The swing

The Swing

Claire walked home from work most days. None of her friends at the
Hospital could understand it. Didn't she want to get home right away
after a long shift. The answer was yes, of course she did. At six in
the morning or ten at night there was nothing more she looked forward
to than coming in the door, sitting down next to her boyfriend Richard
on the sofa and supping on a warm cup of tea as her shoeless feet
groaned on the table from all the work they had done that day in front
of her.

More than that it was the warm blast of air she received in the face
after opening the front door, a comfortable, cooped-in smell of buttery
toast, socks and kettle steam that she most relished. Walking home from
the Hospital delayed and yet at the same time heightened the
experience.

For a second, as she opened the front gate leading up to the house and
observed the moths buzzing round the outside light there was the giddy
notion that this was not her house she was walking up to. She did not
belong here. Her home was elsewhere, in a more sour past or worse, a
forgetfulness had fallen upon her and she did not know where she truly
lived only that it wasn't here.

Her home could be one among possible thousands like this one or she
might not have a home at all. Her household was the street, the
pavement where anyone could walk and the idea she had any place to go
at all was simply a side-effect, a moment of prolonged dreaming, from
wandering around too much with nowhere to go.

Thinking such as this always then made it even more delicious that she
should be able, with the simple application of inserting a key and
turning the handle, to cross over that boundary between thinking and
knowing. Remove herself indoors and someone else to stand outside with
nowhere to go. The thought never crossed her mind that she might in her
moment of self-deception be enacting someone else's private dream- to
be home when there was one, to be welcome when there was none -and
therefore she never felt guilty about it. It was something to confess
as she lay cosily next to her partner in bed, warm and snug under the
sheets while the night wind raged across the skies outside.

As well as which the walk home was refreshing. After being forced to go
around at right angles all day, up stairs and across straight floors
her feet would go into a sort of automatic gallop as she made her way
across the uneven grounds that led away from the building. Unused to
the haphazard curves and drops of grass and earth that had never seen a
ruler or spirit level but only other sets of hurrying feet like this
one, sometimes gravity would prove too much and Claire would find
herself trotting too much and fall. Usually around the car park which
was raised by ten feet or so from the field it had originally once been
a part of, a molehill mushrooming in self-importance at the tarmac and
expensive cars now resting on top of it.

That was the way she usually came. Out of the official front entrance
where people who didn't look ill at all pulled up in their cars and
went into reception or sometimes out of a side entrance if she didn't
feel particularly public that day.

If it was a quiet time of day she would sometimes leave via where the
ambulances came in, stopping for five minutes or so to talk to the
paramedics and drivers she knew who worked there. Always on a tea break
and most of whom would lend her a cigarette if she didn't happen to
have any on her that day as everybody down there, even the mechanics
who didn't live very stressful lives at all, seemed to smoke.

The cigarette was an important part of the ritual. If she didn't have
one smouldering between her lips as she left it just didn't feel like
finishing time.

Away from the building she would then walk across the playing grounds,
a vast expanse of soggy green that the children and athletic adults no
longer seemed to favour for some reason. There was never anybody around
when she finished. The most you did see were people walking their dogs
and the occasional pair of youths dressed in identical tracksuits and
trainers drinking bottles of cheap cider on the fringes, casting
furtive glances underneath the rim of the baseball caps they wore
turned about on their heads. As if someone at any point might eject
them from where they were sitting.

Clare never felt threatened walking past them. Somehow the stature of
the enormous building she had just left looming behind her back always
guaranteed her safety.

Past the playing fields she would then cross a small stream of water
that ran into the adjacent field and begin following the path that
would take her through the thinly populated stand of woods that led on
to the embankment. A railway line had once been here and there were the
shattered remains of what might have been a bridge at one time lying in
rubble three hundred yards from where she came out of the trees and on
to the road. The woods around this area were thicker now. Intimations
of a deeper forest she had neither the will or time to further invest
in.

The path that went along the embankment started to climb higher. From
this vantage you could begin to see the lights from the houses shining
through the trees and in the evening among the birdsong there were the
muted echoes of studio laughter from televisions and parents shouting
upstairs to their children floating through the forest like some
vaporous audible mist.

The path continued on a bit until Claire had to make a detour right
away from the embankment down to where a section of wire had been
removed from the fence and she would be forced to bend and squeeze
herself through to get to the road.

The trees around the point where she had to branch right were huge,
real trees among the biggest she had ever seen. Oaks and elms of
enormous stature and imposing girth. Claire would find her head panning
left to look at them as her body moved onwards of its own in an
entirely different direction, fascinated by their sheer size.

