I think fast this afternoon, though, using the skills I’ve picked up already this summer. And one of the first, most important things I discovered was ways of deflecting, of catching up in a handful and redirecting attention. So with a clattering new brightness in my voice I make this moment turn a letter L.
‘I know!’ I cry, startling them all. ‘The giant spider is taking off again! He’s leaving the bottom of the ocean—listen!’ And they’re all listening now as if spider language comes broadcast. ‘Listen!’ I add a tremor of excitement. ‘He’s flying to Jurassic Park!’
They yelp and bicker and pelt their way back to the spider on the pink asphalt park. Up the metal legs they scamper before the spider can take off. Again I bring up the rear and Martin lags alongside me. His whole face is eyeing me and he won’t conspire in my forced change of mood.
We would meet the other schemes at places like the Recreation Centre, up by the industrial estate. Another perilous walk across town, this time through an underpass. It was on these trips we all took an interest in Neil and Michelle, how they were fucking and how Michelle’s foetus was faring. Were the facts of life something else we were paid fifty quid to impart?
We gave the children free rein on the Rec’s assault course. When four schemes from separate estates met up on an afternoon there were round about two hundred kids. It was mental and most of the supervisors sloped off and left them to it.
The supervisors would have a smoke together. Michelle and Neil would be our centrepiece for some reason. As if we were all basking in their fecund glow. When the kids came over with scuffed knees or grievances, they always talked to Neil and Michelle first, as if they’d become parents to all of us overnight.
While we sat on the grassy bank and smoked and left the bairns to the assault course, Marsha would be standing up high on a wall, blowing a whistle and screaming instructions at two hundred kids.
‘Listen to her!’ Neil scowled.
‘She’s keen,’ said Michelle.
And I was embarrassed because we were partners. I had to work doubly hard to make myself cool because of Marsha.
Robin said, ‘The kids hate her, too.’
‘They take the piss out of her,’ said Joanne.
‘She’s going to university, isn’t she?’ asked Michelle. ‘Isn’t that right?’ she asked me.
‘How the fuck should I know?’
‘You work with her.’
At that point I was getting shit from all sides. At the end of that afternoon Marsha took me aside at the mouth of the underpass and, within hearing of the bairns, said sedately but with venom, ‘Get your finger out or I’ll have you sacked, Teresa.’
I went back after work. I had to see again. But I couldn’t let any of the kids see where I was going, so I hung on in the community centre until I was sure they’d be long gone. Horrible Ruby ambled up.
‘You’ll be pleased with yourself, being supervisor now.’
‘I’ve been surpervisor a couple of weeks already. Since Marsha went.’
‘Hm.’ She looked me up and down. ‘And do you really think the kids are still enjoying the scheme?’
‘I hope SO.’
‘You’re not putting in half as much effort as poor Marsha did. Them bairns aren’t getting their money’s worth out of you. I’ve seen you, up at the park all day. Just sitting on the giant spider.’
I scowled. ‘They don’t pay for it anyway.’
‘Their parents pay taxes.’
‘No, they don’t.’
I left then and went straight back to the park, which was deserted, and to the brick pavilion, which was even more eerie. I steeled myself in the pissy concrete alcove behind the rosehip bushes and again I peered into the letterbox in the boards. That eye was still looking back, almost placidly.
I turned and ran all the way home, as I hadn’t since I was a kid myself, hounded home from school by the threat of a scrap.
What happened next was that Marsha went too far and she must have been too cocky for her own good. Because the next thing I knew she was flat on her arse in the middle of the outdoor rink, in the eyes of the cackling tornado.
I’m not saying did she fall or was she pushed, but just beforehand I’d heard Robin and Michelle and Neil talking about how snotty and ugly she looked, zipping round and round on the concrete, and then Michelle went out onto the rink. Actually Marsha looked the very opposite of ugly. I’m no fan but I have to admit she looked nice, especially that day. I was on the benches as usual, matching one pair of boots with another, the knuckle-bruising business of unpicking laces that have begun to rot.
Marsha was flung somehow through a gap that opened obligingly in the bank of skaters behind her and against the chest-high wall at the side. She hit the deck with a dismayed shriek and an arm broken in three places. From the benches I saw it flop about horribly and it took some moments for everyone to stop skating. Only when there was silence and we were all staring down at Marsha, on the floor in her yellow dungarees, did she burst into tears.
‘It’s my left arm!’ she was sobbing when the ambulance crew arrived with their blankets and started calling everyone ‘love’ in that softly bossy way they have. ‘I’m an artist! It’s my left arm!’
And it was true. She was due to go to art college in Newcastle this autumn. That was buggered up. After three days Marsha returned to work with a plaster cast that made her teeth grit each time she moved it. By her return I’d already picked up the reins on our scheme. Marsha should have realised. Those had been her rules in nonstop rounders and now the baton was mine.
For a couple of days she took a back seat and once I saw
