The Playdate Read Online Free PDF Page B

of pain, that she didn’t include me in that category anymore. I can hardly ring in the middle of the night and ask her to listen as I pour all this out. And then there is Sophie. I count the months she’s been in Zurich on secondment. Four already, and I still haven’t got round to writing in the Swiss phone number she sent me on an ironic postcard of a mountain milkmaid—an almost-forgotten reference to the night she cried with laugher while I drunkenly tried to show her how to milk a cow on our bemused old cat—and have now probably lost it altogether. I suspect she sent it as a formality anyway, out of loyalty to a friendship that has gently dissipated into air.
    I put the book down.
    When did I lose the ability to keep and make friends? When did it become just Suzy?
    Even though it’s only June, the air is balmy and thick. I undo the latch on the old wooden sash window. It lifts with a heavy creak. The tiny crack in the corner pane is spreading, I notice. I keep meaning to tell the landlord. One day I will open the window and it will just fall out.
    A light catches my eye. The new woman at No. 15 is up, too. She is standing up, putting books on the shelf in her sitting room. There are hundreds of them. Just like Mum used to have. The shelves are nearly full, packed around the fireplace.
    A book, I think, watching the woman. When was the last time I read a book? Mum and I used to devour them, passing them between us, waiting to see what the other one thought. Now I am just too tired even to open one. Tired with what, I sometimes think? Shopping and cooking. Washing and drying.Taking lots of things to lots of places: Rae to school, the bins to the gate, our ancient car for inspection. My mind has become like a car engine with a faulty clutch. It revs too fast, without actually going anywhere.
    The woman’s presence is oddly comforting. She looks quite old, with a thick, graying bob and black-rimmed glasses. I saw her husband coming back from the shop earlier. He is shorter than her, with longish sandy hair, sideburns, thick glasses, and a nose that looks too big for his face.
    The woman turns round. That’s funny. She is wearing one of those soft velour dressing gowns that Mum used to wear, too. I touch the cracked windowpane and test it gently with my finger.
    Up and down Churchill Road, darkened windows stare back.
    Oh God. I can’t live like this anymore.
    Rae’s illness has sucked us dry. I am a husk. An empty shell. No wonder other women avoid me. They sense that I will suck them dry, too. Maybe Tom is right. Maybe it is all about me. Me and my endless problems. Women sense I need everything and have nothing to give back in friendship. All of them, that is, apart from Suzy.
    I watch the woman a little longer, staring at a cover. Will I ever meet her, I wonder? Or will we pass wordlessly in the street like I do with everyone else around here?
    A memory drifts back to me. A warm evening the color of buttercups. I am eight, and walking shyly toward our farm cottage, entrusted with a tray of lasagne to take to our new farm assistant and his wife. It is almost too hot, the tea towel placed carefully on my outspread hands no longer absorbing the burning heat. I walk among the dried-mud tractor ruts of the farm track to a patch of nettles on the corner, where ourcat, Tuppence, lies grooming herself beside a pile of rusty old fence posts. The couple are lifting a sofa in through the cottage gate. The woman, who is wearing a spotty headscarf, turns and looks at me, and I see her eyes drop to my tray. My stomach lurches with doubt. What if they don’t want the lasagne? How does Mum know they will want it? Panic overcomes me. I stop and turn. Mum is watching me from the farmhouse window, willing me on with a fluttering hand, and I just know then, in my eight-year-old way, that sometimes you have to make an effort with people. You have to be brave; put yourself out there to get to know them.
    And I did that for a while.