Sylvia dropped the sweet into a clean cotton handkerchief and placed it carefully back in the corner of her bag. Juliet wondered if it would have grown by the next time she saw it, like a strange kind of handbag snowball, rolling around in the fluff and debris.
‘It’s time to go home now,’ she repeated when her aunt closed her handbag and looked back up at her. Aunt Sylvia stared at her blankly for a second then held out a hand for Juliet to grasp hold of. She supported her aunt while she got to her feet, and then guided her back across the floor of the ball pond and helped her over the padded step that led to the main floor of the soft-play area.
The two police officers breathed out a sigh of relief and offered to take them back to Greenacres, the nursing home that really shouldn’t have lost Aunt Sylvia in the first place. Juliet was most cross about that. It wasn’t as if they didn’t charge enough.
The offer of a lift for Aunt Sylvia was tempting, but Juliet reckoned they’d get further if she just took the old lady back herself. She was used to Juliet’s car and was possibly less likely to get confused and distressed all over again if someone she knew – or almost knew – drove her.
Juliet checked her watch and felt her neck muscles tighten. Ten to three. She only just had enough time to take her aunt back to Greenacres, have a firm word with someone in charge, then race to St Martin’s to pick up her youngest three children.
They were just reaching her car, parked a little oddly in front of the leisure centre, when Juliet pulled up short.
The turkey!
Oh, well. There was nothing for it now. She was just going to have to cram that into her already packed schedule for tomorrow.
It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It’s fine. You can handle it. You’re good at organising and multi-tasking and getting things done.
Even so, once she’d checked her aunt was strapped in securely, then started up her car and made the ten-minute drive back to the nursing home, the empty row of boxes in her Christmas notebook began to haunt her.
Juliet drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and checked the clock on her car dashboard for the umpteenth time.
‘Ow!’ a small voice from behind her said.
She glanced in the rear-view mirror to see what her youngest three children were up to. ‘Polly, leave your brother alone.’
Polly stared back at her and pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, the picture of ten-year-old innocence. ‘I didn’t do anything he didn’t deserve.’ Ten-going-on-forty, that was.
Juliet unclipped her seatbelt and turned to face her daughter, who was wedged between her two younger brothers in their booster seats. ‘I’ve told you before, Polly, you can’t just rule over your brothers with a rod of iron because you’re older than them.’
Polly looked unimpressed. ‘Someone’s got to.’ She flicked a haughty look at Josh, who was obviously the accused in this situation. ‘These children are positively feral, Mother.’
Juliet didn’t have time to argue with a ten-year-old about her parenting skills, so she turned to Josh. ‘What did you do?’
‘Nothing!’
She looked at Polly, knowing her daughter would be only too happy to testify against him.
‘He keeps moving his leg over onto my bit of the seat, and I’m compressed enough as it is. I did warn him I’d make him move it if he did it again.’
Well, she couldn’t fault Polly’s logic, but she could hardly let her daughter police the rest of the family’s behaviour – they’d all be locked up and sentenced to torture within the week if that were the case. Even Juliet. ‘If the boys give you trouble, you’re supposed to come to me about it,’ she told Polly. ‘Understand?’
Polly rolled her eyes, but eventually gave her a reluctant nod.
When Juliet turned back round to face forwards again, she noticed the clock on the dashboard. It was already three forty. Where in the world was Violet? She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and sent another short and to-the-point text to her daughter, warning her that the taxi service was leaving in exactly three minutes, and that if she wasn’t here by then she’d have to get two buses home instead.
Just as she was turning the key in the ignition to start up the car, the door opened and Violet flopped into the passenger seat with a sigh. She was smiling, looking completely unconcerned that she’d kept the rest of them waiting.
She laughed, shaking her head. ‘You’ll never guess what Abby just said—’
Juliet turned the key and revved the car. ‘We’ve all been sitting here in the cold waiting for you, and you know the boys have swimming tonight!’
Violet’s warm, open expression closed down and she scowled back at her mother. ‘I’m not that late! God, Mum! And I was helping Kiera find her scarf, so it wasn’t my fault anyway.’
Juliet shook her head, clipped her belt back up and winced at the sound of crunching gears as she put her car into reverse.
Not my fault … Now where had she heard that before? Violet was turning into a mini version of Gemma.
As she drove she could see Violet out of the corner of her eye, hunched in the passenger seat, arms folded and scowling. The atmosphere wasn’t improved by the start of a squabble in the back seat, either, as Polly accused Josh of leaving his arm two millimetres further into her space than it should have been, and then Jake jumped in to defend his brother and deliberately drew Polly’s fire by invading her space from the other side.
‘Stop that!’ Juliet yelled. ‘Jake, you just kicked me in the back! Now, the three of you calm down and behave yourselves.’
And then she turned to her eldest daughter. They needed to have a little chat about her attitude, or else she’d turn out just like her aunt, causing mayhem for everyone else then refusing to take responsibility for it, but she realised she was now approaching a mini roundabout that always got clogged up at that time of day. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Vi,’ she said, glancing quickly in both directions. ‘But you’ve got to learn to express your opinions without being rude, because I won’t have you talking to me like—’
Unfortunately, the fight in the back seat erupted again at that moment and a deft kick in the back of her seat from Jake caused her to pitch forward. Her foot slipped off the clutch as she was crossing the roundabout and the car growled then stalled as it straddled the little white hump.
The car to her right slammed on its brakes and the driver leaned on his horn. Juliet’s heart pounded and her arms shook. The man was using his hands in the most creative of ways and she could lip-read enough of his tirade to know he thought she was a middle-class bitch who shouldn’t be allowed to operate a vehicle.
A stalled car in the middle of the junction meant that traffic backed up in all four directions. Horns blared. Drivers swore. All four of Juliet’s children started to scream and shout at each other, letting each other know, without holding back on the toilet-related insults, just whose fault it was.
Juliet found she couldn’t move. She was just frozen, fingers clenched around the steering wheel. She couldn’t even remember which pedal to press or what to do next to get the car started again. But the noise – the engines, the horns, the bickering children – was burrowing into her skull in a way she just couldn’t bear.
‘Will you just shut up!’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs, surprising herself with the volume, hearing the croak as her voice broke when she reached maximum decibels.
Outside