by Paul Magrs
Rounders out on the playing field for the whole afternoon, that’s what Marsha liked. Nonstop rounders, mind. That terrible version of the game in which, if someone’s struck off, you’ve only got the time of the protesting scream that goes up to grab the flung-down bat if you’re next in line and get struck off yourself. The tennis ball gets chucked at your wicket without you when you’re not fast enough. Marsha liked this breakneck version because it kept everyone engaged and concentrating all afternoon. And it did, it did, I have to admit, but I went home with my shoulders and arms like a lobster and my knees actually shook as if I’d been kicked, after all that dashing about.
Horrible Ruby, the gingham-smocked caretaker of the community centre where our scheme is housed when the days are raining, came to the doors to watch us play, to make sure we weren’t ruining the council’s equipment. She snapped a fag in and out of her mouth, smoking efficiently, using a blue bucket as an ashtray and saying to me as I wandered over, glad of the break, That Marsha’s a miracle worker, isn’t she? Getting those scruffy bairns playing a fair game all afternoon. The bairns round here’d be running wild without her.’
There was no sitting on the back of the giant spider all afternoon with Marsha.
Once we had an inspection to see how we were getting on and a bloke turned up in a car. But we were out. We had walked all forty of our kids across town in a godawful raucous convoy. Over three main roads and honest, I think about it now and we could have lost or killed any number of them. Little bastards running off and tearing about as we walked alongside the rank Burn. They went wild in the trees, in the mottled blue shadows down the Burn. Marsha strode ahead. She made a stick for herself, stripping leaves and bark off a slender branch and she swished it along. Not a care in the world. Assured that everyone was behaving themselves. I was bringing up the rear, sweating.
* * *
For this job, which ends in September, the council pays me fifty pounds a week. Although I am paid to entertain the kiddies and keep them off the streets, I realise now what I am really being paid for.
Taking the blame should any child on the estates our scheme caters for be killed this summer by a car or a pervert or another kid or whatever. Because there is a scheme, there ought to be no casualties. They are catered for. I am a caterer. The parents are customers, with a right to complain if their kids are damaged. The parents here shove their kids out their doors at eight in the morning, take them in again at night-time, later as summer advances. It would be like this even without a scheme nearby. The scheme is convenient for emergencies. The same parents send two-year-old, three-year-old bairns in pushchairs. Our posters say six to twelve. We get the extremes; the insensible babies and the bored teenagers lolling over fences, gobbing and leering at us, wanting, really, to join in, I reckon.
Our bodies, as supervisors, sun-branded and sore and toughened from days out in the sullied air, are rented out to kids half our age. We are walking climbing frames. On walks they cling to our arms, dangle from us, clamber round our necks; they follow us about and are familiar with us. We’re not like teachers and they take pride in knowing us by our first names. We are older brothers and sisters to them; they take our hands, wait to delight in hearing us swear by mistake. They take a keen interest in progress made by Neil and Michelle, helpers with another scheme across town. Everyone knows they’ve been fucking since June and suddenly Michelle is having a bairn of her own.
It’s later summer now and, if anything, hotter than ever. I’ve not known a season last as long as this since I was a bairn. Being out in it all so much makes me feel I’ve wrung every drop from it. Like the precious days on the estate, down the Burn, when I was about ten, say. Summer a long season then, everything reeking of dog shit because people take their dogs on longer walks and the shit gets spread that much further afield. The company of children gives me back an illusion of a lifetime in the sun. I’ve gone a glorious suntanned colour; pale old me, it’s incredible. Especially since so much of the time we’ve spent underwater. This afternoon we are under the ocean once more. I managed to talk them out of Jurassic Park. Which last time gave me a headache, actually.
Martin hasn’t been on the giant spider today. He kept his place on the swings, doggedly as if he thought it was doing him some good. A few minutes ago he left his swing to its own devices and he went sniffing round the brick pavilion at the back of us.
