SHORT STORIES SPECIAL

A lonely mum is thrilled when she makes a new friend in the park playground.But things are not as they seem in this tale by Helen Monks Takhar

Rose watched her son being pushed to the back of the queue for the zipwire yet again.It wasn’t only that Charlie seemed so much smaller than the boys and girls who looked to be about his age, which made the four-year-old easier to shunt to the rear of the wooden platform on which the children waited. It was also because the other children, in their crisp shorts and designer sundresses, seemed to expect it to always be their turn, even when it patently wasn’t.

Rose found herself staring, not for the first time, at the children’s mothers, none of whom ever deigned to talk to Rose, the lone, unglamorous mum in the faded jeans and scuffed boots, always sat by herself on the bench in the shade between the zipwire and swings.

The women, Rose decided, had something of a uniform: loose prairie dresses in geometric or floral prints and gleaming white trainers. Most of them were too concerned with their competitive chatter on kitchen extensions and the relative merits of the European summer destinations from which they’d all recently returned to register what their children were doing.

Rose noticed a plump toddler in a white playsuit flee the pack, unnoticed by her mother, a woman in diaphanous cream dress with a grass-green houndstooth print and an artfully messy blonde bun.

“The Amalfi coast is just the best,” Rose heard the woman say.

“Not for us, we’re Costa Paradiso all the way,” replied her friend, causing the mother of the escapee toddler to appear momentarily wounded before reapplying a nodding smile.