Schrödinger, whoever he was, and his cat, and anyone else that felt like it, had all climbed inside Pandora’s box and were dining on a can of worms. Jackson felt the beginnings of a headache, another one, on top of the one he already had.
Tracy was surprised that more kids weren’t killed on so-called play equipment. People (parents) seemed blithely oblivious to the peril of small bodies arcing high into the sky on swings they weren’t strapped into, or of the same small bodies launching themselves from the top of a slide when they were knee-high to a gnat. Courtney was astonishingly reckless, a kid without reck was a dangerous thing.
Other children in the play park yelled and screamed and laughed but Courtney was merely determined to test everything, including herself, to the limits, like a dogged little crash-test dummy. There didn’t seem to be much in the way of pleasure involved. Abused kids – and there were many forms of abuse – were frequently shut down and closed off to enjoyment.
It was a beautiful day again and the crowds in Roundhay were already out in force, half-naked white bodies lying like corpses on the green grass, people desperate to get some rays and some fresh air. That’s what parks had always been, breathing spaces for the poor who lived six long days a week in factories. All those little kids, slaves to the machines, their tiny helpless lungs full of damp wool fibres.
Perhaps it was insanity to be out like this, they were exposed to the world and his wife, but then – what better place to hide a child than in plain sight, in a play park surrounded by parents and little kids? People took kids from parks, they didn’t take them to them. And as a bonus Roundhay was not the kind of place that Kelly Cross came to in daylight hours. Plus, Tracy reasoned against reason, it was good for her to practise being a parent in public. Sooner or later she was going to have to come out to the world (and his wife) as a mother, so here she was, Imogen Brown, pushing her little girl Lucy on swings, twirling her on roundabouts and helping her negotiate a variety of apparatus that Tracy couldn’t even give a name to, most of it unrecognizable from the uninspired parks of her own childhood.
Tracy was relieved when Courtney clambered off a giant chicken on springs and announced, ‘I’m hungry.’ Tracy checked her watch, they had been in the play park barely fifteen minutes. It felt like hours. She handed over a banana.
‘OK?’ she asked when it was finished and Courtney gave her a solemn silent thumbs-up sign. She was economical with language, and why not? Perhaps when you were little you thought you might use up all your words at the beginning and not have any left for the end.
Tracy wiped away the green maggot of snot emerging from one of Courtney’s nostrils and congratulated herself on remembering to buy tissues in the supermarket. From her bottomless bag Tracy scavenged the corpse of the doughnut she’d bought in Ainsleys a million years ago, tore it in half and shared it with the kid, sitting on the grass. (‘Cake? Before lunch?’ she heard her mother’s voice say and Tracy answered silently, ‘Yes. What are you going to do about it, you old cow?’)
When Courtney had finished her half of the doughnut she licked each finger religiously before giving another silent thumbs-up to Tracy, and then she took out the contents of the little pink backpack and laid each item, one by one, on the grass for perusal:
the tarnished silver thimble
the Chinese coin with a hole in the middle
the purse with a smiling monkey’s face on it
the snow globe containing a crude plastic model of the Houses of Parliament
the shell shaped like a cream horn
the shell shaped like a coolie hat
the whole nutmeg
a pine cone
The pine cone, Tracy noted, was new. She wondered where it had come from. It was like that game they used to play at children’s parties where you had to remember the objects on a tea-tray. They probably didn’t have parties like that any more. Pin the tail on the donkey, pass the parcel – someone’s dad standing by the record player and lifting the needle on ‘The Runaway Train’ or ‘They’re Changing Guard At Buckingham Palace’. Nowadays they all went to ‘indoor soft play areas’ – Rascals and Funsters – and ran amok. Tracy had been called to one of those places in Bradford once. They thought a kid had disappeared, turned out it was at the bottom of a ball pool and nobody could see it. It was fine, alive and kicking, literally. Paedophile heaven.
Tracy picked out the cream horn-shaped shell and rolled it in her palm. When she was a child her father used to pick up a box of three cream horns from Thomson’s cake shop in Bramley every Friday evening on his way home from work in the town hall. Tracy couldn’t remember when she had last eaten a cream horn, couldn’t remember the last time she had stuck a shell to her own shell-like and listened to the sea. Tracy realized that at some point in this reverie Courtney had surreptitiously retrieved the shell and was packing her treasure away again.
‘Yeah, you’re right,’ Tracy sighed. ‘How about we have our picnic? Heaven forfend that we should go more than ten minutes without eating.’
Tracy had lugged with her an old plaid blanket from the boot of the car. She rolled it out and spread out the picnic fodder they’d bought in the supermarket – tuna rolls, cartons of apple and orange juice, packets of crisps and a bar of Cadbury’s chocolate, the latter neutralized – in Tracy’s mind anyway – by a small bag of carrot sticks. It was the kind of picnic (possibly minus the carrot sticks) that she would have liked when she herself was a child, instead of the cold hard-boiled eggs that her mother used to pack, alongside flabby white-bread sandwiches that had been spread thinly with meat paste before being wrapped – for some arcane reason – in damp lettuce leaves. They had taken these meagre provisions with them on Sunday drives in the family Ford Consul – to Harewood House, to Brimham Rocks or to ‘Brontë country’ – as her mother always familiarly called it, even though she had never read a book by a Brontë, or indeed any book unless it had been helpfully condensed first by the Reader’s Digest. The nearest they ever got to the parsonage was when they once stopped in Haworth village so her father could buy a pack of cigarettes.
Tracy couldn’t think of these Sunday outings without remembering what it felt like to craze a boiled-egg shell and peel away the membrane from the solid greyish white beneath. Sick-making. She suddenly remembered how her father would sometimes pop an egg whole into his mouth, like a conjuror, and part of the young Tracy had expected a dove or a row of flags to emerge in place of the egg. They had seen something similar once in a summer show in Bridlington. Top of the bill was Ronnie Hilton, long past his heyday but nonetheless a Yorkshireman and therefore someone to be proud of.
Tracy’s father was a war veteran, the Green Howards, landed on Gold beach on D-Day. He must have seen things but if he had he never said. Sometimes a war was wasted on people. He was born in Dewsbury. Shoddy capital of the world. It said something about a mill town that it couldn’t aspire to even second-rate cloth, weaving instead the lowest quality from rags and shreds. A filthy trade, shoddy. A town where now women drugged and kidnapped their own kids for money. The Ripper was questioned in Dewsbury after being caught in Sheffield. Routine patrol, his luck running out, theirs running back in, late in the day. Tracy remembered being in a corner shop when she heard the news, buying crisps and chocolate for her and her partner. On the beat. The bloke behind the counter had the radio on and when the news came on he yelled, ‘They’ve caught him, they’ve caught your Ripper!’ He was second-generation Bangladeshi and Tracy didn’t blame him for denying ownership of Sutcliffe. She couldn’t remember where she was for all those other newsworthy world events (probably in front of the box, getting the news on the telly), although she was in a TV repair shop buying a new scart lead for her DVD player when she saw the second of the World Trade Center buildings fall. You usually expected Countdown.