Happy Birthday and All That (3 page)

Aunt Is reserved some special recipes for her vegetarian nieces. The things the girls most dreaded were Cheesy Rice (a blackened pyrex dish of rice poached in milk with strings of melted cheese and chunks of boiled celery, cut to resemble caterpillars), and on their last day, High Tea. Posy, of course, always pictured them sitting on wooden thrones, a version of the Mad Hatter's Tea Party. The reality was cold discs of very soft carrot, and hardly cooked shop-bought quiche. Aunt Is considered a whole one each appropriate.

‘Mushroom for you, Flora? Posy? Leek and broccoli? I remembered that those were your favourites last time.'

‘Mmm. Yes please,' they would say politely. She heaped cauliflower onto their plates.

‘Tuck in! You've a long journey.' And then there would be delicious cakes and meringues from the WI and strawberries and plums or gooseberry fool. Mummy collected them (Aunt Is was her aunt really) and drove them home over the Hog's Back.

Fifteen years later when Aunt Is moved to Cornwall, Flora decided to buy her house. Flora's inheritance had been prudently invested, and was sitting there, a big fatty lump, force-fed corn. She had the house valued and paid her Aunt the asking price.

‘It will all come back to the two of you eventually,' Aunt Is said.

It was lucky that Aunt Is took almost everything with her: nothing could have survived Flora's plans for the perfectly streamlined, beautiful home. The old mangle and some enamel basins planted with Californian poppies that were left sitting by the back door were sent to live at Posy's.

When James Parouselli gave his teacher the note, she expected it to be about ‘The Asda Incident' as she'd come to think of it. But it wasn't. Mrs Parouselli seemed unaware that her husband was deranged. ‘Dear Mrs Fleance' (Posy had written in her neatest writing),

‘You might think that I am this flaky kind of person, but I am not. You have the wrong idea of me. I am very organised really. Very together.

James's lack of plimsolls is really a sign of how organised I am. His feet, as you probably have noticed, are so narrow and so flat that I have to get special Start-rite plimsolls with velcro flaps, not just elastic, and even then he requires special insoles or they would still fall off. These have had to be ordered by Frenches and take two weeks to come. I did order them well in advance of the new term, only to find that his feet had grown one and a half sizes in a fortnight. He's gone from 11 ½ to 1. And they were professionally measured beforehand. Incidentally these plimsolls cost £12.40 with the insoles as extra, not £2.50 as the Ladybird ones do, and we have tried Clarks ones too. They never fit.

Anyway, what I wanted to say is please excuse James's lack of plimsolls. It isn't his fault, and it isn't really mine. I am a standard solid Mum, even though my children's feet are not of standard width. Not flaky or unreliable.

Yours sincerely,
Posy Parouselli.'

‘Flaky? Flaky?' Mrs Fleance thought of the cream crackers, and the cheese straws and the Cornish wafers that James Parouselli brought in for snack time. He did always seem to be the child with the most crumbs down his front, to come in after lunch with the biggest blobs of yoghurt on his sweatshirt.

Flaky. Was Mrs Parouselli flaky? She remembered the home-school visit she'd made to them just before James had started in Reception. She
had
noticed that the windows were in need of attention, the paint peeling, dry and damp wood exposed. Or perhaps she meant chocolate flakey. Mrs Parouselli could certainly once have looked like a Flake advert girl, that poppy field one, but not any more. She imagined all the Parousellis on the Common opposite their house, eating double 99s.

How should she respond?

‘There's a lot worse than being flaky,' she felt like saying. At least Mrs Parouselli wasn't one of those pushy critical parents, always on about the reading scheme, and trying to prise other people's children's baseline assessment scores out of her. She marked the letter to go in James's file, and gave Mrs Parouselli a special smile at hometime.

When Posy opened the door a dinosaur fell on her head, then a tunnel, and then a bucket of Popoids.

‘This cupboard!' said Posy, trying to sound jolly, not tearful, annoyed, murderous or despairing, even though there was nobody there to hear her scream.

‘This cupboard is driving me mad!' It merited its own item on the agenda at every St Peter's Pre-school and Toddler Group meeting. Each group blamed the group who'd been in the hall the day before them, and everybody could blame the Sea Scouts, who had lots of irregular meetings and had once been seen mucking about on the mini-trikes and hiding things in the sand tray.

