TW // Threat, violence
I am squeezing my nephew’s hand to keep him beside me, as the gathering mass of over-sugared children around me grows. He - Duke - wants away. Wants to be let loose into the chaotic mess of the soft play. But I need to pay, I need to order myself a coffee, and I need him to stop testing my patience. I want to shout to assert my authority but the environment is already too loud to be contended with, so I bite my lip and then my tongue as I gather together some unknown fortitude to get through the next few minutes.
“How old?” The hovering eyes of the receptionist-cum-barista-cum-sugary treat dispatcher find me as she asks the impossible.
“Not a clue.” I reply, casting a rough half-glance at Duke who is distracted and urgent.
“I need to know.”
“And I don’t. Let’s say five? Five.”
“Thirteen pounds.”
“And a cappuccino, full fat.”
“Eighteen pounds.” She turns and addresses the coffee machine, jabbing fingers at buttons and sending it churning. A vaguely smiling cleaner bustles their filthy trolley past me and I clench my teeth almost to breaking point.
“Five pounds for a coffee?”
“And eight for a five year old. Five for an adult.”
“Wait, you charge for me separately?”
A single, silent nod is volleyed back.
“So make it eight pounds and I’ll fuck off for two hours.”
“Children cannot be unattended at any times in this establishment and please mind your language.”
“Right, so you’re charging me five pounds for an obligation?” There’s a tut from behind in the growing queue. I bristle and force a thin smile.
“Chocolate on the cappuccino?”
“Of course, don’t be shy.” I hand out my bank card and it become eighteen pounds lighter with a bleep and a buzz and then the gate opens and Duke tugs, I let go, grasp my coffee under a sarcastic smile and admit myself into the hell-house.
Everything is plastic and yellow. Or red, or green or blue. Almost exclusively primary and wipe clean. The screams are endless: a note held in vibrato and passed from one child to another, bouncing off the padded uprights and passing through the netted expanses, as though something awful might happen if anybody allowed it to stop; if silence were ever able to - even momentarily - get a foothold under the looming, distant ceiling of the converted warehouse.
An over-sized child runs into my midriff and my coffee wobbles its foam. I whisper a curse as we lock eyes and he looks affronted at my presence before surging off in a sweated and tireless contortion of limbs. Duke has gone, lost to the noxious winds, finding friends he will soon replace, playing games that will prepare him little for real life. This is a microcosm of nothing real; nowhere else is such gaiety and boundless frivolity allowed. Nowhere except perhaps the Netherlands, but God knows what they’re up to over there.
I find my seat: reserved online. Tucked away in the corner by the fairy-castle that houses birthday parties (thankfully none today) and the most distant and removed from the three-storey cube of clambering children and soft plastic balls. I exhale and open my laptop, sipping my coffee and wincing at its bitterness. Five pounds for a shit coffee. Unacceptable.
I open the quarterly forecast and begin my annotation. The progress has been bleak, piecemeal, fragile, the growth unstable and unreliable. We simply cannot go on like this. It will be layoffs and it will be a tightening of the belts to remove impediments to progress. All Christmas leave will be cancelled. This is just the way it has to be. People have to understand that they have to work for their living: nothing will be handed to you on a plate. I sip the disgusting coffee again and hold back a retch. I should go and complain but the idea of leaving the relative safety of my seat and mingling with the simple, dishevelled regulars makes me want to retch again. I remain seated and check my Rolex: it’s been ten minutes. Christ.
“Uncle Ray.” The worst possible sound breaks my focus and I am at once livid and distracted. I know the voice: my sister’s spawn. It is urgent, slightly panicked, somewhat fearful, and this just makes me more angry. This is your territory, this is where you can do whatever you please, in padded, netted freedom, I am distinct from this activity, and I shall not be drawn in. As a five year old I expect you to be able to navigate anything that this enclosure can throw at you. “Uncle Ray.” This one is more shrill and I reflexively rise to my feet, fists clenched.
“What?” I say to the air in front of me, blind to its target, alone with its severity.
“I’m stuck.”
“I don’t care.”
“I need help.” There is a sprinkling of humour in the voice now, a pleasure in its having achieved anger in my own, which is compounding.
“I need to forecast yield for Q3, little boy.”
“Please help.”
