Make My Wish Come True

CHAPTER TWO

Twenty minutes later Juliet found herself standing outside the ball pit in the local leisure centre’s soft-play area. She closed her eyes and opened them again, not quite able to believe what she was seeing. There was Great-aunt Sylvia, sitting in the middle of the thousands of brightly coloured plastic balls, looking grim. Apart from her aunt, herself and two uniformed officers, the play area was almost deserted. A few cross-looking mothers were hurrying their children into their coats and shoes and tutting about having to cut short their afternoon’s activities.

‘She won’t come out, no matter what we say,’ the petite female officer told Juliet. ‘She keeps asking for Mary.’

Juliet nodded. Well, no luck there. Her mother had been dead for almost five years. She stepped into the ball pond and waded towards her aunt. ‘Hello, Aunt Sylvia … These nice police officers are wondering if you’d like to come out of here now.’

Aunt Sylvia shot a withering look at the two uniformed people looking on. ‘I don’t like the look of that girl. Eyes are too close together. She’ll get up to no good when she grows up, you mark my words!’

Juliet stared at her great-aunt helplessly. Somewhere deep inside she wanted to weep – for the indignity of the situation the old woman was in now, for who she’d become and who she’d forgotten she’d once been – but Juliet didn’t do crying. Not in public, at least. And especially not when everyone else was expecting her to make everything right again.

She held out her hand. ‘It’s time to go home now, Aunt Sylvia. Come on …’

Her aunt’s head snapped round as she stopped glaring at the female police officer and transferred her attention to Juliet. ‘Mary!’ she exclaimed.

Juliet gave her a weak smile. She supposed that in her aunt’s dementia-riddled mind, the boundaries between mother and daughter had somehow blurred. And the older she got, the more she saw her mother’s face staring back in the mirror at her. Same brown eyes, same long nose and high cheekbones. Not exactly pretty, but with enough good bone structure that she’d never be plain, either. But in the last few months the grooves in her forehead had grown deeper and her eyes had become more hooded. Her age – and her divorce – were showing up there now.

Sylvia crossed her arms. ‘These people put me in here and won’t let me get out again,’ she said. ‘That’s why I said they had to fetch you. I knew you’d come and sort it all out! You always were such a good girl …’

‘I’m not Mary,’ she said soothingly. ‘It’s Juliet. Mary’s daughter.’

A flicker of confusion passed across the old woman’s features. Juliet inched a little closer, but her aunt, suddenly wary and now doubting the identification of her visitor, just backed away.

Juliet sighed. If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. She lowered herself, jiggling slightly to push the balls out of the way, until her bottom made contact with the slippery plastic padded floor.

Aunt Sylvia suddenly smiled. ‘Oh, yes! I remember …’ She stared out across the sea of bright plastic for a moment, her lips in a slight curve, lost in a memory that Juliet suspected might evaporate before she managed to vocalise it.

But then she muttered, ‘Lively little thing, Mary’s daughter. She looked like an angel with those big blue eyes and white-blonde curls.’

Something inside Juliet sank. After all the hours spent with her great-aunt over the last couple of months …

She’d been blonder when she’d been little, but her hair had always been straight with a wavy kink. She’d never been blessed with the wispy ringlets her aunt was describing. It wasn’t this sister that Sylvia was remembering.

Her aunt blinked and turned to her again. ‘You know her, you say? Mary’s little girl?’

Juliet opened her mouth to explain it all patiently again, but closed it before any sound emerged. What was the point? ‘Yes, I know her,’ she replied wearily.

Sylvia smiled back. ‘Did she send you to me? She’s been away for such a long time.’

Gemma hadn’t seen Aunt Sylvia since last Easter, and the old woman could really do with regular visits from people she knew and remembered. Not that Juliet’s twice-weekly sessions seemed to be helping much. Back in the summer Sylvia had nearly always called her by name, even if there had been a handful of days when she’d smiled and nodded blankly, then referred to her as ‘that nice young girl’. But as the days had become shorter and greyer, her great-aunt had grown more and more confused, as if her memory was seeping away with the sunlight. Now she only knew who Juliet was one visit in four, and even then her recollection was patchy, fading in and out, like a badly tuned radio.

‘No, Gemma didn’t send me,’ she told her aunt. ‘But she’ll be home for Christmas this year, so you’ll see her then.’

‘Oh, good! Do you think she’ll want a sweetie when she gets here? Little girls like sweeties.’ Aunt Sylvia plunged her hands into the plastic balls beside her, not seeming to register the noisy rattling that echoed through the hangar-like building. She pulled her handbag out and rested it on her lap, then rummaged inside before proudly producing a small object, which she held carefully between thumb and forefinger. Juliet thought it might once have been a boiled sweet, but the lint and other old-lady gunk from the bottom of the bag had disguised it almost completely.

