”

  She meets his eyes, playing for time. “Still no news. Eric is making a televised appeal today.”

  “I meant Lina. I need my new golf trousers; she was letting them out. Mike’s collecting me for a round at the club.”

  “I gave her the day off—wear something else.” Her heart is beating fast; normally she would never dare talk to him like that. She is feeling brave and terrified at the same time and continues to place sheets of drawings in her portfolio one by one, apparently unhurried.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Getting samples ready for a client to collect.”

  “Dressed like that?”

  His antennae are out; her mind races to stay a step ahead. “Of course not. I’ll change after the gym.”

  “What about your face?” He sounds worried, but not for her; he’s never marked her so badly and is scared of the consequences.

  “I’ve got excellent makeup, Paul. I’ve used it before.” She glances at the window. “Shouldn’t you be leaving? It’ll be dark in an hour.”

  “The club’s floodlit,” he says, but he leaves the room and runs downstairs. She hears him rattling in the drawer in his study.

  “Where are my keys?” he shouts.

  As his feet thud upstairs again, she reaches for the keys where she left them on the chair and slides them into the back pocket of her jeans, just before he bursts back into the studio.

  “Where are my sodding car keys, Melly?”

  “How should I know?” She stands perfectly still, back against her desk, the keys wedged in her pocket. “I thought Mike was collecting you.”

  “My golf clubs are in the car.”

  “Your old ones are in the closet; you could take them instead. What time will you be back?”

  He shrugs. “There’s a thing at the clubhouse later.” He walks to the window. “Mike’s late.” He taps his fingers on the sill. “Let me know if they find Sorrel.”

  In a minute he’ll leave, then she will. They will never stand together in this house again. She will never lie next to him in bed. For a moment she feels dizzy, as if on a cliff top with endless space beyond the edge.

  Outside, a horn sounds twice, then a car door shuts, footsteps approach the front door.

  “Goodbye then.” He disappears swiftly without waiting for a reply; she hears the front door open and Paul greeting Mike, the clatter of golf clubs being pulled from the closet, followed by the slamming of doors.

  He never usually says goodbye.

  She piles jeans and sweaters into a large suitcase. The dressing table is bare as usual apart from a few photos: Paul grinning on their wedding day, absurdly handsome; she looks so young beside him, her smile so uncertain. She leaves that photo on the table and chooses two others: Izzy and Paul on a snowy slope, another of them in the sea. She places them between her clothes. Izzy will want them. She’ll want to spend time with Paul once the divorce comes through. “Divorce,” she whispers to herself, her heart beating fast. She puts
Izzy’s clothes into a smaller suitcase, hurrying now, anxious to be off. What if Paul should return for something and catch her packing? She chooses a jar of face cream from her collection, abandoning the tubes of thick foundation. She puts the protesting cat in the carrier, then hesitates, looking around. The house is hard to leave after all. She hasn’t been happy here but it has sheltered her and Izzy. Lina too. She writes another note, scrawling quickly:

  Client invited me over to Brittany; Xmas shopping, taking Izzy and Lina. Borrowing car. M.

  He will be furious but she won’t be here to suffer that; the lie might buy a little time.

  She places the carrier on the passenger seat of Paul’s car, throws her bag in the back seat, slips her portfolio beside it, and drives off. Tears well and she lets them come. Tears of exhaustion, relief, sorrow. She should stop because she can hardly see and is skidding around corners, a hand on the carrier to steady it. She is aware, as the car lurches, that the weight in the trunk is shifting and rolling from side to side. She hadn’t noticed it on the motorway today, but then she hadn’t been skidding at speed. What if Paul was lying about the golf clubs? He lies about so many things; there might be something else rolling and sliding in the trunk, something he wanted to take out or hide. Melissa drives the remaining streets very slowly; it’s hardly any distance but she needs to take great care. She steers the car around corners as her heart bangs against her ribs, her mouth dry with a new, deeper kind of fear.