The brick pavilion is disused and dark. I remember it as having an ice-cream counter inside. A window with an old woman squirting yellow Mr Whippy out of a machine. There were toilets. One of those swinging signs outside for Lyon’s Maid; a picture of three kids skipping, holding hands. Now every window and door is boarded up and painted blue.
While we’re relaxed and still in our under-ocean routine on the giant spider, Martin gives a yell and comes running out of the brick pavilion. We sit up muggy and confused like sleepers. What if someone really falls asleep some day and they drop right off onto tarmac? Ours isn’t one of those parks Esther Rantzen converted with woodchips for safety.
‘Come and see!’ Martin’s yelling. He wears a T-shirt from the Tuesday market, navy blue with a clumsy transfer that reads, ‘Take That!’ I saw them on sale, two quid each, last week. This summer has been slippery with the nylon sheen of T-shirts bought in Aycliffe market.
‘What is it?’ I dredge myself from the silty bed to meet a cobalt sky tight as Tupperware. I haven’t put on my supervisor voice. ‘What is it, Martin?’ I try again, brassy, bright.
When I ease down off the giant spider, the legs are hot on my bare skin. Martin takes my hand in his. It’s unlike him, he’s eight and usually pushing off ahead like a real little lad. ‘What is it?’ I ask and he’s pulling me to visit the brick pavilion. My mouth’s gone dry and the other kids have picked up on Martin’s unnerving quiet and the fact that it’s freaking me out. They are coming along with us, into the sheltered concrete space which reeks of dry piss, Martin urging us into the space behind the rosehip bushes. In here it’s shadowed and cooler and I’d say creepy. I’d warn Martin not to come in. Imagine if the likes of our play scheme didn’t go on. Imagine where Martin would play.
I ask, ‘What have you found?’ and make sure the others hang back a suitable distance. They do, knowing something weird is up and not wanting to see it too close, which is my job, after all. I’m being paid to come between them and whatever weird and hazardous thing it is Martin’s discovered in the boarded-up brick pavilion.
Wordlessly he points to the stained boards over what used to be Mr Whippy’s counter. Among the graffiti and scars there’s a dark strip which, as I approach, I see is a letterbox slot of darkness, about head height with Martin.
I swallow my breath whole, fight down my pulse rate and take three steps forwards. I bend and glare into the hole in the boards and find I’m glaring straight into an unblinking eye. I can see it’s surrounded by puckers of grey flesh. It has no brows or lashes and it’s threaded with a painful number of scarlet capillaries. Besides this I can see nothing else in the gap.
Horrible Ruby told us later that she had dealt with the man from the council herself. He’d arrived in a big car with smoked windows and even a little flag. She went out in her gingham smock and carried her broom with her. It was a real caretaker’s broom, its bristled head three feet across.
‘They’re all out,’ she shouted to the council man. ‘You can’t inspect them because Marsha’s taken them all roller-skating for the afternoon.’
The man from the council reportedly frowned. ‘The rink is across the other side of town.’
‘They walk it no bother,’ Ruby went. ‘They’re all young, aren’t they?’
We were crossing three main roads in that hectic crocodile. I look back now, appalled at Marsha’s stick-swishing insouciance, but also at my discomforted complacency in leaving it all up to her.
We were walking alongside the rank Burn, right across town, two by two, singing songs. This is the first summer in years I’ve known a
ll the songs in the top ten. I’m out of date at twenty.
‘This sounds enterprising of Marsha,’ said the councillor.
‘It’s all free at the open-air rink across town,’ said Ruby. ‘They have a lovely time. Every time they come back full of it.’
‘I’m glad to see the scheme such a success this year.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Horrible Ruby approved. ‘That Marsha has her head screwed on.’
At the open-air rink, across the road from the borstal, everything was free, even hiring your roller boots. Most of the time I spent on my knees, going through piles of leathery-smelling boots, combining sizes and tying the squirming bairns’ laces. Setting them off with a soft push onto the smooth concrete. The little wheels, all combined, set up a hum of gentle thunder.