‘Here it is! Do you think she’d like it?’

Juliet thought of Gemma, how everything was so effortless for her, how she breezed in and out of everyone’s lives without a care in the world, and she found herself saying, ‘Yes. I think she’d like it very much. Why don’t you save it for her?’

Juliet had never really considered herself as having a naughty side, but she got a strange warm feeling when she thought of Gemma having not only to suck, but to swallow, the furry little ball of sugar when Juliet dragged her along for her next visit. Because drag Juliet would.

Sylvia dropped the sweet into a clean cotton handkerchief and placed it carefully back in the corner of her bag. Juliet wondered if it would have grown by the next time she saw it, like a strange kind of handbag snowball, rolling around in the fluff and debris.

‘It’s time to go home now,’ she repeated when her aunt closed her handbag and looked back up at her. Aunt Sylvia stared at her blankly for a second then held out a hand for Juliet to grasp hold of. She supported her aunt while she got to her feet, and then guided her back across the floor of the ball pond and helped her over the padded step that led to the main floor of the soft-play area.

The two police officers breathed out a sigh of relief and offered to take them back to Greenacres, the nursing home that really shouldn’t have lost Aunt Sylvia in the first place. Juliet was most cross about that. It wasn’t as if they didn’t charge enough.

The offer of a lift for Aunt Sylvia was tempting, but Juliet reckoned they’d get further if she just took the old lady back herself. She was used to Juliet’s car and was possibly less likely to get confused and distressed all over again if someone she knew – or almost knew – drove her.

Juliet checked her watch and felt her neck muscles tighten. Ten to three. She only just had enough time to take her aunt back to Greenacres, have a firm word with someone in charge, then race to St Martin’s to pick up her youngest three children.

They were just reaching her car, parked a little oddly in front of the leisure centre, when Juliet pulled up short.

The turkey!

Oh, well. There was nothing for it now. She was just going to have to cram that into her already packed schedule for tomorrow.

It doesn’t matter, she told herself. It’s fine. You can handle it. You’re good at organising and multi-tasking and getting things done.

Even so, once she’d checked her aunt was strapped in securely, then started up her car and made the ten-minute drive back to the nursing home, the empty row of boxes in her Christmas notebook began to haunt her.

Juliet drummed her fingers on the steering wheel and checked the clock on her car dashboard for the umpteenth time.

‘Ow!’ a small voice from behind her said.

She glanced in the rear-view mirror to see what her youngest three children were up to. ‘Polly, leave your brother alone.’

Polly stared back at her and pushed her glasses up on the bridge of her nose, the picture of ten-year-old innocence. ‘I didn’t do anything he didn’t deserve.’ Ten-going-on-forty, that was.

Juliet unclipped her seatbelt and turned to face her daughter, who was wedged between her two younger brothers in their booster seats. ‘I’ve told you before, Polly, you can’t just rule over your brothers with a rod of iron because you’re older than them.’

Polly looked unimpressed. ‘Someone’s got to.’ She flicked a haughty look at Josh, who was obviously the accused in this situation. ‘These children are positively feral, Mother.’

Juliet didn’t have time to argue with a ten-year-old about her parenting skills, so she turned to Josh. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing!’

She looked at Polly, knowing her daughter would be only too happy to testify against him.

‘He keeps moving his leg over onto my bit of the seat, and I’m compressed enough as it is. I did warn him I’d make him move it if he did it again.’

Well, she couldn’t fault Polly’s logic, but she could hardly let her daughter police the rest of the family’s behaviour – they’d all be locked up and sentenced to torture within the week if that were the case. Even Juliet. ‘If the boys give you trouble, you’re supposed to come to me about it,’ she told Polly. ‘Understand?’

Polly rolled her eyes, but eventually gave her a reluctant nod.

When Juliet turned back round to face forwards again, she noticed the clock on the dashboard. It was already three forty. Where in the world was Violet? She pulled her phone out of her coat pocket and sent another short and to-the-point text to her daughter, warning her that the taxi service was leaving in exactly three minutes, and that if she wasn’t here by then she’d have to get two buses home instead.

Just as she was turning the key in the ignition to start up the car, the door opened and Violet flopped into the passenger seat with a sigh. She was smiling, looking completely unconcerned that she’d kept the rest of them waiting.

She laughed, shaking her head. ‘You’ll never guess what Abby just said—’

Juliet turned the key and revved the car. ‘We’ve all been sitting here in the cold waiting for you, and you know the boys have swimming tonight!’

Violet’s warm, open expression closed down and she scowled back at her mother. ‘I’m not that late! God, Mum! And I was helping Kiera find her scarf, so it wasn’t my fault anyway.’

Juliet shook her head, clipped her belt back up and winced at the sound of crunching gears as she put her car into reverse.

Not my fault … Now where had she heard that before? Violet was turning into a mini version of Gemma.

