Veronica

When Sarah’s husband arrived that Friday to collect Amelia, Veronica signalled for a word. She’d been watching him all week, an increasingly absorbing pastime, distracting her from competing thoughts of next door, and her ever empty stomach. Days earlier, she’d already mentioned that she was an old friend of his wife’s. He’d smiled amiably at that, acknowledging that Sarah had indeed told him as much; but so far Sarah herself had replied to Veronica’s dinner invitation only with apologies, and not yet provided an alternative date. Veronica had restrained herself from texting again, pretending not to feel the thump of rejection or the seed of resentment that planted, but when she glanced now at Sarah’s hovering husband, and their perfect daughter, she felt a dark tension creep through her chest.

Now that she knew what she was looking for, Amelia Beckham was so very much like her mother. Veronica saw it in the way she double-wrapped her skinny legs around each other when sitting, and tucked her wild hair determinedly behind her ears. She saw it in the earnest way Amelia approached the reward chart on the wall at the front of the class, carefully making sure that each of the oval-shaped stickers next to her name were coloured gold. And she had seen it very specifically that afternoon, when Amelia flouted the playground code of not telling, and to the chagrin of her own best friends reported to Veronica that the small, unfortunately round boy who also had the lamentable habit of being a nose-picker, had been excluded from a game of chase and was crying behind the scooter shed. Amelia led Veronica to the spot and quite seriously gave an account of what had happened, before taking the boy by the hand and striding bravely back to the playground where she started her own game with him herself, handing Veronica the perfect excuse to corner her father.

It was a protracted procedure. Before they could talk, Veronica had to see all the other children out of the classroom. Parents arrived with scooters and snacks, and warnings of just a short visit to the school’s adventure playground since a seeming array of ballet/piano/tennis/Mandarin teachers would be waiting. On behalf of the less advantaged children she’d years ago taught in Kenya, Veronica sometimes rolled her eyes at this; but then she remembered how unlucky she had often felt as a child, in the throes of such overt, material fortune, and she looked harder at the children who leaped onto, or unfolded themselves into, or reluctantly conceded to depart with their arriving carers. Veronica reproached the parents who sent nannies in their stead. Silently of course, and in spite of identifying herself as a career woman, but Lack had a way of hardening judgment. Without intention, every day, she spent countless minutes imagining how, if she had a child of her own, like these, like Amelia, she would cling to every moment possible, and stuff the Mandarin, she would play with them and create with them and tell them a million times a day how very wanted they were. Sometimes, into these ponderings would seep a toxic feeling of injustice: how unfair it was that parents like some of these, like her own, were gifted with children they rarely seemed to desire; how unfair that the dreadful man who lived next door was able to spawn a baby whose cries he wilfully ignored and she had to listen to each night, in mockery; how unfair that her childhood friend, the same age as herself, had been granted not one but two children already.