The baby was born and Penelope and the White Witch were among the first visitors at the hospital. The Witch ventured off halfway through the visit in search of the shop to buy Mel some magazines. Penelope went to the toilet five minutes later and busted Rob and the White Witch doing a little more than wetting the baby’s head in one of the cubicles. No wonder the White Witch had told Mel that Rob was behaving himself – it was her having the affair with her best mate’s bloke behind her back.
Penelope continued with her story. She ran straight back as fast as her legs could carry her up the hospital corridor to Mel and told her everything. Mel had literally given birth just a few hours before. With the baby cradled in her arms, she told Rob to sling his hook and take the White Witch with him. Mel never contacted him again and brought up the child as a single parent. Penelope hadn’t clapped eyes on the White Witch from that day until now.
I had decided during my interview there was something shifty about that woman. I had a gut feeling despite her snooty attitude that she was no better than anyone else, and stealing her best mate’s husband was just unforgivable. I was right to allocate the White Witch of Narnia a seat on my bus. Always trust that gut instinct. Always.
While Penelope was recounting this tale, we both failed to spot who had joined the White Witch back at the table. Luckily for Penelope, it wasn’t Rob as that may have led to an awkward moment. Instead, sat there as bold as brass, holding hands with the White Witch, was Elvis! He looked at us and we looked at him. He quickly moved his hand away from the White Witch but we had already spotted it and he knew we had seen him.
It was no skin off my nose that Elvis was swinging his hips with another woman other than Camilla Noland and her week was going from bad to worse. First the village would find out she had NO LAND and, second, Elvis was clearly all shook up but not over Camilla. Maybe he had decided she wasn’t such a good catch after all, especially now her land prospects had diminished overnight.
Penelope was all of a dither and didn’t know what to do about the situation. I wasn’t going to offer any advice, I wanted nothing at all to do with this business. The walk home was torture. Penelope ran through every scenario of whether she shouldn’t or should tell Camilla. Personally I didn’t care either way. One thing was for sure, Camilla would need a short stay at heartbreak hotel, however she found out.
‘How are Mel and the child?’ I dropped into the conversation.
‘I have no idea, we fell out years ago,’ Penelope responded.
Now why didn’t that surprise me? I hadn’t come across any long term friends of Penelope yet and I suspected I never would.
Within twenty-four hours of our walk Camilla became single; dumped by Elvis and with her husband now shacked up with Marilyn she was left high and dry. In an attempt to cheer up Camilla, Penelope sent me a text to see if I was free to party with them both this coming weekend.
I’d rather listen to the farrier’s repulsive snorting sounds in a morning than spend a night with that pair. I replied, politely declining the kind offer and suggesting it wasn’t my thing. There was a silver lining to this cloud, Saturday night was approaching and that meant Matt and I were free of Rupert and Penelope. It would be quite a rare sight for their coats not to be hung on their coat pegs in our cloak room.
Saturday night was upon us, Matt and I ordered a curry and cracked open a couple of beers.
‘Knock…Knock…Knock…’
Matt ventured off to open the door and in walked Rupert with Little Jonny and Annabel.
‘Is everything OK?’ Matt enquired.
‘Yes perfect, Penelope is out with her new best friend so I was at a loose end with the kids. I thought I’d come and keep you both company.’
‘Marvellous,’ I said as I took his coat and hung it on his peg. There was one thing I detested in life and it wasn’t just the arrival of unwanted visitors – but sharing my curry with the same unannounced guests. My curry was my curry and I still liked playing at being a student and enjoying the leftovers for breakfast.
Just for a change Rupert had brought his slippers and made himself at home. Apparently Penelope and Camilla had bought tickets to watch an Elvis tribute act down at the local drinking hole. Maybe she was really missing Elvis. It was a hole to say the least, one of those places where your feet stick to the floor and the loos are outside. If you wanted to regain entry to the venue after a visit to the toilet, you had to obtain a very classy hand stamp.
Monday arrived, which was the day I was starting my new job. There were only two weeks left of the school term and this would break me in nicely ready for the new school year in September. Penelope had got her knickers in a twist over that, complaining that we wouldn’t have much time to walk. Nothing had actually changed. It wasn’t as though I spent the whole day with Penelope, just an hour every morning. We could still amble round on our walk in the morning and I could tootle off to work in the afternoon.
From this moment on Penelope’s behaviour started to change towards me. I felt she was jealous of my new job. She didn’t want me spending time with anyone else. There was nothing to be jealous of. It didn’t change my relationship with her in the slightest. The ironic thing was she was still child-minding every afternoon anyway so I couldn’t see any problem at all.
Since her friendship with Wendy and Annie had deteriorated she loathed her afternoon child-minding duties. It was no fun any more. Wendy and Annie were joined at the hip and were always together. Penelope now had to actually child-mind all by herself. Even Facebook wasn’t fun any more due to the lack of comments on her continuous status updates. That was an attention-seeking game I had started to avoid.
