Catch Me When I Fall

It’s always been here, this playground. For as long as I can remember, at least. Though when I used it, the swings were often broken, the slide was rusty and there was a roundabout that took three of us to push. Using all our strength we would heave and shove, then we would leap aboard, scooting our legs to make it go faster. Slowly it would sigh and grumble to an inevitable stop, like an irritable grandma after too much Christmas sherry.

Back then I was full of adventure and risk, just like the playground. I ran hard, climbed high, jumped and somersaulted. Most of the time my elder brother was there to catch me as I fell, and we would gasp and giggle, winded by the sheer thrill of danger.

 “Don’t tell mum,” I’d beg and he’d laugh and drag me away, towards the complaining roundabout. As we got older, he stopped going to the playground with me, finding more entertainment hanging around the fish and chip shop with his teenage friends. So, I’d go alone, always confident some kids would be there who I’d know.

But friends aren’t the same as family. They don’t always catch you when you fall.

More often then, I’d hobble home with cuts and bruises that mum would patch up with strong antiseptic and berating words, which carried a much more powerful and lasting sting. 

“It’s all fun and games for you,” she would start, tipping copious glugs of disinfectant onto a cotton wool swab. I’d wince, knowing I’d be picking strands of soft, white thread from my healing scab for days after. With furious vigour she’d push the wad deep into the gashes across my knee and continue lobbing shards of angry words at my bowed head.

“But you never think of the consequences, do you? And every time, stupid old mum here must patch you up. Well one of these days, you won’t be so lucky…”

But ‘one of these days’ never came. At least not for me. I stayed lucky. But the fun and games for my best friend Martin did have consequences. And there was no one there to patch his wounds when he fell. Not his family, not friends and not even me.

***

We met at college. We were studying the same subjects, so took the same classes. He played guitar, dressed in black, smoked and had a tattoo. I wore cute dresses, sensible shoes and my hair in plaits. He first noticed my long, treble clef earrings.

“So, you’re a muso?” he asked as we queued for lunchtime pizza.

“No, why do you think that?”

“Your earrings.” He flicked my right lobe and leaned in close to hum middle C into my ear, like a satanic tuning fork.

I laughed.

“Oh I just got these because I liked them. I also have a pair shaped like surf boards and I can barely swim.”

This time he laughed.

We ate our pizza together and found we had a lot more to laugh about.

We began seeing each other. We knew my parents wouldn’t approve, so we kept our relationship low key. He told me all about his family. His father who drank and would often become violent. How he wanted to protect his mother and younger brother, but how his mother wouldn’t leave.

His band was his release. His fun in a life that was mostly chaos and risk. I watched them practice sometimes and if you listened carefully to the lyrics of his songs, you could hear his pain and cries for help. But then that’s what good lyrics are supposed to be. Stories full of pain and angst, set to tuneful or angry melody. And I was only a teenager, so I heard and even sang along, but I didn’t really listen. I thought his life was edgy and dangerous and by being associated with him, it gave me a feeling of being edgy and dangerous too.

I told him about my family. I didn’t have much to say really. How my brother was going out with a girl who I thought was a bit of a gold-digger. How my dad was often away with work. How my mum was a bit mean, but really, I think she was just frustrated at how much of her own potential she’d sacrificed for her family. Compared to Martin’s colourful, often neon life, my existence seemed grey and dull. Yet, for some reason, he found me interesting. And I wanted to feel dangerous.

The playground became our secret place.

We’d meet there every Thursday night at ten, when I’d finished my fast-food job and he’d done with his band. Most of the time we’d just lie on the roundabout, each in our own segment, holding hands through the bars of deliberately engineered segregation.

“When we lean back like this, we can see the whole sky,” he said, one night.

He stretched up his arms, trying to grab a star.

“Look how small we are,” he said. Then he reached for me through the rails of the rusty roundabout and kissed me.

A few weeks later Martin asked if I wanted to try some Coke he’d got from a band mate. I didn’t.

“It’s just a bit of fun,” he said.

When we made out that night he seemed more alive, less morose. We sat on the same swing together and soared higher than we’d ever been. We leaned back and reached for the stars but grasped nothing other than cold darkness and the swirling hope of each other’s smoky exhalation.

 Then we fell in a tangle of arms and legs. My head landed on the soft flesh of his belly and my knees in the gravel.

“Caught you,” he said, and kissed my gently.

