LITMIR.BIZ

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Junior School. Not to mention the fact that learning the recorder wasn’t a part of the curriculum at Little Tigers. Serious mummies had their four-year-old poppets playing Bach on their recorders to impress the panel at the Carnegie. Sarah could play the television remote pretty well but Mel suspected this wasn’t the same thing.

      It was the large back garden at Number 2 Goldsmith Lawn that had really sold Carrickwell to them.

      ‘We could have apple trees in it,’ Adrian had said as they flicked through the auctioneer’s brochure and saw the long, narrow swathe of lawn with a shabby green shed at the end.

      ‘And we could put a swing on the cherry tree,’ sighed Mel.

      They’d smiled and she’d patted her burgeoning belly, conveniently forgetting that neither of them was able to so much as hammer in a nail without bringing down a shower of plaster.

      Five years later, there were still no apple trees in the garden and the weeds had declared an independent state over by the shed, but there was a plastic swing under the cherry tree. Sarah loved it.

      She ran happily ahead of her mother to the front door now, holding her pink and white spotted rucksack, while Mel struggled in behind with her briefcase, Carrie, and all Carrie’s belongings.

      The front door of Number 2 was a glossy green, flanked by two dwarf conifers in matching green wooden containers on the step. When they had moved in, Mel and Adrian had spent two months’ worth of weekends sorting out the front garden so that it was maintenance-free and would fit in with their neighbours’ beautifully cared-for gardens. The tiny sliver of grass had been replaced by beige gravel with various ornamental grasses and plants grouped in the two planting areas at either end. It all looked well cared for but this was a clever illusion.

      Once Mel opened the front door, reality prevailed. The hall looked tired, the peeling paintwork and battered wooden floor badly in need of a month of DIY enthusiasm. Everything in their house needed work – don’t we all? Mel thought grimly. There was never enough time. Adrian worked in IT in an industrial estate thirty minutes’ drive from their home and since he’d been doing a Masters degree at night, he never had a moment for anything as mundane as Destroy It Yourself.

      ‘Hi,’ yelled Mel as she dumped her load onto the hall floor and kissed Carrie on the forehead before putting her gently down on her chubby little legs.

      No reply, but the kitchen door was closed. With yells of delight, Sarah and Carrie erupted into their playroom. Mel felt that you needed somewhere to keep all the kids’ stuff or it just took over the house, so the dining room was now the playroom, with the table shoved up against the wall and toys spilling out of all the big pink and purple plastic storage boxes. In the rigid tradition of children’s colours, everything for little girls was lurid pink and purple. Mel longed for some subtle colours to take over.

      ‘The dishwasher’s broken,’ announced Adrian as soon as she walked into the kitchen with the gym bags of dirty clothes from Little Tigers.

      Sitting with his course books spread out over the kitchen table, he looked up at his wife and gave her a weary smile. Adrian had Scandinavian colouring, with short blond hair, pale blue eyes, and skin that reacted to a hint of sun so that he always looked golden, unlike Mel, with her Celtic complexion. Sarah and Carrie both had his fair hair and skin, but their mother’s fine bones and lovely eyes. When Mel had first met Adrian, he’d had the build of a marathon runner, despite living off Chinese takeaways and pizzas. But over the years, lack of exercise and a fondness for the wrong sort of foods had made him more solid. Cuddly, she said.

      ‘Needing to go to the gym,’ Adrian would remark good-humouredly.

      If they could afford the gym, that was.

      Mel patted him affectionately on the arm on her way to the utility room to get a wash going.

      ‘Are you sure the dishwasher’s really broken?’ she asked.

      Broken appliances meant organising someone to come and fix them at a time when someone would be in, a task on a par with choreographing Swan Lake on ice.

      ‘The dishes are dirtier now than when they went in,’ Adrian said. He gestured to the worktop, where a white mug speckled with food particles sat.

      ‘Sure there isn’t a spoon stuck in the rotor?’ asked Mel hopefully.

      ‘’Fraid not.’

      She set the washing machine going, emptied out Carrie’s juice cup and snack box, then tackled Sarah’s spotty bag of equipment, her mind whizzing through all the tasks she had to complete before bed. Then she stuck the mushroom and pepper chicken for the girls’ dinner in the microwave, put a pan of pasta on and got out a new wiping-up cloth, flinging the old one into the utility-room washing basket like a basketball pro.

      ‘Will you keep an eye on the girls while I change?’ Mel was halfway out the door as she spoke.

      ‘Yeah,’ replied Adrian absently.

      Upstairs, Mel ripped off her work clothes and pulled on her grey sweatpants and red fleece. She removed her earrings quickly – Carrie loved pulling earrings and Mel had lost a really nice silver one already this week – and was back downstairs to finish the children’s dinner within three minutes.

      The girls were already on their father’s lap, his college books shoved out of the way as they told him all about their day.

      ‘I did a picture for you, Daddy,’ said Sarah gravely. She was a daddy’s girl and could cope with any childish trauma as long as her father’s arms were around her.

      ‘You’re so clever,’ said Adrian lovingly, and kissed her blonde head. ‘Show me. Oh, that’s wonderful. Is that me?’

      Sarah nodded proudly. ‘That’s Carrie and that’s Granny Karen and that’s me.’ From beside the cooker where she was stirring pasta, Mel looked over. Like all Sarah’s pictures, it was in the crayon triad of pink, orange and purple, with Adrian, Mel’s mother, Karen, and Sarah all big and smiling. Carrie, whom Sarah had never quite forgiven for being born, was a quarter the size, like a dwarf stick-person. There was no sign of Mel.

      ‘Where’s Mummy?’ asked Adrian.

      Mel, who’d read plenty on separation anxiety, wouldn’t have asked, but her breathing stilled to listen to the answer.

      ‘She’s on another page. At work,’ Sarah said, as if it were perfectly obvious. She produced another picture, this time of a bigger house with her mother outside with her briefcase in her hand. The briefcase was nearly as big as Mel herself, but she had to admit that Sarah had got her hair right: half brown, half blonde and frizzy.

      ‘Oh,’ Adrian said.

      Mel could feel him looking at her sympathetically over Sarah’s blonde head, and she flashed him a comforting look that said that she was fine. And she was, if the definition was Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional.

      ‘But Mummy is only at work sometimes. The rest of the time she’s here, looking after all of us. She’s a super mum,’ Adrian insisted. ‘She should be the star of the family picture, shouldn’t she?’

      Sarah nodded and snuggled up to her father, one delicate finger tracing her granny’s lurid yellow hair. Granny was in the family picture but not Mummy. Mel felt another stab of bitterness, this time directed at her mother.

      An energetic sixty-one-year-old, Karen Hogan was both Mel’s secret weapon and the source of enormous resentment.

      Karen was ready to leap into the breach if the girls were sick so Mel didn’t have to take time off work, and unwittingly ready with remarks about how they’d sobbed for their mummy – or hadn’t.

      It wasn’t that Karen didn’t support her daughter’s decision to work. She did. But without her, the whole show would have fallen apart, and somewhere in Mel’s head was the notion that this wasn’t quite the way it was supposed to be. She was supposed to be ultimately responsible for Carrie and Sarah – not their grandmother. Take

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