While we’re relaxed and still in our under-ocean routine on the giant spider, Martin gives a yell and comes running out of the brick pavilion. We sit up muggy and confused like sleepers. What if someone really falls asleep some day and they drop right off onto tarmac? Ours isn’t one of those parks Esther Rantzen converted with woodchips for safety.
‘Come and see!’ Martin’s yelling. He wears a T-shirt from the Tuesday market, navy blue with a clumsy transfer that reads, ‘Take That!’ I saw them on sale, two quid each, last week. This summer has been slippery with the nylon sheen of T-shirts bought in Aycliffe market.
‘What is it?’ I dredge myself from the silty bed to meet a cobalt sky tight as Tupperware. I haven’t put on my supervisor voice. ‘What is it, Martin?’ I try again, brassy, bright.
When I ease down off the giant spider, the legs are hot on my bare skin. Martin takes my hand in his. It’s unlike him, he’s eight and usually pushing off ahead like a real little lad. ‘What is it?’ I ask and he’s pulling me to visit the brick pavilion. My mouth’s gone dry and the other kids have picked up on Martin’s unnerving quiet and the fact that it’s freaking me out. They are coming along with us, into the sheltered concrete space which reeks of dry piss, Martin urging us into the space behind the rosehip bushes. In here it’s shadowed and cooler and I’d say creepy. I’d warn Martin not to come in. Imagine if the likes of our play scheme didn’t go on. Imagine where Martin would play.
I ask, ‘What have you found?’ and make sure the others hang back a suitable distance. They do, knowing something weird is up and not wanting to see it too close, which is my job, after all. I’m being paid to come between them and whatever weird and hazardous thing it is Martin’s discovered in the boarded-up brick pavilion.
Wordlessly he points to the stained boards over what used to be Mr Whippy’s counter. Among the graffiti and scars there’s a dark strip which, as I approach, I see is a letterbox slot of darkness, about head height with Martin.
I swallow my breath whole, fight down my pulse rate and take three steps forwards. I bend and glare into the hole in the boards and find I’m glaring straight into an unblinking eye. I can see it’s surrounded by puckers of grey flesh. It has no brows or lashes and it’s threaded with a painful number of scarlet capillaries. Besides this I can see nothing else in the gap.
Horrible Ruby told us later that she had dealt with the man from the council herself. He’d arrived in a big car with smoked windows and even a little flag. She went out in her gingham smock and carried her broom with her. It was a real caretaker’s broom, its bristled head three feet across.
‘They’re all out,’ she shouted to the council man. ‘You can’t inspect them because Marsha’s taken them all roller-skating for the afternoon.’
The man from the council reportedly frowned. ‘The rink is across the other side of town.’
‘They walk it no bother,’ Ruby went. ‘They’re all young, aren’t they?’
We were crossing three main roads in that hectic crocodile. I look back now, appalled at Marsha’s stick-swishing insouciance, but also at my discomforted complacency in leaving it all up to her.
We were walking alongside the rank Burn, right across town, two by two, singing songs. This is the first summer in years I’ve known all the songs in the top ten. I’m out of date at twenty.
‘This sounds enterprising of Marsha,’ said the councillor.
‘It’s all free at the open-air rink across town,’ said Ruby. ‘They have a lovely time. Every time they come back full of it.’
‘I’m glad to see the scheme such a success this year.’
‘Oh, yes.’ Horrible Ruby approved. ‘That Marsha has her head screwed on.’
At the open-air rink, across the road from the borstal, everything was free, even hiring your roller boots. Most of the time I spent on my knees, going through piles of leathery-smelling boots, combining sizes and tying the squirming bairns’ laces. Setting them off with a soft push onto the smooth concrete. The little wheels, all combined, set up a hum of gentle thunder.
I rarely got to have a go myself and when I did, because it was an old pair, somebody else’s broken-in boots, I got a terrible blood blister under one heel. It went to the size of half an apple and I couldn’t stand on that foot for a week. When it popped—on a rainy day indoors—bad blood spilled out on the parquet floor and, oddly, it smelled like shit. Horrible Ruby shot out with her dustpan, fussing about, and dumped a heap of sawdust on the mess. I wasn’t ashamed as I might have been had it not been an injury I’d received in the work I was doing.
I felt slightly aggrieved that I couldn’t skate more often. I used to be a dab hand. At ten I taught myself on the smooth roads of our local streets. I had a shopping trolley we’d fished out of the Burn; I used to push myself round in that. Don’t ask me why or how. There’s a photo of me doing that somewhere, stuck out in the middle of the road. Honestly; slumped inside a shopping trolley with my legs hanging out to pedal on tarmac. Like an underprivileged bairn with nothing better to play on.
Meanwhile Marsha was skating, easily and cleverly, about the stained concrete rink. And all the kids followed her round in bright circles, a leisurely hurricane.
I think fast this afternoon, backing away from the blue boards in the brick pavilion.
‘Let me see,’ urge the bairns’ voices, ‘let me see,’ and their bodies push forwards, eager since I’m so quiet about what I’ve glimpsed. Only Martin, I notice,
