black and white ones – and every time she tried to catch them she couldn’t reach. If they fell to the floor then she lost them forever. She woke up sweating and shouting about photos. It always took her ages to get back to sleep after that dream.
Is it that wretched photo dream again? Tim had absent-mindedly punched his pillow, muttering in his sleep and turning over. Well, yes it was. And it was bothering her a lot. She leant in towards Carole and nudged her in the ribs on the way to placing a dollop of mashed potato on a kid’s plate. He beamed at her and sniffed. Yellow snot glistened under his nose.
Maddie yanked her apron down. These stupid white aprons were the bane of her life. Wait a minute, had she just thought that? Had she just thought her apron was the bane of her life?
She stretched over the counter and swiped a piece of kitchen roll and handed it to him. ‘Here, wipe your nose, sweetheart.’
As the boy blew his nose noisily, she noticed the gravy on his plate start to slide to the left, to circle around his mash. Little tributaries of brown liquid then trickled across to the peas to form a gravy-pea-soup. He looked up and grinned at her, a few teeth missing. He reminded her of Ed at that age. It was almost like a physical ache, thinking about him. He hadn’t texted in a while. She must remember to look at his Facebook page later to see if there were any ‘updates’ from him. And she must stop worrying.
A gap year. She remembered when he’d told her he was taking one. The thud of her heart. She had promised him it was what she wanted too – fingers crossed behind her back.
A soggy tissue was being waved at her. She gingerly took in a pincer-like grip, then threw it quickly in the bin. As she watched the white snot-filled paper towel descend onto a mass of congealed baked beans, a memory from her dream swirled around her head.
What if she could get away? Away from soggy mashed potato and snotty kids, from tidying up after Tim and the dog with halitosis. From the smell of cabbage and bleached floors… But what about Olive? No, stop dreaming, Maddie, her inner voice berated her.
‘Oi, miss.’
She looked up to see Snot Boy.
‘Can I have more peas, miss?’
*
The bus was stuffy. Maddie put her shopping bags between her feet as she knew how bumpy this section of the road was on the way back to her house. She didn’t want her Tesco beans to go flying across the floor. A man sat down beside her. She shifted in her seat and loosened her scarf around her neck – the one with the hummingbirds on it, the chiffon one that he had given her all those years ago, at the graduation party… She shuddered. Had he seen her friend request? She almost felt foolish now.
Her mind drifted off as she looked out the window at the trees lining the road, green leaves fluttering in the breeze. She felt the sweat build up between her shoulder blades in the airless bus and wished she’d checked the weather forecast today. It was humid: late July, sticky and hot. It was as if Mother Nature was having a real go at summer.
All the kids had been tearing around with their shirts off by the end of day, a tradition on the last day of term, waving their signed shirts in the playground, sweat glistening on their foreheads – new schools, new friends to make next term. New beginnings. And where would she be?
And next term, in they’d come with their new school jumpers with the jazzy redesigned logo – sweating their way through the first week of school, the tiny ones who had bright new uniforms, jumpers that hadn’t been washed a thousand times to get the marker pen and Weetabix off. Bright and shiny. It wasn’t how she felt right now.
She’d read about ‘empty nest syndrome’ in a woman’s magazine recently. But it was more than that. Feelings had been awakened – and they were wriggling about and demanding attention.
She yanked her silk hummingbird scarf further down as her mind wandered. She thought about Ed. How long was it since she’d walked hand-in-hand with him and counted ‘all the red cars’ on the way home from school? The thought made her feel old.