Work Text:
Sometimes how it goes is this:
When Jamie was really little, his mummy used to work the swing shift.
In the mornings, she had a part-time job, which he thought had something to do with cleaning although he couldn't remember for sure. After that, she would pick him up from daycare, and they'd stop home for a quick meal. Then she'd take him, his little backpack, and his kid-sized football down the street to the old woman who watched him when mummy was at work. After making him promise not to cause trouble, his mum would kiss his cheeks and wrap him in a hug so tight for so long that Jamie would grow fidgety, wriggling around in her grasp until with one final kiss she let him go.
Watching her leave, he'd instantly regret the wriggling. He'd swear to himself that next time he'd do better, and his mummy would hug him forever and never have to go to work.
Then she would leave and he'd get caught up playing footie and he'd forget all the promises he ever made his mum.
At least then he'd had the excuse of not being any older than four.
Jamie would play long into the dusk, kicking the ball repeatedly under a sign he couldn't read but that he'd been told meant that he wasn't supposed to have any fun. Once it got dark, he'd retreat inside, where his stomach would growl but he wouldn't ask for a snack because it's rude to ask for something that someone hasn't offered you, especially when they can't afford to share.
So he'd sit next to the old woman, chewing on his tongue because he also wasn't supposed to talk – "Baby, please give Moira a break for Mummy? She's doing us a favour." – and while Moira watched her shows, which were all a lot of other people talking, Jamie would daydream about where his mummy worked.
The swing shift had nothing to do with the playground – Mummy had promised – but in his imagination, it was right next to the park. In his imagination, Mummy had a chair that looked like one from their kitchen, and the chair faced the swing set and the slide Jamie wasn't allowed to go down backwards. She wasn't technically in the park, because his mummy wouldn't lie to him, but in his head, she was right along the edge by the trees. There, she'd sit in her chair, and people who looked like the talking people on TV would come up to her and order food – juice boxes and snacks, he assumed – and his mum would whip them out of her purse with the same little flourish she used when she made Jamie's toys magically reappear from behind her back.
It made him happy to think about mummy giving juice and snacks away. It made him less happy when she actually got home, when she was tired and her smile broke. When she wiped her eyes against her uniform, smearing makeup like wet soot across the floor.
"I'm fine, baby. I'm just tired."
"It's alright, love, it was only a bit of a cry. Mummy must have stubbed her toe, is all. Clumsy me."
Clutching tightly to the picture in his head of his mum smiling, Jamie would eventually fall asleep, curled up next to Moira on her smelly settee that stunk of ash and perfume and nothing like home.
Really late, once all the news people finally shut up, he'd wake up to his mummy whispering at the front door. Half-asleep with dreams clouding his eyes, he'd stumble across the floor and into her legs, burying his face against her thigh with desperate eagerness. She'd take his shoes and his bag and his ball from Moira, and with one big heft, she'd add Jamie to her armful of burdens. With his slight but growing form balanced against her hip, his socked feet swaying in the wind, his mum would start them down the short, dark road to their house.
Unless it was payday. Payday was always special, but first it was awful.
On payday, he'd spring awake the second he heard his mum giggling at the door. With two bags of groceries at her feet, she'd pass over a red and grey carton of cigarettes – her payment to Moira for taking Jamie off her hands.
The old woman would rip open the carton and slide her one of the packs right back.
"Jam? You good, baby? We'll be right outside. Moira and I are just going to chat for a few minutes."
A few minutes, but to him it seemed to last a few days or weeks or even centuries, maybe. Restless after his nap, Jamie would lie on the settee, poking his fingers through the holes of the crochet blanket. Sometimes he'd gnaw on his football, still covered in dirt and grit from the road, dragging his teeth across the surface until it caught against the seams. Mummy didn't like it when he did that, but to catch him doing it she'd have to come inside and find him. He wasn't allowed outside when they were smoking, so he'd wait, antsy and bored, while his mum and Moira caught up, the occasional peal of hysterical laughter erupting from the other side of the door.
Sometimes Jamie fell back asleep, and his mum would have to wake him with a gentle shake of the shoulders to tell him it was time to go.
This was the special part.
First, Jamie would put on his backpack. Then, his mum would grab his shoes, too resigned to her son's insistence that his feet were the strongest feet in the world – or, in retrospect, too exhausted at the prospect of trying to show Jamie how to tie his shoes twice in one day.
They would each take a grocery bag. Her, the heavy stuff; mostly cans and eggs and milk, but sometimes sliced meats, cold from Moira's fridge if the chats ran long. For Jamie, his bag was light; a few boxes and bread and the bag of crisps mummy swore she couldn't live without. Nothing breakable. Nothing fragile arms could make more fragile.
Together, they'd walk home. This was the part Jamie loved.
Cold nights; warm nights; foggy nights. Empty nights; nights with cheering from the houses they passed. Nights with noises, figures in the dark that'd stop talking when they saw him and mummy walk by.
Sometimes, the figures were scary. He didn't like the way his mum would fall into step behind him, the hand holding his shoes wrapped around his shoulders and her low whisper to drop his stuff and run ahead if she told him to.
But he was roughly, maybe, four years old, still a few years away from understanding the sort of danger his mum feared, only understanding that when they got home, they had to call Moira; and if mummy wasn't with him, he had to knock on their neighbour's door and ask them to call Moira.
