Silent Playgrounds. Danuta Reah

white under his dark hair. She was about to smile and wave when she realized it was a stranger, another pale, dark-eyed young man. She looked away quickly, aware that she had been staring.

      Lucy sat on the swing and pushed it as far back as her legs would allow. She lifted her feet off the ground and pulled herself into the seat. Lean back and push, lean back and push. She hadn’t been able to swing herself at the beginning of the summer. Now she could swing herself far higher than Emma would push her. Lean back and push. She’d escaped from Emma. Emma would be pissed off – Mum’s favourite word. ‘Wait in the playground,’ Emma had said. She meant the small playground, but Lucy didn’t want to do that. She liked the big playground better, even if it did mean a long walk. She’d been waiting in the small playground, feeling cross and upset. It wasn’t fair! Then suddenly he was there – ‘Come on, Lucy. Quick!’ – and they were off on a magic ride to the big playground through the woods, across the big road she wasn’t allowed to cross by herself.

      Emma would know where to find her. First the swings, then the big slide, then an ice cream. If Emma wasn’t too pissed off. Lean back and push. The swing soared up. She thought she might be able to touch the leaves on the trees if she didn’t have to hold on. She closed her eyes and let the light flicker against her eyelids. Lean back and push. She worked the swing hard now, flying higher and higher, feeling the chain clank and jerk at the top of each swing. High enough! She let the swing swoop her down and up, and for a moment it seemed as though she was sitting still and the playground was a swinging blur around her. The swing dropped and lifted, dropped and lifted, a little less each time, and she began to scrape her shoes along the ground, catching each time the seat swung through its lowest point. Scuff. Scuff. She brought the swing to a stop and sat there, swaying gently, looking up. She had begun to twist the seat round and round, to give herself a twirly, when she saw that someone was watching her. He was standing by the bench at the edge of the playground, where the woods started. It was the Ash Man. She turned the swing again, and tried to twist the chain higher, to make it twirl faster. As she twirled round – chain swings were really not as good as the one her friend Lauren had in her garden, because they went jerk, jerk – she wondered where Emma was.

      ‘Emma’s gone.’ She looked round. He was standing behind her and was looking down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said. Lucy sat very still. She didn’t like the Ash Man. He went on watching her. He got hold of the chains of the swing, twisting them so much that Lucy’s feet were right off the ground. The twirly rocked her dizzy. He looked down at her. ‘We’ve lost Emma.’ he said again.

      Lucy looked up at him. His face had a shadow on it from his hair. He’d said it twice. ‘I know,’ she said.

      It was after half past ten by the time Suzanne got back to the park gates. The traffic on Hunters Bar roundabout was heavy, and the air tasted hot and metallic after the freshness of the park. She walked up Brocco Bank and turned up Carleton Road, the short steep road where she lived. It was a typical Sheffield street, red-brick terraces climbing up the side of the hill, the pavement a mix of flagstones and asphalt, weeds and grass growing in the cracks and against the walls.

      She saw her friend and neighbour, Jane, sitting on her front step with a sketch pad on her lap and bottles of ink on the step beside her. Jane was an illustrator and most of her work appeared in children’s books. She smiled when she saw Suzanne. ‘Have you been in the park?’ Suzanne nodded, and paused to talk, leaning on the wall. She looked at the sketch pad. ‘It’s these shadows.’ Jane said. ‘I want to get the red of the brick and the black of the shadows while the sun’s just right. They want “a combination of the everyday and the eerie”.’ She looked at her painting for a moment, then rested her brush on the edge of the ink bottle. ‘What were you doing last night? That was a rather flashy Range Rover that dropped you off.’

      Suzanne sighed. Jane was currently on a campaign to spice up Suzanne’s life. The women had been friends since shortly after Michael’s birth six years ago. They had met in the park where Jane was throwing bread to the ducks for the entertainment of six-month-old Lucy. To Suzanne, her family life in chaos, struggling with post-natal depression, Jane’s Madonna-like calm had seemed like a haven.