I rarely got to have a go myself and when I did, because it was an old pair, somebody else’s broken-in boots, I got a terrible blood blister under one heel. It went to the size of half an apple and I couldn’t stand on that foot for a week. When it popped—on a rainy day indoors—bad blood spilled out on the parquet floor and, oddly, it smelled like shit. Horrible Ruby shot out with her dustpan, fussing about, and dumped a heap of sawdust on the mess. I wasn’t ashamed as I might have been had it not been an injury I’d received in the work I was doing.
I felt slightly aggrieved that I couldn’t skate more often. I used to be a dab hand. At ten I taught myself on the smooth roads of our local streets. I had a shopping trolley we’d fished out of the Burn; I used to push myself round in that. Don’t ask me why or how. There’s a photo of me doing that somewhere, stuck out in the middle of the road. Honestly; slumped inside a shopping trolley with my legs hanging out to pedal on tarmac. Like an underprivileged bairn with nothing better to play on.
Meanwhile Marsha was skating, easily and cleverly, about the stained concrete rink. And all the kids followed her round in bright circles, a leisurely hurricane.
I think fast this afternoon, backing away from the blue boards in the brick pavilion.
‘Let me see,’ urge the bairns’ voices, ‘let me see,’ and their bodies push forwards, eager since I’m so quiet about what I’ve glimpsed. Only Martin, I notice, is still, with his arms crossed.
I think fast this afternoon, though, using the skills I’ve picked up already this summer. And one of the first, most important things I discovered was ways of deflecting, of catching up in a handful and redirecting attention. So with a clattering new brightness in my voice I make this moment turn a letter L.
‘I know!’ I cry, startling them all. ‘The giant spider is taking off again! He’s leaving the bottom of the ocean—listen!’ And they’re all listening now as if spider language comes broadcast. ‘Listen!’ I add a tremor of excitement. ‘He’s flying to Jurassic Park!’
They yelp and bicker and pelt their way back to the spider on the pink asphalt park. Up the metal legs they scamper before the spider can take off. Again I bring up the rear and Martin lags alongside me. His whole face is eyeing me and he won’t conspire in my forced change of mood.
We would meet the other schemes at places like the Recreation Centre, up by the industrial estate. Another perilous walk across town, this time through an underpass. It was on these trips we all took an interest in Neil and Michelle, how they were fucking and how Michelle’s foetus was faring. Were the facts of life something else we were paid fifty quid to impart?
We gave the children free rein on the Rec’s assault course. When four schemes from separate estates met up on an afternoon there were round about two hundred kids. It was mental and most of the supervisors sloped off and left them to it.
The supervisors would have a smoke together. Michelle and Neil would be our centrepiece for some reason. As if we were all basking in their fecund glow. When the kids came over with scuffed knees or grievances, they always talked to Neil and Michelle first, as if they’d become parents to all of us overnight.
While we sat on the grassy bank and smoked and left the bairns to the assault course, Marsha would be standing up high on a wall, blowing a whistle and screaming instructions at two hundred kids.
‘Listen to her!’ Neil scowled.
‘She’s keen,’ said Michelle.
And I was embarrassed because we were partners. I had to work doubly hard to make myself cool because of Marsha.
Robin said, ‘The kids hate her, too.’
‘They take the piss out of her,’ said Joanne.
‘She’s going to university, isn’t she?’ asked Michelle. ‘Isn’t that right?’ she asked me.
‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘You work with her.’
At that point I was getting shit from all sides. At the end of that afternoon Marsha took me aside at the mouth of the underpass and, within hearing of the bairns, said sedately but with venom, ‘Get your finger out or I’ll have you sacked, Teresa.’
I went back after work. I had to see again. But I couldn’t let any of the kids see where I was going, so I hung on in the community centre until I was sure they’d be long gone. Horrible Ruby ambled up.
‘You’ll be pleased with yourself, being supervisor now.’