It was Posy's turn to set up the hall for Toddlers. Isobel was asleep on the stage in her car seat, her mouth an isosceles triangle. Minute particles of dust from the dusky pink curtains, the memories of a thousand amateur dramatics, pantomimes, and ballet shows, and words of thanks from the vicar drifted down on to her as she slept. Tom was trundling up and down on a new green tractor with a trailer. He'd been the first one there and he was staying on it. The committee should have bought six of them. The Barbie bike and the ride-on Thomas had nothing on it.

Posy dragged out the water tray and the dough table, the ‘home-corner' stuff - a wooden washing machine, cupboards, sink, oven, microwave, plastic fruit and veg, pizza, birthday cake and ice creams, and some scratched red chairs and a table.

‘Now they can sit around and moan about how tired they are and be disappointed,' said someone behind her. ‘Want a hand?'

It was Caroline, Al's wife. Al's ex, Posy corrected herself. Caroline in her Boden gingham capris, looking like a sad Doris Day sans ponytail, a rare voice of dissent at Toddlers where ‘Mustn't grumble' was the order of the day. If only Caroline's life had turned out more like the Boden catalogue, an endless series of perfect days on the beach with X (architect) and their three children (wearing a selection of Mini Boden).

There were plastic pieces of toast and slices of some pink stuff, possibly salami or luncheon meat from the Early Learning Centre of a bygone age.

‘“Have a reality sandwich” is what Frank would say,' Posy said. She liked Caroline, and was unfazed by the rumour that Caroline didn't pay her Access bill off in full each month. Even so, she thought that Caroline could be a bit of a loose cannon at Toddlers.

Caroline kept Posy up to date on the current state of hostilities with Al, often telling her things that she didn't want to know.

‘I think I'll get the Duplo zoo out. We haven't had that out for a while,' said Posy.

‘I'll help,' said Caroline.

There was a landscaped board, various bits of fence, and a gang of bland-faced zookeepers to keep it all under control. Caroline dropped a handful of assorted animals onto the lake.

‘This one's Al,' she said, picking up a hippo. She built it a very small pen and laughed as she trapped it inside.

‘Sometimes I almost start to forget what he was like. God. It was just like sleeping underwater with a hippo - all that farting and grunting like he'd eaten too many lily roots - and the great damp, sweaty bulk of him when he was drunk. And he was always at his most amorous when he was at his most smelly. What's Frank like when he comes home after practices?'

‘Oh, I'm usually asleep by the time he gets in,' Posy lied. She was too loyal to spill any beans about Frank; even though she often wanted to, she wouldn't be drawn. Posy was determined that her children wouldn't have a broken home. She and Frank lived by the maxim ‘No Raised Voices'. Meanwhile her true thoughts and resentments were punched out by a teleprinter in her head and reams and reams of them piled up unread.

‘We practically live in different time zones. He often doesn't come to bed till after two, and I'm up at six or something every day with Isobel. But it does drive me mad when he comes in
and sets the smoke alarm off with a bacon butty or by burning toast. He sometimes likes to grill things when he's been playing. He says lighting the grill with a match is life-affirming … and possessing a toaster would be bourgeois, an affectation, and as for tumble driers, or dishwashers …'

‘Just like Al!' Caroline laughed.

‘Shall I get the paints out, or glue? Both I suppose,' Posy wondered.

‘How about just crayons?'

‘I know: chalks and black paper. Janie's down for clearing up and her baby's due in a few weeks. I want to make it easy for her,' said Posy.

‘Takes you back, doesn't it? Al was so dreadful at those Active Birth evenings. Talk about hostile! I should have known then.'

‘Well I ended up with Hunter S. Thompson as my birthing partner,' said Posy. ‘When Poppy's looking for a mate, I'm going to say “Forget Romance. What you want are DIY skills.”

‘And earning power,' said Caroline.

‘But she won't listen.' They shook their heads.

