The alarm went off far too early the following morning, but Juliet didn’t have the time, or the energy, to argue with it. After dropping the kids off at their respective schools, she headed out of town to one of the nearby retail parks. Both boys wanted this year’s must-have toy – an action figure that did all sort of things Juliet couldn’t even remember, and didn’t really want to – but the Internet company she’d ordered them from had emailed her to say they only had one left in stock.
None of the other big websites could promise to deliver it before Christmas, if they even had it in stock at all, and the companies that did ‘click and collect’ were all showing it was sold out on their websites. How could she give one boy their dream present and not the other? But she knew that many of those big retailers didn’t allow you to reserve on the website if there were only a couple left in store. Her only hope was to try any place that might stock it and hope they still had one left on the shelf that wasn’t showing up for reservation on the website.
She was there early enough to find a parking space and jump out, check Toy World, discover they didn’t have any but the branch in Maidstone might have, and jump back in her car within fifteen minutes. By the time she got to Maidstone, however, it was a different story. When she’d scoured the shelves, trying to see if one was stuck at the back or hidden behind something else in the wrong spot, and had come up empty, she queued up at customer services. Of course, the store only had one member of staff on duty, an unusually spotty and slow-witted junior who needed to ask his supervisor to do everything for him. Probably even wipe his nose.
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