Penelope sent me continuous text messages throughout the day – usually about nothing – but when my job started, she totally backed off. So much so, that I thought she may have lost her phone. But no, she was behaving like a toddler who hadn’t succeeded in getting their own way. I didn’t rise to it and didn’t even mention it. As far as I was concerned, nothing had changed but Penelope had decided to change the friendship from this point. This was Penelope’s choice. I was not going to throw myself into any friendship that needed to be forced. It was either there or it wasn’t.
I didn’t even receive a text from Penelope asking me whether I had enjoyed my first day at work. Fay was the first one to text as soon as my shift had finished. That’s the difference, a true friend is happy for you no matter what you do and what you have and quite frankly I didn’t have the time for meaningless conversations or friendships that drained me of my energy. Smiling to myself I remembered my gran’s old saying, ‘Always surround yourself with radiators not drains’. I let Penelope have her tantrum and later on I sent her a text to see if she was still OK to walk the next morning.
I’m sorry, I can’t tomorrow, came the curt response.
That was it, nothing else, short and to the point. I didn’t reply, I just left it there.
The next morning I stood in the playground with Matilda and Daisy in the pushchair waiting for Penelope’s arrival. She said she wasn’t walking so I dressed in my jeans and thought I would take the opportunity to nip to the shops to pick up a few essentials before work to have a browse. Penelope sauntered onto the playground and waltzed straight past me, without even making eye contact. There was no way you could have missed me standing there.
There was no ‘Hello’ or ‘Good morning’ and strangely she was dressed in her walking gear. Once the school bell rang I watched her plug in her headphones and set off in the direction we usually headed on our walks. Everyone noticed her behaviour in the playground and saw that it was a deliberate attempt to ignore me.
I felt like saying, ‘I’ve seen your swagger, lady, and if you’d like to have an intelligent conversation about it I’m all ears,’ but I left it, what was the point? There was no point, I couldn’t make anyone talk or stand with me. It just all seemed a little childish. I thought the adults in the playground were there to set an example to the children. The chil
dren behaved better than most of the adults. Penelope in particular was acting worse than a toddler, so I left her to it.
That afternoon at school pick-up time I stood again in my usual spot on the playground, the place where I had stood with Penelope for the last seven months. Penelope arrived and walked straight past me again, deliberately ignoring me. She headed towards the middle of the playground and pretended to be on the phone. You could tell she wasn’t and I seriously thought about calling her phone so it would ring and she would look like a complete idiot. But I decided against it; I had four kids of my own and I didn’t need to deal with another child.
I remembered the wise words Fay had once remarked, ‘You don’t need a certain number of friends, just a number of friends you can be certain of.’
This was very true. Those certain friends pass the seven-year rule, not like the pretentious nutters you have to pass the time of day with as you serve out your school playground sentence.
I didn’t bother to text Penelope that night. If she could treat me in this way then she was no friend of mine.
The next morning was interesting to say the least. The gossip amongst the Playground Mafia was all about me and what the hell I had done to Penelope for her to be ignoring me. This was the first time I had come under playground scrutiny and I was livid at Penelope for placing me in this situation. My only crime had been to find employment, I hadn’t done anything else. Penelope’s behaviour was strange and unstable and it was obviously something to do with me as I was the only one in the playground that she was ignoring.
That morning I pushed the pushchair along to the high street and headed towards the local bakery. I was just about to push the door open when Penelope came flouncing out. There was no way she could have missed me but she totally ignored me. Instead she pretended to look deep into the bag of cakes she had just bought and scurried away. How very strange, what a weird woman. We had spent four months in each other’s company and there was no need for such strange, uncomfortable behaviour. I decided to send Penelope a text:
Hi, hope everything is OK? Have I done something to upset you? If so I would sincerely like to put it right.
The funny thing was I knew Penelope had read the text as she was only a little further up the road and I noticed that she had taken the phone out of her pocket and was glancing at the screen. However, it took her two hours to reply.
I do not know what you are talking about.
Everyone else knew what I was talking about, the whole playground knew she was walking straight past me, ignoring me and standing somewhere else. It wasn’t in my head. I just left the situation again, what was the point? If she wasn’t adult enough to discuss it and move on then she could keep her childish behaviour to herself.
This carried on for nearly a week.
Everything in her life was a drama. Her attention-seeking antics were apparent when she thanked some random person in a status update which she made public so I could see, indicating how much of a rock they had been in the last six months, supporting her with her weight loss. This was clearly aimed at upsetting me. I had been the one walking with her in minus temperatures and in the rain for four months while putting up with her drivel, yet there was no mention of me. If she wanted to get her kicks in this way she could go ahead but I wanted to keep my dignity. The next comment she posted was so random, I couldn’t quite decide if she was having a nervous breakdown. It read…
The great thing about living in a small village is when you don’t know what you are doing, someone else does.
The most amusing thing about this was most of the time nobody had a bloody clue what she was doing! They all thought she needed to be sectioned for her own good.
A week had gone by and Penelope began to stand in the middle of the playground. No-one stood with her; she was all on her lonesome. She appeared to be that paranoid she didn’t even trust talking to herself.
Then out of the blue one morning, as she passed me she spoke.
‘You free to walk in the morning?’
