The Playground (16 page)

But we got our moment. I got mine. Beige Nicola's children were easier to organise than ours and of course she had nothing to carry as she didn't bring anything, so she set off towards the car. As Sophie gathered up the last of her things, saying what a brilliant day it had been and how we must do it again soon, I grappled for the gift, stuttering over my words as I tried to pull it out, playing it down, apologising, ‘Oh, God, it's nothing. Just a tiny thing.'

It was a wonderful success. She was thrilled, she was touched. I blushed and stammered and told her that I used to love it, that Joe used to buy it for me, and then we hugged and our sunglasses hit off each other's but we didn't comment on that, we just both rearranged them so we could begin the challenge of getting everyone from the beach back to the car. By now we were all freezing and I was so frazzled with everything that I picked up Ben instead of Addie and carried him over to where I had parked. It was only as I went to lift him into the car seat that I realised I had the wrong child. The Preparation H had seeped into my eyes, covering them with a greasy film and had made everything sepia-edged and fuzzy.

And through the muddle and chaos I didn't get the opportunity to say goodbye to Beige Nicola or her two pink girls. Never mind. Tra la la. My bag was light when I hooked it over my shoulder, everything that was in it now eaten or given away.

I replayed the afternoon on the drive home, trying to reassure myself about how it had gone, recalling a few of the witty things I'd said, things that had got an unexpected laugh. Then cringing that I'd suggested dinner when it was far too soon for that. And about my hand touching a red patch on Sophie's arm where I thought she might
have grazed herself when she fell. And for calling her children by their nicknames and hugging them or helping them when it wasn't my job. ‘No, I want Mummy,' Ben had said when I'd tried to put him into Addie's car seat.

The gift. Had it been too much? Like the Elvis poster I'd bought to make Carla Brogan like me at school. It was in thanks for the torn newspaper cutting she'd given me of Bruno from the kids from ‘Fame'. I pretended I'd found it at home; little did she know that I'd forced Mum through every shop in Stillorgan searching for the perfect one.

*

Though the election was long over, Labour Party candidate Teresa Ferris was still staring in at us from the telegraph pole opposite our flat, with her painted lips and set hair. Her eyes followed me around the sitting room, always seeming to look away just as I turned to look at her.

‘Squirrel!' Teresa didn't flinch, but Addie was over, her small fingers smudging the window pane. ‘Hey, Mr Squirrel,' she said, delighted, her exhales leaving little patches of condensation on the glass. She thumped at the window as he made his way – scuttle, scuttle – over the thick twine of the telegraph wire. And then he was gone, our excitement short-lived.

‘OK, say night-night to the playground,' I was slowing down as I always did at this time of the evening. I contemplated the countless small battles we would have between now and bed.

‘It's not bedtime?' Addie said, releasing a bit of wind.

‘Excuse me, Little Miss Stink-a-lot.'

‘'Scuse me.' She giggled at my giggling.

‘It
is
bedtime, I'm afraid. It's cold and dark. Look, the park's empty.
All the children have gone home. Everyone's asleep. Even the squirrels are off to bed.'

She examined her reflection in the window, moved closer and gave herself a long, wet kiss. ‘Joy says I'm in charge about when I go asleep.'

‘Does she now?' Joy had returned from Monaghan creatively revived and more controlling than ever. We'd had an argument about my parenting skills before she'd even unpacked; Addie had been half-naked and happy on a chair by the kitchen sink, doing the washing up, singing an old country song her dad used to play for her. (
Bottle of wine, fruit of the vine, when you gonna let me get sober?
) Aside from the inappropriateness of the lyrics, Joy felt this was a further sign that Addie needed some professional help to come to terms with her father no longer being part of her life. Then she suggested that she (not I) take Addie to see a wonderful therapist she'd met at the retreat. She'd left a brochure for Oasis Counselling on my bedside table, told me to ‘find a quiet moment to consider it' and had disappeared into the bathroom with a bucket of Epsom Salts.

‘Is Granny asleep?'

‘Yes, Granny's asleep.'

‘Is Alfie asleep?'

‘You can see he's asleep. Now, that's enough questions.'

‘Is Daddy asleep?'

