The Playground Read Online Free PDF Page B

happy which made me all more miserable.
    On the pavement outside the church, where people were gathered waiting for a hearse, pigeons picked over vomit the colour of Pepto-Bismol. I bent my head and braced myself for insults or wolf whistles as I walked by a group of teenage boys squatting on a wall outside the train station, all spunk and angst, their faces pale and papuliferous from a strict diet of chips and burgers. Nothing happened. They were silent. There was nothing to say. I had reached an age where I’d become invisible to a large section of the male population. They simply didn’t see me any more. In fact, a weird, more worrying thing had begun happening. Elderly men had started staring at me. Not just saying hello to the nice young girl as we passed on the street, but stopping and turning and giving me the eye, as if there might be a chance.
    I had period pain. I missed Joe. I didn’t want to live in Bray. The town had always seemed out of focus and out of fashion to us; in a time warp of its own, a bit like an episode of
Coronation Street
. It was too far from the city, we had said in the days when we had money, too far from friends, a bit parochial, a little bit rough.
    I caught my reflection in the window of Fab Framing. Here was me being snobby about the locals but actually I fitted right in, in my too-high heels, too-short leather jacket and skinny jeans, too tight on solid thighs. I’d tied my hair up – Joe always loved me with it tied up, until I told him that women only did that when it needed a good wash.
    *
    â€˜Why are you looking at me?’ I’d snap when I felt him watching.
    â€˜Because you’re so beautiful.’
    â€˜Why are you being nice?’ I’d ask if he put a blanket around me in the evenings or brought me up a hot drink.
    â€˜Because I love you more than life itself.’
    I nodded while a man, who was clearly not from Bray, possibly Spanish, gave me a long and complex set of directions to the supermarket, which I knew I was never going to follow. I was hopeless with directions, always drifting off after the first left, and his voice was being drowned out by a torrent of incomprehensible gibberish coming from the loudspeaker of a car with a Sinn Fein banner on its roof. I thanked him and decided to go downhill in search of sponges and bleach.
    Outside the supermarket, which I somehow stumbled upon, there was a tangle of wriggling limbs between cars and a woman’s backside in the air. A child – too old to be naked from the waist down – was being held under the arms, encouraged to have a pee or worse. By the door where baskets were stacked in a careless heap, a sign, scrawled in Biro and Sellotaped to the inside of the window, read: ‘No Messers’ as if Bray had more than enough of them.
    I found a tub of lethal-looking bleach and some sponges in a dark corner of the shop where boxes and delivery trolleys had been abandoned, and smiled at the thought of Joe and the phobia he’d had about them. He couldn’t even be in the same room as a sponge – I suggested that he must have had a bad experience with one once, though I couldn’t imagine what this bad experience would have been.
    The girl at the till was worrying a nail that she’d bitten down to bleeding skin, and our transaction, me handing her money, her packing my bag and giving me change, was completed without her looking up or saying anything. I felt even lonelier when I heard, as Iwalked away, her greet the woman who’d been queuing behind me. ‘How are you, Mrs O’Malley? How’s Sean getting on in the States?’
    It will take you a year. Give it a year, everyone said. A year would sort everything out.
    Out again in the open air, I crossed the road and strode back up the hill towards home. The sinister, Pied Piper melody of an ice cream van clashed with the sound of an Irish reel coming from the scout hall. I peered in