The Playground (13 page)

‘Chemical Ali's just arrived too. High as a kite this morning.' This was a skinny, jumpy junkie who was in every day, getting agitated with the machines. We were all a little afraid of him. ‘He's wiping his nose on his sleeve and spreading snot all over the keyboard. Disgusting, so it is. The red-faced auld one keeps complaining.'

I wasn't certain if he was telling me this so that I would go up and sort it out or whether he intended to see to it himself. In the children's section a small girl was pulling pages out of a
Mr Men
book while her mother checked her phone. This I could tackle more easily.

‘Imelda, what am I after saying?' her mother said, sleepily, when she saw me approach, then went back to her frantic two-thumb texting.

A woman, gaunt, ponytailed, tired, hurried in with a small boy and girl. She sat them both on one chair in front of a computer, turned it on, found the game they liked.

‘Now, no messin', d'ya hear?'

The little girl nodded. The boy looked upset.

‘See yas later. OK?'

‘I want to come with you,' he said.

‘Ah, don't start that, Sean.'

‘I'll bring back a surprise if you're good, OK?' she said and turned and left.

‘On her way into town again,' Pete said. ‘Just watch and see. She'll leave them here for the day. I've confronted her before but she keeps doing it anyway and sure I've no power to stop her.'

I was in non-fiction filing returns when Belinda wheeled her trolley along my row. She made more noise than any of the regulars, humming, complaining and reminding everyone of the rules: ‘No eating, no drinking, mobile phones off', always ignoring the golden one – to be quiet.

‘God, my shoulders are bleedin' killing me, they're so knotted,' she said, hunching and relaxing them. ‘I'd love one of those deep-tissue massages. Billy got me into a headlock in the chipper last night because I wouldn't buy him another Coke. I think he's after dislocating something.'

‘God, that sounds humiliating. And sore.'

‘It was both, believe me. Then he lost it completely when we got home. He smashed the Batman lava lamp I bought him for his birthday. He loved that stupid thing.'

‘What do you think's bothering him?'

‘Can't tell you. Who knows? The full moon? That makes kids go mad, I read somewhere. And Billy just has these crazy moods where no one can reach him – “incredible sulks” his dad used to call them. So how did the games thing go the other night?' she asked, wanting to get off the subject of her son. ‘I'm on next week, any tips?'

‘It was good fun, though Irenka and Joy were pretty overbearing. Were you stuck here all evening?'

‘I was in, my eye! I had my last session of radiotherapy that afternoon. I was too wiped out, to be honest.'

‘You look so well. I didn't realise.'

‘Really? Thought I was the talk of the playground, assumed everyone knew. Breast cancer. I had a lumpectomy thing and then some radiotherapy. That was my last treatment, thank Christ.' She carried on stacking, then stopped, sat back on her ankles, looked at me, rubbed her hand on my back.

‘Don't look so worried. I'll be OK. I've beaten it, I think. I wish Billy could believe it though. Every time I so much as cough he's fussing over me. The poor lad's angry because this is my second time with it. And I had scans and a mammogram that didn't catch it. He's blaming the doctors, the machines, everything. He's trying to get me on a raw vegan diet that he read about online; he's been on that computer for hours. He's terrified that it's going to kill me. He lost it when his dad left, now he's blaming himself for the stress he put me through around then; he thinks that's why it's after coming back.'

The cleaner, Mary, was making a remarkable amount of noise beside us, throwing old papers into bin sacks, to show that she wasn't earwigging, which of course she was.

‘I'll do next Wednesday's games shift with you, if you'd like? It's the same day as Addie's birthday but I thought I'd bring the party over to the playground.'

‘Ah lovely, thanks, Eve.'

*

The system crashed that afternoon, something to do with ‘comms' – a word, an abbreviation, that meant nothing to any of the staff. For the first half an hour after it went down everyone was irritated, particularly Pete who took pride in his organisational skills and was now unable to record late returns. Two hours later and with no sign of the technician, we had all begun to enjoy our inability to do any work.

