1

They bowled up pushing buggies. Dragging toddlers flushed with sleep. Manhandling bikes and scooters. Carting toys and waterproofs. Mums, dads, nannies, child-minders. Grandparents (like her). Grouping and regrouping. Greeting one another as though a lifetime had passed since they last met. Swapping party invitations and snippets of information – cake sales, after school clubs, play-dates. The latest gossip on The New Teacher.

At three-thirty on the dot, a tide of little people smelling of disinfectant, powder paint and hair-that-could-do-with-washing flooded out through various doors, teachers and classroom assistants checking (with what seemed to Miriam a desultory glance) that each child paired up with the designated adult. The waiting army went into action. Doling out apples and biscuits and muesli bars. Calming tantrums. Praising paintings lethal with gobbets of wet paint. Enticing their fractious charges home with promises of chocolate or loom bands or Panini cards. It was the same every weekday and Miriam had become trapped in the predictable loop of it.

As usual Max was out first, racing towards her, anorak worn Batman-style, its hood concealing his dark hair.

‘Gam,’ he yelled, ‘Gamma,’ as if she might overlook him.

‘Hello, sweetheart.’ She stooped to kiss his pungent forehead.

‘Did you remember—?’

‘Of course,’ she said, producing from her jacket pocket a cockroach (or something equally repulsive) encapsulated in a cube of resin.

Max held it aloft, rotating and scrutinising it from every angle, a faraway look in his eyes. ‘It’s my best thing.’

‘Gamma.’ Rosa came pelting across the playground, coat fastened on the wrong buttons, socks round her ankles. ‘Can I go to Julia’s? Just for a bit. Mum won’t mind.’ She scowled, anticipating refusal.

‘Not this evening.’

She stamped her foot. ‘You’re so mean. Mum would let me go.’

Miriam was accustomed to Rosa’s modus operandi. Persistence. Defiance. Noise. So different from her biddable younger brother.

‘It’s Wednesday,’ she said. ‘Piano lesson. Remember?’

Rosa threw back her head, screwed up her face and shouted ‘I hate the stupid piano.’

Several adults were watching to see how she would deal with her granddaughter’s developing tantrum. When she grabbed Rosa’s hand and yanked her towards the school gate, she sensed an intake of judgemental breath from the spectators.

The kitchen was snug, filled with the smell of chicken casserole. The muffled sound of piano scales, faltering then beginning again, came from the living room. Max was sitting at the table absorbed in his drawing, the tip of his tongue visible between his lips.

‘That looks exciting,’ Miriam said, pointing at a tangle of colourful shapes.

‘It’s Goliath,’ he said. ‘The bit where he gets eaten by aliens.’

He grinned and she loved him with a fierce ache that made it hard to breathe. The world he’d been born into was precarious. Filled with malevolence and despair. It was intolerable to think of his being bullied or frightened or harmed in any way, yet unrealistic to imagine he wouldn’t.

‘I’m starving,’ he said. ‘What’s for tea?’

‘Chicken, green beans and mashed potato,’ she said.

‘Yummy.’

She tickled the silky skin on the back of his neck and he scrunched up his shoulders and giggled.

The piano had stopped and Rosa and Luke were laughing.

Miriam thought back. Every Monday, after school, as her friends were dawdling home, she had set off in the opposite direction, for her own weekly piano lesson. She’d made little progress with the impossible instrument, and if she and her teacher, Miss Halse, had ever laughed together she certainly didn’t remember. (But the old lady’s eau-de-cologne-and-sherry smell, and the touch of the bony hands lifting her wrists and forcing her fingers onto the keys, had stayed with her for fifty years.)

‘Sounds like they’ve finished,’ she said. ‘Off you go and wash your hands.’

The children were both good eaters and had soon cleared their plates. Throughout the summer, they’d played in the garden after supper but it was November and they were confined to indoor activities. Rosa wasn’t good at amusing herself and her default was tormenting Max but this evening she was happily threading beads on a cord and Max was immersed in a complex Lego project. As Miriam pottered in the kitchen, it was easy to forget that she was sixty-one years old and the children murmuring in the next room were not her own.

When Miriam first moved in, she’d waited to eat supper with her daughter and sometimes it was nine o’clock before they’d cleared away the dishes. Lately she’d taken to eating with Rosa and Max. This suited her digestive system and the children were better behaved when they had adult company.

Naomi came down from kissing her sleeping children. ‘Both out for the count, thank God.’

