Spinning Around by Catherine Jinks Page B

supermarket. It’s a bit crummy. The rice shelves are infested with weevils, and I’ve seen a squashed cockroach on the floor. What’s more, there are always big, sticky spills everywhere; there was one this morning, which Emily trod in. She made a bit of a fuss, because the soles of her shoes started to snap when she walked. But then Mandy came by, and she was distracted. That’s the thing about Emily. It doesn’t take much to cheer her up—not like Jonah. Jonah broods. He broods because he can’t get his stroller harness undone, or because he can’t line up five plastic horses precisely in a row. He’s frustrated, I think, by the fact that he’s still a small child. It’s a difficult sort of age, when you’re a perfectionist.
    Anyway, as I said, Mandy came by with two of her three in tow. Mandy is the wholefood mother I was talking about. You know? The one without television? I tell you, she depresses me so much. There she was, looking slim and pretty, with her three-year-old Hamon walking quietly beside her and the baby, Isoline, hanging from her neck in a pouch. (I could never master those pouch things. They always gave me a sore back.) And there was I, overweight and dishevelled, pushing a grizzly Jonah as Emily dawdled along three metres behind me, making patterns on the shiny floor with her sticky feet. Needless to say, Mandy’s trolley was full of wholefoods: rolled oats, dried apricots, tofu, bean sprouts, soya milk, tuna in springwater. The fabric roof of my stroller, in contrast, was piled high with chocolate biscuits, pretzels, tinned peaches, cheese crackers, Ovaltine and jelly crystals. Oh—and the chicken nuggets, of course. Don’t let’s forget the chicken nuggets, which Mandy always says aren’t made out of chicken at all.
    Then, just to top it off, Mandy started talking about her eldest, Jesse. Apparently he wasn’t happy at his current school. It was chaotic, she said, and the teachers were all disillusioned. Rather than have him travel long distances to a Steiner school— one in which a child’s individual talents were nurtured and acknowledged, rather than ignored—she was considering the benefits of home schooling. Home schooling . This, mind you, from a woman who has two other kids under four, a bloody vegetable garden, and a job making children’ clothes that she sells at local markets. (Her children, needless to say, are always beautifully dressed in casual, stylish gear that she whips up herself out of thick-weave cottons and fake linens in shades of stone, wine, denim, watermelon and buttercup.)
    I just stood there with my mouth hanging open.
    â€˜Well,’ she said at last, dismissing the subject with a little smile and a wave of her hand, ‘I don’t know yet. There’s the social aspect I have to consider. Anyway, how are you? You look well.’
    â€˜I’m fine.’ Wild horses wouldn’t have dragged the truth out of me. ‘What about you?’
    â€˜Oh, I’ve been having a terrific time. Remember that book club I told you about? Well I went to it, last night, and I took Jesse and Hamon and Isoline, and it was wonderful . Just wonderful.’ She fixed me with her mild blue gaze, and smiled her pleasant, gentle, earth-mother smile. ‘You ought to come,’ she urged me. ‘Bring the kids. They’d love it.’
    Oh sure, I thought. They’d love to loll on my knee during a discussion of the latest Peter Carey.
    â€˜They have their own book club,’ Mandy continued, ‘where someone reads to them, and asks them questions afterwards.’
    I could just picture it: Jonah trying to wrest the book from this literary person’s hand (being under the impression that every book on earth is his personal possession—he loves his books with a vengeance), while Emily wanders off to check out the bone-meal biscuits in the dog’s