‘I’ve been surpervisor a couple of weeks already. Since Marsha went.’
‘Hm.’ She looked me up and down. ‘And do you really think the kids are still enjoying the scheme?’
‘I hope SO.’
‘You’re not putting in half as much effort as poor Marsha did. Them bairns aren’t getting their money’s worth out of you. I’ve seen you, up at the park all day. Just sitting on the giant spider.’
I scowled. ‘They don’t pay for it anyway.’
‘Their parents pay taxes.’
‘No, they don’t.’
I left then and went straight back to the park, which was deserted, and to the brick pavilion, which was even more eerie. I steeled myself in the pissy concrete alcove behind the rosehip bushes and again I peered into the letterbox in the boards. That eye was still looking back, almost placidly.
I turned and ran all the way home, as I hadn’t since I was a kid myself, hounded home from school by the threat of a scrap.
What happened next was that Marsha went too far and she must have been too cocky for her own good. Because the next thing I knew she was flat on her arse in the middle of the outdoor rink, in the eyes of the cackling tornado.
I’m not saying did she fall or was she pushed, but just beforehand I’d heard Robin and Michelle and Neil talking about how snotty and ugly she looked, zipping round and round on the concrete, and then Michelle went out onto the rink. Actually Marsha looked the very opposite of ugly. I’m no fan but I have to admit she looked nice, especially that day. I was on the benches as usual, matching one pair of boots with another, the knuckle-bruising business of unpicking laces that have begun to rot.
Marsha was flung somehow through a gap that opened obligingly in the bank of skaters behind her and against the chest-high wall at the side. She hit the deck with a dismayed shriek and an arm broken in three places. From the benches I saw it flop about horribly and it took some moments for everyone to stop skating. Only when there was silence and we were all staring down at Marsha, on the floor in her yellow dungarees, did she burst into tears.
‘It’s my left arm!’ she was sobbing when the ambulance crew arrived with their blankets and started calling everyone ‘love’ in that softly bossy way they have. ‘I’m an artist! It’s my left arm!’
And it was true. She was due to go to art college in Newcastle this autumn. That was buggered up. After three days Marsha returned to work with a plaster cast that made her teeth grit each time she moved it. By her return I’d already picked up the reins on our scheme. Marsha should have realised. Those had been her rules in nonstop rounders and now the baton was mine.
For a couple of days she took a back seat and once I saw her trying to sketch something in a pad with her plastered arm. We were up at the park. My idea; I had all of the kids up on the back of the giant spider. It wa
s our first flight clinging to his laddered legs and his red abdomen and poor Marsha was relegated to watching, trying to draw us. I saw her try and fail miserably. The next day up at the assault course she couldn’t blow her whistle and wave her arms like a slave driver. She had to ride out the other supervisors’ lazy mockery.
And then, suddenly, Marsha left. She gave in her notice and didn’t come back.
After that we went all over the place on the back of the giant spider. But mostly we went to the bottom of the sea. The bairns were happy. They couldn’t remember a time without the giant spider, without the green laddered legs, the thick red abdomen, the afternoons spent lazily at the bottom of the sea.
By August’s end none of them even remembered Marsha and how the summer began. Summer this year was spent on the giant spider’s back.
And as August played itself out I began to miss the whole thing before the event. Everything took on a certain tinge. Up at the assault course we heard that Neil was marrying Michelle. Because of their bairn on the way they’d get a house, no bother. They were lucky. I got a silly crush on that Andrew for a bit, but that fell through. I think it was just the bairns urging me on with their bizarre sense of symmetry and anyway, I think he was queer. The bairns had a laugh, they played and fought and there were a few minor mishaps, only one major one, when Horrible Ruby got pushed over by accident when she was out by the community-centre bins. She brushed herself down, shaken and furious, and I apologised effusively, promising to give Martin a good talking-to.
Horrible Ruby just gave me a sickly, triumphant smile. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘I know it won’t happen again. And it definitely won’t happen again next year, will it?’