My knee was grazed, and I complained more than was reasonable. As he walked me home in the hazy glow of lamplight and shop windows, he told me his dad was drinking more and becoming increasingly violent. I felt everything he said through a maelstrom of anxiety and confusion. I didn’t understand his world, but I wanted to keep him safe. I wanted to help him, but I didn’t know what to say. So, I just squeezed his hand and limped the rest of the way in silence, focusing on my own pain and feeling sorry for my throbbing knee, pulsing under my muddied jeans.

Winter hobbled by and spring brought verdant life and a rupture of colour to our playground. Martin turned up with a black eye and swollen lip. He’d challenged his father, and it hadn’t gone well.

“It’s all a bit of a game to him,” he said. “Still, I got in a few good punches of my own.”

He smiled through bloodied lips, as he unwrapped a foil package and started to heat it with his lighter.

“What are you doing?” I yelled, trying to put out the flame.

“It’s ok, baby. It’s just a bit of fun, you should try it. Besides, it helps with the pain.”

I watched in horror as he put a straw into his mouth and succumbed to the ripples of synthetic relief.

I didn’t call him for a while after that and neither did I go to the playground.

***

Now the playground is shiny and safe. Full of soft fall and rounded edges. The swings have safety bars and the roundabout has long gone, replaced with an innocuous rocket ship going nowhere and low slung monkey bars. No-one gets hurt any more. That’s why I bring my son here. Because I want him to be safe. I want him to have fun and games, without consequences.

I stand, wrapped in the ennui of my monochrome world, among the decaying detritus of autumn at the foot of the slide.  I watch my son go up the ladder and arrive feet first at my knees. Sometimes he comes down headfirst, but I’m not worried. I’m there to catch him, and the slide has been designed to be deliberately slow. Each stuttering journey he takes back to me, is accompanied by cries of “look at me”.

But whilst I’m looking at him, my thoughts are over there, on the A-frame of the swings.

***

Martin was a lot thinner when we met again and his eyes were like the hollowed-out holes in tree trunks, where scared animals like to hide.

He told me his brother had died. Caught in the crossfire of a punch intended for his mother. Martin had been at band practice and got home just as his father was being driven away by one set of flashing lights, and his dying brother by another.

“I should have been there for them,” he said quietly.

Once again, I didn’t know what to say, or how to mute the glare of his chaotic life, so I just squeezed his hand.

 He’d quit the band. They were going nowhere anyway, he said. Besides he and his mother were in a refuge on the other side of town now. It would be too hard to get to practice.

I told him the gold-digger had left my brother and made some lame comments about my mother’s ongoing insecurities. He smiled, but only with a crinkle at the corners of his mouth. His eyes were so far away I couldn’t reach him. I squeezed his hand and pulled him over to the swings.

He leaned in to kiss me.

For Martin and his life of physical fear, abuse and danger, my pathetic, juvenile brain had convinced me he needed some tough love.

So that’s when I told him he needed to get his life together. And that I’d met someone else.

Then I left him there, resting his head against the chain of the swing, gently rocking himself backwards and forwards. Heels to toes, heels to toes scuffing the dried mud trenches under the seats.

The next morning, I awoke to the news that his body had been found, with a chain from the swings around his neck, hanging from the top bar of the A-frame.

The playground was closed for a week and the broken swing set was replaced.

I wanted to send his mother some flowers, but I didn’t know where she was any more.

***

Now the playground is shiny and safe. Full of soft fall and rounded edges and no-one gets hurt anymore.

I’m sitting on a swing, leaning against the hanging chain which feels cold against my cheek. I’m gently rocking myself back and forth, heels to toes, heels to toes, on the soft rubber matting. My son is on the swing beside me, flexing and stretching his childish knees, urging himself higher and higher.

“Look at me mum,” he says. “If I lean back, I can see the whole sky. You do it, mum.”

I smile, extend my arms and lean back, feeling the resistance of the chain, trying to pull me upright.

“Look how big it is,” he says.

I smile again, but my cheeks are wet and I’m finding it difficult to swallow.

“Slow down, buddy,” I say, “you’re going way too high.”

“But if I fall, you’ll catch me mum, won’t you?”

I look at him, soaring through the air, trying to kick the sky with his toes.

“I’ll try Marty, but if you go too high I might not be able to reach you in time.”

And, with that, he slows down, then dismounts.

I squeeze his hand and we head home in silence, no doubt both lost in our own, very different thoughts of the consequences and pain of falling from a swing and not being caught.