'Portrait of an ordinary man'

He was, altogether, a very ordinary man. He wore jeans and a hoodie, and he was quietly good-looking, neither plain nor showily handsome. His eyes were of a colour you couldn’t remember. Once, on holiday to Portugal, he had been persuaded to have a caricature portrait taken on the beach; but the picture had come out blandly bad, as if there were nothing in his face which could be grasped or exaggerated but only what was regular.

He was a very ordinary man. No one noticed him as he crossed the bridge and dropped down onto the green. His palms were barely sweating.

The park had its usual June cohort of drunks sunning themselves, picnickers, dog-walkers, a trapeze artist balancing on a line between two trees. Above him, somewhere, the high knife’s note of a lark pierced the sky.

And children. Of course there were children in the park.

By the time he reached the bench opposite the playground, his mouth was dry. He sat down, lit a cigarette. Flicking ash into the grass, his hand barely shook.

At first, he didn’t look. Wrong to be caught looking. That awful word – wrong wrong wrong. He fixed his eyes to a patch of grass and watched a bird consume a worm. The cruelty of it – how mismatched the soft pink body of the worm and that stabbing steely beak.

He didn’t need to look to know the layout of the playground. The swings on the right, the roundabout on the left, the climbing frame shaped like a pirate ship in the middle of the colourful rubber matting.

It reminded him of the awful place. It was called the Kiddie Klub, with two ks. Even aged 8, he knew that that was wrong wrong wrong. What’s more, he hated being grouped together with the other kiddies. They hated him, and he hated them. They were loud and runny-nosed and athletic. They swung from the monkey bars and pulled faces at him. They asked him what his name was, and ran away screaming with laughter when he wouldn’t tell. They dared him to do things, knowing full well that he wouldn’t. Everywhere, primary colours – blue and red and yellow. The colours hurt his eyes. The colours screamed at him. And everywhere that stifling smell. Warm plastic and feet and food smells from the cafe down the hall – cheese and baked beans. There were giant balls that swung from ropes. They would hit you with a fleshy smack on the cheek if you weren’t careful. There were slides that grazed your skin with static. There were climbing frames sticky with sweat. There was a tunnel with things hanging down that touched your face. It was terrible.

The walls of the Kiddie Klub were giant sheets of netting, unyielding. When his mother dropped him off, he would watch her receding down the hallway to the cafe, clutch a hand out through the netting, reach, then she was gone. The netting was rough between his fingers. He’d pound and pound the netting until it burned, and still he’d keep pounding. The skin of his hands and arms red from the netting, his cheeks red from the tears. Don’t let them see you cry. Fists to the eyes, grazing hot tears from the cheeks. Gulping sobs that died in convulsions before they were born. Don’t let them see you cry.

Once, he decided to try the ball-pit. Perhaps that would be OK. He could dive in, pretend he was having fun. The plastic balls couldn’t be as bad as water, could they? He would be able to stay afloat, not fall into that world of primary colours and breathlessness. It would be OK.

But suddenly – another boy. Would he ask Stephen’s name? Or dare him to do the monkey bars? Stephen panicked. He tried to swim to the edge, but this wasn’t like water at all. The balls crowded unyielding in front of him. The edge was only a metre away, but the balls kept coming. He pushed and pushed, thrashed the balls from his path, but there they were. Everywhere, blue and red and yellow, he couldn’t see where he was going now. And suddenly something different beneath his fingers – not the tacky plastic but something soft, warmer even than the warm plastic. Flesh. The thigh of the other boy. Immediately, he froze. He looked at the boy. The boy looked at him. For a second, stillness.

Was this the moment when it all began? There in the Kiddie Klub, aged 8. Had that moment led him directly to this moment, now, in the park by the children’s playground with the swings on the right and the roundabout on the left? And did that question in any way matter?

‘Hey mister!’

The words knifed his ears.

‘Hey mister! Pass us the ball!’

He barely hesitated before kicking the football back to the boy. At the sound of the kick, the bird, worm-full and satisfied, took flight.

‘Time for home!’ the boy’s mother announced, ‘Good boy, you never make a fuss!’