As she drove she could see Violet out of the corner of her eye, hunched in the passenger seat, arms folded and scowling. The atmosphere wasn’t improved by the start of a squabble in the back seat, either, as Polly accused Josh of leaving his arm two millimetres further into her space than it should have been, and then Jake jumped in to defend his brother and deliberately drew Polly’s fire by invading her space from the other side.

‘Stop that!’ Juliet yelled. ‘Jake, you just kicked me in the back! Now, the three of you calm down and behave yourselves.’

And then she turned to her eldest daughter. They needed to have a little chat about her attitude, or else she’d turn out just like her aunt, causing mayhem for everyone else then refusing to take responsibility for it, but she realised she was now approaching a mini roundabout that always got clogged up at that time of day. ‘We’ll talk about this later, Vi,’ she said, glancing quickly in both directions. ‘But you’ve got to learn to express your opinions without being rude, because I won’t have you talking to me like—’

Unfortunately, the fight in the back seat erupted again at that moment and a deft kick in the back of her seat from Jake caused her to pitch forward. Her foot slipped off the clutch as she was crossing the roundabout and the car growled then stalled as it straddled the little white hump.

The car to her right slammed on its brakes and the driver leaned on his horn. Juliet’s heart pounded and her arms shook. The man was using his hands in the most creative of ways and she could lip-read enough of his tirade to know he thought she was a middle-class bitch who shouldn’t be allowed to operate a vehicle.

A stalled car in the middle of the junction meant that traffic backed up in all four directions. Horns blared. Drivers swore. All four of Juliet’s children started to scream and shout at each other, letting each other know, without holding back on the toilet-related insults, just whose fault it was.

Juliet found she couldn’t move. She was just frozen, fingers clenched around the steering wheel. She couldn’t even remember which pedal to press or what to do next to get the car started again. But the noise – the engines, the horns, the bickering children – was burrowing into her skull in a way she just couldn’t bear.

‘Will you just shut up!’ she bellowed at the top of her lungs, surprising herself with the volume, hearing the croak as her voice broke when she reached maximum decibels.

Outside the car the commotion continued, but inside everything went still and quiet. Violet, Polly, Josh and Jake stared at their mother open-mouthed.

She could feel the echo of her words pulsing around inside her head and it scared her slightly. She didn’t shout like that. Ever. And she certainly didn’t lose her temper with her children, not to this degree, anyway. Of course, she disciplined – she’d read countless books on how to do it properly – but she never just screamed at the kids. Right from when they were babies she’d always feared the kind of woman who did that was also the kind of woman who dragged toddlers down the street with their arms half out of their sockets or walloped them in the middle of supermarkets.

She’d had a feeling that things were a little off-kilter for weeks now, but she’d just put it down to the idea of Christmas looming ahead of her. As much as she loved the season, it would now be forever associated with the departure of the man she’d planned to spend her life with. If your husband choosing Boxing Day to announce your marriage was over didn’t leave a stain on a celebration, then she didn’t know what did.

Still, Juliet was good with stains, knew all the tricks and tips to get them to vanish. With the right amount of determination, you’d hardly ever know they’d been there once she’d finished with them. This one would be no different. She’d just have to try harder.

She became aware of quiet breathing beside her and in the back of the car. Silence verging on the miraculous. For the first time in years all four kids had shut up at the same time. She needed to reward them for that, didn’t she? Positive reinforcement.

‘Thank you,’ she said quietly, and if she’d been able to feel anything in the numbness of the after-shock of her outburst, she’d have been pleased at how calm and rational she sounded.

‘Mum …?’ a shaky voice said from beside her. ‘Are you okay?’

Juliet took some air in and held it. There was nothing left now. Not the dizzying frustration, not the clawing sense of racing towards a goal that got ever further away. Not even the fear that Violet would turn out to be exactly like Gemma and push her away for ever. Just nothing. It was wonderful.

‘Yes,’ she said, letting the breath out again. ‘Everything’s fine.’

The ability to not only think but also drive returned, so she started the engine, yanked the car into gear and without making eye contact with any of the drivers giving her withering looks she carried on her journey to the swimming pool.

CHAPTER THREE

The kids were still a bit subdued over tea that evening, but once they’d all tidied their plates away and headed off in their individual directions the sounds of normality began to creep back into Juliet’s household – the stomp of Violet’s feet on the stairs, an argument breaking out on the landing, the tinny cacophony of a cartoon show somewhere on a television …

‘Your dad’s going to be here at seven thirty,’ Juliet yelled up the stairs. ‘Make sure you have your stuff together by then.’

And, miraculously, they did. By the time Greg rang the doorbell four overnight bags were lined up in the hall and four children were in various stages of getting their winter coats on.

Greg looked tense when she opened the door. ‘Are they ready?’

