Дэвид Муди - Strangers

‘Don’t mention it,’ the receptionist said. Michelle was on her way out when the woman called her back. She was holding up five plastic phials. ‘Oh, and the doctor’ll need urine samples with each form, and he’ll need to see all of you in person before he agrees to take any of you on as patients. That all clear?’

‘As crystal. Thanks again for all your help.’

Michelle took the phials and walked away. With the forms, the phials, the car keys, her handbag and George, she was struggling. Unsighted, she crashed into a man coming the other way and managed to drop everything but her son. The man, late fifties, short with grey hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a close trimmed beard, quickly picked everything up for her. ‘New patient?’ he asked.

‘Hopefully. How can you tell?’

‘The forms and the piss-pots,’ he said, grinning. He folded the papers and dropped the phials into her open bag. ‘I’m Doctor Kerr. Nice to meet you.’

‘Nice to meet you, too,’ she replied, trying to juggle everything so she could shake his hand.

‘Alice give you a warm welcome, did she?’

‘Alice?’

‘My charming receptionist.’

‘No, not really.’

‘True to form,’ he sighed, then he leant a little closer. ‘She’s very efficient and remarkably thorough, but her interpersonal skills are bloody awful.’

‘I’d noticed.’

‘I inherited her from my predecessor. She’s been here longer than this building. I think they built it around her.’

Michelle laughed. ‘I can believe that.’

The doctor tapped her arm, ruffled George’s hair, then walked on. ‘Be seeing you soon, then.’

‘I’m sure you will.’

‘Alice, the light of my life, how are you this morning?’ she heard him say at the top of his voice. She didn’t hear Alice’s response.

‘See, George,’ she said as she carried him back out to the car, ‘they’re not all complete aliens here. Most, maybe, but not all of them.’

The Thussock Community Hall was a one-storey rectangular wooden building with a flat roof, situated on the outermost edge of a grassy recreation area close to the main housing estate. Probably the only park in Thussock, the recreation area itself was little more than a large, odd-shaped field with a rectangle of tarmac dropped right in the middle, upon which sat a slide, a roundabout, and a row of three swings. One of the swings didn’t have a seat, and the graffiti-covered slide had seen better days.

Michelle had spotted the play area from the road first and she’d figured that if she hoped to meet like-minded parents with kids of a similar age to George at this time of the day, this place was as good as any to find them. She’d felt like a weirdo, loitering and looking for kids. Fortunately she discovered that a parent and toddler group was in session in the hall next door. Going into the timber-clad building felt unexpectedly daunting, like she was stepping into the lion’s den, but she was getting used to it. If she was honest with herself, she hadn’t felt completely comfortable since she’d left Redditch.

A wide entrance corridor ran from the front door into the main hall. Off it were several more doors: a half-empty storeroom, a small kitchen, and male and female toilets. A particularly gruff-looking woman headed Michelle off before she could get through. Michelle tried to make conversation but received only the most cursory of replies. The woman’s responses were little more than a bullet-point list of dos and don’ts: the times, the rules, the cost. She wasn’t as bad as the doctor’s receptionist, Michelle thought, but she wasn’t far off.

Michelle paused and took a deep breath before going into the hall. She felt self-conscious… on edge. There were chairs around the edge of the room and in the centre a group of between fifteen and twenty children (they didn’t stay still long enough to count) were playing with, and occasionally fighting over, a mass of well-worn toys. She let go of George’s hand and gave him a gentle nudge. Unsure at first, he gravitated towards a sit-in car similar to one he had at home and climbed inside. Within minutes he was settled – already playing with several other kids. Michelle sat by herself on a wooden bench at the side of the room and watched him. She almost envied him. Nothing matters to kids , she thought. Who you are, the things you’ve done, what you’ve been through… none of it counts for anything much. They see someone roughly the same shape and size as them and they play, simple as that .

The same definitely couldn’t be said for adults. It wasn’t a problem specific to Thussock, of course, but it seemed particularly prevalent here. There were plenty of other parents in the room, almost exclusively mothers and (she presumed) grandmothers, but none of them seemed particularly keen to welcome a stranger. No one was going out of their way to be rude – plenty of folk had acknowledged her when she’d arrived – but those nods and mumbled hellos were the full extent of their interaction. There had been a roughly equal number of people sitting on all sides of this room at first. Not now. Now, apart from a couple of other stragglers, there were two larger groups of women on either side of the kitchen serving hatch, leaving Michelle on her own at the other end of the hall.

You’re just paranoid . It’s perfectly natural. You’re the new girl. It’s up to you to make the first move.

Clutching her purse, she walked up to the hatch. ‘Could I have a cup of tea, please?’ she asked the first lady she made eye contact with.

‘What’s that?’

‘A cup of tea, please.’

‘It’s your accent,’ the woman grunted as she poured Michelle’s drink.

‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Fifty pence.’

Michelle gave her a pound. ‘Keep the change for the funds. Can I take a biscuit for my boy?’

‘That’ll be twenty pence.’

Michelle gave her another fifty, despite having already overpaid. Keep trying , she told herself over and over. ‘We’re new here. Just moved here from Redditch.’

‘Thought we’d not seen you before.’

The woman was almost monosyllabic, as if small-talk in Thussock was taxed.

‘Nice hall you have here.’

‘It does the job.’

‘Do you meet here every day?’

‘Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, Thursday afternoons.’

Michelle just nodded, her questions now beginning to sound as forced as the woman’s replies. The door into the kitchen opened, and another woman put her head through. ‘Do we have more fruit juice in the stores, Sylvia? I can’t find any.’

Sylvia – the woman Michelle had been talking to – appeared to visibly relax when she talked to her friend. ‘I’ve not seen any. I thought Bryan was supposed to keep everything stocked up. He’s bloody useless, that one. I can see why Betty’s the way she is.’

‘Don’t get me started on Betty, love. You’ll never believe what she’s gone and done now…’

They moved out of earshot. Michelle stopped listening but kept watching. Sylvia was unrecognisable now, all the frostiness and reticence gone. She was laughing and joking with her friend and Michelle couldn’t help wondering, are they laughing at me? She picked up her tea and George’s biscuit and walked away.

She was getting better with the accent, but people were still occasionally hard to understand. She was sure she’d just heard someone mention Ken Potter’s name. Wasn’t that the man whose house Scott had been delivering to yesterday? The man who…? She stopped herself from jumping to conclusions. They might know him . Her ears better attuned now, she listened in. ‘S’terrible,’ a young mum cradling a new-born was saying to three friends gathered around her. ‘We were just saying this morning how we’d seen him in town at the weekend, carrying on like he owned the place as always.’