‘Head injury?’
‘I think she should see the doctor,’ Mary said calmly.
Kate watched her take hold of Flo’s hand and balance it on her finger and for a brief moment it became a tiny trotter she saw balanced on Mary’s index finger before the tiny trotter became a tiny baby hand again. After reassuring Mary that she would take Flo to the doctor’s that afternoon, she finally managed to exit the sensory room with the A4 sheet of paper she was given every day, accounting for Flo’s dietary and excretory highs and lows.
Findlay was retrieved from the Butterfly Room and coaxed into his coat. It was all looking normal—no sign of pigs or centipedes. She even managed a breezy smile—in case Mary was still standing in the corridor behind them, watching—and a light-hearted, faux commander’s, ‘Okay, people, let’s move out,’ for Findlay.
Ignoring his retort—‘We’re not people, I’m Spiderman’—she propelled them across the playground past the nursery’s chicken coop, and through the security gate. There, on the pavement by the Audi that they were two instalments behind on, was Ros Granger, mother to Lola and Toby Granger.
‘Kate!’ Ros called out, dismounting from her Dutch-style bicycle, ‘I’ve been trying you all morning—where’ve you been? Did you get my message?’
Kate nodded, not trusting herself to speak, and wondered how it was that, despite the rain, Ros didn’t look bedraggled. Her skin was tanned and the white T-shirt advertising her company, Carpe Diem Life Classes, was still white. Ros was somebody other women wanted not only to emulate, but to become, and here she was walking towards Kate, her eyes glistening with an obscene wellbeing she just couldn’t keep to herself. The overall effect was pathologically upbeat. She looked as if there wasn’t a thing in existence she wouldn’t be able take succour from—not even mobile-phone adverts that used Holocaust survivors to imply that global communications had the ability to wash away all tears.
Ros was the postcode prototype of a young, successful mother. Within their group—the PRC—she’d gained herself a reputation for originality that was, if you looked closely, nothing more than a highly evolved form of plagiarism. When Ros dropped her wheat intolerance for lactose intolerance, everybody followed suit because—as Ros pointed out—if you were still wheat intolerant it was because you weren’t buying sourdough bread. So then everybody had to buy sourdough bread from the deli and—after the lactose intolerance phase—make sure their fridge was full of soya milk.
‘So -.’
‘So—what?’ Kate managed to say cheerfully back, pretending not to understand while knowing exactly what was coming next, exactly what question she was going to be asked.
Here it was—in Ros’s clear, ecstatic diction: ‘Did—Findlay—get—in?’
The letter was crackling in the pocket of Kate’s suit jacket just above her heart -, as if it was about to start talking. With an effort, she managed a slow up and down nod and the sort of smile somebody recovering from a minor stroke might produce.
Ros couldn’t quite work out what was going on.
Kate, who had never seen Ros’s eyes darken with doubt before, saw them darken now, and had a sudden apocalyptic vision of just how lonely her future in the postcode would be if she were ever excommunicated from the PRC. She would become Jessica—and nobody wanted to become Jessica. Suddenly terrified, she threw the arm that wasn’t holding Flo up into the air and screamed an evangelical, ‘YESSSS!’, walking for no reason whatsoever into Ros’s arms.
The next minute the two women were hugging and Ros was the first to pull away. This unexpected physical contact with a woman she didn’t even particularly like provoked an unexpected, almost uncontrollable urge in Kate to cry, and to counteract this she started mumbling, ‘I can’t tell you how…how…’
‘…relieved,’ Ros put in, letting out one of her light-hearted laughs.
‘Relieved—that’s it—I am about the whole St Anthony’s thing.’
‘And now you’ve got Findlay in, getting Flo in won’t be such a hassle.’
‘Exactly,’ Kate said heavily, while thinking, who the fuck’s Flo? Then remembering, and patting her on the back, hoping this wouldn’t make her posit anymore.
‘So—everybody’s in,’ Ros said.
Apart from me, Kate thought, staring at her. ‘Everybody?’
‘Evie, Harriet, me, you…everybody in the PRC.’
‘What about Jessica?’ Kate asked.
Ros’s pause suggested that this question wasn’t strictly necessary given that Jessica wasn’t a fully acknowledged member of the PRC, but she showed magnanimity by shrugging and responding with, ‘I can’t get hold of her.’
‘Me neither,’ Kate lied.
A strobe-like frown flickered over Ros’s face, then she was smiling again because life really was unbelievably good—apart from when you had to run past people in mobility aids. Although, in her darker moments, she had to admit that the thought of the cripple’s eyes on her honed body as she streaked past, fully functioning legs pounding, did thrill her.
‘You wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on the bike for a minute, would you? Just while I nip in and get Tobes—saves me locking it up. Bless you,’ she said, squeezing Kate’s arm and jogging past her through the security gates and into Village Montessori.
Kate put Flo, in her car seat, down on the pavement next to the railings and got Findlay into the car, pushing on a nursery CD whose tracks she now heard in her sleep. Satisfied that Findlay’s head was bobbing in time to the music, and that his laughter wasn’t hysterical, merely effusive overflow from some complex childhood game, she scanned the contents of the Sainsbury’s Organic Bag bulging out of Ros’s bicycle basket, and had just managed to uncover a tub of natural cherries and a bar of Valrhona chocolate, some luxury Jersey cream and a gluten-free swiss roll, when Findlay’s window whirred down and Findlay called out, ‘That’s not yours.’
‘I know that, Findlay—I wasn’t looking in it, I was looking after it,’ Kate explained as Findlay swung his head out the window. ‘There’s a difference.’
Findlay grinned, nonplussed.
What did that grin mean? Was Findlay being ironic?
‘My bike’s got four wheels,’ he said.
‘Four?’ she said, uninterested, but relieved he’d changed the subject. Her mind swung back to the natural cherries and gluten-free swiss roll…she was sure there’d been something heavy at the bottom of the bag as well—potatoes? Keeping her eyes on Findlay, she gave them a quick squeeze. Definitely potatoes. Was Ros making tortilla for the PRC that night as well?
Kate had, she realised—staring into the abyss of perfectly honed merchandise in Ros’s bicycle basket—set her heart on tortilla for the PRC that night, and making something else instead just wasn’t an option at this stage. She had eggs in the fridge—in fact eggs were about all she had.
Findlay was saying, ‘Soon it’s only going to have two.’
‘Two what?’ Kate asked, preoccupied.
Findlay was staring at her and there was a baby whimpering somewhere nearby. ‘Wheels,’ he said after a pause, still staring.
Did she have time to get up to the allotment this afternoon? If Ros was making tortilla as well, wouldn’t home-grown potatoes give her tortilla the edge? Kate let out a sharp, involuntary chuckle: a home-grown tortilla.
Behind her, the nursery security gate clanged shut, the sound searing through her cranium as her entire head continued to pulsate with migraine.
‘Thanks for that,’ Ros called out, and was