‘A Black and Decker drill. He’d had to buy it new. My husband took ours with him.’
‘What did the clarinetist want with one? What did he do with it?’
‘A fair-sized hole at the end of my big toe on the left foot. Then thirty smaller, at regular intervals, all the way up to my navel.
‘Then he lay on the floor beneath me and I sat back on my swivel chair and waited.
‘Sheer bloody poetry he gave me and it’s honestly worth the itching if you can get it scratched by a virtuoso.’
THE GIANT SPIDER’S SUPERVISOR
As usual we were playing on the back of the giant spider. One of those games where your feet can’t touch the ground. You’re dead if your feet touch tarmac. Imagine the sizzle, scalded rubber, of plimsolls on hot, pink playground tarmac.
Mind, lots of the kids turn up barefoot, or in sandals. Unsuitably attired. The parents send them any old how, just getting them off their hands. Sending babies, too. We get kids bringing younger ones in pushchairs. Of course we have to send them back.
But I’m starting at the point with us all on the giant spider’s back. Each of its—how many? Six—legs was a ladder to the thick red abdomen I was straddling, shouting, ‘Quick, run! Quick! So the spider can take off!’ And the kids were screaming, scrambling aboard, because they didn’t want to be left behind.
You have to make all sorts of stuff up. This giant spider can fly anywhere if I say so. They look up to me, even when I’m not towering above them, straddling the red abdomen of the giant spider in my cut-off jeans, my white cotton shirt knotted at my waist, a paisley scarf keeping my hair out of my eyes while I work. Though at its best it’s hardly work. I don’t wear sunglasses, although we’ve had some lovely days already this summer, because they tend to alienate the bairns. I think that’s what put them off Marsha, actually.
Marsha’s leaving put me in charge, made me sole supervisor. So we come here, most days, to sit on the giant spider with the six laddered legs. When I say so it can take us where we like.
Some of my kids stayed on the swings. Wedged in truck tyres, heaving themselves high as they could go. Refusing to give up their precious places even for a go on the spider.
When we’re in the park they all enjoy themselves and fling themselves into it. Our enjoyment this summer is headlong and reckless. But each has one ear open, waiting for me to yell that the spider is powering up, readying to leave without us. They are tensed to catch up, these bairns.
‘Where’s he going today, the giant spider?’ I ask.
Jackie answers, a girl who’s so white she looks like a skeleton and has purple rings around her eyes. They can’t be bruises unless terrible trouble has been taken to make them in that shape. She goes, ‘I think the spider’s going to Jurassic Park.’
All the other kids go ‘Yeah!’ and there’s an excitement as everyone realises what she’s said, punching of shoulders, kids pretending to be dinosaurs.
‘What do you want to go there for?’
‘I don’t,’ Jackie goes. ‘It’s just where the spider’s going today.’
I decide I don’t want to go to Jurassic Park today, actually. We’ve had three weeks on this play scheme and not a day’s gone by without dinosaurs in some form. Me, I like the giant spider, its thick red abdomen, the splayed green, laddered legs. That blistered paintwork with writing gouged in by house keys. I wonder who here is of reading age and, if so, whether they can read the Lara's a Slag, Stew's Ugly as Fuck, Michael Summers Sucks Cock and We Did an E Here 93 on the skin of the spider that’s meant to carry them to Jurassic Park.
I go, ‘I know.’ (I slipped into prefacing everything I say with ‘I know’ weeks ago, as if everything was spontaneous.) ‘Why doesn’t the giant spider take a swim under the ocean?’
‘Like in The Little Mermaid,’ Susan coos. She wants to be the Little Mermaid because she’s ginger. She sings all the songs in this chilling, raspy voice and it makes me sad for her. Don’t know why; probably because she’s so ugly, poor bairn. That prized red hair looks like it’s been washed and clotted up with house soap.
‘Crap!’ This is Daniel, who looks at me narrowly because the giant spider wants to go under the ocean again. As sole interpreter of the giant spider’s wishes, suddenly I’m under Daniel’s suspicions.
When the giant spider is under the ocean I lie on my back and make everyone pretend to be a fish or a starfish for an hour or more. It’s dead relaxing. Daniel isn’t the only dissenter. There were a few tuts when I said the bottom of the ocean again. They’re getting bored, I see. I no longer have them in the palm of my hand. With this tide turning maybe it’ll be Jurassic Park after all.
Susan can switch from Little Mermaid simper to vitriol in seconds flat. ‘I bet Daniel wants to go to Tracey Island really,’ she spat. Awkward on the spider’s laddered legs, she was showing her knickers as she tried to get her balance. ‘Yeh. Go to Tracey Island, Daniel. To be with the… Thunderbirds!’ She shrieks with laughter.
Daniel colours and the other kids are laughing now. It’s true, I realise, he does look like a puppet and the cruel little buggers have picked up on this. ‘I don’t! I don’t want to fuckin’ be a Thunderbird!’
There’s a sharp ‘Eeee!’ from most of the group. I decided at the start not even to blink should ‘fuck’ get said on this scheme. You just can’t stop it. A blind eye costs nothing, but I draw the line at ‘cunt’ and there has been one or two
