The Playground Read Online Free PDF

onto the balcony. I was still excited by the novelty of having one. When we first moved in I’d spent a good deal of time ducking and bending as I clambered in and out of it, organising things. I’d put the potted Windmill fern I’d brought with me from the old house in a corner to hide an ugly and hazardous cracked Doric pillar. This was the third flat we’d looked at. The first, a basement two-bed below a doctor’s surgery, had no garden and felt subterranean. In the second – a chintzy new development with candy-striped wallpaper, free gifts of honey and waving, life-sized teddy bears – Addie had used the facilities, yet to be plumbed, sullying the aroma of fresh hydrangeas in the hall and colouring everyone’s first impressions of the place. We’d got out of there quick.
    I looked around me in the cool morning air. Beyond where I stood, the chestnut and elm trees in the park were house-high and glorious in the early morning light. The one good thing about the flat was that it overlooked this little park, which had a playground at its centre and was hedged on all sides behind high Victorian railings. I would take Addie to visit it in the morning. From where I stood, I could see there was a swing and a slide. An old woman walked and smoked along the curled path with her even older dog; a man kicked a ball to a little boy.
    The traffic on the road that separated the house from the park was another worry. Sporadic but fast, it swept around a blind corner. I could see a child charging across, not looking, excited by the sight of a friend. And then the memory of the solitary plimsoll, left on the roundabout after the accident, belonging to the little boy I used to play Cowboys and Indians with. Lesley French, almost six.
    I liked the idea of living beside a home for the elderly. I imagined happy little trips in to visit them with still warm homemade buns and small gifts at Christmas and Easter, but the skip in the front drive was ugly: overfull with the flotsam and jetsam of the dying and the dead – old armchairs, soiled cushions, surgical gloves and incontinence pads and needles that surely brought sniffing dogs and snippy complaints from the neighbours who did not wish to be reminded, as they walked along Altona Avenue, that the sea was not all that lay ahead of them.

Chapter Four
    From a distance and from the waist up, Bray appeared to be a pretty seaside town: the humpback bridge over the pewter water of the Dargle; the clusters of red brick houses rising up into the green; tall chimneys and village spires; the domed church at the hill top and the breast of the sugarloaf with its perfect nipple visible through mist beyond. It was only at street level that things got ugly.
    Most of the shops on the high street had yet to open, or had shut down for good, padlocked behind graffitied shutters, except for Shoe Zone which had wearily begun trading – Scholl sandals for nothing in a wire basket by the door.
    There were a few early risers on the street, most of them aimless, just standing and watching. A pink-track-suited woman, ‘Babe’ emblazoned across her bum, pushed a buggy full of groceries towards the golden arches of McDonalds, which glowed from the Tudor beams of the once-magnificent town hall. An old woman with nicotine hair, a red raincoat and rash-red face, and arms over-stretched from a lifetime of carrying heavy bags, hacked her way along the road ahead of me, head lolling to the side. She stopped for a cigarette outside the chemist on the corner. ‘Blahhh!’ she shouted as I passed, making me jump, her gaping rubber lips exposing the rottenness of her gums. If the old men weren’t limping, they were dripping from the nose, blue-faced and defeated on a long uphill walk.
    It was cold that morning; the sky cinderblock grey and threatening. I was glad of it. Recently the sunshine had been rubbing it in, making me feel that everyone else was