Chapter 4
4
Toddler group had been an unmitigated disaster. After dropping PC Plod off at the school amid a myriad of perfect Harry Potters and Wimpy Kids, Sarah drove the car back home and transferred Eva into her pushchair. At three, she was just about old enough to walk the mile journey there and back, but that meant going at such a lethargic pace that the local OAPs would be tutting behind her on the pavement trying to get her to speed up. Plus, given how much they had paid to get the car serviced already this month, she’d rather they never used it again.
The walk there was brisk and pleasant, and exactly what Sarah needed to clear her head a little, although sadly, her optimism didn’t last long.
Eva was on form in the worst possible way. Continuing on from the toilet roll mayhem of the morning, she decided to start the day by stealing everyone’s toys at toddler group and then screaming like a banshee with a throat infection at anyone who tried to get the items back off her. She snatched another child’s drink carton, and then proceeded to squeeze the juice all over the table and said child. During the forty seconds in which Sarah thought her daughter was actually behaving, Eva was using a permanent marker to add a little decoration to the newly painted walls.
All of this was made a thousand times worse by the fact that Justine Simmons was watching it all.
Sarah had first encountered Justine at her antenatal classes with George, and no matter how much she tried, she just couldn’t bring herself to like the woman. Justine was one of those women for whom everything arrived on a silver platter. Her hair was perfect, her figure was perfect, her skin was smoother than that of an antique porcelain doll, and her teeth could put any Hollywood A-lister to shame. You went camping in Snowdonia, she went trekking in the Himalayan foothills. You took the kids to the zoo, she took hers on a bespoke, environmentally sustainable safari, where incidentally, she helped rescue an orphan baby elephant from a mudslide. And if you managed to find a nice dress which you actually felt reasonably attractive in, then you could guarantee that Justine would wear the exact same one as you to the same party and look a thousand times better than you did. It had happened twice now.
Her husband, Hugh, like Drew, worked up in London, although he worked in finance and was easily able to maintain their family lifestyle of exotic holidays, mani-pedis, and designer outfits. As such, it had come as a huge shock to Sarah when Justine enrolled her eldest, Philomena, in the same local primary as George.
‘Honestly, with the way some of these private schools are growing, there’s hardly any difference in class sizes. Then you add in the commute, and we’d obviously need help with the long school holidays. It just doesn’t seem worth it at this age. Of course, they don’t have the same range of peripatetic teachers in the state sector, but we can compensate for that.’
Sarah nodded mutely, wondering if peripatetic was a word she was supposed to know the meaning of.
‘This means I’ll have to see her every day,’ she had said to Drew that evening as she’d wept into her glass of wine. ‘Every day. Forever. What have I done to deserve this? School plays, parents’ evenings. Everything.’
‘It won’t be forever,’ Drew assured her. ‘Doesn’t primary school only last for seven years?’
What she would give to swap lives for just a day.
Less than fifteen seconds after Sarah had managed to yank the permanent marker out of Eva’s hand, Justine appeared at her side.
‘It’s so difficult when they’re like this, isn’t it?’ Her hair was clipped back in a perfectly coiffed manner and would have looked more in place on a film set than in an environment where it was at constant risk of attacks from anything from PVA glue to pine cones. ‘Demetrius has been going through a terrible phase, too, if I’m honest. Sometimes, I don’t know how I get through it.’
Sarah glanced across the room to where the two-year-old was sitting perfectly, making pasta necklaces, in exactly the same manner he had been doing for the last forty minutes. In fact, the only time Sarah had seen him move was when he lifted his hand, to ask in the politest way imaginable if he could ‘possibly have a small glass of water, please?’
Sarah grunted her response. ‘Hopefully, they’ll grow out of it soon,’ Sarah said. ‘I don’t ever remember George being like this.’
‘It’s the second child. They just need so much more. Are you sure she gets enough attention? It’s so easy to neglect one and focus your attention on the other. We all do it. Last night, I was so preoccupied with Philomena’s spellings that I actually cooked Demetrius white pasta. With gluten! Can you imagine?’
‘No,’ said Sarah flatly. ‘I couldn’t.’
‘Well.’ Justine flashed her luminous teeth. ‘I’m always here if you need to talk. You know what they say: a problem shared is a problem halved.’
‘That’s very kind,’ Sarah said through gritted teeth and a forced smile. ‘I’ll bear that in mind.’
By the time it was over, Sarah and Eva were equally exhausted. Toward the end, the little girl’s whines had risen an octave in pitch, and she could barely walk for rubbing her eyes and yawning. All Sarah had to do was make sure that Eva didn’t fall asleep in the pushchair on the way home. That way, Eva would nap in her cot and Sarah would get a solid two hours to get all her jobs done, including two loads of washing, writing the shopping list for the week, and replying to at least one email about the possibility of a book-translation job.
