‘It’s ridiculous, of course,’ he said, thinking of something else.
‘What?’
They were at the Playground gate.
‘Hello, Charlie. Hi!’ Far away, atop the monstrous slide stood the Marshall boy, waving, not smiling now.
‘You wait here,’ said Mr Underhill to his sister. ‘I’ll be only a moment. I’ll just take Jim in.’
‘All right.’
He grasped the small boy’s hand. ‘Here we go, Jim. Stick close to Daddy.’
They stepped down the hard concrete steps and stood in the flat dust. Before them, in a magical sequence, stood the diagrams, the gigantic ticktacktoes, the monstrous hopscotches, the amazing numerals and triangles and oblongs the children had scrabbled in the incredible dust.
The sky blew a huge wind upon him and he was shivering. He grasped the little boy’s hand still tighter and turned to his sister. ‘Good-by,’ he said. For he was believing it. He was in the Playground and believing it, and it was for the best. Nothing too good for Jim.
Nothing at all in this outrageous world! And now his sister was laughing back at him. ‘Charlie, you idiot!’
Then they were running, running across the dirt Playground floor, at the bottom of a stony sea that pressed and blew upon them. Now Jim was crying, ‘Daddy, Daddy!’ and the children racing to meet them, the boy on the slide yelling, the ticktacktoe and the hopscotchers whirling, a sense of bodiless terror gripping him, but he knew what he must do and what must be done and what would happen.
Far across the field footballs sailed, baseballs whizzed, bats flew, fists flashed up, and the door of the Manager’s office stood open, the desk empty, the seat empty, a lone light burning over it.
Underhill stumbled, shut his eyes and fell, crying out, his body clenched by a hot pain, mouthing strange words, everything in turmoil.
‘There you are, Jim,’ said a voice.
And he was climbing, climbing, eyes closed, climbing metal-ringing ladder rungs, screaming, yelling, his throat raw.
Mr Underhill opened his eyes.
He was on top of the slide. The gigantic, blue metal slide which seemed ten thousand feet high. Children crushed at his back, children beat him to go on, slide! Slide!
And he looked, and there, going off across the field, was a man in a black overcoat. And there, at the gate, was a woman waving and the man standing there with the woman, both of them looking in at him, waving, and their voices calling. ‘Have a good time! Have a good time, Jim!’
He screamed. He looked at his hands, in a panic of realization. The small hands, the thin hands. He looked at the earth far below. He felt his nose bleeding and there was the Marshall boy next to him. ‘Hi!’ cried the other, and bashed him in the mouth. ‘Only twelve years here!’ cried the other in the uproar.
Twelve years! thought Mr Underhill, trapped. And time is different to children. A year is like ten years. No, not twelve years of childhood ahead of him, but a century, a century of this.
‘Slide!’
Behind him the stink of Musterole, Vicks VapoRub, peanuts, chewed hot tar, spearmint gum and blue fountain-pen ink, the smell of kite twine and glycerin soap, a pumpkin smell of Halloween and a papier-mâché fragrance of skull masks, and the smell of dry scabs, as he was pinched, pummeled, shoved.
Fists rose and fell, he saw the fox faces and beyond, at the fence, the man and woman standing there, waving. He shrieked, he covered his face, he felt himself pushed, bleeding, to the rim of nothingness.
Headfirst, he careened down the slide, screeching, with ten thousand monsters behind. One thought jumped through his mind a moment before he hit bottom in a nauseous mound of claws.
This is hell, he thought, this is hell!
And no one in the hot, milling heap contradicted him.
The end
