I sat cross-legged in the park in the last days of the summer holiday in shorts, halter top and trainers.
A recurring daydream was of a hole immediately before me that, somehow, has my shape. Leaning and peering in, I see nothing, just browns and greys that turn to black. I feel a tremor beneath my feet and fall back from the edge of the earthy rim as that hole that is me climbs out of itself, liberates itself from its substrata of stone, clay, sand and pebbles and assumes a form through which the wind and the light pass without obstruction. I want to comfort it and it me and we stumble and fall into each other.
‘What are you hugging yourself for?’ asked Dad, standing unknowingly at the very edge of the hole. ‘It’s not cold.’ He hit the outstretched palm of one hand with his tennis racquet. ‘Where’s Seamus?’
Dad’s face was against the light but I could tell from his tone that he knew I didn’t know, so I said nothing but looked around me and at the milling, funning children on swings and slides.
‘Yes,’ said Dad gleefully, tapping the soles of his tennis shoes with his tennis racquet. ‘You’ve no idea, have you?’ He paused and when I said nothing he added, bored, businesslike and sarcastic in succession, ‘I came to tell you that he’s gone with Mum and Sherah to buy new school uniforms. To Kingston. Just in case you worried for him and thought of looking for him.’
Seamus was going to a new school, as was Sherah – to a crammer, in order to resit her exams. I looked up, resisting my desire to beg for a new uniform too, intent on disappointing Dad. The breeze picked up and I saw him through strands of my hair, as if on old, striated film, and he seemed as irrelevant and unconnected to me as the film stars in the black and white films he and Mum sometimes fell asleep to.
‘You’re okay, though, aren’t you?’ he said hopping from one foot to the next in exercise. ‘You can wear Sherah’s old uniform. It’ll fit, won’t it?’ Dad knew that I hated living in hand-me-down clothes that were the fashion of some three years previously, that Sherah had frayed, stretched or discoloured. ‘Won’t it?’ he insisted, testing the strings of his tennis racquet.
The goblins and elves of my parents’ coming separation and my sister’s antipathy lurked in trees and bushes, behind the children who swung to and fro and climbed up and slid down. They were too quick and cunning for me to see them out of anything but the corner of my eyes.