The Misadventures of a Playground Mother (4 page)

I
didn't feel
brave enough to drive in such appalling weather conditions. Granted it wasn't very far, but the roads would be treacherous. I located my phone and dialled the number of the local taxi firm; at least if any car was going to slide through a hedge it wasn't going to be mine. The number connected and an irate woman said, ‘Yes!' Well, you could hear by the enthusiasm in her voice that she was chuffed to be working on New Year's Day.

I was just about to speak when she screamed at me down the receiver, ‘It's on its way!'

‘What's on its way?' I innocently asked.

‘The taxi is on its way, it's just round the next corner.'

‘How can the taxi possibly be on its way? I haven't even ordered the bloody thing yet.'

My patience was beginning to wear a little thin. I rattled my car keys in Penelope's direction. I quickly swapped my slippers for wellies and stomped down the path towards the car. I was still dressed in my onesie, smelling, if I'm truly honest, worse than BB's latest perfume; I hadn't been near a shower all day.

The car slid down the lane on the icy road, the sky was darkened with snow and the street lamps were barely visible through the thickly falling snow. The only reliable light source we had to guide us back to Penelope's house was the car's headlights. There was no denying the night had an eerie feel about it. There was not a single person or car in sight. Well, there wouldn't be would there? Even the flipping taxi that was meant to be round the next corner was nowhere to be seen. Everyone else had the common sense to stay indoors, curled up in the warmth with a drink whilst munching on leftover turkey sandwiches. Mercifully, Penelope didn't speak a word on the short journey to her house.

I pulled up outside her house, well when I say pulled up, what I actually mean is the car bumped up the curb slamming straight into her recycle bin which proceeded to spill the contents of her rubbish all over the front garden. The house was in complete darkness, which was strange as Rupert was meant to be home. Penelope stepped over an empty can of baked beans in the snow as she glared at me. Placing the key into the lock, she pushed the front door ajar. We both stood like statues for a moment as we witnessed some sort of flashing emerging from the living room, then looked at each other. ‘We have burglars,' she whispered. ‘Bloody hell, the house is being robbed!'

So not only had Frisky Pensioner died revealing BB as a budget prostitute, or that the Farrier had moved in next-door-but-one, and that Penelope had gatecrashed my house, Wearing only my onesie, I was about to come face-to-face with a burglar on my birthday. I was not sure who would be more scared, me or him.

Penelope opened the cloakroom door slowly, and bending down, she grabbed one of Rupert's work boots from the shoe rack, the type with a steel toecap, and forced it into my hand. Why give it to me? Did she expect me to pummel the burglar to death?

We stood as still as possible; I could swear that my heart was pounding so fast it was jumping out of my chest. We listened carefully to a faint moaning sound. Maybe the burglar was in distress, wounded. Possibly, he had sliced his leg on the broken windowpane as he clambered through. We took very small steps, tiptoeing towards the living room door. We both froze to the spot. I mouthed at Penelope, ‘What's the plan?' Well, she was no bloody use as she shrugged her shoulders back in return.

My instincts kicked in; I held my left hand up towards Penelope and as I practised my 3-2-1 with my fingers – I burst through the door armed with Rupert's boot in my right hand.

Penelope pushed through the door behind me nearly tipping me off balance shouting, ‘Let's have him,' at the top of her voice – giving the impression she was as hard as nails.

There he was, lying on the settee with the lights dimmed. I was distracted by the slight moaning sound escaping from the television. Squinting, I witnessed a naked couple in a very compromising position. Rupert was startled and appeared to be in mid flow – his trousers and boxer shorts pushed down to his ankles. I couldn't believe my eyes as I followed the movement of his hand and realised he was right in the middle of jerking his turkey; he was having a five knuckle shuffle and we weren't talking Strictly Come Dancing!

Rupert's New Year's Day was visibly going with a bang; Penelope leaving him had noticeably not affected his mojo one bit.

‘You dirty bastard,' Penelope screeched snatching the boot from my grasp and lobbing it straight at Rupert's head. Rupert tried to dodge the flying boot but with no success, he fell flat on his back tripping up over his own trousers that were tangled around his legs. The boot hit Rupert square in the face. I was quite impressed with Penelope's aim. However, Rupert's aim wasn't as accurate as I noticed he had already shot his bodily fluids at some point all over the lovely, deep shag pile carpet. In all honesty, I didn't know where to look, but as Rupert was now sprawled out on the floor trying to grab his pants I took the opportunity to have a sneaky peep. Well, I knew I would never have an affair with Mr Kensington, but I was curious to see what he had to offer.