“Fuck.” I slam the laptop shut and storm off in search of my blood relative. There are several entrances and I choose the first, pushing past a loitering child and squeezing around another that appears to be attempting to ascertain the flavour of a red, plastic wall. I have to heave myself up a rope ladder - my moisturised hands burn - crawl through a pitch black tube with troubling damp surfaces, and then over a Perspex floor: my stomach rolls at the sight of the distant ground below and the creaking plastic that fights against the new, excessive weight. I finally find him, standing in the corner, hands in pockets, eyes down, and I approach.
“I need you to not need me in here. I need you to leave me in peace. I am here because my sister begged it of me. She knows my loathing for this place, for these people, for y-…” I trail off, take a breath, make an attempt at composing myself. “Now just get on with it, will you? Stop wasting my time.” I draw myself up to standing and bang my head on the low ceiling with a thin yelp. A laugh behind me makes me turn. It’s the over-sized boy with crisps around his mouth. He grins at me and I stand with shoulders hunched to keep my head from the low top of the place. “What’s funny?”
“You.”
“Oh shut up.” I push passed him and a couple of other gathered children and make to the small pipe that will lead me back to the sweet freedom of spreadsheets, charts, and strategising.
“You shouldn’t speak to him like that.” The over-sized boy says, and I round on him.
“You shouldn’t talk to strangers.” My nose is almost touching his as I speak and I can smell the sweet stench of the snacks that had delivered this delusion of grandeur.
“You’re not a stranger, I know you.” The voice has a quiver of anxiety but is clear and confident beyond his years. “You’re what my mummy calls a nar-sist.”
“Narcissist?”
“Yep.” He folds his arms and I smile at his composure.
“My therapists have told me I am progressing well.”
“I don’t agree.”
“I don’t have time for this.” I turn again to ease my way out and I see the path ahead of me: through the short tubing - on hands and knees: how pathetic I have been forced to pretend! - and then down the curling yellow slide to the floor where I will then walk away from this nonsense and be gone. But my way is blocked; three children stand there now with arms tightly folded and mouths, with sugary crusts and housing random, sporadic teeth, hanging ajar. "Will you please move?" I try, anger rising and polluting my voice, diluting the composure.
"You shouldn't talk to him like that." Two girls say in unison like a stereo recollection of an art form long forgotten.
"He is my nephew and I will talk to him however I see fit!"
"Apologise." The boy - the evident ringleader of this uprising demands. I laugh and scratch my brow, exhausted from the attempt to remain calm and the anxious of the time lost where I could be otherwise synergising dynamic strategic solutions.
"I will not."
"Yes, you will." The boy nods and then more kids pour in from the numerous concealed and promptly gaping orifices of the enclosure. They clamber and chatter and claw like rats, they clasp my arms - crease my suit! - and knees and ankles and drag me down to the netted floor.
"Get off me!" I yell at the top of my lungs, but the sound seems to gather in the plastic, taut cladding, knocked into silence by the unwavering, unending screams that cannon from the metal walls. But their combined strength is more than I would have ever predicted and I am pinned into a wriggling prostration. The big boy sneers over me and then gestures over Duke who saunters into view, heads slightly bowed and lips pouted. "Duke, tell them.” I beseech, “I'm a good uncle. I bought you that car with the electric roof, I paid for those brogues you never wear, I bought your sister's house!" Duke's gaze was cool and flat.
"Bring the ball." The leader said, his eyes not leaving my face and his loose smattering of teeth fierce and angular. A small girl shuffles in, a plastic ball in her hand. A ball from one of the ball pits. The bastard things are everywhere; lost and rolling. She hands it to the big boy and he bows slightly; ceremonially, and suddenly I am fearful. None of this seemed like a real threat until now. It was all an elaborate game until the ball arrived. The ball is menacing, the ball is foreboding. The ball is twisted in the boy's hands and split in two. Two plastic halves of a ball are in his hands and he passes one to Duke. Another nod and another pang of terror and then everything is still.
"You are not kind." Duke says. Suddenly the half of the ball is no longer a dissected piece of soft play paraphernalia, but a hunk of sharp and exposed material: a weapon in the wrong hands. But Duke's hands aren't the wrong hands, are they? It is spun so that open sphere is facing out, the rough and livid end pointing my way; the chasm of blue within absorbs me. "You are not kind, at all." A hand finds my mouth as Duke approaches and the scream catches in my throat, quenched before it can join the chorus of screams that decorate the hall like baubles on a Christmas tree.
The cleaner whistles as he squeezes his mop into the bucket and watches the reddened water drip and run down its off-white fronds. He gives an almost imperceptible nod to the queue at the gate as he exits beyond them, a half-smile of expectation on most of their faces.