Wasteland

It was a tired patch of grass at the end of the road. No-one ever went there, why would they? Just scree and scrap, worthless, pointless, brilliant. It was my end of the road – laid claim to and conquered – with my bramble bushes and my muddy puddles giving way to foreign fields and a towering viaduct which carried tooting trains across my horizon. Mum’d always tut when I asked to go play there, rolling her eyes and spouting the same old, ‘you’ve got a perfectly good garden here,’ or ‘I don’t know why you insist on spending time at that dead end.”

She didn’t understand. I liked it. It was mine and that was what counted. I was away when I was down there and they couldn’t get to me. The shouting didn’t reach me there and the scowls couldn’t be seen. It was silent and simple there, just me – sometimes Ella. We would throw stones into the puddles together or see who could stand the brambles for the longest – always me because they were my brambles. We would make up stories about the people on the trains in the distance, acting them out as we balanced along the curb, or jumping and waving to get their attention as they hoot hooted in and out of our day – even though we knew they couldn’t see us.

Sometimes when it felt like it was getting bad, more silence than shouting, I would disappear down there, to the end of the road, without asking. I would sit on the pavement, feet tucked up against the curb, knees jutting out, kicking footfuls of gravel down the drain. With every tiny stone I always felt a little bit better, a little bit braver ready to suck it all up and head back up the street and knock on my own front door.

Then there were the times when the gravel didn’t work and I would just sit, listening to the plates clattering to the ground in my head, thinking of words that were spelt the same front to back. I liked those words, they took concentration, they helped me forget. Those days, the days when the plates clattered, they were the days when he would come. He’d sit down next to me, his big shoes tucked up under him like mine and he would put his heavy arm around my shoulders. The weight of it would make me crumple a little but I liked it. Crumpling made me feel safe. He’d look at me and make me laugh and in a second the broken plates on the floor were whole again and I was on his shoulders riding back to an open front door singing The Sun’ll Come Out Tomorrow all the way inside.

So that day I sat there. And I waited. More than plates had fallen to the floor that day. Everything clattered downwards piece by piece and I could hear it all, splitting, shattering and spinning – echoing around my head as clear as ice. Gravel couldn’t help me. Neither could the back to front words. I had nothing to turn to, to get away from the noise. So I concentrated on my horizon, on the viaduct, charging it with the duty of carrying me away from the breakage, a hoot hooting escape route into the unknown. No train came. No escape. The night wrapped around me quickly and completely, a dark blanket suffocating me with its thickness. I could hear the car doors slam as Dads arrived home for their tea after a ‘difficult day in the office dear,’ or a ‘sorry I’m late love meeting,’ and that made it worse. Much worse. The street lights buzzed into action, pouring an orange glow into the gloom and my skin went goosy with the cold.

And still I sat. It was so bad that day that I knew he would have to come. He’d have to head down here, to my end of the road with ten times as much vigour and we would have to sing ten times as loud on the way back to make it better. I wasn’t sure I could even sing that loud, or if he could. So I tried on my own, thinking that it might pull him to me, like a snake hypnotised by a charmer. But my tired little song didn’t bring him. All it brought was a train across my horizon taking whoever was on it away from me. The windows flashed past in the early evening darkness. I didn’t feel like jumping up and down and waving.