Chapter 10
10
MAY 2018, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND
Kate stands on the driveway of number five The Finches, her arms folded, her back to the white door of the garage. She cranes her neck and shifts her weight from one foot to the other. She’s too angry to appreciate the neatness of their front garden. The polite foliage. The recycling bins hidden tidily away in the bespoke timber cubby. She looks at her watch.
He said he’d be home by seven.
It is ten past, and Kate is panicking that the meeting at Claresham Church of England Primary School will start without her. She needs to be there because she has agreed to be chair of the PTA from September, so it won’t look good if she is late for the summer fair planning meeting, which starts in five minutes. After the family fireworks night, the summer fair is the biggest fundraiser of the school calendar, where coconut shies and teddy-bear tombolas take over Claresham village green on the first (hopefully sunny) Saturday of every July. Tonight, Kate needs to watch outgoing chair Melissa Cox closely, to see how this meeting runs, because next summer’s fair, and all of the events, will be on her watch .
‘Argh,’ Kate rages to herself, quietly and with restraint, as she watches lights go on in the cul-de-sac’s prim houses.
Kate looks to the sky as she waits for George’s little red car, his train station runaround, to turn into The Finches from the left, and notices it’s lighter than it has been at this time lately, although the warm bounce of spring from earlier in the day has subsided and her arms feel chilly.
Kate wraps her cardigan around her spongey middle and lets out a sigh. She rushed the kids through teatime so she could leave George with as little of the bedtime responsibility as possible. And he’s late anyway.
I shouldn’t have bothered. He could have cleared up their tea.
A small red Aygo swerves into the road, heading towards their house.
Her harangued-looking husband gets out of the car, leaving the engine running, and raises his palms passively but doesn’t apologise.
‘You’re late, I’m cold!’ says Kate in anaemic anger.
‘Why didn’t you grab a jacket?’ George snaps.
‘I didn’t want to go back in, I’ve had to shout at the girls too many times tonight. George, they were so vile, I just don’t want to look at them right now.’
George rolls his eyes and then does a double take as he looks at Kate’s face. ‘Are you wearing lipstick?’
‘Yes. I sometimes do,’ Kate counters defensively.
Baby steps.
George’s small grey-blue eyes contain both mistrust and mockery.
‘Here,’ he says, unwrapping a stripy scarf in three shades of blue from his neck and stuffing it in Kate’s hands. A chivalrous gesture ruined by the execution.
‘Thanks,’ Kate says sarcastically, winding it around her neck, wondering when the last time he might have done that for her was.
Never mind.
She doesn’t dwell on it for too long before getting in the car.
‘Your dinner is in the oven, make sure Jack has finished his times tables.’
George nods. ‘Don’t sign me up for running “splat the…”’ Kate doesn’t hear the rest of the sentence amid the rise of the engine. She’s late and she heads off down the road, wiping her Heather Shimmer lipstick off her mouth, onto the back of her left hand, before changing gear with a sharp grunt.
‘Right, so we’ve got Mr Horsley’s Punch and Judy show at the north end of the green, bouncy castle on the east flank, and retro games to the south. I’m thinking coconut shy, pin the tail on the donkey, that kind of thing. That means refreshments can go along… here.’ PTA chair Melissa Cox marks an X on the A4 printout of a poorly reproduced map with a black Sharpie. ‘I’m thinking retro refreshments like fondant fancies, coconut macaroons, ginger beer, elderflower cordial…’
‘Ooh, the site manager’s wife makes a wonderful elderflower cordial,’ interjects headteacher Hilary Smith.
‘Does it have to be Punch and Judy?’ asks Venetia Appleyard, mum of Millie, the most precocious girl in Year 6.
Melissa Cox’s bright pink cheeks flush in the warmth of the overheated staffroom. ‘Sorry, Venetia, you’ve lost me.’
‘Well, Punch and Judy will encourage the children to laugh at a man whose only interaction with his wife and child is based on violence. It’s misogynistic.’
Kate, still smarting from Chloe and Izzy’s attitudes, and George’s careless comment about her lipstick, starts paying attention. She even stops the click click clicking of her pen, which she would have felt terrible about had she known how much it was annoying the school business manager sitting to her right.
‘Is Punch and Judy not a thing these days?’ asks Melissa, turning even pinker. In fact, Melissa’s yellow hair and pink cheeks make her look like the colour of a retro sweet herself.
Kate widens her kind eyes. It was news to her, but this meeting has just got a bit controversial.
‘It’s so politically incorrect.’ Venetia sighs with vehemence. ‘It doesn’t really sit with the school’s ethos… And it’s saying domestic violence is OK.’
Melissa looks politely inconvenienced. ‘Well, I’m not sure how to tell Mr Horsley that he needs to change the entire content of his much-loved puppet show.’ She grimaces – he is the deputy head’s husband, after all.
‘I’m afraid Venetia does have a point,’ says Hilary.
‘I don’t mind talking to him,’ says Kate, signing herself up for something she will only regret. She can hear George’s voice in her head, moaning about her moaning about the tricky conversation she’s dreading. ‘He and I worked on the egg-shell painting stall together at the Easter disco and we had a nice chat. I’m sure I can think of a way to say it without insulting his work.’ Kate gives a hopeful smile. Always trying. Always people-pleasing. Always taking on the shitty jobs everyone else avoids.
‘Brilliant,’ says Venetia. ‘Surely he must have some animal puppets or something, the little ones will like that.’
Hilary Smith knows Mr and Mrs Horsley best, and she knows it won’t go down well, but is relieved that Kate volunteered to take on this one.
Kate clicks her pen and writes ‘speak to Mr Horsley’ on her list of actions and draws some stars on the line next to it. ‘So back to the refreshments table. Last year, do you remember, we had those little lucky dip bags of sweets…?’
Melissa continues and Kate’s mind trails off again.
She wonders how she can build up to red lipstick when she doesn’t dare to wear Heather Shimmer. She wonders how her daughters are so much more sassy and spirited than she was at their age – or still is really. Chloe already knows she wants to be a vet; she has gone off to Brownie camps and coped perfectly well with being away from home thankyouverymuch. Kate had never been further than France when she did the most daring thing she ever did the summer she graduated, going to a Third-World country to volunteer in an orphanage, and even then it felt as if she had scaled Everest.
I wouldn’t have dreamed of talking to my mother like that when I was eleven.
Kate’s neck gets hot and she loosens the shackles of George’s stripy blue scarf from around her neck and slides it out from under her ponytail and onto her lap. She looks down. A long, blonde hair sparkles under the stark strip lighting of the staffroom, too long and too blonde to belong to either Chloe or Izzy. Kate pulls at the hair, unravelling it as it goads her. A misogynistic and belittling shrill, that no one else can hear, rings inside Kate’s hot ears as she instinctively puts a hand to her own brown ponytail.