The disorder was infectious. No one was even attempting to whisper. Kids were plunging into the bean bags, screaming, amazed at not being told off. The local drunks had reinstated themselves on the bench outside the back door, and were happily inebriated. The elderly, always noisy with their groans and coughs and heavy breathing and unable to find their mobile phones with the incredibly
loud and incongruous ringtones their grandchildren had selected for them, chatted at the top of their voices about the news, the weather, the result of the general election.

The chaos had seeped as far as the toilets. ‘You'd want to see what they've done in there,' Mary said, on her way back with a mop and bucket and a slippery surface sign.

‘Spare us the details, would you? Please?' Belinda said.

It was that time of the afternoon, three forty-five, when the Leaving Cert students arrived: coats hanging off, dragging their bags behind them, the girls, flatfooted in Dubes, the boys behind them in beanies, slumped shoulders and spotty chins, pretending they were there to do homework when really they just wanted to hang out.

As soon as they sat, the sniggering and loud whispering began. Then snorts of hysteria, swapping places, dragging chairs across the floor, lots of little rebellions. They were too full of hormones and too keen to impress to sit still. Next were the endless trips in and out through the swing door for cigarettes or to the shops for coffee and sweets. One girl thought it was hilarious to continuously clear her throat, as if to sit silently doing your homework was deeply un-cool. Had I ever been this silly? A whole lot sillier actually, but that wasn't the point.

‘Hey, guys, can you keep it down a little?' I said, from where I was standing in Health and Beauty, the sound of my voice reverberating horribly in my ear, the snorts of suppressed laughter from the two girls down the end making me cringe. It still came as a shock to realise that I was no longer young, but someone's mother, middle-aged, invisible. ‘Snazzy,' I heard myself say about a new coat one of Addie's little school friends was wearing the other day—I could have sworn the toddlers rolled their eyes at each other.

My phone beeped in my pocket, causing a student to look up from
his computer and tut. Two new messages, the first from Sumita letting me know that Addie was ‘very great but didn't eat much her carrots'. The second from Mr Norman:

‘Library's closing in five minutes,' I said, working my way around each section, at exactly five minutes to five. The small girl and boy that had been deposited in the corner that morning were still there. The boy was lying on the floor on his belly, colouring in a photocopy of SpongeBob SquarePants; his sister was above him, curled into a chair, sucking her thumb as she read a book.

‘We have to wait for our mam,' she said as she stood up, bookmarked her place in her novel, grabbed her rucksack.

‘That's OK, sit tight. She'll be here soon, I'm sure,' I said, trying to be kind. She opened her book again, slotted her thumb back in her mouth, told her brother it was OK.

*

With Joe it was always his glasses, but there was something about me and keys. If you were to pile up all the keys I'd lost in my life they would reach a great height. I must have left them in the library which was now closed. It was Addie who noticed the open window by the balcony. Joy must have forgotten to close it when she'd left monkey nuts out for the squirrels that morning. She'd now gone to spend a week at an artist's retreat in County Monaghan, to work on the
themes of loneliness and sexual longing, so there was no point in calling her about keys.

Mr Norman, who always kept a close eye on happenings around the square, was straight over to assist. What we needed was a ladder. I hitched myself over the wall of the porch and knocked on Mr Larson's door. I knew he had one, I'd seen him use it for the hedge that separated our two homes. He appeared in his dressing gown for some reason, didn't acknowledge Mr Norman, who was leaning against the wall, arms folded, and he was at the front gate moments later with the ladder, still in his dressing gown but having swapped his slippers for wellington boots.

I'd forgotten that the two men didn't get along. Irenka told me that they'd fallen out years earlier over a strip of land between their two homes. Mr Norman had wanted to develop the land but Mr Larson wouldn't give it up, so Mr Norman sold, moved to the opposite side of the square and for a while Mr Larson used the land to grow rocket, turnips and potatoes. Now it was a no man's wilderness, a rubbish dump for the neighbourhood, great hunting ground for cats. ‘That bastard' was how the two men had referred to each other ever since.