None of that mattered when he was four. When he was four, what mattered was this: for a few minutes, him and his mum would walk home together in a world made of mostly dark. With his precious responsibility clutched to his chest – a paper bag at risk from childishly careless arms – he would dance circles around his mummy, filling the air with his own one-sided chat about everything he hadn't had the chance to tell her before, in the short shuffle between daycare, home, and Moira's. Thinking himself very clever, he'd insist on circling every lamppost they passed, just to stretch out the night a little longer.
For that five minute walk that took ten minutes, he had his mummy all to himself.
He was four years old, give or take.
He'd not had any reason to think of it from her point of view. To wonder if maybe, having gone from one job to another with only a small break between, she might be tired. He didn't think much of the scary voices, not once they were out of earshot. He didn't even wonder at the groceries, or that she'd gone directly from work to the store. Hours on her feet, and then she'd gone and done the shopping. That the only store still open at that hour was the corner shop.
Jamie is twenty-five now.
He's standing in a convenience store at 4am and wondering how, after all of that, his mother could bring herself to love him.
Shopping alone at night when no one else is up is a lonely business.
Jamie eyes his choices. Juice boxes and snacks.
The refrigerated case in front of him has juice, but Jamie's not allowed it, so he grabs a bottled water instead.
He was already at the park, waiting along the edge by the benches, when Roy texted him that he had to cancel their morning training. Something to do with his niece and his sister, who's either in hospital or works at the hospital, Jamie doesn't know. He doesn't know what's too personal. He doesn't know where the line is.
He'll run his mouth through training – chattering and running circles around Roy up until the point he physically can't – but sometimes this truce they've struck with Roy coaching him feels like it's balanced on a knife's edge. Like they're both just waiting for Jamie to be the one to tip it over, even though he's not the one who starts it half the time. Even though Roy's the old, grouchy bastard full of mixed signals, the signs that Jamie couldn't read that he'd been told meant he wasn't supposed to have any fun. That's never stopped him before.
But given his situation with the team, with the coaches, with Zava–
Jamie needs to do better.
So he's walking past the snack displays, past his mum's favourite brand of crisps, and he's grabbing a couple energy bars that barely scrape over the line of his nutrition requirements, because he's still going to train this morning. Usually his coach brings his snacks. That, or he let's Jamie trail home after him for breakfast. Jamie never asked him to do that. It's rude to ask people to share more than they're willing to offer.
Looking down at his energy bars while the cashier rings him up, Jamie resigns himself to the fact that they're not going to taste as good as the ones Roy shares from his pockets. He didn't used to understand why his mum would hand over the entire carton of cigarettes instead of taking a pack out for herself first, but he gets it now.
The cashier doesn't offer him a bag, paper or otherwise. Jamie stuffs his bottled water and his energy bars into his hoodie pocket, and when he pushes his way out through the door, the chill from the glass isn't enough to prepare him for the brittle cold that greets him outside.
The chill isn't colder in London, the same way he knows the dark isn't darker. The opposite, if anything. But London bites worse than Manchester, probably because it isn't as cold. If it were, Jamie could simply layer up; less, and he wouldn't need layers at all. He's used to being frostbitten a certain way. Anything less, and it's hard to tell if he's being gnawed on at all.
He bounces on his feet, trying to get his blood pumping as he considers which direction to take off in first. Lampposts beckon in either direction; beyond that, trees teeth along the edge of the park.
The only scary voice shouting at him from the dark these days is the one Jamie willingly jogs out to meet each morning. That doesn't stop him from looking over his shoulder as he takes off in a light sprint.
The bottled water bounces in his pocket. His shoes drum out a steady thump-thump-thump on the pavement as he settles into a familiar beat. It's the same route he's run a hundred times, and with every stride, a dense certainty builds in him like a fog – that all he's done is found a way to tread the same path over the ghostly footprints of the old one.
He's four and he's waiting to go home. He's twenty-five and he's never learned how to settle the hunger in his chest. He has a foot stuck on either side, straddling the small kid with the backpack and the grown adult who can carry his own burdens.
He's staring at his life through the holes of a crochet blanket, unable to see the whole picture for what it is. Like there's some piece hiding in the middle, some piece of him that's been here the whole time, and if he could just find it, then the two halves would finally snap into one picture.
Until then, he's stuck in a life constantly looping back in a circle.
Until then, he'll run as man laps as he has to, until he's tired and aching and sore on his feet.
He wishes Roy would be there on the bench waiting for him after training. He wishes he'd slide him over a snack.
The way it goes is sometimes you're small and the world is endlessly big and impossible to grasp and you're Jamie Tartt, telling yourself bedtime stories about a mother while you wait for her to come home.
Sometimes you're big and the world is endlessly big and impossible to grasp and you're Jamie Tartt, and you thought something would be different by now, but instead somehow somehow you're still waiting, caught between then and now, two images layered over the other, because the past is the thing you're always carrying with you, and you can't help gnawing on the seams, waiting for the day to break open and all the light floods in.
Or maybe you’re Jamie Tartt, and it’s 4am, and your life hasn’t turned out exactly the way you wanted yet. There's nothing for it now except to jog into the ready darkness; keep his chattering in his chest and an eye towards the shadows at his back; and, when he passes them by, circle every lamppost.