Free The Playdate by Louise Millar Page A

fingers. I think this means she has four months to go. But it could mean she is four months’ pregnant. I nod and smile, and hold up a thumb to say “good luck.”
    I tried to exchange names when we first met, but she spoke back Arabic words at me in this gentle voice and I couldn’t work out which of the words were her name. I checked her post once, and worked out it is probably Nadifa, but, as that isn’t one of the words she said to me, I’m too scared to use it in case it’s her surname. And now it feels too late, too rude, to ask again.
    So, I think to myself, with a nagging sense of failure, our lives will probably pass by one another’s, with no connection between us other than a street name, like the woman with the wrought-iron window boxes.
    The woman waves and heads up the stairs, her long dress swishing around her feet, to her shy husband who also smiles but never looks me in the eye, and a world that I know nothing about, apart from the soft footsteps above my head, and occasional interesting cooking smells that drift down into my flat and make me nostalgic for something I don’t even understand.
    “Can you try on your dresses now, Mummy?” Rae shouts, rushing ahead into the flat. She loved Brent Cross, grabbing a hundred different items in ten different shops and shouting, “What about this, Mum?” till I had to tell her to stop because the shop assistants were starting to look cross. She also persuaded me to have my makeup done in John Lewis and now it sits oddly on my face in thick powdery layers. It is so long since I’ve worn makeup, I feel like I’ve been colored in with crayons.
    “OK, come on then.” I smile. I need a cup of tea but, to be honest, it’s better to keep going. Every time I stop and allowmyself to imagine walking into Guy’s studio in Soho tomorrow, an electric shock of nerves bolts through my stomach.
    We go straight into my bedroom and lay out the new things on my bed. There are two dresses, a pair of dark, well-cut jeans, three tops, a pair of sandals, and some makeup. My purchases have the effect of cut flowers, filling the room with a new, fresh smell and bright, unadulterated colors.
    “The shiny one first,” Rae says, clapping her hands gleefully. She is wearing the pink sunglasses I bought her, with a lollipop for “being good” sticking out of her mouth.
    I pull off my T-shirt and pick up a silver shift dress. It took me three visits to the shop before I felt brave enough to buy it. It is made of silver sequins, which gives it the effect of being beaded with a thousand tiny lightbulbs. I pull it on carefully over my made-up face, enjoying the factory-fresh chemical odor of new clothes and the sensation of how it clings to me, crisp and unsagging, unlike my old T-shirts.
    Rae stands back and stares at me.
    “What?” I say.
    “Don’t know,” she replies, looking shy.
    “What?” I repeat more forcefully.
    She shrugs, and comes over and falls into me, pulling my arm around her.
    I bend down to look in the dressing table mirror and see why she has gone quiet. I look completely different.
    With a shock I recognize this woman. I am looking at myself before Rae. I blink heavily, focusing through the thick mascara.
    “You are all lighted up,” Rae finally blurts out.
    “Hmm,” I say. I’m not sure I like her seeing me like this. I realize what she’s thinking. That the woman in the mirror is taking me away from her.
    “It’s going to be fine, you know,” I say as she wraps herself silently around my neck. “Listen, Hannah will be at after-school club and that will be fun, and I’ll be at work, so we can have more money to do nice things by ourselves, like go on holiday, maybe.”
    “Can I have a party if we have money,” she murmurs in my ear, “a big one for all my class?”
    “Well . . .” I pause. She’s only been invited to two class parties this year, both of them thrown open to all thirty children by parents rich enough to do it, or too