  Grace

  Blake hunches down in the passenger seat, eyes lowered, brows drawn tight. This close she can smell his fear, man sweat already. His hands are larger, she looks closely, more muscled. She’s missed this recent growth; he’s on that cusp tilting toward puberty, hormones swirling, impelling recklessness.

  “Your teacher believed the story about the shears but I don’t, not completely.” It was that glance in Mr. Richards’s office, the way Blake checked her face to see if she’d been fooled as well. His hands clench tighter, he doesn’t move or turn. He’s so still he might not even be breathing, though she knows at any moment he could jump out and disappear into the dark street.

  “It’s okay, Blake. I’m not angry, just worried.”

  Terrified. There is something Blake is hiding, though the explanation of why the shears were in his bag seemed genuine. She turns farther toward him, trying for a reasonable tone.

  “Eric supported your story, it’s probably true. The teacher thought it was, but I’m your mum. There’s something else.”

  His eyelids lower, shutting her out. Despite her intentions, her voice rises. “You’re in danger, Blake, Dad talked to you about this months ago. If you carry weapons, it makes it more likely that weapons will be used against you.”

  He turns his face to the window, waiting this out. She leans over, rests her hands on top of his clenched fists.

  “It’s me. I’m on your side.” She can feel the heat of his skin, imagine the sweating palms. He jerks his fists away. He might find it easier to tell the truth to Martin than to her, but Martin would probably turn this into a joke. She leans closer. “When a child in a family goes missing, the suspects are the people closest to the family, relatives and trusted friends. When he works out our friendship with Eve’s family, that safety officer Mr. Richards told me about could put two and two together and come up with an answer that’ll do, even if it’s wrong. You know what police do to us, people like us. They could make you out to be dangerous.”

  Blake looks away, bored by the speech or pretending to be.

  Then she says it, she has to. “They might even think you’ve got something to do with Sorrel’s disappearance.”

  She’s lost him. She knows that as soon as he turns away and wrenches the door open. He scrambles out and starts running; for a moment it looks like he’ll continue running down the street but at the last second he swerves into Eve’s drive and disappears.

  A minute later a car follows him in, Melly driving Paul’s car very slowly.

  It’s cold now, but sweat is trickling down her back. Stupidly handled. Martin might have done better after all. Blake’s school backpack is in the footwell where he dumped it; she picks it up, hesitates, then tips it out on the seat. The books tumble out first—a dog-eared workbook, a geography textbook—pens, then several empty packets of chips followed by a snowstorm of candy wrappers. The empty bag feels heavier than it normally does. She shakes again but nothing further falls out and then she remembers. Blake had been thrilled when he unwrapped this backpack four Christmases ago. It was the same as Martin’s, made for camping expeditions, replete with flaps and hidden pockets. Martin had shown him the zipper under the rectangle of thick plastic lining the base of the bag; she’d been resigned to the thought of the candy he would stash in there. Now she pushes her fingers into the space, encountering, as she knew she would, a slim shape, roughly bundled in toilet paper to stop it from sliding around.

  Mr. Richards would have found it if he’d known where to look. The shears were a decoy, as it turns out, intentional or not. This is the danger. She unwraps it with trembling fingers. A knife lies in her hands; a thing of beauty with a smooth indigo-blue handle and a long, shining blade. She turns on the light in the car. A line of red lies along the edge of the blade, separated into minute granules, thicker at the edge where it makes an uneven reddish stripe thinning to pale orange. If she looks hard enough she can convince herself there are little pieces of matter caught along the edge, dehydrated fragments, translucent like skin. She puts it down on the pile of candy wrappers, her head thumping to the rhythm of three questions: Whose blood, whose skin, who exactly has her son hurt?

  Eve

  “Sorrel!”

  A crow rises from the ground, black wings flapping. Empty branches scrape the sky; the day is ticking fast toward its end. The police and their dogs have searched the wood again; Eve is still looking. There may be clues left on the ground, under the fallen leaves, or caught on a branch, something small the police might have missed.

