Page 19 of Special Delivery
Theo Caryannis.
Ah, fuck it.Next time, she would tell him that his behaviour was completely unacceptable. She woulddefinitelydo that.
The pram bumped over a crack in the pavement. The phone had absorbed the chill in the air and was cold in her fingertips. Poppy stared at the screen long enough for James’s eyes to flit in her direction again, but it was useless. No matter how hard she stared, she could not make those three dots reappear. Waiting for thanks from Patrick was like her mum’s Zumba era: utterly pointless. She shoved the phone back in the cup holder.
The path beneath them was now carpeted with reddened pine needles, slippery under foot. Poppy tightened her grip on the pram and steered it around the pine cones that cluttered the pavement. They were just what she didn’t need right now: more speed bumps.
She’d always thought of herself as a strong woman—a feminist!—but regardless of how long she spent daydreaming about reducing Patrick to a stuttering mess with her biting put-downs and dazzling intellect, it always seemed that when she was in his orbit, she became a spineless wallflower.
Maeve extended her chubby hand towards Eileen, and James flashed her a tiny smile. When he saw Poppy looking,he quickly turned away, his features morphing back into a square-jawed mask.Men!
Poppy was so intent on staring straight ahead andnotlooking at James that she hardly flinched when Maeve let out a giant fart. It wasn’t until both James and the dog looked over, and her nostrils registered the acrid smell, that Poppy leaned over the pram hood to assess the damage. She saw it immediately. A mustard-brown splodge was emerging from her daughter’s left buttock with alarming speed.
For god’s sake!Poppy quickly pulled off the path for an emergency nappy change. She looked frantically from left to right, but there was nowhere to lay a change mat. It was a sea of pine cones. She tried to kick one away but the pine needles were slippery and she toppled clumsily, landing with an ungainly crack on a spiky conifer. ‘Ow!’ she cried.
James had pulled Eileen to a halt.
More hot tears were building behind her eyes. Embarrassment tears. ‘Keep walking,’ Poppy hissed. This was precisely why she liked to walk alone. Poonami crisis management was hard enough without an audience.
She clambered up to unbuckle her daughter. The poo was halfway up Maeve’s back and down to her knees, and the kid hadn’t even started solids! What the hell would happen when they introduced fibre?!
‘Ah …’ James shifted on the balls of his feet.
‘Go!’
He began walking away, tugging at Eileen, who began barking emphatically.
Poppy tore off all Maeve’s ski bunny layers, opened the nappy and began scraping as fast as she could. At the sightof the puppy leaving, Maeve screamed louder, flung her body to the left and rolled with a slow thud onto her belly. Poppy quickly grabbed more wipes and began scraping away at Maeve’s bottom, but the rolling motion had displaced even more poo.
Maeve’s cries were met with a booming bark, followed by a roar from James. ‘EILEEN!’
Poppy looked up to see the kelpie running full pelt towards them. Without thinking, Poppy grabbed Maeve and hugged her to her chest, just as the kelpie came to a skidding stop on the change mat.
‘This fucking dog!’ yelled Poppy, as James ran up to them. She gripped her daughter tighter, feeling her sweater transform into an ombre-brown monstrosity. ‘She almost killed my daughter!’
‘She wanted toseeher, not kill her!’
Poppy glared at him. Her sweater and singlet were both soaked through. She could hardly breathe from the smell. She’d packed spare clothes for Maeve, but not herself. What the hell was she going to do? Walk home topless?
James was already tugging Eileen away. Poppy scowled at his back. First Patrick, now James—scarpering when they could be helping! She closed her eyes helplessly and a fat tear plopped onto Maeve’s head.
‘Give her to me,’ James said gruffly, suddenly beside her again. Eileen was tied to a nearby lamppost.
Without waiting for permission, he took Maeve from Poppy’s arms. She wiped her eyes roughly as James fished a spare blanket from the pram’s undercarriage, laid it flat on the ground andlowered Maeve onto it. Pulling more wipes from the nappy bag, he began rubbing her clean. Maeve blinked up at him, dazzled. Before Poppy could unclench her molars, her daughter was somehow wearing a new nappy and a clean onesie, babbling contentedly to a pine cone. It had all happened so fast.
James turned to Poppy. ‘You got hand sanitiser?’
‘I’m not a total heathen,’ she retorted, throwing him a bottle. She knew she looked like a murder victim, but brown. She was determinedly not inhaling through her nostrils.
James cleaned his hands, wiped down the pram and lifted Maeve back into it. Poppy glowered at him. He was acting like a better parent than her, the show-off.
When he turned back to her, his eyes were so stormy that Poppy unexpectedly felt a surge of triumph through her veins. His mask of irritating calm had been smashed!
‘Poppy, I swear …’
‘What?’ she demanded, dimly registering that he’d remembered her name.
He threw his hands in the air. ‘I’ve never had so manyissueswith one patient.’ His eyes flashed over her like lightning in a thunderstorm. Angrily, he unzipped his vest, threw it on the ground then pulled his t-shirt off over his head.
