Mantequero by Jenny Twist Page B

each get a present.”
    “The guests get a present?” June was appalled. Her nephews and nieces already had far more toys each than she and her sisters had ever had between them. What was the point of filling people's houses with more and more plastic rubbish which would never be played with?
    “And it has to be a nice present,” Mary said. “Nothing cheap and nasty.”
    June thought about the cheap and nasty presents she had received as a child. Paint by Numbers sets, cut-out dolls, jig-saw puzzles, and remembered how much she had loved them, especially the cut-out dolls. You could get them for sixpence a book from the market. And that was in old money–only two and a half pence in new money. She had played with them for hours on end, laying them out on the floor and dressing them in their paper clothes. She loved them. Patsy had a bedroom full of My Little Pony sets. Dozens of them. June had never seen her play with any of them. It was obscene when there were children in the world dying for lack of food or clean water.
    She was on the verge of saying so when Rose patted her on the arm and said kindly, “Of course, Sweetie, you couldn't be expected to know.”
    A white hot wave of anger threatened to engulf her, so intense that it robbed her of the power of speech. Of course she could be expected to know. She spent more time with Rose's kids than Rose did. This was nothing to do with what the children wanted and everything to do with her sisters keeping up with the Joneses. She was fed up with being treated like a half-wit because she didn't belong to their bloody Mother and Baby club. Everything her sisters said to her implied she was a failure just because she had not married some boring bloke and produced children that nobody could be bothered to spend any time with.
    But before she had pulled herself together sufficiently to deliver the most stinging rebuff she had ever composed, her sister Ellen cut across her with an even deadlier remark.
    “We've been thinking,” she said, “about Mother. She's getting more and more absent-minded. It's probably time you moved in with her.”
    June sank back on her chair, numb with horror. So that was it, then. She was to become full-time carer as well as convenient baby-sitter and general factotum. Good old June. She was hopeless, of course, fat and stupid, but she was always there when you needed her.
    It wasn’t supposed to happen like this. She was the clever one, the one who was brilliant at languages, the only one in her family ever to go to university. She was supposed to have a glamorous life. She was supposed to travel to exotic places and meet interesting exotic men, one of whom would prove to be her soul mate, sweep her off her feet and marry her. She wasn’t supposed to spend her waking life trying to cram a modicum of foreign language into the brains of teenage louts at the mercy of their hormones, who were unable to think of anything but sex. And she was not , under any circumstances, supposed to end up as a dried-up old maid looking after her senile and no doubt eventually incontinent old mother.
    She was thirty-two and her life was over.
    “We thought,” said Mary, “that it would be a good idea if you could move in before Christmas.”
    “Out of the question,” said June. “I'm going away this year.”
    It was almost worth the anguish to see the expressions of surprise on her sisters' faces.
    “But where? Who with?” said Ellen. “Is it a school trip?”
    “It's not, as it happens. I'm going with a friend.” And she got up and walked majestically out of the hall, leaving her sisters staring after her, open-mouthed. Ha!
     
    ****
     
    Of course, having said that, she now had to do it. Strike while the iron is hot, she thought and headed off to the travel agent she used for booking the school trips.
    By the time she got to the travel agent, she had decided where she wanted to go. Not Germany or Greece, it was too cold in December. And not Italy or