  “Sorrel, answer me, baby.”

  Her foot strikes unexpected softness. She moves the covering leaves with care and leans close to the ground, her heart tipping forward in her mouth. She sees a rounded shape, brown-gray fur, soft ears. A dead rabbit. She turns it with a foot and the guts spill out, mauve and gray against the amber leaves. She straightens, feeling sick, and walks away, halting at a leafless horse chestnut tree at the back of the wood by the fence. The children had been sitting in the dappled shade of a chestnut tree when she found them with Martin that afternoon in May, maybe the very same one. Babes in the wood, he had said; she should have taken that as a warning.

  “Tell me where you are, my darling. Tell me you’re alive.”

  She looks up at the birds in the sky above the wood, but the tilt of her head makes her dizzy and she puts a steadying hand on the wire. A certainty comes, as if from nowhere, that Sorrel is alive, she is waiting, she isn’t far. It’s as though she has left a trace in the air, touched the trees, or leaned against the fence. Eve closes her eyes; minutes go by, lost in prayer.

  A car horn rips into the silence. Through the trees she can see the Mercedes pulling up in the drive. Paul’s car, delivering Poppy from school. It was supposed to be Grace’s turn, not his, and he is clearly annoyed. She must rescue Poppy from that impatience. Eve begins to run through the wood, across the meadow and toward the house, but it’s Melly who gets out of the car, not Paul, and no one is with her. Something has happened to her face, it’s a different shape and color. She is shouting and crying at the same time, though Eve can’t make out the words. Eric comes out of the barn at a run, Igor following him. Melly is behind the car as Eve approaches.

  “. . . rolling from side to side. None of the keys seem to work.” She rattles each in the lock. “I think I’ve seen him using his phone, he’s probably got a special app; he’s paranoid about security—”

  Eric turns to Igor. “Crowbar. Length of steel. Anything.”

  For a big
man Igor moves swiftly. He races to the barn and back again, handing a crowbar to Eric, who applies it like a lever. There is a wrenching noise and the trunk comes open, revealing a bag, a long black bag, zipped and bulging, the kind that’s used for golf. Eve puts her hand to her chest while Eric leans in and pulls the zipper slowly, holding the bag so it doesn’t jerk with the movement. He pushes the edges apart carefully.

  Inside is a bundle of golf clubs, the expensive, heavy kind, wrapped around with thick cloth. The heads are different sizes, different shapes. Her father used to play golf but Eve has never understood what the different kinds of heads were used for. She can remember asking him but he never replied.

  “I’m sorry.” Melly can’t seem to stop crying. “I thought, while I was driving over, I actually thought . . .” She doesn’t finish, she doesn’t need to. Tears are pouring down her face. Eve knows what she thought, she’d thought the same.

  Eric puts an arm around her. “Okay, Melly, it’s okay.”

  Melissa’s mouth is moving awkwardly because of the swelling in her face. Eve knows with the stinging acuity of grief that it was Paul who hurt Melly; pity settles on top of grief and fear, another sliding layer. She glances down at the empty trunk but it isn’t empty after all. In the corner there is a curved glittering shape. Eve reaches in and brings it out in her hand. She holds it so tightly that the glassy fragments dig into her palm. A tiara. A child’s tiara.

  Part Five

  Disguises

  The children dressed up all the time, pretending to be someone else, practicing for life, which is exactly why children play games. Poppy wore that little sequined jacket from the dress-up box—it went well with her hair; Blake pretended to be a soldier; Sorrel was a princess. Charley, well, Charley’s always herself. Izzy was beautiful, and that was a disguise in itself.

  It’s quite funny to think that while we were admiring the children’s disguises, we were busy making our own: Melly and her pretty scarves, Eve putting on makeup at the barbecue and becoming someone else. I wore glitter, disguising damage, like Melly. And all the time, Paul and Martin were disguising themselves as family men who loved their wives, though I’m not saying they were the same, I’m not saying that at all.