“Take care,” he said as he hoisted the suitcase up and onto the train after her and the children. She looked down at him with a puzzled expression. “Of yourself, I mean.”
“And you take care too,” she said. “Of yourself.”
III. GOING OUT
She wiped Tommy’s mouth with her hand and then shoved the remains of the food into a bag that she slung up onto her shoulder. She had saved a salad cream sandwich in case her older boy was hungry, but when she looked around, she still couldn’t see him. The sun had gone behind a cloud, and it looked like it might rain, so she knew that it was time to leave this sorry excuse for a park that was littered with dog mess and empty beer cans and pop bottles. Having straightened Tommy’s shirt, she looked again and spotted Ben playing on the swings with a group of Pakistani children, but when she called to him, he ignored her and kicked his feet up in an attempt to climb even higher. “Don’t you make me have to come and fetch you.” She could feel the intrusive stares from the foreign men and women, who sat on the grass in a circular group around a seemingly endless supply of food that the wives had no doubt slaved over. They behaved like it was their park, which in a way it was now.
When Ben saw her striding towards him, he jumped from the swing and ran and hid behind a tree. “Ben!” Ten years old now, she thought, and still playing the fool. “You stop right where you are or I’ll give you what for.” He darted out into the open and then hid behind another thick oak, but he knew it was no use.
“Okay, I give up,” he said as he walked towards her. She twisted her grip on his wrist and accidentally gave him a Chinese burn.
“Oi, leave me alone!”
Then, with her free hand, she slapped the back of his head, which served only to make her palm sting. The Pakistani kids began to laugh out loud and point, irritating her no end. However, she didn’t want to say anything to the little buggers in front of their parents, so she just glared at them as she frog-marched Ben back in the direction of his temporarily abandoned brother. Ben turned up his nose at the salad cream sandwich, so she asked him again just to make sure. “So you’re not hungry then?” He shook his head, but he still wouldn’t meet her eyes. “Right then, it’s staying in the bag, and don’t bother me with any nonsense on the way home. Come on, we didn’t bring a brolly, so we’ll have to be lively.”
The wide entrance to the park bespoke a civic ambition that had never truly come to fruition. To the left of the iron gates stood an immodestly large statue of a former lord mayor that was now speckled in bird droppings, while the ceremonial urns on top of each gatepost sprouted thriving weeds. As she passed out of the park and turned right into Stanhope Lane, she silently reattached Ben’s hand to that of his brother and looked at the older boy in a manner that let him know that he should not let go. The roots of the trees had cracked and displaced the flagstones on this stretch of pavement, so it was treacherous for an adult, let alone two kids to try and walk here. They wandered by dismal-looking pubs and corner shops with paint peeling from their facades and windows that were securely grilled, but she understood that these places had no need to attract clients, for the faces that appeared each day, and the words they uttered, were as depressingly predictable as the cast and script of a long-running soap opera. After four years as a librarian in this run-down city that, despite the evidence of increased poverty, recently had the temerity to make a bid to host the Commonwealth Games, she was quietly desperate to escape back to Oxford, or even back to London, where she thought she might make a better fist of it given a second chance. Stamping out books five days a week, and rearranging shelves, and keeping the periodical subscriptions up to date, and shooing tramps, before spending her weekends at the park with the kids, was doing her no good at all. But what choice did she have? When she finally worked up enough courage to contact the admissions office at her old college, they wrote back and told her that she would be most welcome to return and complete the final year of her degree, but only after she had “established a domestic situation that would be compatible with study.” She scrutinized the piece of yellowish notepaper embossed with the college’s crest, and she read and reread the offending words.
Monica kept this news, and all her other business, from her boss at work. Denise wouldn’t shut up about how smart the city was getting, especially down by the river, where a cake shop and a place that sold flowers had recently opened up. Some of the greasy-looking blokes who liked to come into the library with the express purpose of trying to chat her up, they too wouldn’t give over about the virtues of the newly revitalized city centre. However, she felt that if you’ve never been anywhere, then you don’t know, do you? And what’s more, it was all well and good talking big about a place if you didn’t have children to bring up. She assumed that anywhere, even this dump, could look acceptable to you if you didn’t have kids.
Ben kept hold of Tommy’s hand as instructed, but he tugged at her skirt with his free hand.
“I’m hungry, Mam.”
“Well, we can’t stop now, understand? I don’t want to get wet, and your brother’s tired.”
They waited by the side of the dual carriageway, which ran like a scar through this part of town. On one side were the older terraced houses and run-down factories, including the town brewery, which they were now standing beside, but the sharp, sweet smell of malt and hops turned her stomach, and so she was always anxious for the traffic lights to change. A brand-new footbridge spanned the road at this point, but hardly anybody used it as you had to climb up two dozen steps to reach the bridge proper, and in her own case how were you supposed to do so with two kiddies who treated it like something you’d find in a playground? The cars and lorries thundered by in both directions, but once the lights turned green they hastened over to the far side, where the houses had been knocked down and replaced with a warrenlike collection of grey low-rise flats that the council had named after battles in the Second World War. On this far side of the road the only evidence of the past was the decrepit redbrick swimming baths building, which stood out like a rotten tooth all by itself. If you looked at the estate from a distance, you might easily imagine the swimming baths to be some weird architectural reminder of the Edwardian past, but despite the fact that it was falling to pieces, most mornings of the week school kids still used the place. When they first moved in there used to be a grassy picnic area and a place for kids to kick a ball outside of their range of flats — Arnhem Croft — but the council had decided to gravel it over and make a stab at a play zone. Of late, teenagers had claimed the area, and from dawn till dusk they colonised the place and exchanged their cigarettes and swigged cider, and occasionally a boy and a girl would slip into the tunnels of the concrete castle for a snog, but the adults just watched and left them alone as long as they didn’t bother anybody.
It was always hit or miss as to whether the lifts would work. Monica pushed a button, and as she waited, she heard the thunderous clamour of debris tumbling down the central rubbish chute.
“Mam, I’m really hungry.”
The lift doors opened, and she looked at Ben and nudged him forward. Truthfully, she was too tired to scold him, so she jokingly pinched his mouth shut and gave him a fatigued smile. A few moments later they all stepped out of the lift, and she looked down over the balcony to the gravel pit of a play area three stories below, where she could now see one of the teenagers urinating behind the slide. She had spent her first month in Leeds in a mournfully stark one-bedroom flat that Denise had arranged for her, but the council then informed her that because she was one of their employees, and a single mother, they could relocate her to this award-winning estate without her having to spend any time on the waiting list. The woman at the council office told her this in a manner that made it clear that Monica was to regard this as a great privilege, but from the moment she pulled up in Denise’s Mini and squinted out of the window at the bleak, characterless landscape of this new community, she instantly knew she would never be happy in such a place.