I decided the best tack was not to judge her as I already knew she was a complete attention-seeking fruit loop. I didn’t need to judge that fact. There was no need to blatantly ignore me like she had done the past week, manners cost nothing. I was dubious as I didn’t really want to get back into the walking lark with her and I was looking forward to getting my Saturday nights back to myself. However, I decided to give it another chance; I felt sorry for her, her behaviour wasn’t stable and she certainly didn’t have any other friends to rely on.
The next morning we set off on the walk. Even though the sun was shining and the birds were tweeting, the atmosphere was bloody frosty to say the least. So frosty in fact it could have been the middle of December, not July.
The conversation felt forced and Penelope was being guarded about what she said. I didn’t quite understand any of it until she suddenly said, ‘How come Samuel got selected as the captain for the school athletics team?’
So that was what all this was about? Samuel had been chosen over the almighty Little Jonny.
As we walked further Penelope started to relax a little and hopefully started to realise that it didn’t actually matter who was the captain of the athletics team.
She was starting to behave more normally and I complimented her on her weight loss. It genuinely did look like she had lost a few pounds and I knew bringing the conversation back round to her would please her. She said that she felt a little better about herself and that she and Rupert were trying to get back on track for the children’s sake, even though she was finding it hard to spend time alone with him.
I piped up, ‘In the bedroom department,’ but she informed me that they hadn’t even got as far as the stairs yet.
Penelope decided she needed a challenge. She was already providing me with the challenge of being her friend – when it suited her of course. I wasn’t sure I needed any more challenges, it had been nothing but a challenge since we’d arrived in the village.
Then Penelope came out with a bright idea.
‘Let’s climb a mountain!’ she proclaimed.
She couldn’t even climb up the stairs with Rupert, never mind a bloody mountain. The thing I found strange about this conversation was the word ‘let’s’. That word is plural so did her plan include me? Did it have to include me? This woman had spent a whole week not speaking to me, probably because my child had beaten her child to the captain’s place in the athletics team. I looked at her in complete disbelief but I suppose all the climbing gear she wore on her first weigh-in on that Friday morning needed to be put to use somehow.
There was a method to her madness; if she threw herself into this challenge it would mean spending even less time with Rupert. Deep down Penelope knew Rupert and Annie were the perfect couple. She was convinced they were ‘in love’ and they were always going to be in love. The sad thing for them, however, was that they couldn’t do anything about it.
I could see the desperation in Penelope’s face; she needed to climb this mountain to prove to herself that she could do it. When I returned home, I rang Fay.
‘Why me, Fay? Why me? Why do I attract these nutters, shoplifters, frisky pensioners, witches, people who want to climb mountains and other folk one wave short of a shipwreck?’ I demanded.
Fay let out a howl of laughter and said, ‘God put you on this earth to take the crap away from the rest of us “Normaltons” who wouldn’t be able to cope with these nutters.’
‘Do you think that’s true, Fay?’ I asked.
‘No, do I bollocks – you are just one unlucky sod!’ she giggled.
Eight
August
Over dinner I informed Matt that I had definitely decided to allocate Penelope a seat on ‘the bus’ and she would be keeping Camilla company. I was contemplating saving a place for Elvis on the bus too, just for the comedy factor: they’d certainly be ‘All shook up’ when the bus trundled over the side of a cliff. If only the bus theory was real, it would give m
e something to look forward to. I’d even pay for the petrol to transport them to the cliff then all these nutters would be driven out of my life forever. Matt pointed out that all these nutters had one thing in common – ME! I reminded Matt there were still seats on my bus if he carried on sharing his daft opinions. He made a conscious decision to quit while he was ahead and before he was banned again from all marital privileges – he had learned the hard way last time.
Frisky Pensioner had been keeping a low profile of late but he was still hard boiled enough to knock on the door every Friday for his eggs. I was ready for him each week. I made sure the eggs were placed by the front door so he didn’t have the opportunity to venture into the house. I thought, or rather hoped, he would have ceased coming by now as every time he did I was extremely unpleasant. I didn’t smile and I didn’t make conversation, in fact I was a very unsociable bugger. But no, I still had to hand over the eggs while he placed his grubby little fingers over the top of mine for a quick squeeze when he grabbed the box from me. Every week, I scrubbed my hands red raw trying to get rid of his grubbiness. It made me cringe.
Frisky Pensioner’s wife had recently retired and he appeared to be keeping his head down more than usual. Maybe he was on his best behaviour because she was present all day to witness his antics.
This week they were both walking up the lane – well his walk was more like a shuffle – when Mrs FP bawled a very loud ‘Good morning’ in my direction.
I glanced around and she gave me a polite wave which she complemented with, ‘Hello, how’s village life treating you?’
Frisky Pensioner himself looked very shifty and seemed to be in a hurry to whisk Mrs FP away from me.
At that point I wasn’t sure whether to reply with, ‘Yes village life is great, thanks. I’ve been touched up by old men who felt it appropriate to put their hands on my breasts while I was holding a dead chicken?’ or just to say, ‘It’s marvellous, thank you very much; especially when I am snogged by pensioners.’
A Year in the Life of a Playground Mother: A laugh-out-loud funny novel about life at the School Gates (A School Gates Comedy Book 1) Page 17
