gave her a weak smile. She supposed that in her aunt’s dementia-riddled mind, the boundaries between mother and daughter had somehow blurred. And the older she got, the more she saw her mother’s face staring back in the mirror at her. Same brown eyes, same long nose and high cheekbones. Not exactly pretty, but with enough good bone structure that she’d never be plain, either. But in the last few months the grooves in her forehead had grown deeper and her eyes had become more hooded. Her age – and her divorce – were showing up there now.
Sylvia crossed her arms. ‘These people put me in here and won’t let me get out again,’ she said. ‘That’s why I said they had to fetch you. I knew you’d come and sort it all out! You always were such a good girl …’
‘I’m not Mary,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s Juliet. Mary’s daughter.’
A flicker of confusion passed across the old woman’s features. Juliet inched a little closer, but her aunt, suddenly wary and now doubting the identification of her visitor, just backed away.
Juliet sighed. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. She lowered herself, jiggling slightly to push the balls out of the way, until her bottom made contact with the slippery plastic padded floor.
Aunt Sylvia suddenly smiled. ‘Oh, yes! I remember …’ She stared out across the sea of bright plastic for a moment, her lips in a slight curve, lost in a memory that Juliet suspected might evaporate before she managed to vocalise it.
But then she muttered, ‘Lively little thing, Mary’s daughter. She looked like an angel with those big blue eyes and white-blonde curls.’
Something inside Juliet sank. After all the hours spent with her great-aunt over the last couple of months …
She’d been blonder when she’d been little, but her hair had always been straight with a wavy kink. She’d never been blessed with the wispy ringlets her aunt was describing. It wasn’t this sister that Sylvia was remembering.
Her aunt blinked and turned to her again. ‘You know her, you say? Mary’s little girl?’
Juliet opened her mouth to explain it all patiently again, but closed it before any sound emerged. What was the point? ‘Yes, I know her,’ she replied wearily.
Sylvia smiled back. ‘Did she send you to me? She’s been away for such a long time.’
Gemma hadn’t seen Aunt Sylvia since last Easter, and the old woman could really do with regular visits from people she knew and remembered. Not that Juliet’s twice-weekly sessions seemed to be helping much. Back in the summer Sylvia had nearly always called her by name, even if there had been a handful of days when she’d smiled and nodded blankly, then referred to her as ‘that nice young girl’. But as the days had become shorter and greyer, her great-aunt had grown more and more confused, as if her memory was seeping away with the sunlight. Now she only knew who Juliet was one visit in four, and even then her recollection was patchy, fading in and out, like a badly tuned radio.
‘No, Gemma didn’t send me,’ she told her aunt. ‘But she’ll be home for Christmas this year, so you’ll see her then.’
‘Oh, good! Do you think she’ll want a sweetie when she gets here? Little girls like sweeties.’ Aunt Sylvia plunged her hands into the plastic balls beside her, not seeming to register the noisy rattling that echoed through the hangar-like building. She pulled her handbag out and rested it on her lap, then rummaged inside before proudly producing a small object, which she held carefully between thumb and forefinger. Juliet thought it might once have been a boiled sweet, but the lint and other old-lady gunk from the bottom of the bag had disguised it almost completely.
‘Here it is! Do you think she’d like it?’
Juliet thought of Gemma, how everything was so effortless for her, how she breezed in and out of everyone’s lives without a care in the world, and she found herself saying, ‘Yes. I think she’d like it very much. Why don’t you save it for her?’
Juliet had never really considered herself as having a naughty side, but she got a strange warm feeling when she thought of Gemma having not only to suck, but to swallow, the furry little ball of sugar when Juliet dragged her along for her next visit. Because drag Juliet would.
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
