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‘Sorry, didn’t mean to wake you.’
‘I’m used to it.’
‘Bad night?’ Pete enquired.
‘The usual.’ Cara yawned, arching her back and stretching her arms. ‘You?’
‘The usual. Mostly elderly patients, an asthma attack, baby with a fever, and a teenage boy who went too far with the alcohol. At least no one died. Well, not on my watch anyway. You never know what’s going to happen later.’ Pete had seen a lot in his time with the ambulance service. At first he’d had trouble sleeping, constantly going over the events of the day and making sure he’d done everything possible for each patient. After a while, it became more familiar. It never got easier for him, but he’d grown more confident in his skills.
‘My husband; out there saving the world!’ Cara flung her arm over Pete’s shoulders. ‘Toby woke four times. That damn teddy bear! I don’t know what to do about it. He refuses to sleep without it, but it always manages to end up on the floor. What do we do?’ Cara propped up onto her elbow. ‘Pete?’
His eyes were closed and his breathing slow. Sighing, Cara got out of bed and stretched again, desperate for a strong cup of coffee. ‘Let the day begin.’
‘I knowyou want jam on your toast, Jacob, but we’ve run out. Mummy will buy more this afternoon.’ Cara quicklyadded ‘jam’ to the shopping list before spreading peanut butter on Jacob’s toast, Vegemite on Toby’s, and pouring milk into Lily’s cereal. ‘One day you kids will be old enough to get your own breakfast, won’t that be good?’ No one answered.
After wolfing down some muesli and Jacob’s discarded banana, Cara put the lunches into their school bags, signed an excursion permission note for Lily, put on the first load of washing, and carefully rolled the portrait of Jacob into a cylinder for show-and-tell day. ‘C’mon kids, time to brush your teeth.’ She shuffled the troupe one-by-one into the bathroom. A few spits and gurgles later, they all hopped in the car.
‘Skooo... skooo...’ Toby said a few minutes later, pointing to Lily skipping off to meet her friends in the school playground. ‘Me go skooo?’ he asked.
‘One day, baby, one day.’ Cara laughed. ‘Believe me, Ican’twait.’
Next stop was Penguins Pre-school. Cara unbuckled the kids, led Jacob inside, then buckled Toby back in the car. ‘Oh, crap!’ She noticed the cylinder on the seat. ‘Oops, I mean crab!’ The last thing she needed was for Toby to start saying ‘crap’ every time something went wrong. He’d already caught on to her frequent use of ‘bugger’. When she’d dropped a bottle of juice at the supermarket, spilling the contents on the floor of aisle four, ‘bugger’ had been Toby’s response. ‘My thoughts exactly,’ she’d whispered under her breath, as an elderly woman raised her brows in disapproval, pushing her trolley away from the spreading deluge.
She unbuckled Toby again, grabbed the cylinder and raced it back into the pre-school. ‘Jacob forgot his show and tell.’ She handed it to Mrs Fern.
‘Thanks, Cara. Have a good day!’
‘You too!’ Cara waved, already half way up the path.
‘How on Earthdo these things get so tangled?’ Item five on Cara’s To Do List was underway. ‘You’d think everything comes to life as soon as I close the drawer, dancing around and tangling themselves for the sole purpose of annoying me!’ She pulled out the can opener, entwined with four or five elastic bands and a candy wrapper, and hooked onto the egg whisk. Toby looked at her blankly, then peered into the drawer. ‘It’s like that Barrel of Monkeys game, Tobes, where you have to link the monkeys and pull them all out together, only with this I don’t have to try, it just happens!’ She continued pulling out gadgets and utensils, linked and knotted together like a set of Christmas tree lights.
The beep of the washing machine gave her permission to end the madness of sorting the drawers. They weren’t perfectly organised like her mother’s, but they would do for now. She closed the drawer, then yanked it open again to check if things had re-tangled themselves while she wasn’t looking. ‘What am I doing?’ She shook her head. ‘Mummy’s going a little bonkers, Tobes! Or maybe I just need another cup of coffee.’ She scooped her youngest out of his walker and went into the laundry, and twenty minutes later the sun was rapidly drying everything she’d hung on the clothesline.
‘Okay, household gripe number two: Where do all the matching socks go?’ Hands on hips and eyes squinting, Cara surveyed the scene: clothes, towels, and underwear swinging gently on the line, and nine socks, none of which had a match. It was like there were free radicals roaming around the house taking socks as they went on their destructivejourneys. Actually, there were: her kids. Smiling at her weird thoughts, Cara led free radical number three inside to give the washing machine its second workout of the day.
Toby grumbled, scratching at his chest. Cara pouted, crouching down and lifting his top. White scaly skin and red scratch marks greeted her. Turning him around, she saw them on his back too. ‘Oh dear, Mummy forgot to buy more cream.’
Twenty-five minutes later, Toby having been buckled in and out of the car for the tenth time, she rubbed cream on his skin. She knew it would only last about six hours before he scratched again. It helped somewhat, but Cara thought there must be another solution for Toby’s eczema. She scribbled ‘Book Dr’s appt’ on the notepad beside the phone and decided she’d request a referral to a specialist.
After progress with her To Do List, Cara arrived at the pre-school. The kids filtered out one by one to their waiting parents, carrying sculptures made from cereal boxes and cardboard toilet rolls, Mums and Dads saying ‘Wow, this is beautiful!’ and ‘Of course we’ll decorate the dining table with it!’ while rolling their eyes.
‘Cara, could I have a word?’ Mrs Fern gestured inside.
Oh God, what has Jacob drawn on now?Please don’t let it be another child like last time. During the first week he’d drawn glasses around little Benjamin’s eyes with black marker, complete with a moustache and beard. Needless to say, Benjamin’s mother wasn’t amused.
‘That picture Jacob brought for show-and-tell, did you really draw that?’
‘Yes, I did.’ Cara nodded.
‘It’s fantastic!’ exclaimed Mrs Fern. ‘You have quite a gift.’
‘Um ... thanks.’ Cara said, relieved that Jacob didn’t appear to have done anything wrong.
‘Listen, I was wondering ... would you be interested in doing after-school art classes here for the children?’
‘Oh! Um...’
‘I was thinking one afternoon a week for about an hour, perhaps a Wednesday if that suits you. You’d be paid of course,’ she explained.