It was hard to imagine Mr Norman being bad-tempered, a little easier with Mr Larson. Though outwardly jolly, jogging indoors instead of walking when he came back from putting out the bins, I sometimes heard his raised voice through the walls, and he'd shown a flash of anger the other evening when I'd charged round the corner with my umbrella and we'd collided, the spokes of my brolly poking him on the head (I was in heels and he was quite short). His expression had changed as soon as he'd recognised me and I'd smiled and said hello. He'd smiled back, asked how I was, folded his arms and settled
into a conversation. I liked that I might be mending old wounds – that I was bringing them together, forcing a truce.

The two men stumbled around the front garden, trying to manage the ladder, looking like Laurel and Hardy. They were attempting to balance it against the balcony – neither one of them seemed particularly excited about the prospect of climbing up and neither had volunteered when Nathan arrived. He took the ladder from the two men, propped it against the balcony and climbed up the side of the house in seconds. I stood there like a silly girl, shouting at him to be careful. The other two men stood back, impressed but somewhat emasculated by his confidence and agility.

‘Do you want me to put that up while I'm here?' Nathan asked, once we were safely inside again, tapping his foot against the side of an Ikea box that was lying on the floor in the sitting room beside the TV. It was a bookshelf that I had bought for Addie several months before but had yet to assemble.

‘Could you? That would be wonderful, if you're sure you have time? Can I get you some tea?'

‘No bother at all. Milk, two sugars, please.'

‘Now, you show me where you'd like me to put it, little lady,' he said, taking Addie by the hand and letting her lead the way.

He also replaced a door handle that afternoon and fixed a leak in the toilet, lifting Addie up when he'd finished to show her how the cistern worked.

‘So, I'd better get back to it …' he said, all his jobs done. I thanked him. Told Addie that he had to go home.

‘Would you like to play a game with me?' she asked, her invitation so simple and earnest it was impossible to refuse. He threw her up in his arms, caught her and tickled her until she could bear it no more,
the way Joe used to. Then he rooted in his pocket, took out a small green bouncy ball that lit up when you squeezed it.

‘OK, I know a good game, come with me.'

He stood at the top of the stairs in the hall while Addie stood at the bottom and they threw the ball to each other. Every so often it bounced against the Memory Foam mattress propped in the hall for Irenka to help her bad back, which caused it to ricochet off the walls. This made Addie giggle so hard that she got the hiccups and then she had a little accident.

‘Nathan's so silly,' she said that evening, as I lifted her into her bath. ‘He's my best friend. That's why because he makes me laugh and laugh.'

*

‘You are more relaxed than you've been in a long time. You are in complete control of your thoughts and your feelings
.' Nonsense.

‘Your mind is very centered and calm. A deep feeling of inner calm begins to resonate through your whole body
.' No it doesn't.

Why was I being deliberately self-destructive? Why wouldn't my mind just shut up and let it work? Bella had recommended this meditation CD,
Creating Inner Peace and Calm
. She'd tried it out for her fear of flying and she made it the whole way to Boston and back without the help of alcohol or drugs; she'd just listened to the CD over and over and practised diaphragmatic breathing techniques.

I tried again to quiet my mind, I breathed slowly and deeply. I tried to shut out Addie's little snores.

‘You are strolling through a meadow on a warm summer's day. The air is clean and fresh. You feel the pleasant warmth of the sun on your head and shoulders. You feel so good. You relax, deeper and deeper. Drifting down, drifting down, drifting down. You reach a secluded spot by the edge of a stream
where you can rest. You gaze into the gently flowing water and feel a deep connection with the effortless flow of nature. You lower yourself down onto the soft grassy bank and gaze up at the bright-blue sky. You lie back on the grass. And relax, deeper and deeper. Not a care in the world now. You feel yourself drifting off into a relaxing sleep. A deep, dreamy sleep. Sleep, sleep, sleep. You gooo to sleep. You gooo to sleep …'