A Run in the Park

by David Park

  Because although Henry my husband had probably stopped loving me a long time before he left, I hadn’t realised. That’s partly my fault, taking things for granted, just getting on with life and thinking everything will look after itself. And there’s a trust issue involved for me now as well, because he’d been having a relationship with his work colleague and I never suspected. Maybe that makes me naive – I don’t know. But it does make you think about what type of man you want, and I’m better at knowing what I don’t want rather than what I do. So I don’t want any Heathcliffs – none of that brooding darkness with a propensity for violence; nor a Mr Rochester with some secret lurking in the attic. And I never really found the television Darcy attractive either, not even after his wet-shirt episode, because he’s like those men who always have a ready-made apology for how they behave and need so much re-engineering to help them become someone you’d want to spend your life with.

  But what do I want? Well, independent means, for a start. I don’t intend sharing my meagre pension with anyone, especially now that the government has moved the retirement age in the hope that more of us will die before we get back some of the money we’ve contributed to the Exchequer. This is when I start to struggle with the words for what I want and if I say a sense of moral responsibility, then it makes people think I’m looking for some Victorian vicar in a frock coat. But yes, someone who’s able to care. Care about me, care about others, who has a clear vision of what’s right and doesn’t need someone to constantly point out what’s wrong. But I don’t know how you construct any of this into a personal profile you post online. So for the moment at least I’m focusing only on completing this running programme, even though I struggled with the twenty-minute run last week and my shins are starting to complain. Following Pauline’s advice, I’ve bought a couple of pairs of compression socks – they’re supposed to increase the oxygen supply to the muscles and improve circulation. When I told Martina about them, she said I should wear one on my head.

  I don’t know if it’s part of my called-back-to-life feeling after my recent health scare, but aside from my shins I’m increasingly conscious of the physical benefits of my five weeks of running. I’ve a fuller appetite and I’m sleeping better too, no longer waking up at the first break of light slithering into the room through curtains that have never been heavy enough to prevent its entry. And it’s offered some counterbalance to my worries about my daughter Zara who’s pregnant with her second child and frightened that it will prove as difficult as her previous ones. Our conversations on Skype are still awkward, trying to construct chat round the things that we know aren’t important, almost as if, were we to venture into the things that really matter, somehow our connection will get lost and into that absence will flow all the thousands of miles that separate us.

  And, despite the positive feelings about my own body, I’m still checking it religiously and think that when you’ve been granted a reprieve you should make the most of the future given back to you.

  I’ve been thinking too about how so many of us lose our children. Lose them to faraway countries and better jobs, to what they see as improved opportunities. They go off at eighteen to get educated and we’re proud of them, but then most of them don’t come back. Perhaps it’s just because other places are able to offer more of the things they want. Perhaps it’s because when they look back at where they were born, it seems a small place, eternally locked into its ancient feuds and tribal bitterness, a place where prejudice is still allowed to legislate how people should live. Change is coming but it comes too slow for the impatience of youth. And for generations this whole island has seen its children emigrate, and while it’s true that it’s easier nowadays to stay in touch through FaceTime and Skype, through all the benefits of technology, it doesn’t make it any easier in your heart. You can’t reach out your arms into the screen, can’t touch the body of your child, can’t talk to them without feeling like you’re performing in some way, with everything stilted and awkward. Everything just on the surface. Nothing ever below. Putting on a brave face. Not being able to tell your only child about your health scare, not being able to share sadness.

  Hoping too that tragedy never blurs the images on the screen, because there is no language able to deal with that. Maurice has never spoken of his wife but a few days ago someone told me about the accident. It came as a bit of a shock. I always thought there was a sadness about him and when he runs it’s as if he’s carrying some burden that goes beyond his surplus weight. I think he’s probably let himself go a bit and that’s understandable in some ways after a tragedy like that. But all credit to him for getting himself up and running, and the price stickers finally fell off his trainers during that night we ran in the rain. And while running in the rain might hold some kind of resonance for romantics, I didn’t find any in damp knickers and wet feet, my hair plastered to my skull like rats’ tails. The only pleasure was a post-run long soak in a hot bath accompanied by candles and a gin and tonic.

  It’s a nice bunch of people in the running group and I’ve had a chat with almost all of them now, usually when we’re waiting around about to start or when we pair up while walking. Women are able to tell each other lots of things, even though it’s not long since they were complete strangers. So I know about some of Angela’s wedding plans, her problems with finding the right dress and what she thought of Meghan Markle’s – a bit plain was her verdict; about Maureen’s mother who has the beginnings of dementia; and Elise the classroom assistant who by all accounts needs to have the patience of a saint; and about Zofia whose cleaning business now employs five people but who’s going back to Poland if Brexit makes things too difficult. Only Yana is a closed book, not just because she holds herself a little apart, but mostly because she runs so fast, always striding purposefully out as if she’s no time to waste in getting to wherever it is she wants to go.

