Page 3 of We All Live Here
“They rang off,” she says quickly. She thinks she may actually explode. A pressure is building inside her that feels too much for a body to contain.
Mrs. Tugendhat is wearing an emphatically hairy cardigan with batwing sleeves and a yellow cardboard hand-made badge on the lapel that says “Happy Birthday” in green Sharpie. “I was just talking to Violet about the end-of-year production. Did she tell you she’s the narrator?”
“Great! Great!” Lila says, her face stretched into a tight smile.
“We don’t like to do a nativity—we’re multi-faith, these days. And I know it’s a long way off…well, I suppose not that far off—four months—but you know how long these things take to pull together.”
“I do!” says Lila.
“You’re being weird,” says Violet.
“And youareour resident Parent in Entertainment, since Frances leftEmmerdale. Not that she had a regular part anyway. So Violet thought you might do it.”
“Do it?”
“Sort out wardrobe for the lead characters.”
“Wardrobe,” Lila repeats blankly.
“It’s an adaptation ofPeter Pan.”
Marja is walking away from the other mothers. She pulls the camel coat across her middle, and casts a quick, awkward glance in Lila’s direction, Hugo, her young son, pulling at her hand as she passes the gates.
“Of course!” says Lila. A loud humming has started up somewhere at the back of her head. She can barely hear anything beyond it. She thinks tears may have sprung to her eyes because everything seems oddly glassy.
“You will? That’s marvelous. Violet wasn’t sure you would.”
“She doesn’t like coming to school,” says Violet.
Lila tears her attention away and back to her daughter. “What? Don’t be silly, Violet! I love coming here! Best part of my day!”
“You paid Celie four pounds to do pickup last week.”
“No. No. I gave Celie four pounds. She needed four pounds. The school pickup was unrelated.”
“That’s not true. You said you’d rather chew off your own feet and Celie said she’d go if you gave her enough for one of those marshmallow coffees from Costa and you said, ‘Fine, okay,’ and—”
Mrs. Tugendhat’s smile has become a little wobbly.
“That’s enough, Violet. Totally, Mrs. Tugendhat. The thing. What you said. Of course I’ll do it!” Something is happening to her right hand. She keeps flapping it in the air for emphasis. It feels entirely unrelated to the rest of her body.
Mrs. Tugendhat beams. “Well, we’ll probably get started after the October half-term but that will give you time to get the costumes into shape, yes?”
“Yes!” Lila says. “Yes! We must go. Bit of a hurry. But we—we’ll talk. We’ll definitely talk. Happy…birthday!” She points at Mrs. Tugendhat’s chest, then turns and starts walking down the road.
“Why are we going this way?” says Violet, jogging to keep up. “We always go down Frobisher Street.”
Marja has headed down Frobisher Street. Lila thinks she may keel over and die if she has to look at that glossy tousled blonde head again. “Just…fancy a change,” she says.
“You’re being really weird,” says Violet. She stops and pulls from her rucksack the packet of root-vegetable crisps that Bill must have put into her bag instead of Monster Munch. He’s trying to improve their diet. Violet slows to eat them, so Lila is forced to slow too. “Mum?”
“Yes?”
“Did you know Felix has worms in his bottom? He put his finger up there at break to get one out and show us. You could actually see it wriggling around in his fingernail.”
Lila stands still and digests this. Normally such information would have made her scream. Right now it feels like the least terrible thing she has heard today. She looks down at her daughter. “Did you touch it?”
“Ugh. No,” says Violet, popping another crisp into her mouth. “I told him I was going to stay exactly ten miles away from him forever. And the other boys. They’re all disgusting.”
