by Fiona Harper
She was second in the queue when she heard the woman in front of her ask exactly the same question she was going to ask, and receive a weary no, so when her turn came she and the junior sales assistant just stared at each other and then she mumbled, ‘Never mind,’ and walked out of the shop.
By the time she got to Bluewater she’d almost lost the will to live. Inside the shopping centre was Juliet’s definition of hell. The wide walkways were crammed with people jostling each other, the queues at the cash tills in every shop seemed to snake for miles and the jaunty music pumping from the speakers in the ceiling was making her want to pick up something sharp and attack someone with it. Seriously, if she heard ‘Happy Holidays’ one more time she was going to scream!
Both toy shops she trudged to had felt-tip-written signs pinned on the inside of the windows, firmly warning customers they were out of stock of Robotron Xtreme, and in a haze of disappointment, she wandered into John Lewis and sought to soothe herself with the sight of all those desirable home furnishings. And it worked. Enough for her mind to clear and realise they had a toy department on the top floor, anyway.
She quickly ran to an escalator and marched up it and onto the next one. She was marching through the pink and girly toy section when she pulled up short. There, stuffed among the Barbies and Hello Kittys was the holy grail—Robotron Xtreme! Obviously dumped in the wrong department by someone who’d changed their mind.
She silently prayed blessings on that fickle soul as she lunged for it and hugged it to her chest with both arms. She wasn’t about to let it go, even if rugby-tackled.
Once the toy was paid for and in a bag, she was heading back to the car, but the euphoria she’d felt at the moment of sale started to drain away. By the time she was driving back towards Tunbridge Wells she felt as if she was in trance. A quick check of the clock on the dashboard revealed that she didn’t have time to go home, so she sped straight to the boys’ and Polly’s school, hid the present in the boot before she picked them up, then headed off to fetch Vi.
The twins were even more ear-splittingly energetic than usual on the drive over, and then she remembered it had been the class party that day and, despite each parent providing both a healthy and a ‘treat’ donation for the food, she suspected her boys had consumed nothing but E-numbers and the poor teacher would now be faced with disposing of multiple pots of cherry tomatoes and trays of rapidly curling brown-bread sandwiches.
‘I’m hungry,’ Josh whined.
‘Me too,’ his brother added.
‘I’m going to cook tea as soon as we get in...’ Lord, forgive her—dubious frozen casserole from the back of the freezer. ‘So you’ll just have to wait until then.’
She was as good as her word, too. Within twenty minutes of walking through the front door, she was dishing up tough-looking meat, slicing chunks off a home-made loaf to go with it and calling the kids to the table. Vi, Polly and Josh appeared, but Jake was nowhere to be seen.
‘Where’s your brother?’ she asked all of them, but directing most of her attention to Violet, who she was attempting to train up as her second-in-command.
Violet looked heavenwards and crossed her arms. ‘How should I know? I try to steer clear of the runts as much as possible.’
Juliet didn’t have time to lecture her daughter on her attitude to her brothers at the moment; Polly had to be at the parish church by six thirty to get ready for the carol concert, which started at seven fifteen. And she’d also said she’d try to pop in to her neighbours’ mulled wine and mince pie evening once the younger ones were safely tucked up in bed. Since she’d only be a few doors away, she’d bribed Violet to babysit for the evening. She even considered the tenner her daughter had wangled out of her for doing it a bargain. When was the last time she’d put on a nice dress and talked to adults about adult things?
And Will was going to be there. She half-wanted to see if that twinge of something she wasn’t quite ready to name happened again. Not that she knew what she’d do about it if it did.
She discovered Jake behind the sofa in the living room, surrounded by bits of gold foil. It didn’t take more than a couple of seconds to work out that her hungry little man had raided the Christmas tree for the Belgian chocolate decorations she’d hung there earlier in the week and now was regretting it thoroughly. He looked up at her with big eyes, his complexion grey.
Oh, no!
Juliet knew that look. She picked her son up under the arms as he clamped his hand across his mouth and mumbled, ‘I don’t feel very well.’
Thankfully, they had a downstairs toilet. Not so thankfully, they only made it as far as the hall before the inevitable happened. The sound of regurgitated party food and liquid chocolate hitting the flagstone floor was not pleasant. Juliet swallowed her revulsion down and just kept running.
When the worst of it was over, she called Violet to keep an eye on him, then returned to the hall with a mop, bucket and disinfectant to clear up the mess. It was only then that she realised that the tiles had not been the only casualty of Jake’s greediness. Polly’s angel costume had been draped across the chair in the entrance way, and while it had been covered in dry-cleaner’s plastic, the hem had been peeping out of the bottom. Streaks of pinky brown sick were now congealing on the tacked-on tinsel.
Forgetting about the floor, she grabbed the dress and ran to the utility room with it. The only thing to do was to rip all the hard work she’d done last night off the watermarked silk before it stained. Perhaps a strand of clean tinsel tied around the waist would add the extra sparkle it needed now the hemline was plain?