      ‘It was just Richard Kean from the Alpha Project,’ Suzanne said now. Richard was one of the centre’s psychologists, and one of the few people there who seemed to have any real interest in Suzanne’s work.

      ‘Richard? He’s the tall one with dark hair, isn’t he? So what was he doing dropping you off in the middle of the night?’

      ‘It was half past nine,’ Suzanne retorted, goaded.

      ‘That is the middle of the night for you,’ Jane said reasonably. She didn’t approve of Suzanne’s monastic life.

      ‘Mm.’ Suzanne was non-committal. There was nothing to tell. She had attended an evening session at the Alpha Project and Richard had dropped her off on his way home. She wanted to get Jane off the subject, so she said, ‘I saw something when I was in the park—’

      Jane interrupted her. ‘Did you see Em and Lucy there?’

      ‘Is Em back?’ Emma, Jane’s babysitter, had been away for the past week, and Jane had had to juggle her timetable and call in favours to cope with a rapidly approaching deadline. Jane had coped as she always did, wrapped in a hazy cocoon of abstraction.

      ‘Yes. She just turned up this morning out of the blue.’ Jane frowned and ran her finger along a sweep of pencil on her page. ‘No phone call or anything. Actually, it was quite useful.’ She looked at the drawing again, still frowning, still dissatisfied. ‘I can’t get this right. I don’t know what I want.’ She looked up at Suzanne. ‘Lucy’s got a hospital appointment. She didn’t want to go, so I said she could have an hour in the park with Em, and an ice cream afterwards.’ Suzanne shrugged in sympathy. Lucy suffered from bad asthma, and hated her regular trips to the hospital. The ice cream was a big concession. Jane was a health freak.

      Jane had been backtracking on the conversation. ‘You didn’t see them? They went to the playground.’ Suzanne had run past the playground. It had been empty. Jane frowned, pulling her attention away from her drawing. Her look of vague abstraction sharpened into focus. ‘They should have been there. I told Em not to take her to the café … You know, I’m not happy – Oh, it’s nothing serious,’ she added. ‘It isn’t so much the not turning up, it’s just …’

      For the past month, Emma had looked after Lucy for a few hours each week. Before that, Jane had had Sophie, a first-year undergraduate who rented a bed-sit in the student house next door to Jane. She’d turned up on the doorstep just before the start of term and introduced herself, offering her services as a childminder. Jane, after contacting Sophie’s parents, smallholders on the east coast, was happy to take up her offer, and the arrangement had worked well. Sophie was inexperienced and unsophisticated, but she was bright and sensible and fun. Jane liked her, Lucy adored her, she was just next door and could fit in with Jane’s elastic schedule. But then, quite suddenly, she’d dropped out of her course and left.

      Emma was a fellow student. She had been one of the regular visitors at the student house – a house with a lot of coming and going – but Jane and Suzanne hadn’t met her properly until after Christmas when Sophie had introduced her: ‘Do you mind if Emma comes with me and Lucy?’ And she had, imperceptibly, drifted into their lives, a quiet, rather serious young woman, a contrast to Sophie’s vivacity. She had moved in to the student house in March, and had rather diffidently offered herself as a replacement when Sophie left. Jane had been pleased at first, especially to have someone whom she and Lucy both knew, but she was starting to have second thoughts. Emma was younger than Sophie, and, Suzanne was beginning to realize, a lot less responsible. She listened with increasing unease as Jane expressed her doubts. Since Sophie had left, Emma had become moody and unreliable. Lucy had started having nightmares, nightmares about monsters, about ‘the Ash Man’, Jane said, about Emma being chased by monsters. Sometimes she’d come back from the park with the smell of tobacco smoke lingering on her clothes. ‘I know Em smokes,’ Jane said. ‘Her lungs are her business. But she knows not to smoke near Lucy.’