‘I’ve kept you some food,’ Miriam said, and while she ladled chicken casserole into a bowl, Naomi moaned about work and her colleagues whom Miriam heard about regularly but would never meet. Naomi’s job (‘in PR’) was a mystery to her but she listened with what she hoped was a sympathetic expression, now and again muttering a strategic ‘oh, dear’.

When Naomi ran out of steam, it was Miriam’s turn to report on domestic matters. Not for the first time she felt as if her life had flipped back thirty years, Naomi replacing Sam as head-of-the-household whilst once again she, Miriam, played the supporting role.

‘There’s a parcel for you. From Amazon,’ Miriam said. ‘I put it on your chest of drawers. Oh, and Rosa’s been invited to a birthday party.’ She flattened out the sheet of paper which had obviously been in Rosa’s coat pocket for days. ‘Sunday. Eleven o’clock. At the Leisure Centre. “Tom’s Trampoline Party”. She’s quite excited about it.’

‘Well she won’t be able to go,’ Naomi said. ‘David’s taking them to his mother’s for the weekend.’

‘She won’t like that.’

‘I’m afraid she’ll have to lump it.’

Naomi’s phone chirped an incoming text. ‘It’s Sally. She wants to know if I’ll go out for a drink tomorrow evening. That’s okay, isn’t it?’

Miriam hesitated. ‘Actually I’m going out.’

‘Really? Where?’

‘The cinema. Sorry.’

Naomi sighed. ‘I’ll just have to tell her I can’t make it.’

Rosa and Max delivered to school and a wash in the machine, Miriam rooted out the Arts Centre programme. The film showing that evening didn’t appeal but she needed to spend the evening away from the house and the Arts Centre was as good a place as any.

She felt bad about lying to Naomi. Such a spineless, juvenile lie too. But now and again it became necessary to remind her daughter (and herself) that she wasn’t endlessly available. Recently she’d come across the term ‘mission creep’. She wasn’t entirely sure what it meant but it seemed to fit the way her life was being smothered.

Of course she should have considered all the angles before accepting Naomi’s offer to move in with them, but at that point she’d been incapable of deciding what to wear, let alone how to salvage her life. Medication had eased her through those first grim weeks and, looking back, she couldn’t help wondering whether things – vital things – had been discussed, agreed upon, when her brain had been candy floss.

She was wrestling her duvet into a fresh cover when the phone rang. Without fail, her parents called her on Sunday evening so seeing their number flash up on this, a weekday morning, was cause for concern. For octogenarians they were remarkably on the ball but they were also worryingly frail. A fall or a chest infection – and that would be it.

‘Dad?’ she said. ‘Everything okay?’

‘Can’t I ring my only daughter for a chat? Does something have to be wrong?’

Her parents hadn’t changed in twenty years. They were frozen in time like Max’s cockroach. She didn’t need Skype to know that her father was kitted out in shapeless grey trousers and pilled cardigan; her mother in a beige (or taupe or brown) dress, dab of rouge on each cheek, scant hair coaxed into a French pleat.

‘Of course not. It’s always lovely to hear from you.’

‘Can you believe it’s a month since you came to see us,’ he said.

Her parents lived a hundred miles away. Did they expect her to pop in every five minutes? But sunlight was flooding the room, turning dust motes into powdered gold, and she wasn’t going to spoil the day with an argument.

‘Really? I don’t know where the time goes,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to tell us that.’

Her mother was whispering in the background.

‘What’s Mum saying?’ she said.

‘I’ll put her on.’

She pictured her mother taking the receiver, handling it as if it were a piece of the finest porcelain.

‘Hello? Miriam?’

‘Hello, Mum. What’s the problem?’

‘It’s not really a problem, dear. Well… We’re defrosting the freezer. We’ve got a piece of beef that needs eating. It’s too much for the two of us. We thought you might come and help us out.’

Miriam swished her hand through the shaft of light, setting the motes spiralling. Easier and cheaper to bung the wretched meat in the bin, but such a suggestion was unthinkable. ‘Actually I’m a bit busy this weekend, Mum.’

The children would be off with David, and Naomi had plans to go gallivanting with friends. ‘Busy’ amounted to having the house and weekend entirely to herself – a rare treat.

‘Oh. Oh. I see. Well. Never mind.’

She heard her father’s voice demanding ‘What did she say?’ and her mother’s ‘She’s busy.’

‘Miriam?’ Her father had retrieved the phone. ‘Busy? It’s the weekend.’ His voice dipped as he ratcheted up the pathos. ‘Why can’t you come and see your old mum and dad?’

Her second’s hesitation allowed her father to jump in. ‘So that’s settled then. We’ll see you on Saturday morning.’

‘Afternoon,’ she said, salvaging a few precious hours of her weekend.