There was a wail behind her from the entrance to the utility room, and she turned to find her youngest daughter there, tears streaming down her face. Juliet left the dress and pulled Polly into a firm hug. ‘It’s okay,’ she said calmly, even though she could feel her internal thermostat rising, even though voices inside her head were screaming about the time ticking away, the hall floor and the grey-looking child hunched over the toilet in the room next door. ‘I’m going to fix it, and it’ll be just as pretty, you wait and see. Now go and eat your dinner.’
Polly nodded tearfully and trotted off back to the kitchen. Juliet stared at the dress, her head pounding. What had she thought she could do to rescue it? Something to do with tinsel, but she couldn’t remember what. It didn’t matter, anyway, because she didn’t have time for that now.
She rushed next door and checked on Jake, who was looking a bit sorry for himself but hadn’t been sick again. Hopefully, now he’d let the pressure off his overloaded stomach, he’d be okay. She was pretty sure this was the result of too much chocolate, not the dreaded sickness bug that had been going around school.
‘How are you feeling?’ she asked him, crouching down beside him and rubbing his back.
‘Bit better,’ he said mournfully.
She wiped his face and gently led him upstairs to brush his teeth, then brought him back downstairs and tucked him up on the sofa with a bucket next to him. Yes, her lovely upholstery was in danger there, but it was quicker to get to him if he needed her.
‘You just call me if you need me,’ she told him. ‘I’ll be right back. I’ve just got to go and check on Polly’s dress.’
The next fifteen minutes were spent running between Jake, the other children eating dinner in the kitchen and the utility room, to see if the sick stains were showing on the dress now the adornments had been removed. On one pass through the living room she stole a replacement strand of silver tinsel for Polly’s costume, then ran upstairs. She wouldn’t be needing her little black dress any more, but maybe she could smarten up what she had on for the carol concert. Higher heels and her silver cardigan ought to do it.
When she came back downstairs she went to find Violet. ‘You can be in charge while I run Polly to the church,’ she told her.
Violet crossed her arms. ‘I
’m not clearing up if he’s sick.’
‘Fine,’ Juliet said, manhandling Polly out of her summer rain mac and into her winter coat—honestly, when would that child ever learn to dress for the appropriate season? ‘Then make sure he stays on the sofa and throws up in the bucket.’
Violet made a face and stomped off. Juliet grabbed the angel dress and her warmly wrapped-up child and headed for the car. She calculated she just about had time to drop Polly off, run back home to do her make-up—which would have to be a refreshing of what she already had on—brush her hair, find a pair of heels and then she could dash back to the church for the service, dragging Josh with her to give Violet some peace to look after Jake. And if he was looking perkier when she got back, maybe she’d pop into Mike and Sarah’s just to say Merry Christmas and drop off the nice bottle of wine she’d bought them. Surely one glass of mulled wine and twenty minutes of adult conversation wouldn’t be too much to ask?
She sat in the carol service, mentally rejigging her To Do list as children sang and recited poems and stumbled their way through Bible readings. She paused while Polly sang her solo, of course, but went straight back to thinking about Christmas cake and stocking fillers right afterwards, and all the while the tinny carols she’d heard in a thousand shops for the past month kept running round inside her head, so loud they threatened to drown out the Angel Gabriel on stage, announcing the birth of the Messiah in a manger made out of corrugated cardboard and hamster bedding.
She left the church feeling slightly, very slightly, less stressed about the rest of the evening. If she hadn’t been looking forward to being just Juliet for a while instead of a busy mum of four, she might have been tempted to climb into bed with a good book, but this was her one invite to do something this year where she wasn’t helping or serving—partly because of a packed timetable, but partly because invitations hadn’t been as forthcoming recently. Old friends weren’t quite sure what to do with her now she and Greg had split up.
Once Polly and Josh were back at home and brushing their teeth before bed, and Jake had been checked on and Violet mollified, Juliet ran upstairs to swipe some more lipstick across her drying lips and refresh her mascara. She let her hair out of her ponytail and brushed it quickly. She was just poking diamond studs into her ear holes when Violet knocked on her door.
‘What’s up?’ Juliet asked, squinting at her reflection in her dressing-table mirror. Had the lighting in here got worse, or was she starting to need glasses?
‘Abby’s invited me to a party and I want to know if I can go.’
Juliet pressed her lips together as she forced the stud through the soft flesh of her earlobe. She wasn’t keen on that girl. Abby had been caught bunking off school once and always seemed to have a crowd of boys hanging round her. ‘Will her parents be home?’
‘I think so.’
Juliet turned to look at her daughter. ‘Think so isn’t good enough. I need to know for certain. Get me her mother’s mobile number and I’ll talk to her about it.’
Violet reacted as if her mother had asked her to hold hands with her while walking down the high street. ‘You’re so embarrassing! No one else’s parents do that!’
Juliet decided not to fight that point now. ‘When is it?’
Violet played with the door handle and looked at her sock-clad feet. ‘Christmas Eve,’ she said quietly.
Juliet spun round, dropping the second stud on the carpet as she did so. ‘Christmas Eve! But you know that’s our special family night!’
Violet shrugged.
Juliet turned and crouched down, running her hand across the carpet in search of her lost earring. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Violet. Right now I haven’t got the time.’