‘You don't have a daddy any more. Just like you don't have a little brother.' That was not a sensible thing to say. I wasn't handling this well.

‘Or a crocodile,' Addie said, grinning. Addie was fine. Addie was going to be OK; we were going to be OK.

I turned away from her, tried to think of other things, tried to catch the headlines on the six o'clock news.

‘Mummy, Mummy, peoples there.'

‘Really,' I said, kneeling on the ground, balling up a bit of newspaper and throwing it onto the fire. Another of Joe's old jobs. He always seemed to be passing me on his way upstairs or down, with a bucket full of logs, always on his knees, sweeping the grate, forehead creased with industry, engrossed in this, his favourite daily ritual. I'd become quite adept at it.

‘Peoples. No clothes on!'

‘Silly-billy,' I said and stood, wiping my hands on my jeans, leaving great black streaks along each leg. I walked over, bent down behind her, held her around her waist, blew on her neck. Reflected in the window, the flames from the fire were licking the telegraph wire. It took a moment to see what she was pointing at, and then to make sense of it, but there on the bench beneath the oak tree in the playground, was a boy in a red sweater, his bare backside moving up and down, a girl's legs bent either side of him.

‘Jesus.'

‘What happened, Mummy?'

‘Never mind. Silly people. They'll get very cold. Now, how about a cartoon?' I said, pulling her away and turning on my computer which I'd set up on the coffee table beside the window.

‘I love you. You're my best friend,' she said, settling into her seat, thrilled at my inconsistency.

She pointed at a thumbnail illustration on YouTube for an episode of
Peppa Pig
she hadn't seen and settled into her seat. I turned back to the window – they were still at it. Then the girl must have seen me; she pushed the boy off. He stood up, tugged at the belt of his jeans. It was Dylan Freeney, Mimi's ‘dream child', the boy all the mothers loved. Dylan and Juliette doing it in the park. Juliette grabbed her bag, sat back down on the picnic bench. No wait. Not Juliette.
Juliette's hair was longer, blonder. It was Dylan and some girl I didn't know. I closed the shutter, turned back to the TV, tried to concentrate on the news.

The beautiful female newsreader, so polished and coiffed, always made me feel grubby. Too aware of my unshaven legs, my dirty, bitten nails. Two hundred jobs were to go at a factory in Roscommon. There would be Social Welfare cuts in the budget. House prices had fallen again.

‘Come on, Peppa,' says George, ‘I want to rape you.'
I looked over Addie's shoulder to see the two little cartoon characters ice-skating, and then the sound of kids giggling and a thumb over the camera, and more giggles.
‘Peppa's dad wants to fuck you.'

‘God, what's going on this evening? OK, that's enough Peppa.' I stretched over, slammed the lid down and pulled her away.

‘'Nother one,' she said, holding up her hand, voice cracking. ‘Look at my thumb, it says one.'

I carried her protesting down to the bedroom.

‘I want more cartoons! You're hurting my tummy's feelings. Is it school tomorrow?'

‘Yes, sweetie.'

‘But I don't like school.' She started to cry.

‘Do you want to see me hop?' she said, with a quick change of tactic, jumping from foot to foot. ‘I'm not very good but it's the bestest I can do.'

‘Fantastic. Now, off we go.'

‘But I didn't do whining and crying.'

‘You
are
doing whining and crying.'

‘But I want to be happy. I want to be good.'

‘OK, be good then, please.'

‘But I don't know how to be good.'

When she was calm, I crept back into the sitting room. The playground was in darkness. Definitely Dylan, but not Juliette. The little creep. I then spent one hour and fifteen minutes trying to remove the security tag from the bottle of wine I'd bought at Tesco using the self-service till, such was my need for a drink after a very long day with a very short person. It took three screwdrivers, one pair of scissors (now kaput), a pair of pliers and Joe's Swiss Army knife to remove the plastic.

I texted Sophie, my fingers still sore and cut, to tell her how much we'd enjoyed our day at the beach. Of course just after I'd sent it, I thought of a joke I could have made about the au pair, but a second text would be a bit needy.

