She’ll make a date and walnut cake for teatime, as a treat, she decides, mentally adding baking powder to her shopping list. She’s annoyed that she can’t reach her handbag for her notebook to write it down. Her brain is like a sieve these days. The boys relentlessly take the piss about her forgetfulness. Even Pim had joined in on Christmas Day, when they’d mimicked her clicking her fingers and saying, ‘pass me the thingummybob in the whatsit.’ It has become a family catchphrase. She knows they mean it affectionately, but it stings nevertheless.

As she sets off, she glances across to the beach, surprised to see a few women playing in the waves in the distance. The way they bend over with laughter makes her do a double take. It looks like they’re having fun.

On Christmas morning, when a few of the neighbours were out on the street, Claire had gone outside to catch her neighbour, Jenna, and wish her happy Christmas. She’d been dressed in one of those giant camouflage Dryrobes and was off to the beach with a gang of friends. Jenna had told Claire to come too, but Claire had declined. She’s forty-four and the days of exposing her body to the public are long gone. She’d feel far too flabby and saggy in front of super-fit Jenna and her shiny friends.

Maybe she should push herself out of her comfort zone and go next time though, she thinks. With the new year coming, she needs to do something to shake things up. She can’t keep on making resolutions and breaking them. Even so, she reaches across the dashboard to the cubbyhole, where she knows Ash has left half a packet of Tangfastics. The new regime can start in January.

7

Scatter Cushions

It’s ridiculous, Maddy thinks, that she’s become so reliant on her phone for all her basic functions that, now that it’s broken, she’s rendered helpless. She pays for everything on her wallet app and, having left her actual wallet in her parka pocket at home, she can’t even buy a cheap replacement. She’s cobbled together eleven pounds in cash from the pockets of her gym bag, but she knows it’s not going to go very far and that she’s going to have to face the music.

Even with no traffic it takes over an hour to get home. She’d been in such a state when she’d left that she hadn’t noticed the distance, but she’s exhausted by the time she gets to Cobham. She stops the car in the drive, glad that Trent’s car isn’t here. She notices that the wreath and Christmas lights have been left in a tangled heap by the front door. Everything had looked so pristine and welcoming on Christmas morning, but now her home looks strange and worrying to her – like a relative in a coma.

She feels her eyes fill with unexpected tears as she gets out of the car. What had she been expecting? That her home would welcome her back? That it would make everything OK? After all, this is the home that she famously built from scratch, documenting the whole process in her @made_home log and Instagram account. She’s shared everything: from bidding on the ugly bungalow that had once stood on this patch of land, to driving the bulldozer that had razed it to the ground. Every roof tile, window frame, radiator fixing and light bulb she’s painstakingly chosen herself, and that’s all before the eye-catching décor and snazzy furniture. She knows at least five people who have used her Moroccan-inspired tile scheme in their own bathrooms.