One afternoon at the end of summer she noticed something odd hanging
from the branches of these self-same trees and once she squinted to see
properly, realised quite pleasantly that it must still have been the
swing she had seen a group of boys playing on during the school
holidays dangling between the leaves.

For some reason she had thought it would no longer be here now that the
children were back at school. Someone, an adult or perhaps the boys
themselves, would have taken it down now that shorter hours and
homework were here. Apparently not it seemed.

Claire remembered the time during the summer just past when she had
walked this route home and caught the boys playing on the swing.
"Caught" because although Claire was just walking near them the boys,
six of them, all stopped what they were doing to watch her walk by. She
did not actually walk past them but in a widening diagonal away from
them but still in visual distance.

One of them was holding the stick of the swing in his hand, a boy of
about twelve with fair hair and freckles on his face. Like the rest of
them he was stripped to his waist due to the weather. Claire herself
had been in a tee-shirt and every time she raised her arms anywhere
near to her shoulder could smell the fact of how heavily she was
perspiring.

The boys kept on looking at her as she walked past. Claire kept a smile
on her face but none of the boys smiled back. On their faces was only
suspicion. Just as she was about to walk away from them forever she
raised her hand and waved at them. The smallest boy with ginger hair
and dirt all over his face broke into a grin and waved cheerfully back
to her.

Immediately the boy standing next to him punched him on the arm. As
Claire walked away she could begin to hear the crackling stirrings of
recrimination being directed against the small boy from the rest of the
group. Five different voices all merging furiously together as one to
give the illusion of some swear-words being said Claire could not
possibly imagine children as young as these saying.

Now that she has discovered it again Claire begins to find her path
through the short sun-bleached grass drawing closer to the swing each
day she walks by. She does not know why this should be. She has already
went up and had a look at it, tossing the stick backwards and forwards
over the short drop for a minute or two until she was bored, and finds
no special reason to go back yet inexplicably finds herself walking a
yard or too closer than she ordinarily might have just to get a glimpse
of it.

It is not consciously done, these extra metres or so she adds on to her
journey. It is around here she begins to find herself in a unique
mental space anyway. The end of the day moment as she likes to call it,
when simple exertion has driven away all thoughts of the shift just
gone. The chattering characters of the people she works with beginning
to die away in her head, not yet thinking of what she might do when she
got back to the house but somewhere else in a no-mans land comprised of
the embankment and her own unfinished thoughts of the day.

It crosses her mind each time she passes it to perhaps stop and have a
go on it. There is never anyone around when she is walking by the
embankment and if there was, so what? What would they see, a woman
having a bit of fun, big deal. Yet the moment it actually crosses her
mind to have a shot on it something else rises up in her, something
concrete and inflexible, almost like a command telling her not
to.

Clare feels it each time she stops to look at the swing, a physical
reaction as well as a mental one. A swift rising in her stomach, a
short sharp gasp, then a deep swallowing of flem back into the bowels
of her stomach where it will be safely crushed in the acidic juices of
her lower intestine.

The weather doesn't help either, clouding over for the next few days
and blocking out the sun, which has been a more or less constant
companion for Claire on her sojourns home since the early days of
June.

Walking home from work now seems a trudge. A process she has to
actively work at just to make her legs walk ahead of her, when before
it had been an airy skim, a moment of prolonged lightness, where it
seemed like her feet never had to touch the ground.

Perhaps, when she thinks about it, what it really boiled down to, what
it really represented was her general lack of impulsiveness these days.
Swings by nature weren't something designed by committee and if you
wanted a go on one it didn't require a permit. Claire on the other hand
sometimes felt even the smallest action on her part required written
permission and planning weeks in advance.

Maybe she should then she thinks seriously to herself, annoyed that her
normally pleasant walk has been ruined by this. Have a shot on the
swing. Everything in the world was connected to everything else and if
she could somehow free herself in this tiny inconsequential moment
perhaps it would act as a chain reaction to liberating other more
troublesome areas of her life.

No sooner had she taken a step forward towards carrying this out than
Claire had to suppress a fit of giggles at the idea of it and stop. She
was a grown woman, she couldn't be seen acting like an eight-year old
on a swing. But it was only a swing surely&;#8230; yet Claire
couldn't get out of her head the image of a plump, jowly blonde woman
dressed in a white nursing uniform sailing through the air above a
patch of nettles.

