Every year just before summer break, the school would send us all on the same trip. Each year group was separate, of course, but we all went to one of those soft play centres. Ours was called GoAdventure and no amount of protesting got us out of it for the whole five years we were stuck in that school.
The teachers seemed utterly oblivious to the dangers we faced whenever they dragged us all in there. One year my class tried to stage a sit down protest only to be called one-by-one into the plastic tubes, behind the neon net walls, by some unseen compelling force that urged us to run and run and never look behind us just run until they say you can leave.
We stopped trying to resist after that and tried to hold our own for the next three years.
Sometimes kids went missing in the ball-pits only to appear at the back of the class lines, ready to go home with their pockets full of baby teeth that weren't entirely theirs.
Sometimes the food would writhe about on our plastic trays, trying to crawl away.
Every year someone would cut themselves on the same rope swing and swear that it glowed after.
I hear they renovated it last year, modernised every inch of it. Maybe they finally emptied the ball-pit, removing those matted clumps of hair and fingertips that were always lodged deep into the plastic balls. They might have gotten rid of the lingering scent of vomit from those claustrophobic tubes that ran around the ceiling.
Management's still the same though and the staff are still the same as they've always been for the past twenty five years so who can say without going in again, this time without all the protections afforded to children and the knowledge that your friends will come after you if you scream because they've seen what lurks behind the slides.
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