Joe by Michael Blastland

Author:Michael Blastland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Profile Books
Published: 2007-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

6

Self-consciousness

Avon Country Park is not slick; the signs are more likely to be painted plywood than neon. To find it, you turn from the A4 Bath road over a humpback bridge, pass the municipal rubbish dump and jolt through potholes alongside fields of cabbages and sweetcorn.

But it is charming. Up from the banks of the coiled river where the ducks shuffle and sit, shuffle and sit, past the flapping tents and hay bales, the miniature railway, the tractor and rusting trailer offering rides, not far from the burgers and peas, you amble from the car park through this patchwork of modest ambition to the top of a gentle hill and the one proud new building.

It was to this oddly pristine industrial barn that I brought Joe shortly after he’d started school, at the end of a day out. He’d already played on the fraying, bouncy slides, then on the long silver slides outside; he’d climbed a bit, he’d lathered himself in ice creams, and of what he’d done he’d tired. There was one place left to try to keep him entertained.

We stepped inside and the doors opened on a cacophony of children, the steel rafters surely ringing, loud enough ordinarily to terrify Joe, whose apprehension held him back, until, that is, he clocked another slide.

Joe likes slides, and here he met the divine archetype of all he’d ever seen: fifty metres of swift, undulating colour, four tracks in a row. We flipped off his shoes, collected a sack to sit in, clambered up the metal stairs, positioned sack on slide, sat down … nearly. Then stood up. Joe retreated. He didn’t want to go. He’d changed his mind and pulled me away towards the stairs. Not too steep, but perhaps too long or too fast, the slide had abruptly lost its appeal.

At the bottom, he watched the children whooping down and changed his mind again; we returned to the top.

And then to the bottom, running against the herd. I didn’t mind at first, thinking Joe was drumming up courage. Yes, no, yes, no; desire competing with fear, the idea tussling with his senses. Sometimes we’d get a little closer to launching ourselves before his resistance flared and he scrambled away. Each time his reaction was categorical: no, emphatically no; half a minute later, yes, insistently, yes.

I had a hunch he’d like it, but didn’t want to force him, so we persisted, another ten minutes, up and down, and then another, less tolerant, until, with all encouragement failing, something in me snapped and I spun from patience to irritation:

‘Joe! Up and down, up and down. Will you make up your mind?’

‘Sss,’ he says. Yes.

So we head to the top.

‘Naghh,’ he says.

And we thread our way back to the bottom.

‘Ssss.’

‘Joe!’ I look him square in the face and try to keep the lid on something Neanderthal. ‘If we go up and down those bloody steps. One. More. Time …’

‘Ssss.’

‘Right. Last chance.’

And I stomped him to the top where he wriggled and wrestled, plonked in front of me, held tight and clawing; but too late now, we hurtled forward.

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