Free The Playground by Julia Kelly Page A

mind I was making phone calls, at the funeral already, trying to come to terms with my mother being gone. Her tiny tennis shoes no longer of use.
    We’d been on a ship together in a dream I’d had a few nights before. Her face was sketchy, unsmiling, distant, her eyes sort of scratchy and vague. I’d shown her my cabin at bedtime and she’d pointed towhere she would be sleeping – in an enormous shiny white coffin. I’d begged her not to get in. I needed her not to be dead because, then, who would look after me?
    Sean – I remembered him now from my mother’s drinks party last Christmas – was striding back towards me, shouting, ‘It’s fine. She’s fine. Her bathroom window’s open. Elaine said it was closed five minutes ago.’ I didn’t see how this was proof of anything but we crunched back up the gravel path together. I gave the bell another long ring, Sean rapped on the knocker. Seconds later my mother was standing before us, a garden spade in her hand, bringing with her that particular, comforting but impossible-to-define, smell of home.
    She’d been putting cuttings on the compost heap and hadn’t heard the bell. ‘And you’re not normally that punctual,’ she said, pulling me towards her and kissing me on the head, apologising and blaming me at the same time. She thanked and excused Sean, both of them amused by my neurosis.
    The kitchen floor was slippery with grease. The two chickens in the oven needed to come out. Still suffused with the relief of her being not dead, I watched Mum work around us, confident but rather irritable. She was trying to locate the oven glove the cleaner had tidied away, settled for a T-towel, put the peas on to boil, then lifted the heavy, ancient oven dish containing the chickens – ‘Ay yi yi’ – from the top to the bottom oven shelf. ‘I really don’t need little people under my feet right now,’ she said, encouraging Addie out of the way.
    Bella arrived just after us, with a litre bottle of 7UP, ‘the worst PMT’ and without her husband Sean who’d stayed at home to watch the match. She warmed her backside against the Dimplex heater in the kitchen, which wasn’t in fact on. Her two children, Emma and Jack, were slumped in the sitting room, legs lolling over sofa arms,eating tortilla chips, bored, whiffy-socked, half-watching
The Simpsons
.
    Older than me, more practical, more sensible, more dependable, and more like my mother in every way, Bella was Mum’s perfect company and comfort. They moved about the kitchen in sync as they spoke – Bella in her Sunday best: navy hoodie and tracksuit bottoms, hair scooped back into a bun; Mum more formal in cashmere, pearls and tapered slacks – knowing what to do, how to do it and when, whereas I just got in the way. I was an irritant, a tsetse fly, as Joe used to say.
    The table which Mum had set minutes earlier was already in a state of disarray; a brush matted with brown hair and a copy of
I Can Make You Thin
had somehow made their way on to it, and Addie was rearranging the table settings, moving along the bench on her knees, putting one fork at a time in her mouth as part of her quiet game of make-believe. Mum tried to clear some space for the roast potatoes and broccoli. Rosacea had flared up in a butterfly pattern around her nose as it did when she’d been rushing. ‘Gosh, it’s like an oven in here,’ she said, when I complained of feeling cold, using the back of her hand to brush a stray hair from her eye. She always suggested Sunday dinner but you could tell that she had begun to find it too much work. She’d have been far happier snoozing in front of
Midsomer Murders
.
    I tried to divert Addie by making rather unconvincing noises of pretend interest when she handed me several small dull objects to admire. I wondered if there could have been someone somewhere in