Then she did laugh, not at the image of herself but at how stupid it
was, to spend so much time thinking to yourself only to realise what
was bothering you was whether to have a go on a silly swing or
not.

Then one day not long afterwards it didn't seem so funny. That part of
her which always seemed to be thinking had followed her from the
embankment and into her home and the places where she worked. It was
like a switch had been left on in her brain and she didn't know how to
turn it off again. Everyone she knew now seemed more interesting, more
varied and full than they had a day ago. The mates Richard now talked
to on his mobile, which ordinarily she had never listened to half of,
now seemed extensions of him. Evidence of a three-dimensional life that
didn't just stop when he left the room.

While he sat talking on the couch that morning Claire pretended to
watch the telly, secretly imagining how fun it would be on the fishing
trip they had planned for the weekend. Including herself as one of the
party, a male for the day, telling dirty jokes and drinking beer and
having to climb out of the tent at six in the morning to go for a
pee.

Similarly at her work that day it was the same. At least with Marie,
her best friend, it was to be expected. By anybody's standards she was
an out and out extrovert. If she wasn't working then the weekends were
devoted to clubbing and sex, in either order. Claire didn't mind being
left out of Marie's weekends, in fact she looked forward to Monday
morning when Marie came in, wearing sunglasses and still hungover, and
relayed in detail her exploits. Changing the names to protect the
innocent, leaving them in when there weren't any, but on this
particular day, a Friday no less, it didn't seem enough.

Marie and another girl were sitting next to her in the canteen. Claire
was busy reading her magazine while the two of them discussed what they
were going to get up to. The other girl was new to working at the
Hospital and seemed delighted she had found someone like Marie in such
a short amount of time.

Someone who as she put it wasn't "interested in sitting at home all
weekend like some sadsack" and wanted to live it up a little.

Claire squirmed in her seat and continued to read her magazine while
beside her, perhaps prompted by a nod from Marie, both the girls fell
silent. Marie asked her if she was okay and Claire, trying hard not to
show how angry she was, read them each their horoscope for the
day.

When finishing time came Claire left feeling depressed. It was six
o'clock at night on a Friday evening and everyone else it seemed was
preparing themselves for going out.

Some indefinable secret rendezvous had been planned for later on and
meanwhile she was heading down to the embankment and she couldn't even
phone Richard to come and pick her up because he was away up North with
his friends in the car. Gone fishing.

At the car-park she noticed a loose stone lying on the ground and began
kicking it in front of her. Making a game out of how far she could keep
it going on the narrow stone path which ran alongside the football
pitch before losing it down the side or into a bush somewhere, her eyes
vary rarely leaving the ground she looked onto. Perhaps from overhead
she would appear as someone looking for something they had lost.

A coin or a wallet maybe that had fallen from their pocket into the
grass. Claire herself didn't know what she was looking for.

As she reached the weathered bars of the goalposts she lost the stone
she was kicking and gave out a little huff to herself of
dissatisfaction. By degrees, as she made her way onto the familiar path
(her feet so used to it at junctures she could close her eyes and catch
a brief advertisement of the sleep she was looking forward to when she
got home), her mood began to lighten or rather there was the reminder
that she had felt like this before and compared to previous lows
encountered, this one was mild in terms of how wretched it made her
feel.

Claire slowly began to talk to herself into feeling good again. Claire
talking to herself wasn't an unusual sight along the embankment. Her
voice was as welcome here as the birds twittering melodies or the
rustling sigh of air being distributed off the leaves.

She didn't actually talk "talk" to herself when she found herself
agitated like this. Someone listening in would have heard nothing but a
garbled mix of words.

Sentences composed entirely in her own head would find themselves
finished out of her mouth. Certain motifs would keep on reoccurring. A
name, a place, a frame of mind disguised under another word. Listening
to Clare was like reading a book with all the words taken out apart
from the nouns.

In a way it was protection to speak with such a halted stutter she
often thought. People wouldn't think you were that mad if they caught
you doing it and for another it prevented Claire from revealing
anything too intimate. Anything that was too much of an attachment to
the core of her being that she wouldn't like a complete stranger to
overhear.

It was one of her greatest fears actually, even with Richard and her
friends, to reveal too much of herself. There was so little their she
doubted it would last less than a week for people to come in and
completely devour what she had to hide. Her soul, she often thought,
was a snack compared to others. Then when it was over she would be left
with nothing. All that she ever had would belong to someone else and
she would be left like some kind of emotionless zombie.