  A closed book that unexpectedly opens some of its pages. On a slow day before the schoolkids arrive and after the unemployed have left, she comes into the library. She recognises me, but doesn’t say anything to reveal that recognition, and she wants to join. She doesn’t have any form of identification new members are supposed to have, but I bend the rules and register her. I give her a little tour, show her how to sign into the computers, and all the time I’m thinking of saying something about our running, but perhaps the fact that I don’t is the reason she eventually asks me if I’m enjoying the sessions. When I tell her I found Week Five hard she smiles, because I think it didn’t represent a challenge for her, but then she says I’m doing well. That it will get easier.

  I say that perhaps I’m too old for it and she shakes her head and tells me I’m not old and then, although it might seem rude, I ask her age and she tells me nineteen and after I ask about her family I mention my daughter in Australia and reveal that I’m a grandmother. She asks me if I miss her and when I say yes, I ask her how she’s settling into her new home. But even though she says the right things I see there’s a sadness in her eyes, that part of her is looking back at things she’s unable to talk about, so I don’t push her and after our own troubles we’re experts at sidestepping the consequences of trauma by not talking about it.

  She tells me that her family are bakers and she wants to use a computer to see if there might be restaurants in the city that would be interested in using some of the food they could produce, of how they hope to find premises where they could cook and bake. I don’t know for sure but I say there might be government help with start-up grants for small businesses and stuff like that. That I’ll make some enquiries, ask a few people who might know. As soon as I’ve said it I start to worry that I’ve conjured some hope of help that I won’t be able to deliver. But I know I’ll try.

  Just as I’m going to try on this, our Week Six independent run, where we have to walk for five minutes, run for ten, then walk for three followed by a final ten-minute run. It doesn’t sound too bad when you say it like that, so I try not to think about the twenty-fi
ve-minute run with which we’re supposed to finish the week. I had asked Yana if she’d like to join our small group, but she said she preferred to run early morning along the river.

  Perhaps I’m conscious of her choice of running route and that’s why I suggest that we change our normal circuit and follow the river before looping back to our starting point. It seems a good call. Only Maurice looks a little disappointed, probably because we won’t be running past his daughter’s house, but he doesn’t say anything and so we set off following the Lagan’s slow curve to where it will eventually end in the Lough. The air tingles crisp and clean and a single oarsman rows a smooth furrow through the water, his steady rhythm an example to all of us. We mostly have the path to ourselves, apart from the occasional cyclists who politely ring their bells to warn they’re going to overtake.

  It’s when we’ve just finished our first ten-minute run that we see them. Thousands and thousands of starlings, a great shifting and pulsing cloud churning and shading the sky, twisting and turning in on itself. We stand transfixed and watch, momentarily forgetting about our second run. Someone says it’s a pity we can’t move like that, and Brian starts to give some scientific explanation, but then I hear nothing more except a kind of murmuration in the heart, because what I’m seeing is the thousands of our sweet-souled children set in flight and I want to reach out my hand to them to wave them home, or wherever the home is that brings them happiness.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Maurice asks.

  ‘Yes, thanks, Maurice. Just having a moment.’

  ‘You look sad,’ he says.

  ‘Give me a hug, Maurice,’ I tell him.

  Then he does and after the briefest of touches we set out on our final run.

  Brendan and Angela

  I didn’t expect to see him waiting there. I’d just come off shift to find Angela’s father Aidan standing beside my car, giving it the once-over, a kind of visual MOT, and I could tell from his expression, and the way his fingers traced the dent in the door where I had an argument with a car-park bollard, that he was mentally failing it. But as soon as he saw me it was all bonhomie and best-mates stuff, and supposedly he thought it a good idea that we hang out a little and shoot the breeze. But he’s not good at subtlety, so before I could even produce my keys he was offering me a new car – well, one of his cast-offs actually – something he obviously thought more suitable for his future son-in-law to be seen around town in. And as I politely declined I suspected we had reached that point in dramas where concerned fathers offer lowlifes a substantial financial inducement to drop any pretence of love for their daughter and depart forthwith. I glanced at the pocket of his coat because I imagined that he was no stranger to bunging people wads of money in brown paper bags in car parks. And there were rumours doing the rounds that he wasn’t entirely detached from some of the ongoing NAMA property scandal, but he also had a reputation for having all his business interests Teflon coated.

  But if a brown paper bag was going to emerge from a pocket, there was no sign of it yet and instead his empty hand rested lightly on my shoulder for a second while he invited me for something to eat, telling me it was important we got to know each other better before the big day. I couldn’t refuse and so we ended up in a city-centre restaurant where the staff knew him by name, saw that we got a suitably appropriate table and served his usual drink before he’d even ordered it. After a few cursory questions about work and how the running was going, he launched into a mini biography of himself whose purpose was to let me know that he was a self-made man, that he’d started out with nothing and grafted to make something of himself. It got most embarrassing when he said he grew up in a house just like the one my parents still lived in, with the unspoken implication that if only they had grafted as hard as he did then the golden prizes would have been theirs.

