Page 34 of Special Delivery
No! How had she stuffed that up?!
‘WAAAAAH!’
This had escalated so quickly! Her daughter was screaming under her chin like a car alarm. She shouldn’t have called Dani! She should have been more efficient in the nappy aisle! She shouldn’t have wasted so much time thinking about bloody Patrick! And why did she continually let her grocery supplies get so low?! She needed to get better at weekly shops—that was how real adults did it!—but if she didn’t need to go to the shops every day, would she ever have a reason to leave the house?! She’d trapped herself in this vicious cycle of consumerism. Poppy did some more squats and added some useless patting. Random passers-by were staring openly.
‘WAAAAAH!’ Maeve reminded her, for lack of any other vocabulary.
A checkout assistant had still not materialised. Were they on strike? Wildly, Poppy weighed up her options: steal a (small) pack of nappies or risk being thrown out of the shop for noise pollution (was that a similarly indictable offence?!). Poppy suddenly wished James and his distractingly thumpy-tailed dog were here.
Her phone buzzed in her pocket and she seized it as if it were some kind of lifeline.
K.
‘WAAAAAH!’
K? K?! Poppy’s eyes bulged in disbelief as she stared at the screen. Patrick finally deigned to respond to her FaceTime invitation, and this was what he said?K?!He couldn’t even spare the time for a fucking vowel?!
‘WAAAAAAAH!’ Two lines of snot were now streaming down Maeve’s face and onto Poppy’s chest. It was very possible she was going to commit her first non-alcohol-induced felony.
‘Voila,’ announced a portly gentleman, appearing at her side and tapping the screen with a magic swipe card. ‘Someone’s grumpy,’ he said with a chuckle.
You bet I’m grumpy!Poppy fumed, before realising he was referring to her screaming child.
‘Thanks.’ She smiled weakly, paid with superhuman efficiency, and hightailed it out of there, quickly hammering out a text to confirm she’d call Patrick later. She didn’t make eye contact with a single soul until she emerged into The Bustle and spotted the phalanx of prams.
Hearing Maeve, two mums sprang into action, clearing a path for Poppy to cannonball onto a chair, where she whipped off the BabyBjörn and shoved Maeve onto her boob.
Oh, the relief. She was still panting from the adrenaline. Her lungs were at post-cardio levels of deoxygenation, like she’d just won the Tour de France and celebrated with a jumping-jack floor solo. On her left, a ginger-haired mum beckoned to a waitress. ‘Caffeine needed here asap, please.’ Poppy glanced up in thanks. The ginger-haired mum smiled back.
As Poppy wiped the beads of sweat from her hairline, the conversation washed over her. Away from the confines of the white-walled community health centre and without the hard-backed plastic chairs forcing them into frigid schoolgirl postures, the group seemed livelier than she remembered. Projectile vomits, night feeds, backing the car into a telegraph pole while the baby was screaming. To Poppy’s surprise, the chat wasn’t completely terrible.
When the coffees arrived, there was a flurry of movement as everyone cleared rattles and bottles off the table to makespace. It was refreshing being around people who had the same amount ofstuff.
‘Seriously, call me a Sherpa and send me up Everest,’ groaned one mum. ‘I’d be a real asset to any trek, I’m so highly proficient in lugging around crap.’
‘You try formula feeding,’ quipped another. ‘If anyone needs a few tins, I’m your girl. My nappy bag weighs, like, twenty kilos.’
Poppy snuck in a few glorious sips of her hot soy cappuccino before Maeve, now sated with milk but apparently existentially unsated with life, began to cry again.
‘She looks so much like you,’ said the ginger-haired mum, who—subversively—was not wearing activewear.
‘Like the kid fromThe Exorcist?’
The mum laughed. ‘I meant she has your eyes.’
Poppy set down her coffee and repositioned Maeve on her lap so she could balance her in the crook of her arm. She could not get past Maeve’s little nose, which was unequivocally perfect on her but also an exact replica of her father’s. At least it didn’t overwhelm anyone else.
‘I’m April,’ the mum said. ‘You’re Poppy, right?’
‘Good memory,’ Poppy replied. ‘I can’t remember anyone’s name. My brain isn’t fully functional yet.’
‘You’re telling me. I left my sunnies on the top of the car today and drove straight off without them. Sayonara, Ray-Bans. I was so sad I cried.’
‘Ha!’ piped up another mum. ‘Today I filled out my Medicare forms and used my maiden name. I’ve been married six years! Poor hubby, it’s like all his help getting up in the middle of the night counts for nothing!’
‘That’s nothing,’ said another. ‘I clean forgot my husband’s birthday last week. No presents at all!’
‘Better than Hello Kitty lingerie, which is what my husband bought formybirthday,’ said a brunette mum.
