Highly Commended 1 - Short Story Competition 2015

"Palmerson Park" by Ann Rhodes

I hesitate by the open gate. It is early morning, two days before Christmas. The brooding sky leans low and an unnerving silence lingers around this park. It is many years since I played here, many years since I walked the streets of this city.  

Ice decorates the wrought-iron gate. I brush my hand along it and walk in. Memories creep from the dead trees, seeping from the frozen ground and with every step I wish I hadn't come here. Perhaps I should have stayed in America; perhaps, after all, the past is best left to moulder.

I follow the path to the playground, no longer the concrete square with a few swings and the seesaw that we loved but an adventure of climbing, spinning and sliding on a bright red soft floor.  Despite my mood, I smile.  How we would have loved this!

Up and down, up and down, the see-saw creaked, its flaking green paint sticking to our knitted gloves.  Bobby and I always got the best places.  Johnny saw to that.  He was our undisputed leader.  Flaxen-haired, chubby cheeked and ten years old, he seemed, to Bobby and I, both a year younger, to be as wise as a grown-up and we always listened to him, always did as he bade us.

It was Johnny and his Dad who built the wooden cart that we clung to as we raced down the park hill on summer days. It was Johnny and his Mam who dressed us as ghouls and witches at Halloween and it was to Johnny's house that we called first to sing our carols on Christmas Eve.

With the peal of the park closing bell ringing in our ears, we walked home each evening through avenues lined with stately houses and tall trees to our small houses huddled together by the canal.  Frowning trees we call them, cold and stern, so unlike our trees in the park.  

Busy housemaids, as cold and stern as the trees, chased us away when we ventured through the garden gates in search of our bouncing ball.  Johnny could hop our ball almost all the way along the avenue, but I never could and it was always me the housemaids caught.

Christmas Eve and it snowed, great peppermint flakes lightening the gloom. Johnny and I knocked at Bobby's door, a narrow green door, with a golden star in the fanlight and silver tinsel sneaking along the frame.

"Bobby, Bobby!  C'mon.  It's snowing!"

A white Christmas!  We had never had a white Christmas.  

"Let's go to the park - we'll go carolling later - when it's dark and we can take a lamp...Come on, hurry..."

The air was cold and little puffs of life bounced ahead of us as we ran.  We were breathless with excitement, laughing at our smudged footprints in the snow.  

"Our footprints can't keep up with us!" Bobby laughed, "Come on, let's have a race to the gates!"

The park was full of joyous children.  Here and there a snowman stood and elsewhere frozen hands willingly gave life to another.   

"Oh.... let's make our own snowman!" I cried, "just the three of us.....", and we set to work in a frenzy.  Soon we had a snowy companion whose pebbly smile delighted us and made us forget our cold hands and feet.  Bobby wrapped his bright red scarf around the snowman's thick neck and I wedged my woolly hat on his lop-sided head.

We stood back to admire him.  "He's a picture," Johnny said, "but there's one thing missing!  The snowman in the poster at school has a big wooden stick to hold.'  And he looked about him to find one but the ground was frozen and bare.  

"He shall have one too," cried Bobby, and he ran to the gaunt skeleton of our favourite tree and began to climb.

We watched as he climbed closer and closer to heaven, higher and higher into our tree, the one we scaled effortlessly in summer when green leaves covered the branches and there was no ice.

Bobby was near the top, reaching for a thick, bare, branch when he slipped, tumbling down so fast, so quietly, that we didn't have time to move.  

He lay crumpled on the ground, like my sister's broken doll.  His face was chalk-white and a crimson pool seeped from beneath his head, brightening the churned, grey snow.

"Johnny! Johnny! What'll we do...?"   I cried, very frightened but sure Johnny would know what to do.

Johnny said not a word.  He crouched beside the sad, little figure and I thought that he had been frozen there like the snowman for he did not move when I shook his arm.  

"Johnny!"  I shook him again and this time he turned to me but his blue eyes were dull and he began to cry.

I recall easily the shrill scream of the ambulance siren, the circle of silent children and the battalion of snowmen in the park when they took Bobby away, but the memory of my mother hugging me and the soft sobbing at Bobby's graveside have merged now into the misty memories of childhood.

Bobby lived on in my memory long after he had gone and snowy days made me sad for my lost friends.  

For I had lost Johnny too.  He did not return to school after that dark Christmas holiday and he would not see me when my mother brought me to visit.  Each day on my way to school, I passed his house and waved to him but he sat silently in his window-seat.  His once chubby face became thin and he grew as frail as my granddad.  One bright May morning Johnny was not at his window and I never saw him again.

"He's gone to a place where they'll care for him," my Mam told me when I asked.  His Mam and Dad had gone too and for a long time their once bright house was empty and the cheerful windows shaded with ugly boards.

This morning the silence of my park is broken by the howl of a dog.  The sun has risen listlessly.  The heavy sky releases its burden and snowflakes fall lightly to the frozen ground.  

Still remembering my childhood friends, I walk towards the park gates, pulling my collar up against the insistent flurry of snow, wishing I could welcome it as others do.

– The End –