Juliet nodded. It was odd, her standing here and him standing there. She hadn’t quite got over the shock of it each time he arrived to pick up the kids for his allotted weekend. She still wasn’t really sure what had gone wrong between them. They’d thought themselves the perfect couple, and this their perfect house, and then their four perfect children had come along and they’d been so happy … But now she could see how smug they’d been in the middle of all that perfection, how complacent.

She hadn’t seen it coming. Not in the slightest.

It was as if on her rigidly maintained To Do list she’d forgotten to reserve a tick box for ‘prepare for the disintegrating of your life and a painful divorce’. How stupid of her. She was never normally that disorganised.

‘Can I open the car, Dad?’ Josh said, pushing past Juliet’s legs and reaching for the key in his father’s hand.

‘No, I want to!’ Jake said, trying to nudge his brother out of the way.

Greg handed the key over to Josh. ‘Josh can open the car up now and you can lock it when we get there,’ he told Jake. Both boys ran off in the direction of the drive. At least Violet and Polly stopped to give their mother a kiss on the cheek before they went out the door.

She ran after them, hugged them to her, one under each arm, and gave them a proper kiss. ‘Love you,’ she said, squeezing them, ‘and I’m sorry about earlier on.’

Violet shrugged.

Polly gave her an unblinking stare. ‘You know, as shock tactics go, it was really rather good.’

Juliet couldn’t help but smile. She ran after the boys and kissed them as she helped strap them into their booster seats in the back of Greg’s car.

When the doors were closed, the kids effectively sound-proofed from their conversation, Greg looked at her across the top of the car.

‘You look tired, Juliet,’ he said as he knocked on the window and signalled for Josh to return his keys. ‘Maybe you should try to chill out a little instead of doing the whole Christmas rigmarole this year?’

The smile immediately dropped from Juliet’s face. Oh, he sounded so polite and reasonable. So polite and reasonable she wanted to knock his block off. He still thought he had a say about how she behaved, or could comment on how she looked? Seriously? He’d given up that right when he’d moved out and moved on.

And there was nothing wrong with wanting to make Christmas a happy time, when nothing went wrong and everything was perfect. Greg’s surprise exit had put a blight on the festivities two years ago and last Christmas had been their first one living apart, the poor kids ferried from pillar to post and feeling very unsettled, so Juliet was determined this year should be extra special, especially as their father was being totally selfish about the whole thing.

‘Goodbye, Greg,’ she said through teeth so tightly clenched her jaw was starting to hurt, and then she bent and smiled brightly and waved to their children in the car. They didn’t need to know their mother and father were arguing again.

She kept it up as he shook his head and climbed into the driver’s seat and pulled away, but the effort of keeping that smile in place as they pulled out of the drive started to make her head pound. Once the Mercedes had rounded the hedge and joined the traffic on the road outside, she let it all out in a most colourful and unladylike word, the sort of thing she’d trained herself out of saying when the kids had been small, and then she hugged her arms around her to stave off the cold and marched back into her empty house in her slippers.

Maybe it wouldn’t be so galling if Greg hadn’t found it so easy to move on. They’d split, he’d grieved and now he had a new girlfriend. Easy as that. Sometimes Juliet wished she could find someone else, just so she could show him she wasn’t lagging behind, that he had no reason to pity her.

As she stalked into the kitchen and reached inside the fridge for a bottle of Pinot Grigio, she spotted her phone lying innocent and silent on the kitchen counter and her thoughts turned from one self-absorbed family member to another.

She kept eyeing her mobile while she emptied a generous amount of wine into a wine glass and took a large slug. And then she flexed her texting fingers.

When Gemma eventually fell into bed she didn’t even bother to put her pyjamas on. She just stripped down to her T-shirt and crawled under the covers. She picked her phone up off the bedside table and squinted at it. Two twenty-five. She had to be up in – what? – three hours? It was positively inhuman.

She flumped back heavily onto the soft down pillows and stared at the ceiling as tiredness rolled over her, but instead of sinking beneath those glorious waves, she was tossed and turned on them, feeling the pull of gravity on her eyelids but not quite able to surrender to unconsciousness.

Grunting, she reached for her phone and swiped the screen to wake it up. As usual, this was the only time she’d had all day to check her messages. The little badge on the app told her there were five waiting. It wouldn’t take a genius to guess who at least one of them was from. Her eyes rolled back in her head as she stared at the screen, promising a reprieve, but then, rather annoyingly, they refocused themselves again.

It had been the day from hell. Toby Thornton had had one of his legendary meltdowns and Gemma hadn’t even had the time to eat, let alone sit down in the last twenty-four hours. It was her job to sort things out again, to charm their star into setting foot on set again, and it was taking every last ounce of her resources to make that happen. Millions of dollars were at stake. She didn’t have time to indulge Juliet’s petty moans about the right kind of ivy or whether they should have a red or gold theme for the Christmas table settings.