There was a loud huff from the other side of the room. ‘That means no...you always say we’ll talk about it later when you’re going to say no! God, Mum...! I’m not a baby any more. I can go out with my friends if I want to. And I want to...’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘Much more than playing stupid games with Miss Know-It-All and the runts!’
‘Violet!’ Juliet’s reply was terse but not explosive; even so, she felt the rage beginning to boil inside her, making her stomach quiver and her fingertips itchy. ‘I do not have time for this now!’
Violet flounced from the room, and Juliet continued to hunt for her lost earring, all the while feeling like a pressure cooker just about to blow. Eventually she gave up searching, yanked the first earring out and threw it on her dressing table, then shoved her feet in the first pair of heels she found in her wardrobe and clomped downstairs to say goodnight to the kids.
She was met at the bottom of the stairs by Jake, trailing the blanket she’d covered him with, puffing his cheeks out and trying to keep his mouth closed. The way his eyes were popping was slightly alarming.
She kept her voice low, soothing. ‘Jake...where’s the bucket, sweetie?’
He just shook his head and she saw the panic in his eyes.
‘Jake,’ she screamed, forgetting all about low and soothing, ‘where’s the bucket?’
Half a second after that the bucket was a moot point and Juliet was trying not to look at her shoes.
CHAPTER EIGHT
JULIET TRIED TO WORK out what to do first—comfort Jake, clean up the hall for a second time or shout ‘Ewww’ about the slightly warm and squishy stuff that was seeping into her left shoe. She opted for the former and hugged her snivelling six-year-old to her, never minding what else was transferring itself onto her best black trousers.
She guided him upstairs, stood him in the bath and washed him down, and she was just tucking him into bed when the phone rang. She ignored it.
But then the distant cry came from downstairs. ‘Mum! It’s for you!’
Not wanting to yell so close to her poorly son, Juliet stuck her head out of the twins’ bedroom door before she yelled back her answer. ‘Tell them to call back later! I’m busy with your brother.’
Violet’s clumping steps came closer and then Juliet could see her face as she rounded the corner in the staircase. Instead of looking mildly put-upon, as she usually did when required to answer the phone, she was wide-eyed. ‘It’s a policeman,’ she said quietly. ‘He says he needs to talk to you.’
Juliet motioned for her eldest to go and keep an eye on one of her youngest and took the handset from Violet as she passed her on the landing.
‘Hello...?’ she said, as she stared down over the banisters at the ugly-looking puddle in the middle of her otherwise pristine entrance hall. Twice in one day. That had to be some kind of record.
‘Mrs Taylor?’
Juliet’s stomach dropped. She knew that voice, and she was having a horrible sense of déjà vu. ‘What has she done this time?’
There was a weary sigh and then PC Graham asked if she could come and talk to her great-aunt. Apparently, she had installed herself on the back seat of a bus and wasn’t inclined to get off again. She’d got on earlier in the afternoon and had been riding the 281 round its route ever since and was now loudly complaining about the lack of a tour guide.
Juliet closed her eyes and shook her head. That pressure-cooker feeling was back, so bad her ears were threatening to pop. ‘I can’t...’ she mumbled weakly. ‘I just can’t...’
She couldn’t do any of this. Not any more. It was all too much—the driving, the organising, the chasing round after everyone and never having any time for herself.
‘It would really help if you could...’
‘I can’t!’ she said louder. Didn’t the man understand English? ‘I’m on my own and I have a sick child and I just...can’t.’ And then she pressed the button to hang up the phone.
She stared at the handset for a couple of moments, and then she walked into her bedroom and shoved it under the stack of pillows and cushions she always arranged nicely at the head o
f the bed. It might have made a noise under there, but she couldn’t tell if it was a call coming in or the ringing in her ears.
She felt like an inflatable raft on a deep and churning river that was desperately trying to stay above the surface as it headed for the rapids. All she could do was cling on and hope she survived the ride. But instead of the sound of roaring water in her ears, all she could hear was ‘Happy Holidays.’
It was coming.
She could feel it coming.
Juliet picked up the nearest pillow, buried her face in it and screamed for all she was worth.
* * *
VIOLET STOOD IN THE doorway of Juliet’s bedroom, biting her lip.
Juliet began to shake. It started deep down and reverberated through her limbs. She hadn’t been aware of it, but she’d sunk to the floor and now her top half was draped over the edge of the bed, her legs crumpled beneath her. She steadied herself by placing a hand on the mattress and pushed herself to her feet.
It hadn’t been easy to keep a lid on it all before, but it had been do-able. However, since that chat—that argument—with Gemma a couple of days ago, she was starting to think she was losing her mind. From the look on Violet’s face, her daughter was starting to think so too.
Get a grip, Juliet. You can’t have that. You will not turn into your mother. You will not pile all the things on this sweet girl that she piled on you.
She pulled oxygen into her lungs as best she could, considering her ribs felt as if they were being squeezed in a vice and she was finding it strangely difficult to breathe properly. ‘Is Jake okay? He hasn’t been sick again, has he?’ Her voice was high and soft, much like Violet’s, actually. Much like her own when she’d been that age.