As I walk in I become very aware that I’m wearing my filthy work clothes — my mud-stained, (previously waterproof) high-vis jacket and my dirty work boots. The cafe is filled with well dressed people, sat alone at small tables, staring into laptop screens. Even though no-one seems to care or even really notice that I am here, I feel out of place. I tread carefully through the forest of freelancers and escape through the door in the far corner of the room to the gents’. The smell of piss soaked bricks and the strong chemicals used to mask them hits hard and instantly takes me back to the boys’ toilets at that school on the green, in Ormesby St. Margaret ~ 1987.
When I was at school here there were boys’ toilets outside, behind a wall at the edge of the playground. No urinals, no roof, just a brick wall to piss on and a gutter to guide it all into the drain. I remember competitions with the other boys to see whose stream could reach the highest up the wall. The courses of bricks and the climbing rows of grout markers made a perfect piss’o’meter, creating a challenge none of us could resist. Thankfully, none of us ever made it over the wall, no matter how hard we tried. We didn’t drink as much in the 80s so we never had a full tank.
There was always a feeling of unease, a tinge of sadness, mild fear and loneliness here for me at this school. My mum had applied for a job here once and I remember being questioned by her as to whether I’d ‘said something’ to the teachers when she found out she didn’t get it. My boastful pride at the idea of my mum working at the school had apparently backfired and I ended up shouldering the blame for her unsuccessful application. I remember the noisy dinner hall and the off-putting stench of a hundred lunchboxes all open at the same time. I remember the kid whose mum packed his lunchbox so full that he could never finish eating in time to run around the playground with the rest of us before the bell called us back to the classrooms. I remember my mum asking ‘how would you feel if your dad and I split up’ and the response I gave that tried to shield her from feeling any of that awful guilt ‘I don’t know… It’s up to you I guess’…
I remember running my hands along the rough red bricks of the walls in the playground so that my skin felt unusually soft to the touch when I could no longer bear the sensation. I remember feeling tired, and longing for the bell to ring to mark the end of the school day. All the kids piling out with their shirts half untucked and their shoelaces half-tied. All eyes searching for a familiar shape of mum.
After a while in Ormesby it wasn’t my mum who picked me up, it was someone else’s. My mum had moved away and taken with her my sense of home. I still lived in the same house with my dad and my younger sister, but now we had a new mum who had arrived with a new sister and a new brother for us, new rules and routines for the house and a new focus for my dad’s attention. Everything had changed. The house had more people in it but I’d never felt more alone. Never again was I allowed to stay up late watching grown-up films with my dad, lying on the sofa with him to inevitably fall asleep in his arms and magically wake up in my bed upstairs in the morning. I didn’t get to feel special anymore. I was just ‘one of the kids’ and the kids had to go to bed early.
There was a grey and red bobble hat. It used to keep me warm on the cold days before my mum had left and before they had all arrived. One day, the hat turned into an argument between me and the new brother. He said it was his. I knew it was mine. The new mum ended the argument and declared the hat was his and always had been, and that, was the end of that. In that moment a knot twisted up so tightly inside of me that it’s still tied today.
The sound of a crappy hand dryer brought me back to the gents’ and I was reminded that this place used to be a pub and that these toilets would have been used by drunk men who, from the smell of it, had wondered how far up these walls their piss could reach. A few years ago this place was turned into a cafe and now instead of being filled with tables of men in grubby work clothes and dirty work boots drinking beer together, it’s filled with freelancers, sat mostly alone and dressed in clean clothes and nice shoes, staring not into pints, but into screens. A few more years before that my beautiful old school on the green got turned into houses and they built a bunch of new ones where the playground used to be. While I waited for my overpriced takeaway coffee I wondered if they had repurposed any of those old bricks from the playground to build the new houses? And if they did, I wondered if the walls of those houses remember the games we used to play against them.
I wonder if my mum is waiting there for me now?
Maybe she’s brought my hat…