Monkey Bars

There are boys, running and jumping and swearing. They're throwing words about in a back-and-forth sort of way, big words that they’ve heard from their dads, their brothers, their sisters and their aunts: words that they don’t really understand, but like the taste of all the same. These words - bad words, dirty words - taste like an electric shock. They’re little zing-zings of pain that zap the boys’ tongues and tingle across the skin that covers their arms and their necks, feeling very much like something that isn’t supposed to be there. Because these boys, they aren't supposed to be swearing - they've been told this, time and again, and again, and again. But these words, they come with a flash and a flicker of white-rush danger: danger, danger, swinging from the monkey bars, and Michael is a bastard, and Daniel is a dickhead, and Benny is a worthless son of a goddamned-bitch. These swear words, they’re like lemon Starbursts on a tongue with a paper cut: sharp, stingy, so very sweet.

Sam doesn't really like lemon Starbursts, and he knows that if he lets a single swear word slip past his teeth, his Mum will hear it - somehow - and he’ll spend the rest of the day in his bedroom, with only himself and imaginary monkey bars to hang from, alone, inside of his head. And so, instead of running and jumping and swearing, he lies quietly on the hot, wet concrete of the Brent Street playground. It’s been a week of rain: the damp is creeping up through his clothes, and it’s summer, and the two-thirty-degree sunshine is poking little white-gold fingernails into his cheeks. He closes his eyes so that the nails can’t get at them.

Across the way, beyond the monkey bars and the yellow tunnel and the see-saw, the Mum-Club has gathered. There they sit, with their track-pants and their hair and their twenty-first-century bodies, and Sam doesn’t think that they look like Mums, doesn’t know if they can really call themselves Mums. He isn’t certain, but Sam suspects that ‘Mum’ is a title; he suspects it must be earned. It will be one-hundred years and a day before these people can really be Mums, and not just ladies wheeling little bundles of bone and milk-skin that would splatter like pancake mix onto the concrete if you tried to swing them from the monkey bars around the footpath.

If he's to be honest, Sam doesn't enjoy the monkey bars, in the same way that he could take or leave a lemon Starburst. He enjoys the idea of them, of course: the idea of moving, of flying from one place to the next, his feet dangling high above earth. But Sam's arms are short: his fingers aren't long enough to wrap around the metal, and he's tired of hitting the ground. He hates the scrapes, the red flags on his knees and on his palms, and his Mum hates the holes in his clothes.

“D’you want a banana?”

Sam opens his eyes - he had forgotten that they were closed. The sunshine stabs, just like he was afraid it would, and he lifts his hands, trying to build a wall out of his own fingers and skin.

“Why?”

The girl who's standing over him - the girl who’s blocking out the monkey bars and the Mum-Club but not the sun - shrugs her skinny shoulders and replies, “I've got two.”

“I don’t like bananas,” Sam tells her. He does like bananas - quite a bit, actually - but he knows that taking food from strangers is something that only stupid people do. If the girl has picked up on his blatant lie, however, she doesn’t let on. Instead, she shrugs again and says, “That’s okay, I don’t either.”

Sam frowns, at that. “Then why do you have two?”

“Nan says I need to eat more fruit,” the girl replies, and Sam's frowning turns into nodding: his Mum always says that he needs to eat more greens.

“What’s your name?” the girl asks.

Sam doesn’t answer straight away: is he supposed to give his name to strangers? He thinks that his Mum would say no, but Sam is almost certain that, if he tells her his name, the girl with the bananas will tell him her name in return. And if two strangers tell each other their names, then it evens the whole situation out, doesn’t it?

“I’m Sam,” says Sam.