'Wow ... it's really not all that big,' I thought to myself, handing him a tissue from the box that was strategically placed next to the sofa. I didn't know what all the fuss was about; it wasn't even average which just led me to ponder what the entire population of women in the village had seen in him? I concluded it must be either his personality, or that he actually knew what to do with it. Luckily, for me, I was never going to find out.

What do we do now? The three of us were just standing there awkwardly. Rupert didn't know whether to pull his trousers up or hold his head that by now had probably begun to throb.

I was going to make a comment about the three wise monkeys, as I undoubtedly would be saying nothing after hearing and seeing all. The porn film was still playing out in the background with a woman on the screen doing; well actually, I don't quite know what she was doing. I grabbed the remote control and switched it off and the room fell into complete darkness. I was waiting for Rupert to say, ‘I was watching that', but I think at this point he didn't know where the other boot was and valued his life. As we were plunged into darkness my phone beeped and lit up with a text message, I swiped the screen to see a message from Matt.

‘Where are you? You have been ages. x'

‘Caught Rupert exercising his right arm whilst watching porn, not a birthday present I was expecting; it would be funny if it wasn't so tragic. x'

Penelope was seething and Rupert was not a pretty sight. I took this as a cue to abandon the scene fast by offering to retrieve the children's clothes from their bedrooms, and left the soon-to-be-divorced couple to it.

I heard Penelope screaming at Rupert while I opened the children's wardrobes and stuffed clean clothes for the morning into carrier bags. I located the wash bags and loaded them up with the children's toothbrushes, and then grabbed a couple of teddy bears off their beds.

My phone beeped with another text message from Matt.
‘Well, at least someone is getting some action tonight!'

When I returned downstairs with the children's clothes, Penelope was already outside sitting in the freezing car waiting for me. Rupert was now standing sheepishly in the living room doorway with his trousers finally pulled up. I couldn't bring myself to make eye contact. I found myself still staring at his lower regions.

‘Your zip is undone,' I stated, marching straight past him and shutting the front door behind me.

We made the short drive home in the same appalling weather conditions, and in complete silence. Well what did we have to chatter about? I'm not sure we were up to comparing notes on men's body parts

We arrived back at the house and sat down in front of the roaring fire to defrost. Matt was pretending nothing had happened but I knew by the look on his face after reading my text message that he was dying to laugh at the fact Rupert had been caught. He'd rustled up a tray of leftover sandwiches and placed them down on the coffee table in front of us and poured us each a glass of wine. I was extremely hungry and seemed to have worked up an appetite in the last hour. Penelope looked worn out; give her her due, enough was enough and she had finally made the brave decision to leave Rupert, which not only meant she was single but it catapulted Little Jonny and Annabel into a new set of statistics – children that come from a broken home.

While sitting in her chair and sipping her wine, Penelope appeared agitated.

‘It could only happen to me; I thought I was being burgled and what do we find but Rupert making his own entertainment. I have to say though, when I glimpsed at the telly screen I wanted to pause the movie (movie in the lowest sense of the word), but I could have sworn the woman on the screen looked like Botox Bernie, that mother from the school playground.'

That thought
had
crossed my mind; something told me we had barely scratched the surface of the great BB and what she got up to in her spare time. Blimey, I had forgotten Penelope hadn't been present to witness Frisky Pensioner's body being removed and BB sporting the ‘classy look' in her flea-ridden chinchilla, and of course, she was unaware that the Farrier had acquired a new property.

T
he following morning
, the house was run like a military operation; there were six children to wake up, feed and get ready for school and nursery school. I woke up an hour before the chaos started and grabbed a quick shower. I was back on Planet Earth, clean and looking as if I was back in the land of the living. That was it. The Christmas holidays were over, we were back to the same routine, taking our lives into our own hands as I survived the pretentious mothers loitering at the school gates each day – My two least favourite words: school and gates.

I needed to prepare myself mentally for the next six weeks and then I would be rewarded with a week off to recharge my batteries during half-term.

I rallied all the children round, washed, dressed, clothed them, and then dished up bowls of cereal. As I placed the empty packets into the recycling bin, I thought I had never seen boxes of Cheerios be demolished so fast. A quick brush of the teeth and we were nearly ready to go. I packed satchels with lunch boxes full of tuna mayonnaise sandwiches made with chunky malted bread, and slices of leftover birthday cake wrapped up in a serviette – not forgetting leaky water bottles – Father Christmas had failed to remember to bring new ones – it must be his age. The children were bundled up warm with their feet stuffed into snow boots, their bodies wrapped up tightly in their coats, and woolly scarves draped around their necks to keep the warmth from escaping. I opened the door to start the trudge through the crisp snow, when I realised Penelope hadn't emerged from her slumbers.

‘Penelope, it's time for the school run, are you ready?' I shouted up the stairs.

