for a drink with Jenni.’
I close the front door and step into watery sunshine. My mother looks after the children for us three days a week, so that I can work for Rob in Riverside Surgery. Rob. The most popular GP in Stansfield. I hear it from our receptionists, from the school-gate mums, from the neighbours, and have no reason to doubt that it’s true. Our surgery list is full. I can’t compete with his popularity. Why would I want to? I’m just one of his practice nurses. All I do is give injections, take blood, and perform breast and gynae checks. Although aspects of my job are boring, I enjoy my three days at work more than my weekdays at home with the children. Weekends at home are fine because Rob is so very helpful. But my weekdays with the children are just plain hard work. Stopping fights, making too many peanut butter sandwiches (Matt’s favourite), wading through burial mounds of laundry. The worst part is Pippa’s school-gate pick-up. Mother seems to relish it, enjoys talking to the school-gate mafia. She fits in. But I don’t. The school-gate mafia; women who are living through their children. Women who don’t have anything else.
I walk towards the surgery. Left at the end of our road, along Stansfield High Street, past the Chinese restaurant, past the fish shop. I cross the road at the traffic lights and enter the surgery through the side door, away from the receptionists and the patients. I hang up my raincoat and open the door to the nurses’ station. Sitting at my desk, I switch the computer on to check my patient list. Eight patients this morning. Two breast checks. Three blood tests. Three sets of travel injections. As I press the buzzer for my first patient, the shadow that started following me on holiday begins to darken.
The shadow is no lighter when I finish at the surgery and am on my way to meet you, Jenni. You are waiting for me after work at the coffee shop, by the bus stop in the centre of town. I see you through the window as I move past the bus queue – sending a text from your iPhone, your glossy hair tumbling across your face. As soon as I enter the coffee shop you look up and beam at me, as if seeing me is the most important part of your day. Jenni, you always try to make people feel like that. As if they are important. It is one of your tricks. I know that now. When we first met, I fell for it.
We knew each other at nursing college, didn’t we, Jenni? But only from a distance. You weren’t really my type. Christian Union. No make-up. Didn’t look men in the eye. Rumour had it you didn’t go out on Saturday nights, stayed in to prepare your mind for the Lord on Sunday. Jenni. What were you like?
Our paths crossed again on a couples’ night nearly six years ago at our local NCT co-ordinator’s house, stranded together like beached whales on a low-slung sofa, so heavily pregnant that we could hardly change positions. Mark and John incubating inside us, almost ready to be born. I was the expert because I already had Pippa. You were stick thin except for your bump, which overwhelmed you, looking so worried as the NCT co-ordinator droned on about Braxton Hicks contractions and TENS machines and whether they worked. I looked at you as you listened, chocolate brown eyes closed in fear, and wanted to protect you. To hold you against me and tell you it’s not as bad as it sounds. (Even though with Pippa it was far worse.)
At the end of the meeting we went to the pub, I can’t remember which one of the four of us suggested it, but we all thought it was a good idea. We went to the White Swan, down by the river at the end of our road. A cold October night, sitting by the fire drinking orange juice and tonic water whilst the men cradled their pints. We were so engrossed in our own conversation, we didn’t talk to them much. It took me so long to find you, Jenni, the first female friend I really cared about. All through school and university, men had been my companions. Women can be so bitchy, don’t you think? So temperamental. Men are kinder. Simpler. I had up to this point socialised with them more as a rule. But then came the female-dominated world of pregnancy and early childhood that led me to you.
Today, with Mark and John at school, and another birth behind each of us, we hug clumsily across a small wooden table in the coffee shop opposite the surgery. Across the coffee you are already halfway through drinking. Across the crumbs of someone else’s cake. I sit down on an uncomfortable wooden stool, which scrapes across the floor as I position it.
‘How was your holiday?’ you ask.
‘Awful.’
‘That wasn’t what Rob said.’
Your words punch into me.
‘When did you see Rob?’ I ask.
‘I didn’t. He texted me.’
‘Texted you?’
‘Because he was worried about you.’
You wave and smile at the waitress, who starts to weave towards our table.
We order fresh coffee for you, and chocolate cake and cappuccino for me. The waitress presses our order into a small handheld machine and disappears to the next table.
‘Why is Rob so worried about me?’
‘He said you weren’t yourself on holiday. You didn’t seem to enjoy spending time with the children, apparently.’
‘Well, did you when you were on holiday?’
Your toffee brown eyes widen as you look at me.
‘Yes.’
Yes?
Jenni. You sanctimonious, husband-stealing bitch.
When I arrive home, chicken nuggets and chips are beginning to sizzle in the oven as my mother listens to Pippa read. The boys are making strange shapes with Play Doh. From the moment I open the door I feel superfluous. A feeling I do not like. A feeling I frequently have to live with these days.
‘Hello, Mummy,’ the boys say without turning from their Play Doh shapes.
‘Good day?’ Heather asks me, without lifting her eyes from Pippa’s reading book. Pippa continues reading in a strange monotone, high-pitched and proud. Two monkeys are stuck in a tree. Who is going to help them down? The monkeys’ mother, apparently. Uninterested in the antics of the monkeys, I go upstairs to my bedroom to change. As I unbutton my nurse’s uniform to throw it in the laundry basket (which is full again), my mobile phone rings. I pick up.
‘Hi Carly. It’s Craig.’
Craig. Jenni’s husband. Craig. Handsome. Too handsome. The sort of good looks that I have difficulty trusting. He can have whatever he wants too easily, with too many of the opposite sex. Or so it seems to me. But you don’t think like that, do you, Jenni? You love him. You trust him. I mustn’t judge him by his looks. Just because he can, doesn’t mean he does. Or does it?
‘I’m planning a surprise birthday party at the pub for Jenni on Friday night. Can you and Rob make it?’ Craig asks.
‘That sounds great.’
Dancing to please Jenni. Great, Craig, great. We all dance to please bitch-whore Jenni.
Friday night. Walking to the pub, arm in arm with Rob, carrying the lilies I bought for Jenni. A chilly summer evening, the pavement still wet from earlier rain, making my world look grey – grey upon grey. The lilies make me think of my father’s funeral, of the curved petals crawling across his casket – soon to be destroyed by the heat of the furnace. My mother standing next to the casket, trying not to cry. Mother, still so bereft without my father, seven years since his death just before Pippa was born. Seven years of centring her life on us.
As soon as I enter the pub, I push death away. We are wrapped in noise and warmth. Jenni moves towards me, smiling. So pleased to see me. Trying to make me feel warm. Trying to make me feel special.
I hand her the lilies, and the card I have chosen, and she shrieks with delight. A small shriek from the back of her throat.
Jenni. They are only lilies.
A few minutes later we can’t get near Jenni and Craig; so many well-wishers have turned up. I sit at a small rickety table by the log fire, which the landlord has lit even though it’s summer, while Rob heads for the bar. Jenni is surrounded by people, her head is thrown back. She’s laughing. I stare at her: Jenni