Page 5 of Just for the Season

‘Thank you.’ No smile.

I wonder how she knows Ellie. I am not going to ask. I do not need to know, and I won’t, I hope, ever see this woman again, so it’s irrelevant to my life.

‘No problem,’ I say.

As I turn to leave, she picks up her fork and very deliberately takes a big mouthful of destroyed cake.

‘Don’t forget the antibiotics,’ I say.

She chews and swallows – somehow managing to look beautiful throughout – and then says, ‘Yummmm. Delicious.’

‘Antibiotics?’

She rolls her eyes at me. ‘I’m not going to forget.’

‘Okay. Good news.’ I hesitate for a moment, worrying about Maurice. ‘Why don’t we do the antibiotics together?’ I suggest eventually. Why can’t she just bloody do them so I can go? Or let me do them.

‘Because I am not a child and I can manage by myself?’

‘Yeah.’ I can’t leave until he’s had them, I decide. ‘I’ll just stay and check everything’s fine. Gave my word to Ellie.’ I check my watch; I really need to get home very soon.

Frankie takes another very deliberate mouthful and I decide that I don’t have time for this.

I take the three strides necessary to cross the room, open the fridge door and take out the antibiotics bottle, and, grabbing a handful of fishy biscuits from the box that Ellie keeps in the corner of the worktop, call, ‘Maurice, fishy.’

Maurice is an intelligent cat and immediately strolls into the kitchen and heads straight for my hand. I feed him the biscuits and then catch him by his collar. Shortly afterwards, I’ve given him the antibiotics and am rinsing the syringe.

‘Did you genuinely think I couldn’t give a cat some medicine?’ enquires Frankie icily.

‘I’m sure you can but I wasn’t certain, and I need to go and did not have time to wait for you to finish eating.’

‘Right.’

I should say nothing else and just leave, but can’t help adding, ‘Maurice and Ellie should count themselves lucky that you didn’t grab the antibiotics and spill them all over the floor.’

‘If you are referring to the cake, it was in fact you who grabbed it and caused it to fall onto the floor. It was my cake, because I was at the front of the queue. You reached round behind me for it and if you hadn’t been holding it out, my bag would not have hit it and it would not have landed on the floor and I would have had my cake with its icing intact.’

‘I explained that I wanted the cake.’ I can’t entirely argue with her; I did reach round her. But I had very good reason.

‘And I explained that I wanted it. And I was at the front of the queue.’

The if-looks-could-kill expression in her eyes is so extreme that I laugh.

She does not join me in laughing. She just raises an eyebrow and takes another mouthful. I should go.

‘Agree to differ,’ I say, and walk out of the door while she continues to glare.

* * *

I rush home – it’s my daughter Ruby’s fourteenth birthday today and I have to be there to greet her when she gets back from school – only to see, when I open the front door, her school backpack, sports bag and Doc Marten boots strewn across the hall. Fuck.

I dive straight for the kitchen and find her sitting at the table drumming her fingers and looking at me with her eyes full of even more disdain than Frankie’s were earlier.

At least she isn’t holed up in her bedroom.

I place my bag from the café, which contains my half of the ruined carrot cake, plus three other cakes I hope she might like (she won’t but worth a shot), on the table, and say, ‘Happy birthday!’ with ludicrously fake-sounding jolliness. It’s hard to be truly jolly when you’re terrified that you have yet again completely messed up with your daughter. ‘I have cake!’

‘Thanks. Nice of you to be home when I got back.’