‘It was when I found I was seriously contemplating killing him,' said Caroline, ‘that I realised that divorce was better for Finn than his Daddy being dead and his Mummy being sent to jail. That's if they'd caught me. I'd come up with the perfect murder based on a movie I saw on Channel 5. Want to know it? Might come in handy, like a spare packet of tissues in your bag.'

‘I do quite like Frank most of the time,' objected Posy, but Caroline told her anyway.

‘I was going to put so much neat alcohol into one of his drinks that he would definitely die. I think that would have been undetectable, well, unnoticeable in someone who drinks like Al, don't you? Foolproof, huh? And he'd have had a killer hangover if he didn't die.'

By the end of their marriage, but just before the final split, Caroline had been consumed by hatred. She had spent her time perfecting tiny acts designed to express her contempt. Al liked his tea weak and milky with plenty of sugar. Each time she made him a mug (and she was too determined not to put herself in the wrong not to make him one if she was making one for herself) she made it a little stronger with a few grains less sugar. She stirred in extra bitterness. The last few times that they had made love (oh what a misnomer that was) she had mentally worked her way through the Lakeland catalogue, listing the things she would buy if she had unlimited funds (completely plain white matching mugs, plate stackers, machine washable doormats, a patio heater, a juicer … it was a long list). Then she thought about how she would like to replace the worktops and cupboard doors in their kitchen, if only she could afford it. Then she thought that if she stayed with Al she would never have a new kitchen. Realising this made making the decision easier. She knew that she was like a cold, hard, winter tomato. If they cut into me, she thought, they will see that all the pips have turned black.

After Caroline booted him out, Al really went to seed, like a big old onion left on an allotment. The booze and takeaways had taken their toll.

Posy wondered why almost nobody else at Toddlers was divorced. How come the figures were one in three, or was it half of all marriages now? At St Peter's it seemed more like one in twenty. Subsidence seemed to be the thing that these couples lived in fear of. She thought that there must be a lot of divorces yet to come, or perhaps this wasn't a representative group.

The car park began to fill with BMWs and MPVs. All-terrain buggies made light work of the gravel. The person whose turn it had been for the tray-bake piled slabs of chocolate cake, lemon drizzle cake and gingerbread onto
the unbreakable, pale green, unique-to-church-halls crockery. It was spawned by the damp cupboards, made to appear magically by the conjunction of the ‘How To Use This Water Heater' notice, with the never-quite-dry tea towels and the ‘Please Leave This Kitchen As You Would Like To Find It. Thank you - Parish Office' sign.

There were healthy snacks for the children, curved slices of apple that the Parousellis called Apple Rainbows, saltless breadsticks and mini rice-cakes. Posy couldn't help thinking that the children could do with something that had a few calories, but most of the mums gave them their cake anyway.

She sat behind the table with the register and the empty Flora Light tub for people's pound coins. She couldn't remember the names of all the children, let alone their parents who were mostly known only as Ashleigh's Mum, Dylan's Mum, Darcey's Mum … If you flicked back through the years of the toddler group register you saw the rise and fall of children's names. In the mid nineties there had been seventeen Jacks. Then there was the year when people had thought they were being so original with Callum, and now the names fought on the page in a competition for the most unlikely. Welcome Jerome, Jessamy, Bradley and Bramley (these were apple-cheeked twins) and Cain, who fortunately wasn't a twin, but had a baby sister called Scarlett (Scarletts were now two a penny). There were surnames for girls' first names and very many jewels. Sapphire was still a rarity, but Rubies and even Diamonds were now common. There was a child who Posy had thought was called Leah (relatively sensible) until he took down his trousers and peed on the slide, and Posy realised that he must be called Lear. At a nearby toddler group was a Chloe who was, for reasons best known to her parents, a ‘Khloey', and babies with apostrophes in their names (a Clay'd and a Hayd'n had been the trailblazers). Posy always
sniggered when she read Cnut - they must have been joking, surely - and then she remembered that she was called Posy.

She glanced up to see that Tom was still driving the tractor up and down, up and down, and Isobel was still asleep on the stage. She could see steam from the urn rising in the kitchen. The chairs around the walls of the hall were taken up by coats and changing bags, mums and child-minders, two dads all alone. She could only hear snatches of other people's conversations through the swimming pool echoes of sound.