“And that’s you, is it?”
“Yes, that’s me. If someone – that man over there for example – was to eat me, I wouldn’t make him ill, but he might have tasted better.”
Ellen screwed her face up and made vomiting gestures with her fingers.
“I think I might throw up now…don’t you realise it’s your duty as my mother to remain a completely asexual being for the rest of your life? I like to believe that you’ve only ever had sex once – a majestic coupling that resulted in my entry into the world. I’m not ready to acknowledge anything more than that without trauma counselling. So stop leching and let’s head home. I think you need a cold shower. Invite the rest of the penis-starved hordes to come if you like.”
“Okay,” said Maggie, laughing inside at the thought of the ‘majestic coupling’ that resulted in her getting pregnant at 16. Not the description most people would have used, taking place as it did in the back of a Datsun Sunny parked in a layby off the A40. “Message received and understood, Captain Puritanical. Just let me have five more minutes of acting like an asexual being perving over a complete stranger, and we’ll be off.”
Ellen harrumphed, crossed her Bambi legs, and stuck her ear buds back in to listen to music. Presumably to drown out the sound of the sighs whispering all around her.
Maggie gave her a sideways glance, then looked again at the playground. Apart from the man, the whole scene made her feel a little bit sad. Melancholy. The park was only ten minutes from their home in Jericho, and you could see the dreaming spires of Oxford city centre rising hazily out of the fog, distant and fuzzy and lit up like a Christmas tree made of mellow yellow stone. It was a beautiful view, and one that seemed to never change.
This was the park she’d been coming to for so many years now. There were distant, almost sepia-tinged memories of her own mother bringing her here as a kid. Then as a teenager herself – reckless and wild, swigging from huge plastic bottles of cider and spinning on the roundabout. A habit that may or may not have been related to the later majestic coupling in the back of the Datsun Sunny.
Then as a parent with a cute baby girl of her own in the pram, filling in the endless hours of life as a stupidly young mum, feeding the ducks and wondering what her friends were up to. And with Ellen as a toddler, Ellen as a little girl – and now Ellen as an almost-adult. If she closed her eyes, she could almost replay it, like a fractured dream sequence in a movie.
The swings might have had a lick of paint and the benches were new, but for Maggie, there were ghosts of Christmas past everywhere here, wrapped around the branches of every frost-tinged tree and echoing in every excited childish squeal she heard.
Ellen’s childhood – those days you take for granted, where you’re the centre of their lives – seemed a million years ago. The mums out there now looked tired, and messy, and frazzled like all mums do. They hadn’t yet realised how precious these times were – and how fast you lost them.
She dragged her mind away from pointless, bittersweet memories, and back to the present. He was still there. The Man. Mr Tall, Dark and Handsome. It wasn’t just the way he looked that was getting the ladies in a tiz – it was the way he was behaving with the little boy. His son, presumably.
A chubby faced cherub with unruly, deep brown curls, he was clearly what was known in the trade as ‘a bit of a handful’. That – in school gate speak – could mean anything from a normal energetic tot to a demonically possessed alien being whose head could rotate 360 degrees while humming the theme song from In The Night Garden.
He was about two, and at that stage where they only have three settings – running, falling over, or sleeping. The Man didn’t look tired though. He didn’t look frazzled. Not a smudge of pea puree in sight. He was glowing with health and vitality, and keeping pace with the kid as he jogged from swings to slide to climbing frame, laughing all the time.
The Man was always there with a supportive hand, ready to catch the boy when he fell, ready to wipe mud of the knees of his jeans, ready to pick him up and swing him round in circles until the giggling had infected everyone within hearing distance. The Man sounded like he had an American accent, and he was calling the child Luca, which only added to the unexpected glamour of finding him here, on a grey, frosty day in Oxford at the start of December.
If he was aware of the fact that every woman in the playground was hoping he’d need a spare baby wipe or directions to the toilets, he didn’t show it. He was focused on one thing only – being super fun time dad.
Yeah, thought Maggie, standing up from the bench and starting to stretch out muscles that were already sore. Asexual. Past my sell by date. And late for work.
Time to stop the drooling, and get ready for the rest of the day.
The second time she saw him, she had her head up Gaynor Cuddy’s skirt. Gaynor was the first of her Christmas brides, and had come in for her final fitting. She was a larger-than-life girl, Gaynor, and had ordered an even larger dress – in fact, Maggie had decided, it was entirely suitable to feature in an episode of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding. Even if Gaynor wasn’t, to her knowledge, a gypsy, and instead worked as a call centre manager and lived in quite a swish flat off the Woodstock Road with her boyfriend Tony.
Hooped and embroidered to within an inch of its life, the frock was pretty much done. It had taken over a year to make, and about three miles of satin and tulle to construct. She’d exhausted the stock of every faux pearl merchant within a 100 mile radius, and risked permanent curvature of the spine, hunched over attaching them.
Now, after much trial and tribulation and detailed accounts of how little Gaynor had had to eat for the last month, it was perfect. Or, more accurately, it was perfect for Gaynor. Some of her other clients would faint with shock, but Gaynor was happy – and that was all that mattered to Maggie.
The reason she head her head up the skirt was to fiddle with the bridal under-garments. In keeping with the OTT frock, Gaynor had decided she wanted to have a garter belt that could double as a gun holster – where she planned on hiding a small fake pistol to whip out for comedy effect after the ceremony. It wasn’t an everyday request, but perfectly doable with a bit of fast stitching and the occasional dollop of cheat glue.
She’d normally be doing this in the fitting room, but, well. It just wasn’t big enough – so she was out on the shop floor of Ellen’s Empire, crawling around in discarded scraps of material and the stray threads of cotton that always seemed to coat the tiles, no matter how much she swept up.
As she worked, the hoop held over her head, Gaynor rattled on about the reception (200 of their closest friends, including Maggie), and their honeymoon (the Seychelles, not including Maggie), and the fact that she planned to eat her own bodyweight in Terry’s Chocolate Orange the minute the dress was off, before she did anything else at all. Tony would undoubtedly be delighted with that schedule.
Maggie couldn’t hear everything clearly, and just kept shouting the occasional encouraging sound as she practised inserting the little gun into the holster, and pulling it back out to test its quick draw qualities. Yup. It seemed to be working just fine, and would definitely make for an entertaining photo or seven. Not quite a shotgun wedding, but she got the gag.
As she decided she was finally happy, she slipped the gun out again. It, too, was decorated with faux pearls – and had been filched from a Calamity Jane fancy dress outfit Gaynor had found online. Maggie took one more deep breath before trying to fight her way out again, carefully lifting the hooping, listening to the swish of acres of material, before crawling back out.
At exactly that moment – with her backside inching away, head still submerged in Gaynor’s flounce – the doorbell to the shop rang. Perfect timing. She should really have flipped