She is holding another Pantone mug, in a different shade. This is perhaps the best way to describe Asha: she is a woman who has throughout her life successfully kept hold of identical sets of mugs. In her late twenties but more grown-up than me, by far.
This is perhaps the best way to describe me: I have random and disparate and sometimes entirely unknown mugs that have somehow been acquired through life.
I see Flick calling again. Ignore.
‘It is.’ I nod sagely, sipping from my mug with its just right blend of blue-green. ‘Insane.’
This is approximately the 177th time I have had this conversation about how fast my daughter’s childhood is going.
My phone beeps. Flick. Ignore.
While the small talk would normally have me climbing the walls to look over the top for some dark humour and spark, today it’s comforting. It’s the conversational equivalent of putting one foot in front of the other. We’re back to the basics and the basics are what I need. I think I’m acclimatising to the basics.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Asha, frowning. ‘You seem distracted.’
I nod.
‘You should write about that on the blog,’ she says, back to her topic. ‘The weirdness of time when you have kids.’
‘Yeah, I’ll have a think,’ I say. ‘Hey, who was that guy I saw you talking to in the village the other day?’ I ask, spontaneous, just in case, because something has to give, something has to move forward. ‘I couldn’t cross the road in time to say hi.’
Asha looks caught out.
‘Guy?’ she says. Slightly pink? ‘Oh yeah, I was giving him directions.’
‘To where?’ I ask and she tells me the pub but Sowerton is small. Who needs directions to our village’s only pub, that cosy old-school hub where the locals turn when you walk in and the gravy comes in slices?
You can see it from wherever you are. It’s tiny, Sowerton, thirty minutes outside Manchester. We have one coffee shop that doubles as a bar. There is a post office, doctor’s surgery, one of those high-end boutiques only frequented by WAGs and rich retired women who have blow-dries every week and need an outfit for their son’s wedding. And that’s our lot.
Zoom out from there and it is fields, houses, a small village school. You can climb over a stile and walk for an hour without coming to a road. You don’t nip to the post office without having five conversations with people you know; the doctor’s receptionist, your neighbour three doors down, that octogenarian you don’t remember meeting but who says hello to Poppy by name every time you see her. Friendly, people say. Stifling, I mutter quietly as I scurry away.
I pass Poppy a Lego brick.
Sit back on the sofa.
Sip my peppermint tea.
I think about how I move quickly in Manchester. How it fuels me. And how I move slowly here, like the countryside depletes me. I don’t know. It’s an odd thing because I’m in my thirties with a child and I’m supposed to spend my life muttering about how glad I am to be out of the city and instead, I pine like I’ve left a hot, wild lover who wore me out but I could never tire of.
I look at Asha and she seems on edge, twitchier even than her normal anxious state, tidying up around the kids.
Was she lying to me? And if so, why?
I come back to the now and look around at Asha’s house, painfully tidy. I glance at her bookshelves, perfectly filed; the rows of framed pictures, of Ananya, minutes old, weeks old, months old. Of Asha in Delhi with her grandparents as a teenager, with Aidan on their wedding day, my friend a doll in her exquisite sari. The pictures line up neatly in matching frames.
‘I swear my hair is still falling out after having Ananya,’ Asha says, looking in the mirror above her fireplace and smoothing down her already perfectly smooth black hair. ‘Surely that should have stopped by now.’
I look up. ‘Sorry, what?’
I have drifted off, I realise, to thinking about Ollie, sipping his coffee. About Joshua, holding my elbows. About my disintegrating marriage. About that man who looked like Mitch. About Asha, and how she could possibly fit into this.
‘My hair,’ she says, looking at me strangely. She ducks her head. ‘Just saying it’s still coming out in clumps in the shower.’
I stare at her and go into a trance. When I wake up, I panic. Where’s Poppy? But she is there on the floor throwing a ball. I lean across and smooth down a bit of her hair that’s sticking up. She giggles because it tickles and I tickle her properly so that she shrieks and claps her hands together in pure joy. And I laugh then too, genuinely.
‘Are you okay?’ asks Asha from above when I come back up.
‘Oh yeah, yeah. Sorry.’
I feel stupid. Obviously it was just a guy. Not Mitch. How could it be Mitch? We sit in silence for a while and Asha breaks it.
‘So what happened with work then?’
‘I just decided to take more time off,’ I lie. ‘It’s going so fast, like you say.’
‘Wow, that’s generous of them!’ she says, and I detect envy. ‘You must have a decent boss.’
I think of Flick and want to cry. ‘I do,’ I say.
I reach down, human yoyo, to pass Poppy her Lego brick.
The doorbell rings. I nip out to the hall to answer it as I’m closest and Asha shouts, ‘Sorry to be a pain but …’ as she charges urgently towards us, anxiety etched across her thick foundation.
‘It’s okay,’ says Emma, holding her hand up to Asha as she puts Seth down on the floor with the others. She yanks off her ballet pumps, knows Asha’s urgency is about the fear of shoes on her cream carpet.
Emma puts her car keys in her bag and pads across the cream carpet in the living room in her bare feet. She lives in the next village as opposed to the
