Read Online The Playground by Julia Kelly - Free Book Online Page B

Maybe – the faintest of faint pink lines? I checked it and checked it again. With glasses, without, threw it in the bin only to retrieve it ten minutes later, to study it and study it further. And on it would go for hours, all day. Because I must have been. I had all the signs, the drugs mimicking pregnancy symptoms, convincing me that this time, at long last, it had worked. But always my time of the month arrived, as violent and bloody as negative can be, a shouting scream of NEGATIVE, NOT A CHANCE, NO BABY, NO HOPE. I wasn’t just a little bit not pregnant but absolutely un-pregnant, no baby whatsoever.Fresh, streaming, bright-red blood stained the hard, shining white ceramic and crisp layers of toilet tissue.
    *
    Joe would open a bottle of wine; I’d peel the patches off my thighs, their black sticky outlines, so difficult to remove, reminding me of my failure for days after. I’d tell my friends and feel their disappointment, their overly long hugs. ‘I’m so sorry it didn’t work for you. I can only imagine how you feel,’ they’d say as they fed coins into a parking meter and waited for the little ticket to print out.
    But they didn’t know that I’d already moved on. They were still getting over Plan A, whereas I had galloped on to Plan B. A new cycle. A fresh start. Hands over my ears and humming to block out their concern and questions and to fight the gnawing feeling that nothing would ever grow. That at not quite thirty-eight years of age, I was barren, acarpous.
    I’m doing it again, grinding my teeth. Working away on that enamel.

Chapter Seven
    â€˜You have passed,’ the instructor, a very kind man from Germany, told me on the day of my third driving test.
    I beamed at him, disbelieving.
    â€˜Not,’ he said then.
    â€˜I have passed not?’
    â€˜Yes. I’m sorry. You have passed not.’
    It was the single sentence he had to get right in his day.
    *
    â€˜She failed,’ I heard Mum say as I sat in her kitchen, quiet that evening. She had stumbled on the stairs on her way to answer the front door, such was her speed, her need, to impart the news to Bella before anyone else. She was girlishly competitive about these things too, always first in line. Like a child, she was energised by drama of any sort.
    After three failed tests (everyone promised I’d pass in an automatic) and five instructors, I had accepted that driving wasn’t for me. I would travel by train, I would walk, cycle, keep trim, become happy with my quirk, happy to be in the passenger seat, reading magazines, my socked feet pressed up against the windscreen, happy to be chauffeured about by Joe for the rest of my days. Then Joe was gone, but his car was still there, moss growing along the rubber sills of the windows. And I was living in Bray, miles from anywhere.
    Little Miss Muffet liked to keep a keen eye on my driving, her head craned forward from where she sat in her throne behind me. Her complaints were varied and continuous: ‘Too fast, Mama!’; ‘Slow down,’; ‘Too bumpy over the bumps.’ ‘That’s better,’ she sometimes said, settling back into her seat, turning her face and thoughts to the window.
    That afternoon we were on our way over to my mother’s for tea. ‘Thank you,’ Addie whispered, imitating me, holding up her hand as I gestured to a driver who’d let me go ahead of him as I turned onto Bray High Street. It was just after that, that I clunked into the pot hole. The full force of it hit the front left wheel, but we seemed to be still moving and the tyre felt OK and I was now too terrified to stop. I’d been jumpy already, driving Joe’s hearse on my own without a licence, and every time I set out I was convinced that I was going to kill us or someone else.
    We took the back road through Shankill and Killiney to avoid other traffic and the possibility of being stopped by the police.