All six pairs of eyes looked up the stairs as Penelope appeared in her fluffy slippers and PJs, with her hair tied back in a bobble and not a scrap of make-up in sight, giving the impression she wasn't about to go anywhere.

‘I'm sorry, I can't face the school run today,' she snivelled. ‘Everyone will be talking about me. Will you take the children?' she asked, as she dropped her head and sniffled away her tears.

I knew from the antics of yesterday that I could presume Penelope was newly separated with a good chance of becoming divorced. It wasn't that I lacked sympathy; I did truly feel her pain – which I had a feeling would also become my pain – but the children still needed stability from their mother and walking with them to the playground on the first day of their new term at school would have been a good start. Penelope needed to grasp the fact that some of the mothers do have a life other than at the school gates, and are not interested in tittle-tattle of any sort. But yes, granted there were others who thrived on gossip. Those mothers tended to stick out like a sore thumb; the ones you knew to avoid. They would usually congregate outside the gates in their little cliques with their posh pooches. Even the bloody dog would be wearing a Barbour jacket but I was sure it would be a fake, just like theirs.

I wasn't sure how Penelope concluded she would be the topic of conversation in the school playground as there was only Matt and me who knew of the split and Rupert's leisure activity from the previous night, and I wouldn't be sharing that misdemeanour with anyone at the school gate.

Penelope was lucky that Camilla Noland had left the village, if the Farrier's account of events was true, otherwise, there would have been a possibility that the whole village would have found out by now – Camilla was a terrible gossip. Anyway, I think Penelope was worrying over nothing. Surely, the topic of conversation would more than likely be the antics of BB that had sealed Frisky Pensioner's fate. Actually, I owed BB; that was a job well done.

I hurried the older children out of the door; their arms interlocked to steady themselves and to avoid falling over onto the ice. After strapping Matilda and Daisy into the pushchair, I set off through the slush towards the end of the drive. Glancing over at the Farrier's house, I noticed he was closing his front door behind him and that he and his daughter were en route to the school playground.

I waved, and he smiled back at me. They slipped their way down the path and caught up with the train of children. His daughter Rosie tagged onto Annabel, Penelope's daughter, who was holding up the rear.

‘How are you this morning? Did you both settle OK in the house?' I asked the Farrier in my most pleasant neighbourly manner.

‘It felt strange at first; once Rosie had fallen asleep, I helped myself to sleep with a couple of glasses of whisky. Funnily enough, there was no ice in the freezer but I did find a set of false teeth in a glass in a cupboard,' he replied.

‘New start, New Year; please tell me you didn't drink from the glass with the teeth?' I said, and winked.

He laughed. ‘Of course I didn't, but I just kept thinking they were going to start chattering at me and have a conversation.'

I didn't really know what to make of the Farrier. I didn't know if he had a lady in his life; he'd probably had a bellyful after his ex-wife. As far as I could judge, from yesterday, and this morning on the walk to school, he was a caring man, who looked after his daughter beautifully.

This wasn't the impression that Penelope had given me, but we all should know never to judge a person on another person's opinion, especially when it's Penelope's fuelled by Camilla Noland.

By the time we reached the school gates, the cold had captured our noses and each of us looked like a relation of Rudolf. The cliques were gathered as usual in their usual spots on the playground, and even with the snow on the ground, you knew which territory you belonged to. I could hear BB, but took a while to locate her, now she was minus the flea-ridden chinchilla. She was dressed in a puffa jacket and was sporting new Ugg boots – probably fake – but such different attire from that of forty-eight hours ago. The Farrier tapped my arm and told me he would catch me later on. He walked off along the gritted path in the of the school office probably to inform the teachers of Camilla's abandonment of their only daughter, the death of his father, and a change of address.

I was standing in a corner of the playground, when I was suddenly aware that heads were turning in my direction. Maybe Penelope was correct, maybe they did all know what Rupert had been up to last night, and the fact she had left him high and dry.

Then I realised that they weren't looking at me, but at a woman standing next to me, who was busy reassuring her daughter that today would be okay. A new mother; the Playground Mafia would be delighted and no doubt would be desperate to subject her to a full interrogation. They would soon be firing questions at her and trying to uncover her life story – her husband, his salary and more importantly what level reading book her daughter was on. Even the mother with the small pooch wearing the fake Barbour jacket that I had passed on my way into the playground had now tied the dog up at the gate and assembled with the rest of the clique so she wouldn't miss a trick.