Yes she began to agree to herself, she knew what kind of person she
was. She always had. For years she had been comfortable with being that
person. It was just sometimes days came along like this where a hole
seemed to open up in the sky and you wanted to be so much more. So much
completely different from what you had been before and it was then you
realised there were limitations, actual limitations on how far you
could stretch yourself. That everyone came with these specified limits
of being from god knows where in the muddle of genes and complex
neurological patterns they had been handed down from somewhere else:
Marie had hers, Richard had his and once again Claire was being
reminded of hers.

Claire suddenly turned to look up at the evening sky, a smile on her
face for she had just had a brilliant idea. It seemed to come out of
nowhere, dropping from the same hole in the sky she had just
described.

She should ask Richard to walk down here with her one day. In all the
years she had been coming this way Richard had never once came with
her. It would be great. They could laugh and talk and hold hands
together as they walked just so all the rabbits and birds in the trees
they passed would know what a happy couple they were.

Claire practised it as she continued walking. Keeping a note of things
she could point out to him like a birds nest that was always in the
same place each winter or a sheet of corrugated iron lying abandoned
down the side of the embankment Richard might be able to use for the
shed he was planning to build in the back garden.

As she lovingly checked off each item she began to feel better than she
had in days, possibly weeks, wondering if what started with the swing
was simply not an accumulation of other stuff. Feelings she had been
hiding from herself or plain just didn't notice, that would have
resulted in this day anyway, regardless of any external influences like
swings or not having enough bread in the morning to make toast.

Yet as she walked up to where the swing was there was again a feeling
of disquiet running through her, something wrong. Not with her- that
was established already -but somehow with the swing itself.

When she reached it and ran her eyes up and down over the tree that
held the rope she realised the feeling had gone, that somehow it was in
the perspective. That when you looked at it from a distance only then
did you get the feeling something wasn't quite right.

She began to toss the stick back and forth over the drop- that same old
game! -sending it wide in a circular motion or seeing if she could hook
it up onto the branch it was tied to.

After a while she began to think of other swings she had been on. All
of them from her childhood, for a swing after all was a uniquely
childish invention.

By far the most terrifying had been when her brother, fourteen at the
time, along with some of his friends had set up a swing in an old
disused quarry they lived next to.

The swing had been at the very height of the quarry and led out into
nothing but thin air and a death of a hundred feet on the rocks below
if someone were to let go. It had only lasted for a week or so until
someone had told their parents what a dangerous activity the other boys
had been up to and the swing was taken down.

Claire refused point blank to go on it. Somehow she had the notion that
because she was so much smaller than the other, older boys the damage
to her would be far greater if she fell.

Her brother had done it though. Just the once. After considering it for
hours, without saying to the others what he was about to do, he stood
up from where he was sitting and made a mad dash to where the swing was
and grabbing hold of the stick sailed out for thirty seconds into the
great void, screaming like a madman.

When he came back he was different. Claire was not a great believer in
life-changing incidents, even still to this day. People changed
gradually she believed. Millions of events conspiring to erode them
from one form into another over a course of weeks and years, not
seconds.

Yet Michael her brother was different after coming back on that swing.
A promising student with good grades one year, the next he was playing
truant and trying to cajole strangers into buying him drink from the
off-licence. A promising career of house burglary and three years in
prison soon beckoned.

More morbidly there had been another swing which a man had hung himself
on. Claire and her friends had only been playing on it for a few days
when they started to notice the man, always it seemed to them
inappropriately dressed in a powder blue suit, wandering in among the
trees towards them.

He had short sandy hair and spoke with an Irish accent, which by
novelty alone convinced Claire that when he spoke to them he had
sounded quite cheerful although obviously the opposite was true.

When he was asked what he was doing down here, as the woods were an as
yet uninhabited area for adults, he had replied he was looking for a
girl.

"A girl girl?" Samantha Jenson, Claire's neighbour at the time had
asked, referring to the rest of the nine-year old quartet.

"No just a girl" he had replied a little sadly and Claire had thought
it a shame that he couldn't find who he was looking for.

The next time she seen him he was hanging from the tree with his tongue
hanging out of his mouth, his eyes rolled up into the back of his head
and still wearing his blue suit.

Something was still held in his hand, a small slip of paper, and dared
by the others to go and fetch it Claire discovered what it was: a
meaningless shopping receipt. Apparently the last thing he had bought
was a carton of milk.

For some reason Claire had thought it had been an accident and it took
many hours of persuasion from her parents to convince her the man had
done this to himself.

The next time she would see a dead body again would be thirteen years
later when she started working in the Hospital.

