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hear.

      ‘What are you talking about me?’ he called out. ‘Where won’t I want to go?’

      ‘The allotments,’ Margery shouted back.

      ‘I don’t want to go to the allotments,’ Findlay moaned.

      Margery’s eyes skittered triumphantly over Kate as Findlay appeared in the kitchen doorway, his shoulders pushed forward and his arms hanging loose—a posture he often assumed to denote despair.

      ‘Half an hour, that’s all—I need you to help me dig.’

      ‘Digging stinks.’

      ‘Findlay…’

      ‘I don’t want to go—my suit’ll get wet like it did last time then it won’t fit.’

      ‘He can stay here with me,’ Margery put in.

      ‘Yes, yes,’ Findlay started to shout, gripping onto the doorframe and using it to jump up and down.

      ‘Findlay, calm down—if you stay here there won’t be any TV.’

      The last time she’d left Findlay with Margery for an afternoon they had watched a documentary on the Milwaukee cannibal.

      Findlay stopped jumping.

      ‘He can help me with my Tom Jones jigsaw.’

      Findlay remained silent, considering this, as Flo started to cry.

      ‘What’s wrong with her?’ Margery said, irritably.

      ‘Hungry. Could you heat her up a bottle?’

      Margery grunted something Kate chose to ignore as she made her way upstairs, running the rest of the day’s schedule through her head. She couldn’t stay up at the allotments for more than an hour—she had to leave herself time to pick Arthur up from nursery, take him and Findlay swimming then get back to make the tortilla. Pausing at the top of the stairs, she made another mental note to phone Robert and remind him to pick the boys up, before disappearing into the bathroom and swallowing 400 mg of Nurofen.

      She took a quick shower in the Philippe Starck shower room they’d remortgaged the house for—along with the Philippe Starck en-suite—before it finally dawned on her that nobody they knew would know the fixtures and fittings were Philippe Starck…unless she told them.

      On the way to the bedroom she stuck her head over the banister as the microwave she’d finally capitulated to—which Margery had brought in triumph at Christmas when Flo was barely two months old—let out a resounding bling. The constant bling, bling, bling of the microwave had become one of the signature tunes of Margery’s brief Christmas reign at No. 22 Prendergast Road. The entire Christmas, in fact, had been a nonstop triumph for Margery, who found her usually challenging daughter-in-law captive in a postnatal world where sleep deprivation and hormone imbalance sent her careering between vegetative trances and hysterical ranting. For the first time in their relationship, Margery had been able to control Kate. Robert no longer knew how to and, anyway, needed all the help he could get when he realised that the two weeks’ paternity leave granted him by the government wasn’t nearly long enough to construct the illusion that the Hunter family was a happy, thriving unit.

      The Christmas dinner Margery insisted on buying was entirely microwaveable. Everything, including the turkey, was nuked—the bell kept blinging, the door kept opening and shutting and there was so much packaging stacked against the kitchen window that it blocked out entirely the drab, drizzling festive daylight.

      Kate only finally came alive to the fact that Margery’s selfdefined role as douala was a smokescreen for total takeover when Robert started mumbling something about getting the spare room properly fixed up so that Margery could be on hand to give round-the-clock help. Enough was enough. Margery was dispatched swiftly but messily back to Leicestershire. This was the first time since the post-Christmas dispatch that Margery had been to stay at Prendergast Road.

      In the bedroom, Kate changed into jeans and her new boutique wellies by Marimekko—black daisies on a white background—that Evie had insisted she had to buy on one of their shopping trips, and that Kate had only been able to afford because the family allowance had just gone into the account. Sometimes it felt as though her libido had been sacrificed to Marimekko, Orla Kiely, Philippe Starck…along with the Reverend Walker’s Sudanese orphans and other people she didn’t know.

      Dressed in the postcode’s requisite uniform for young mothers, which basically consisted of suggesting rather than revealing your female anatomy, she sat down on the bed and thought about having two minutes’ lie-down, but knew if she did that she’d never get up, so straightened out the creases she’d made on the throw and stood up again.

      Through the broken blinds, she saw a woman standing at the same window as her in the house opposite. She was wearing a Disneyland Paris T-shirt, but didn’t look as if she’d ever been to Disneyland. She was holding back the curtains that were usually drawn and was staring intently at the Hunter house. Kate made out black hair hanging down either side of the woman’s face, then she started to flap her right hand.

      It took Kate some time to decipher the flapping hand.

      The woman was waving at her.

      Kate was about to wave back when she remembered the St Anthony’s letter, Harriet and Evie’s ecstatic voicemails, hugging Ros—and was overcome with a sudden nausea she didn’t think she could control. Everybody was in apart from them, and it had something—she was convinced—to do with the woman waving at her from the house opposite. The brothel. Evie, Ros and Harriet didn’t live opposite houses whose curtains remained permanently shut. The woman opposite, still waving, was the flaw in their lives.

      Kate was about to turn and leave the bedroom when she saw that the woman was now holding up a sign—plees help 02081312263—written in blue on what looked like the inside of a cereal packet.

      Kate, startled, stood back and let the blinds fall.

      Forgetting about the discarded suit, still on the bed, she went downstairs.

      Margery was nursing Flo awkwardly in the crook of her arm, and Findlay was shuffling the pieces of the Tom Jones jigsaw.

      ‘I don’t want to get my suit wet,’ he said morosely.

      ‘Well, if you don’t come to the allotments, you won’t be able to go swimming.’ She paused.

      That stumped him.

      ‘Why?’

      ‘Because after the allotments we’re going to pick Arthur up from nursery and then I’m taking you both swimming. So…if you don’t want to go swimming with Arthur you can stay here and finish that jigsaw.’

      Findlay looked up, flicking his head between his mother and Margery, aware that they were both waiting.

      After a while he dropped the piece of jigsaw he was holding and followed Kate out to the car. She pulled the seat belt over his bulging foam abs and pecs, then got into the car herself and was about to start the engine when Margery appeared in the front garden with Flo over her shoulder.

      ‘That’s my sister,’ Findlay said.

      Kate got back out of the car.

      ‘I thought you’d gone without her,’ Margery said.

      Without commenting on this, Kate retrieved the car seat from the kitchen. ‘I’ll be home around five,’ she called out, making her way back to the car—with Flo this time.

      ‘What time’s Robert back?’

      ‘I don’t know, he didn’t say, but he’s picking the boys up from swimming at six.’

      Margery nodded, then slammed the front door quickly shut.

      Five minutes later, Kate was driving at high speed down Prendergast Road towards the allotments, through rain that wasn’t letting up.

      

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