“I’m Alex,” says the girl - Alex - and Sam's chest feels warm, because he was right: they’re even, and maybe, in a little while, he’ll tell her that he’s changed his mind and take one of the bananas that he can see tucked under her arm now that his eyes have tuned themselves into the too-bright light. If he's being honest, Sam is glad that he opened his eyes. He’s glad that the sun is no longer blinding him, because not only have the bananas popped themselves into focus, but so has their holder. Alex has planted herself near where his head has made a pillow out of the concrete. She’s upside-down, and this makes her face seem a little too big for her neck. But her face has freckles - across her nose, dancing around above her eyebrows - and she has short, scruffy hair, even shorter than Sam's own. What’s more, rather than looking past him, she’s looking at him, and so, Sam decides that his view of Alex the Banana Keeper is fine the way that it is.

“I like your hair,” he tells her. Alex's mouth gives a little flip, as though it wants to smile but isn’t completely sure that it should, and the arm that isn’t holding the bananas lifts a hand to brush at the hair around her ears. “Thanks,” she mutters. “Nan says it makes me look like a boy.”

Sam shakes his head. “I like it,” he says again. This time, Alex's mouth does smile.

“I like yours, too,” she offers, and the warmth in Sam's chest - the warmth that had slowly begun to build ever since Sara gave him her name - blooms into a red-and-gold flower with a head that’s shaped like a dragon. He wants to say thank you, he wants to smile at her. He’s just about to do one or the other, when Alex's freckled face suddenly becomes thoughtful.

“I like your dress, as well," she adds. Again, she fiddles with the hair just below her right ear. “I don’t wear dresses very much, but yours is nice.” Sam gazes up at her, and Sara leans forward, ever so slightly. "Are you a girl?"

At this, the dragon recoils, just a little. "I'm a boy," says Sam.

“Why are you wearing it?” Alex asks, and Sam sighs.

“My Mum bought it for me.”

A look of understanding dawns in Alex's eyes at this, and she nods. “Can I sit down?” Sam nods as well, careful not to bump his head too much against his concrete pillow. With a huff, Alex plops herself down, legs folded, and Sam notices a hole gaping through the right knee of her jeans. It’s the sort of hole that would give his Mum a heart attack, and Sam can’t help but smirk. “What happened there?” He stretches out his arm, jabs his finger at the denim-gape. Alex follows his finger. “I think my cousin pushed me during soccer,” she replies. “He’s not very good, so he just pushes everyone. Why’d your Mum buy you a dress?”

Sam sighs once more; he’d been hoping that they could move on from that particular topic. He presses his chin into his neck, and studies the blue-and-white spotted material bunched around his chest. “She likes me to look… pretty.” The word feels horrible against his tongue, and maybe Alex notices, because she furrows her eyebrows, and the freckles on her nose clump together, like a group of little brown magnets. “But you’re a boy,” she points out, and Sam rolls his eyes.

“I know.”

Alex's furrowing doesn’t go away. “Do you have a willy?” she asks.

Sam shakes his head. “Not yet, but I’m going to get one when I’m older.”

“How?”

“I asked God for one."

This appears to satisfy Alex's curiosity. “Well, you’ve just gotta wait ‘till you’re older, then,” she reasons. “Once you’ve got one, your Mum will probably stop buying you dresses.” She glares down at the bananas under her arm. “I asked God to make Nan stop buying me bananas.”

Sam holds out his hand. “I’ll have one," he announces, and Alex is back to furrowing, again. “You said you don’t like bananas.”

Sam shrugs as best he can while remaining horizontal. “Changed my mind.”

Across the way, the Mum-Club has begun to migrate, sensing that it’s time for their afternoon soy lattes. Below the monkey bars, Daniel the Dickhead sits where he’s fallen, rubbing at his ankle, and Benny the Worthless Son of a Goddamned Bitch is howling at him, calling him a retard and an idiot and homo. Michael the Bastard rubs his palms on his shorts, and looks out over the playground: past the monkey bars, past the swings, past the little girl in a blue-and-white dress sharing a banana with a little boy who’s busy frowning at something only he can see, past the footpath, and out into the street beyond. He scratches at his cheek, and wonders how long it would take him, Dan, and Benny to walk to the nearest McDonald’s.