Claire stopped throwing the stick around and held it in the grip of her
hand instead, slowly caressing the grain of the wood with her fingers.
She was close now, she could feel it.

"Oh wow" a deadpan voice in her head replied, "Going to have a shot on
the swing. Don't be too adventurous and do anything too crazy" it
continued to sneer.

Claire didn't care. After today she needed to do this one small thing.
Prove them all wrong, even if there was no-one here to witness
it.

Putting her bag down first she then sat on the stick, taking care that
her skirt wouldn't get caught in the wrong place. Then, pulling the
rope back as far as it would go, she took her feet off the ground and
watched from the right as the ground fell away and ten feet beneath her
were only nettles.

It took all of ten seconds and when she returned back to the spot she
launched herself from she didn't feel any different, in fact felt
rather unsatisfied.

"One more go" she said to herself, also noticing that it was really
getting quite dark now. Directly across from her a light had come on in
a house and a few seconds later Claire heard the sound of a toilet
flushing.
One more then she really would have to go.

This time she launched herself on a diagonal, heading in an arc away
from the tree. Halfway round and just beginning to enjoy herself there
was a sudden downward lurch of perhaps only a few inches.

Instinctively Claire looked up to where the rope was attached to the
tree and through the twilight thought at first she seen snakes there
but quickly realised the knots securing the swing to the thick wooden
branch were untying themselves under her weight.

"Shit" said Claire and as she came back round to where she originally
set off, desperately tried with her feet to stop herself.

Instead they skimmed the surface and as she scrabbled to touch ground
accidentally propelled herself even faster.

She was going around again and just at the point where she realised she
could see into someone's back garden the rope let go completely and she
went flying into the air.

It must have been the boys she thought some time later. Those boys who
had been at the swing that day she walked by. Evil, suspicious little
boys. Not to mention incredibly insightful little boys who had been
able to see through the shallow wave she gave them and read on her face
how much she had wanted to have a go on it when all she could do was
deny.

She could imagine them gathered around the tree on the last day of
summer, bored, resentful of the holiday gone too fast, when someone
suggests not to take down the swing but leave a trap instead. A little
token of appreciation from one kingdom to the next.

Claire wasn't hurt too badly by her fall. She had a sprained ankle and
a slight cut on her head but it wasn't anything that wouldn't heal in a
week. Her pride however&;#8230;

Stepping out onto the road from the bushes Claire felt self-conscious
in the orange sodium glow of the streetlights. Her nurses uniform was
ruined with mud and stuck in her hair were twigs she couldn't pull
out.

Waggling her tongue about she could taste the soil smeared all over her
face. She imagined she must look like some lunatic female commando
right now and hoped no-one would see her in the time she got
home.

An expletive rushed out of her mouth and was quickly muted as she
turned down to go into her road and seen a group of teenagers about a
hundred yards away walking up towards her.

They were a boisterous bunch and as Claire got closer to them,
desperately trying not to make eye contact, she noticed they were not
teenagers at all but people, men and women, she would have put around
her own age group.

The men were all dressed in colourful shirts while the women, walking
as one group slightly behind the men, wore low-cut dresses and high
heels you would have heard a mile away.

The noise they made was energetic and cheerful. Every so often one or
all of the men couldn't contain themselves and simply had to bounce
around on the pavement. It was clear from their hurried strides they
were heading out somewhere even though, as Claire glanced to her watch,
it was just seven o'clock in the evening.

Claire walked past them, keeping her head bowed as she passed. There
were a few comments she didn't catch but by the time she was opening
the front gate that led up to her house they had rounded the corner and
were gone, leaving behind a mingled scent of perfume and aftershave.
The chemical equivalent of two separate beings fused into one.

Distantly she heard a burst of laughter from them. As if someone had
said something really funny, but that could have meant anything she
later thought.

At the foot of the path leading up to her front door Claire stood,
momentarily stunned, looking up at the lights still on in her
house.

She did not expect them to be on and once again there was the spooky
sensation that she really didn't live here.

I've seen this before she thought to herself.

Richard must have forgotten to turn them off she realised once she seen
his car was gone from the driveway but still the feeling didn't go
away.

For a moment she was tempted to examine it in more detail. Who else
would possibly be in the living room. What reaction she would get from
the occupants when she began demanding that this was her home, no her
reality they were in and how long it would take for the Police to
arrive.

But there had already been enough of that she thought. Starting out
with only a thread until you took the whole jumper, Claire was sick of
fooling herself any more.

Taking out her keys and inserting them into the lock, she opened the
door and went inside.