Elder Park Is Melting In The Dark

Elder Park is Melting in the Dark

Pradip Jadeja killed his children in Elder Park.

For some fuck-knows-why reason he took them, hand in hand, all the way down to the playground at the Clyde Tunnel end of the park and he killed them there, among the swings.

Not with a gentle pillow, not with the drifting bliss of narcotics, not with a mad twist of his steering wheel into the eternal embrace of a Douglas Fir.

But, instead, with a knife.

Bloody, visceral, and public, he killed them where everybody could see, even although none of them wanted to, men, women and children.

No, Pradip Jadeja killed his children in Elder Park.

Both of them.

And when the police went back to his tenement flat overlooking the park, they found he’d killed his wife, too.

Of course, naturally.

With the same ten-inch blade he used to kill his children. And he didn’t bother to wipe it, witnesses said.

No, he led his two children through Elder Park to the chutes and roundabouts where they died, carrying a huge fucking bloody blade in his hand.

How do I know? How does anybody know? Because the witnesses said so.

The witnesses who watched a man grasping a bloody knife and leading children by the hand.

The witnesses who noticed enough to remark – later - on what they saw, but who never thought to intervene.

Who failed to prevent the murder of two children under the age of seven, butchered beneath a darkening evening sky in Glasgow G51 by their loving father.

But, listen…some of that story isn’t true. How much? Some…plenty…most…I don’t know. I don’t know, because I wasn’t there and because “witnesses” are the worst kind of evidence upon which you could ever choose to base any conclusions. Witnesses lie, they forget, they invent, they rationalise, they concur. They will tell you what they thought they saw, what they wanted to see, and what they think you want them to tell you they saw.

If ever you hear the words “I saw it with my own eyes” tumble from the lips of a member of the general public, assume whatever they are saying is garbage. If you do make that assumption, you’ll be right more than half the time – which immediately makes you more reliable than most “witnesses”.

So, all I know about Pradip Jadeja and the death of his children in Elder Park, I read in the papers or I heard at the other end of a phone. And then again, it was because of the phone calls that I read the papers. The papers...they take what witnesses say and add their own gloss, their own slant, their own...lies.

And it didn’t - couldn’t – concern me anyway, because I was four hundred miles away. I wasn’t in Glasgow at all. Instead, I was ambling across Blackfriars Bridge, trying to figure out how that new station worked, the one that was on both sides of the Thames, when Tommy Mac called.

“’How ye doin’, Stevie?”

“I’m good, jist admiring some architecture here…well, actually, it’s a train station on a bridge across the river, so mibbe it’s more a question of engineering than architecture. Anyhow, shouldn’t you be educating Scotland’s future about now?”

“That’s a job for lesser men and women. This time of day, people like me are doing management. Put some quotation marks round that, if you like.”

“Which includes this phone call to me?”

“It seems to. Thought I’d give you a bell and see if you’ve had enough of London yet.”

“Samuel Johnson said…”

“…I know what he said – what does Stevie McCabe say?”

“Well, I’m still here. That’s the non-breakin’ news today. Am I missing much while I’m away?”

“Uh…everybody’s, you know…the same…the weather’s amazin’, though. The weather, you believe it? This heat, never known anything like it. Everybody was like lobsters for a few days, now they’re like walnuts. Canny get a breath, even at night. Hotter than Casablanca, they said on the news…talkin’ about the news, did ye see that thing there, those murders? Terrible thing over your old patch last night. This taxi driver killed his kids, right there in Elder Park. Two or three of ‘em, stabbed them on the swings, a sword or somethin’.”

“Jesus. Bastard. Gettin’ back at his wife for some reason, usually, that type of thing. If I can’t have them, nobody will. They divorced, him and the mother? A certain kinna guy just…”

“Dunno. I jist heard it on the TV, and people are talkin’, y’know? Like you’d expect. How could anybody do that, and so on. Shockin’ thing – is it not on the national news?”

“Might be, haveny seen it...but I must admit, news isn’t the first thing on my mind these days.”

“Whit? Not even the Daily Banner?”

“Ouch, Tommy, that hurt, but I guess I asked for it. Or did I? Anyway, sure, I’m still spending the Daily Banner’s blood money. It keeps me from havin’ to do anything as tedious as actually work. For now, anyway.”

“So… you thinkin’ seriously that you might actually stay in London – you gettin’ on okay with your mate?”

“Ronnie is bein’ very good to me, but I’m cramping his style. It’s fine the now, but…dunno. He could get me a job, probably, if I wanted it, workin’ for the bank he’s at. Dunno if I want that, or not. An actual job...hmm. Depends on a lot of things.”

“Doesn’t everything? You talked to Bernie?”

“Talked? Eh…”

“Simple enough question.”

“You’d think. Yeah, I phoned her, twice, so we talked.”

“How is she? About you, I mean.”

“She’s the way you think Bernie’d be. She’s angry…no, that’s not right…more like she was angry, now she’s disappointed. Like when somebody lets you down, and you knew it was comn’, but it happened anyway. Disappointed like that. But she’s…fair. I think that’s the word. She’s not slow to stick the knife in, you give her the chance, but what can I say? She’s right, that’s fair.”

“And ye’re not down there makin’ matters worse, with that woman from your TV show?”

“Worse? Christ, Tommy, Sarah is just a friend.”

“Whoa there, where did that word come from, ‘friend’? Sounded just wrong in that sentence, Stevie, like you’d said ‘anvil’, or ‘stickleback’. Or worse.”

“Well, Tommy, it’s a weird fuckin’ day in old London town when it’s you givin’ me relationship advice. I think you need to get back to your management, in quotation marks, or telling 5C about covalent pair bonds.”

“Fair enough – just let me know what address to send your wedding invitation to.”

And he was gone before I could ask “what wedding”? I knew anyway, it would be Tommy and Veronica, who else? And I guessed that they would be inviting Bernie as well as me.

Still, he had planted a seed in my mind, so I made my rounds of the news sources of the world wide web and after an hour I was better informed than Tommy about the bloody murders in Elder Park. Elder Park, Govan’s dear green space, every inch of its northern perimeter staring down a huge brick-and-steel industrial mass of what had once been the shipyards that built the world’s fleets but was now…what? I don’t know. Nothing, probably. Reading the words on the screen stirred some memories, prompted some thoughts, provoked some doubts…

And so, Pradip Jadeja and his tragic family crept their way into my life, not as experience, but as drama, a tale told by another, who was himself playing the tribal historian and adding his own layers to the “truth”. Still and all, lies and their bastard offspring are…were…my stock-in-trade

But me, I’m in London. What do I care?