This time last year, that had been me. I wanted to tell the mother to run – to run like hell and get out of here. BB was straining her neck to catch a glimpse of the competition, let's face it not much competition as this woman didn't look like a hooker and actually appeared quite normal. In a bizarre twist of events, I noticed BB turn away almost immediately after spotting the new mum. It was a toss-up as to whether BB was going to throw up, pass out or maybe have a heart attack like her love interest had forty-eight hours earlier. Something wasn't quite right; BB had become very quiet way too quickly. This to me suggested only one thing; there was history between these two women. There was more to her reaction than met the eye. If a stranger could silence BB in less than two minutes then I had an inkling she was going to be my kind of friend.

The mother was quite ordinary looking. She was of average height, and average build with plain bobbed brown hair. Her face wasn't caked in make-up; her fingernails were clean; nothing out of the ordinary to report. She would be like a lamb to the slaughter once the Playground Mafia got their claws into her. She smiled at me.

‘Hi I'm Melanie, as you can probably guess, we are new. I'm not sure if it's worse for the mother or the child on the first day of a new school.'

‘Pleased to meet you, I'm Rachel,' I said with a friendly smile and stretched out my hand.

‘I feel like I'm under scrutiny,' she grinned grasping hold of my hand and shaking it.

She was being watched all right, except by BB. The majority of the playground mothers were twisting their heads in our direction.

‘Don't worry about that lot; I was new a little while back. Are you living in the village?'

‘Yes, we've moved into the house that is set amongst those beautiful acres of land on the outskirts of the village but unfortunately the acres belong to the local farmer not us. We can't grumble though, it does provide us with some fantastic scenery. The house was repossessed from its previous owner about a month ago and I couldn't believe my luck when we purchased it at an unbelievable bargain price. Well, when I say us, I mean my daughter and me; I've been a single mum for years. Well, since the day she was born,' she added.

‘Are you from this area originally then?' I enquired.

‘Years ago I lived around here, it didn't work out at the time but I decided to move back recently, so here I am.'

I did wonder to myself why it hadn't worked out but it wasn't my place to ask her. That was her business. We had only just met.

Suddenly it struck me like a bolt of lightning; the property she had purchased was Camilla's old gaff, the one that had been repossessed. Therefore, the Farrier's account was true, but I'm not sure why I doubted that it wouldn't be, as what did he have to hide?

‘How many children do you have?' Melanie asked.'

‘I'm a glutton for punishment, These four belong to me,' I said patting their heads and naming them, Eva, Samuel, Matilda and Daisy and this is Little Jonny and Annabel who came for a sleepover.'

The children looked up at Melanie and smiled.

Wow! You have four of the little people, you must have the patience of a saint,' Melanie said admiringly.

‘Something like that; luckily for me they are all very well-behaved children – must take after their mother,' I joked.

Melanie laughed.

‘This is Dotty,' I have just the one daughter.

‘Hello Dotty how are you?'

‘She's a little shy and probably a little anxious with it being her first day.'

Squatting down before Dotty I said ‘Eva and Samuel were new last year; it's a lovely school and you don't have anything to worry about. This is Matilda and Daisy and they have their mornings at pre-school and nursery.'

Dotty looked up and smiled but still didn't say anything.

‘Such an adorable name, Dotty,' I said to Melanie.

‘Yes she was named after my Great Gran.'

‘The bell is about to ring, but if Dotty would like to come over and play to help her settle in please feel free to let me know; we could have a coffee too,' I suggested.

‘Absolutely, thank you, what a lovely idea I will certainly take you up on the offer. It is so very kind of you,' Melanie smiled. At that very moment, the bell sounded and all the children scampered off over the brown gritted ground towards their lines.

Melanie walked Dotty towards her teacher who promptly took her hand and with a huge friendly smile welcomed her to the school.

‘Don't worry Mum, she will be absolutely fine but please feel free to telephone at lunchtime if you would like an update,' suggested the kind teacher.

After kissing their children on the tops of their heads and checking out the new designer coats of other kids, the wave of mothers turned and headed up the playground towards the school gate.

Melanie was walking back towards me so I waited.

‘Was Dotty OK?' I enquired.

‘Yes, she went in with no trouble at all,' Melanie replied relieved. ‘It's such a worry when they start a new school.'

Just at that moment, BB passed in front of us, glared awkwardly at Melanie, and then turned away sheepishly confirming my impression that there was history between the two of them.

‘Blimey! Do you two know each other?' I enquired.

Melanie raked her fingers through her hair. ‘Our paths have crossed before. Do you have time for that coffee now? I can tell you all about it.'

I had things to do today: first on my list was to evict Penelope before she decided to get her feet firmly under our table, and the second was a visit to the lovely new shop in the next town that sold all sorts of crafty things. However, my interest was certainly piqued, and curiosity got the better of me.

‘Of course,' I answered. There's a quaint little coffee shop that's just opened near the post office; it's walking distance and near the pre-school so I will drop the children off there first. You can walk with me if you like.'

‘Perfect,' came Melanie's reply.