The Playgroup

Cara didn’t want to go back there. It hadn’t been fun the last time and she had been in tears when she had left. The good toys had all been immediately claimed by the older or more boisterous children as soon as they came out of the crates and the ones left for the slower, weaker or just less confrontational kids were old, dirty and generally rubbish. A girl who looked like she was definitely old enough to be in school had laughed (not just giggled innocently either, but cackled in a really sneering way) when Cara put her shoes in the wrong cubbyhole, but obviously the very worst thing about the last time was that nobody had wanted to play with her and Susie. She still couldn’t understand why not; she had ever so smiley, leaving a lot of room on the playmat and ensuring that she didn’t hog any toys and Susie was so beautiful even if she did smell ever-so-slightly of vomit. Still, nobody had come near them, which had damaged Cara’s newly shaky confidence and made her want to stay in the house in front of an endless loop of Tom & Jerry forever. But Paul had said that she had to go back today, that she was a 33-year-old grown woman, a mum now and if she could handle running the biggest department in the agency, then she could certainly handle a local playgroup.