As she wheeled the buggy out of the hall, Sarah glanced up at the sky. The weather was perfect for the walk back. A little overcast, but at least the chill woke them both up a little. Sarah refused to be one of those mums who wore workout gear everywhere she went, mainly due to the hypocrisy. She would be hard pushed to count one aqua aerobics session and two yoga classes over the past five years as a regular fitness regime. There were now two levels of hips where there used to be only one, and bulges in places she was sure shouldn’t bulge.
With George, she had felt so great being pregnant, and even with Eva, she had had her good days. But with this bump, she felt terrible. Her growing belly, her veiny legs, and the grey hairs that infiltrated the once uniformly brown ones. Every day, there would be another one. She was in her late twenties for crying out loud; what kind of woman in their twenties had grey pubes?
Sarah was busy thinking about stray grey hairs and whether she should just take the plunge and dye them all when Eva’s pushchair bumped awkwardly.
‘Please don’t do that, Eva,’ Sarah said, assuming her daughter was kicking the footrest the way she normally did. She pushed on the handlebars to resume their journey. Nothing moved.
‘Not again,’ she groaned and moved around to the front to have a proper look. The front left wheel was now pointing a full seventy degrees in another direction to all of the rest of them. Sarah gave it a quick kick before trying to push again. The back wheels lifted up, while the front ones stayed fixed to the ground. Eva flew forward.
‘Shit!’ Sarah lunged forward and caught her daughter before she tipped out of the top and hit the gravel. She kicked the wheel again, harder. Still, the buggy refused to move.
‘Oh, for crying out loud. You have to be kidding me.’ She tried again and again, but each time, the same thing happened. The dodgy wheel was now acting as the strongest brake in the entire history of pushchairs.
She was still busy hammering the wheel with the heel of her hand when a brand new SUV drew up behind them and the driver beeped the horn.
‘See you at pick-up time,’ Justine called through her open window before doing her best impression of the Royal wave.
‘See you at pick-up time,’ Sarah said with her most perfect smile. As the SUV drove away, her smile dropped and was replaced by two middle fingers in the air.
In the end, Sarah managed to lift the pushchair, with Eva inside, over to the path, where she got down on her knees to try and see a way to fix it from down there. Perfect , she thought to herself. This is exactly how I thought I’d spend my life: twenty-two weeks pregnant and crawling on the ground trying to fix a cheap bloody pushchair wheel. Then, just to add insult to injury, it started to rain.
In the end, the only option she had was to take Eva out and force her to walk while she carried the broken pushchair beneath her arm. For most of the way, Eva screamed, mostly from tiredness, but occasionally because of Sarah swinging around without thinking and accidentally clobbering her in the head.
‘I don’t want to walk. I want the car. I want the car!’ she screamed at what seemed like a thousand decibels.
‘We don’t have the car, sweetie,’ Sarah repeated for the umpteenth time.
‘I want the car.’
‘So do I, my love. So do I.’
Nearly an hour later, and with a soaking-wet toddler so tired she was practically sleepwalking, Sarah finally opened her front door.
The extra time it had taken with Eva walking resulted in further disasters for the rest of the day. Eva, understandably, collapsed on the sofa the moment they got in the house, meaning – due to the close proximity of the washing machine and Eva’s supersonic bat hearing – Sarah still couldn’t put the dirty washing on. The shopping, which Sarah had planned on doing, didn’t happen due to Eva’s extended nap, meaning that when Eva did eventually wake up, there was no food in the house. After rummaging through the back of every cupboard, Sarah finally managed to find a packet of breadsticks – she deliberately avoided looking at the sell-by date – and a tin of sweetcorn, which Eva scattered everywhere from the kitchen to the downstairs toilet. By that point, it was time to pick up George. Sarah rang Drew before she left.
‘Hey, what’s up?’ he said the moment he answered.
‘A lot. I don’t suppose you could do a quick shop on the way home, could you? I haven’t managed to get it done, and I honestly don’t think I could face it with the pair of them.’
‘What do you need?’
‘Everything. Bread, cereal, milk… I’ll send you a list. And do we have a screwdriver?’
‘You want me to pick up a screwdriver?’
‘Only if we don’t already have one.’
‘We’ve probably got one in the garage somewhere. What do you need it for?’
‘The pushchair. The front wheel’s gone again.’
A sigh rattled down the line. ‘I told you we should have got a new one.’
‘Really? With what money?’ Sarah could feel her tone sharpening. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath in. ‘I’ll send you a text, okay? If you can just pick up whatever you can carry. I’ll take the car tomorrow and do a big shop. Or I can go tonight, and you put the kids to bed if that’s easier?’
‘Whatever you think’s best. Don’t worry, I’ll get enough stuff to get us through tonight. Just send me the list. Oh, there might a screwdriver under the sink. Although I can have a look at the pushchair when I get home if you want.’
A slight pause lingered down the line during which Sarah tried to work out if there was a polite way of saying that their twenty-two-week-old unborn foetus was probably more naturally inclined at DIY than her husband. Fortunately, he got the message in the silence.
‘Maybe it’s just best if I leave it to you,’ he said.
‘I’ll see you later.’