  I did a lot of non-committal nodding and waited for the brown paper bag to be pushed across the table. It came between the main and dessert, prefaced by a question about where I saw myself in ten years’ time, and after I had avoided any meaningful response, he offered me a job. An opportunity had come for him to acquire a certain city-wide property portfolio and he thought that Angela and I would be the ideal people to manage it. I had no idea what managing a property portfolio entailed and wasn’t interested in finding out, but before I was allowed to reply he insisted that I think about it, give it suitable consideration and talk to Angela before coming back with an answer.

  So my fate was not to be dispatched from the family but to be incorporated in it. The end result felt the same. I wondered if Angela had known about this offer in advance of it sliding across the table. The following night, as we turn up for our second group running session of the week, I don’t say anything and wait to see if she’ll raise it, but she says nothing and seems focused only on completing her run. At first I try to run with her, but find it difficult to keep to her pace, and she must realise this because she tells me to go on ahead and so I leave her, fall into my own rhythm. Afterwards I tell her that she’s done well, that I know she’s going to make the final run, and we hug briefly. When she tells me there must be an easier way, I say I know it’s hard but she’s doing great and it’ll be worth it in the end. But I don’t say anything about the job, nor do I tell her that after the programme finishes I’m going to keep on running, that I run each morning before work. That it’s doing something good for both my body and my head.

  I don’t have to think much about Aidan’s offer – I already have two families, the one that brought me into the world and the one I work in every day, so I’ve no need of another. When I’m back on the wards I’m aware of a bit of a commotion in Judith’s room and after I go to see what’s going on, I find a group of people standing round her bed and realise she is actually getting married, that it wasn’t the morphine talking. She signals me in and I see that she has a little scarf of white lace round her neck and matching lace gloves on her hands – it’s the closest her wasted body can come to wearing a wedding dress – and the groom, her partner of fifteen years, wears a dark suit and white shirt with a spray on his lapel. It’s a humanist service and after they do the vows her two sisters sing a cappella. I stand in the corner and try to hold it together like I’m supposed to do and after the ceremony is finished Judith calls me over and asks if I’m not going to give the bride a kiss. So I bend down and lightly kiss her hollow cheek, shake hands with the groom and then leave them to their precious time together.

  But I can’t get it out of my head. And that weekend, when we go to stay in an apartment on the north coast owned by Angela’s parents, the images press themselves into my consciousness. And they’re accompanied by thoughts about the unpredictability of life, the preciousness of time shared and most of all what real love looks like. How it doesn’t need anything, not a single thing, except what exists between two people.

  On Saturday morning I wake early and then ease Angela awake, tell her that we need to go for a run on the beach. She asks if I’m crazy, offers me an alternative form of exercise, but I tell her we have to run and I think she can see that it’s important to me so she gets up and we both put on our running gear. We walk through the dunes to the beach, the marram grass sharp against our hands. The sky is full of the winter’s morning light stretching cloudlessly over the calmness of the sea, the beach almost empty with the tide out and the sand shining in a kind of diamond brightness. We walk towards the water through soft rucks of sand to reach where it’s firmer underfoot and look out towards the horizon.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ she says and then we stand in silence.

  A little trill of white-edged water ripples close to our feet, making me think of the white lace that served for a wedding dress and how in that moment it seemed more beautiful than the most expensive creation. How every moment I spent in that side room felt more real to me than just about anything else I’ve ever experienced. And I’ve slowly come to a decision. A decision about the wedding, about Angela, about if we have a future toget
her or not. It’s simple in a way, because it all comes down to one thing, and that’s whether she’s going to try and persuade me to work for her father. If she does then I know we’ll never have an independent life, always be in the shadow of someone else, and that we can’t be enough for each other purely on our own. So I’m nervous as we turn and start to do our walk as a warm-up. Frightened that we’ve finally reached this moment because, despite the certainty of our synchronised steps, I’m unsure of where they’re taking us.

  The five minutes of walking seem to last an eternity and I check the phone app to see if it’s actually working. Then we start to run and I’m keeping it at a really gentle pace, even getting her to slow down as we aim for the end of the beach and the stone pier that stretches into the sea. Our faces are splashed clean by the freshness of the air and for a second it feels like we’re inhaling the right type of drug. Sometimes a little break of water runs towards us and she squeals as we have to veer further up the beach out of its reach. Perhaps the tide is starting to come in. Then a few seconds later I feel her hand plucking at my arm, signalling me to stop, and I think there’s something wrong but she wants us to take our trainers off so we leave them further up the beach and start to run again at the water’s edge, our feet splashing up little glitters of water. In the morning light without a stitch of make-up, she looks beautiful and I think that my heart will break if I am faced with the truth that what we have isn’t going to work. So, hard as it is, I try to stay in the preciousness of these few moments, don’t want us ever to reach the end of the beach. And she’s running well, displaying the determination she brings to everything she does, even if occasionally she’s wincing at the coldness of the water, water that’s clean and clear so we can see the wavy ridges of sand that we feel on the soles of our feet.