Time's Long Ruin Read Online Free Page B

he slapped his knees with his hands. He raised his finger to the timetable and said, ‘Come on!’
    We went out and closed one gate each. Just as the city express thundered through, Doctor Gunn came out of his clinic and waved at me. ‘Still on for Thursday?’ he called, and I waved. He did some stretching against the wall, lifted his face to the sun and took a deep breath. Then he turned and went inside.
    As Con started opening his gate I said, ‘Want to play?’
    He winked. ‘You’ll never catch me up.’
    I ran across the road and into the playground that joined Croydon station. If I was to say there was a place where I did most of my growing up, this was it. And I measured my growth against the height of two tall, shabby-looking palm trees that shot up like a pair of flagpoles in the middle of the playground.
    I would sit on a swing and make the biggest arc I could. If I straightened my body and looked out past the tips of my toes they’d reach up the side of the trees. It was only when I was nine that I could swing high enough for my toes to pass the top of the palms. Now I’m fifty-four, and when I try, as I often do, I can only get my feet quarter of the way up. And I don’t think those palms have grown all that much.
    I went and sat in my melaleuca tree. This was my tree. It was hidden from the rest of the playground by other trees. When I managed to climb up and sit in its bottom fork I could see across the station platform and all the way along the tracks to Brompton station in one direction and West Croydon in the other. The minute I saw a train or puff of smoke I would take my cub whistle on its lanyard from around my neck and blow loudly. Con would then come out and start closing the gates. This would mean I’d won. If Con came out and started closing the gates before I’d blown the whistle, he’d won. If he came out first I’d call out, ‘Too early,’ and he’d reply, ‘Come and check the timetable,’ and I’d say, ‘Not my fault, it’s late,’ and he’d say, ‘Doesn’t matter, my point.’
    Then he’d go inside his coffin-sized hut and put a mark for the victor on a small blackboard beside the timetable. At the end of every session he’d tally the point and change the total on the bottom.
    And this is where I sat, for years, in my tree, blowing my whistle like some kind of spastic. Until some kid in the playground heard me and came to look. ‘What yer doin’?’
    â€˜Lookin’ out for trains.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜I’m helping Con.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Just am.’
    The only time I stopped helping Con was when I was seven and had my foot operated on. They put me to sleep and cut some tendons and sewed something and reattached something else. Then they put me in a cast up to my bum. For the whole six weeks of my summer holiday I rested in bed, or hobbled around the house, or went and sat out back under the Rileys’ almond trees. Janice would come over and read to me, or show me her movie star cards, and Anna and Gavin would recreate the battle of Stalingrad in Lego on my bedroom floor. All I can remember is sitting in my hot room trying to scratch my leg with a knitting needle, looking at my plaster-cast foot, pointing straight ahead instead of at an angle. And wondering, will it stay that way?
    But it didn’t. Six weeks later I was back at school for another year, dragging my foot around like Quasimodo. Mum and Dad were livid. They wanted to sue the surgeon, but apparently they’d signed something that meant they couldn’t. So there I was, my holidays wasted, walking to school with Janice and the little ones, as everyone from Room 7 came up and looked at my foot and said, ‘What happened?’
    â€˜It didn’t work.’
    â€˜Why?’
    â€˜Something didn’t take.’
    â€˜They gonna try again?’
    Then Mama