the door shut.
What was it she’d yelled at the Reverend Walker? Something about Sudanese orphans…?
Afraid, she phoned Robert, but Robert didn’t answer his phone.
She pulled up in front of Village Montessori nearly twenty minutes late—which, following stringent regulations, she’d have to pay for by the minute—with a full-blown migraine; but at least the rain had stopped. She retrieved Flo from the sensory room where she was lying on her back with fifteen other babies—who looked as if they’d just been thrown out of heaven, and landed on a rug of synthetic fur—all jerking their arms and legs towards the ceiling where silver spirals were revolving, overlooked severely by the black and white faces on the Wimmer-Ferguson Mind Shapes mural. There was a CD of rainforest sounds playing.
Mary handed her Flo from among the minute bodies jerking on the floor, and Kate wasn’t entirely sure—if it hadn’t been for Mary—that she would have recognised her daughter. The lighting in the sensory room was eerily low and Kate wondered how Mary coped, sitting among the parakeets and the jerking, snuffling bodies, with the door shut. Surely Village Montessori was in breach of EU health and safety regulations?
Once in her mother’s arms, Flo showed absolutely no sign of recognition. It must have been the same with Findlay at this age, but with Flo, for some reason, Kate felt less able to cope. Flo twisted her head blearily from side to side, blinked her wet eyes at nothing in particular, posited a dribble of something white and curdled on Kate’s lapel then concussed herself on her collarbone—and started to cry. Kate felt a wave of violence pass through her that she found difficult to control—because of the migraine.
Her arms started to shake and she experienced an almost vertiginous nausea as she tried to remember the names of familiar sights and sounds. This had been happening to her at least twice a day since Flo was born—the first time, slumped in a hospital bed at King’s, she had been staring past the mass of bouquets on the table at newborn Flo, in her Perspex hospital tank, and there, right in front of her, her daughter turned into a piglet.
Findlay, sitting on the end of the hospital bed, pushing a small fire engine with a broken ladder along the railings, became a centipede, and Robert became a bear—a huge bear clumsily trying to pull the blue curtains round the bed for some privacy.
Now, all she wanted to do was hurl Flo over Mary’s shoulder through the silver spirals and into the wall behind her, where the impact would no doubt make various bits of Flo burst open and trickle over Wimmer-Ferguson’s impervious black and white faces. Then everybody—including Mary—would be able to see that Flo wasn’t a human baby after all; she was in fact nothing more than a tiny pig.
Kate stood with her arms shaking, listening to Mary give her a rundown on all Flo’s bowel movements since 8.30 a.m.
Then it passed, and after it had passed, she remembered to smile adoringly at Flo—like the woman on the front of the Johnson & Johnson’s wet wipes packet—and nod and say ‘great’ in response to Mary’s monologue.
Mary looked surprised, indicating that ‘great’ wasn’t quite right.
‘Everything okay?’ she asked.
‘Everything’s fine,’ Kate said, hoping she was still smiling.
‘I saw Findlay today—he’s a big boy now—he’ll be leaving us soon?’
Kate was aware of Mary—who had been Findlay’s primary carer as well—watching her.
‘I know,’ she said vaguely.
‘Where’s he going?’
A pause. ‘St Anthony’s.’
‘That’s good—a good school. A lot of my friends—their children, they all went there and now they go to university.’
Mary was smiling at her.
‘And Findlay—he told me Flo had an accident this morning. He told me she fell off the bed.’
‘I know,’ Kate said again, sounding as though she was confirming gossip she’d heard about another person’s child. ‘She did sort of roll off—onto the duvet, fortunately. Our duvet was on the floor.’
Mary carried on smiling, and carried on watching. ‘I think she has a bump, just on her left temple. There’s a swelling.’
Mary’s finger hovered over the pink and green protrusion.
‘But the duvet was on the floor,’ Kate insisted, taking in Flo’s swollen forehead.
Mary nodded. ‘I didn’t put her to sleep this morning.’
‘She hasn’t slept?’
‘I didn’t want to—not with that swelling. It’s not good for them to sleep after a head injury.’
‘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