And then I didn't hear back from her. I checked my phone every few minutes, feeling a bit put out by her casualness, re-reading my sent message to see if the tone was right. She'd have read it by now for sure. Maybe she didn't enjoy our time together as much as I had? Maybe the gift was too much after all. Maybe she'd wanted to hang out with Beige Nicola instead, maybe she'd just invited us to be polite.

And then it happened. My phone rang. ‘Hello?' I said, heart galloping.

‘A disaster striked!' It wasn't Sophie, it was flipping Irenka. I could hear her in stereo, on the phone and coming up through the floorboards.

‘Those leetal bastards. I'm sorry, Eve, but can't you not see? They're burning the bloody rope bridge out there. The leetel shits.'

I looked out the window, saw the flames.

‘Can you come and see me, please?' she said, sounding like a headmistress. ‘I can't leave Charlotte, Donal's out at a Tidy Town's meeting.' I knocked on the bathroom door, and called out to Joy in a
loud whisper, trying not to wake Addie. No reply. I imagined her like Ophelia, ears under water, swishing her salt-and-pepper hair about, deaf to everything. I grabbed the baby monitor from the hall table, trudged down the stairs.

‘You know we have no fire service here in Bray?' Irenka said, holding her door open. Her hair was standing on end – it looked hacked at, as if she'd taken a pair of scissors to it in a premenstrual rage. ‘It's bloody dangerous,' she said, negotiating furniture on her way to the window, her mobile phone in her hand.

We stood together watching the kids, who were now trying to put out the fire, but I sunk back behind the shutters when one of them turned around, terrified of being spotted. I wasn't going to tell her about the sex. Her reaction would be exhausting and I couldn't be certain of what I saw.

‘What can we do? We can't confront them. Two women on their own.'

‘What? And why nod?' The spots flared up between her eyebrows. ‘Should I be afraid in my own home?' A bit of her spit landed on my lip. This was just what she didn't want to hear; what everyone had always said to her before. I had hit her Achilles heel, I could feel a rant coming on, but I didn't have the energy for it. All I wanted to do was to go back upstairs.

‘I tell you, Eve, when we get those hedges cut – the council said Monday for sure – we can keep our kids safe and we can keep an eye on those pigs.'

Her mobile phone began playing ‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik'.

‘Yes, Sergeant. Thanks for returning my call. The boys, the three boys I told you about, they're back. They're setting fires in the park. I'm watching them as we speak,' she said, picking a bit of fluff from my sweater.

I looked around at her remarkably clean and orderly home. The handles of all the tea cups along the shelves in the kitchen were turned in the same direction; the tea towels lined up at the same length on the rail in front of the cooker. This wasn't going to be a quick conversation with the police; Irenka had settled on the sofa with the phone and was flipping through the pages of a notebook, looking for something else to complain about to the sergeant, now that she had him. I felt sorry for the police, however ineffectual they had been in sorting out the problems with the playground, Irenka was on to them almost daily; she must have had them on speed dial.

I was restless; it was difficult to see anything in the park now that the fire had died. I moved away from the window and occupied myself looking at framed photographs of Irenka and her family that were arranged on a mahogany side table. Donal in a mortar board, receiving a degree, everyone huddled together and beaming on a family skiing trip, Charlotte and her grandparents beside a Christmas tree. Something about all of them seemed a little odd, but I couldn't say precisely what.

‘You'll notice a white space in each of them, yes?'

Irenka had finished her call, without my realising, and was now standing behind me.

I looked closer. In each photograph there
was
a strange white space.

‘That was where my sister, Jolanta, used to be. She's no longer part of my family. I had her professionally airbrushed out. They did an excellent job, don't you think?'

‘That was a bit radical,' I said, laughing but at the same time thinking she was insane. ‘What on earth did she do?'

‘That is none of your concern, Eve. You understand me, eh?'

‘Diddle, diddle, dumpling!'

We couldn't make out his shape in the darkness, but Irenka recognised his voice. There was the chime of a stick on the park railings, the top of his ginger head. Billy Flynn was marching across the road towards us. He stopped and stood still, legs spread, hands on hips, outside our gate, looking in at us. ‘My son John went to bed with his trousers on. One shoe off.'