Samantha: The whole Erotic Book Club started as a joke. It was actually my fault. I was doing canteen duty with Madeline and I said something to her about a raunchy scene in the book she’d chosen. It wasn’t even that raunchy, to be honest, I was just having a laugh, but then Madeline says, “Oh, did I forget to mention it was an erotic book club?” So we all started calling it the Erotic Book Club, and the more people like Harper and Carol clutched their pearls, the worse Madeline got.

Bonnie: I teach a yoga class on Thursday nights, otherwise I would have loved to have joined Madeline’s book club.

29.

One Month Before the Trivia Night

I have to take in my family tree tomorrow,” said Ziggy.

“No, that’s next week,” said Jane.

She was sitting on the bathroom floor, leaning against the wall while Ziggy had a bath. Steam and the scent of strawberry bubble bath filled the air. He loved to wallow in deep, very hot bubble baths. “Hotter, mummy, hotter!” he was always demanding while his skin turned so red, Jane was worried she was scalding him. “More bubbles!” Then he played long, complicated games through the bubbles, incorporating erupting volcanoes, Jedi knights, ninjas and scolding mothers.

“We need special cardboard for the family tree,” said Ziggy.

“Yes, we’ll get some on the weekend,” said Jane. She grinned at him. He’d molded the bubbles on his head into a Mohawk. “You look funny.”

“No, I look supercool,” said Ziggy. He went back to his game. “Kapow! Kapow! Ow! Stop that right now! Watch out, Yoda! Where’s your lightsaber? Say please, Yoda! Here it is!”

Water splashed and bubbles flew.

Jane returned to the book Madeline had chosen for their first book club meeting. “I picked something with lots of sex, drugs and murder,” Madeline had said, “so we have a lively discussion. Ideally there should be an argument.”

The book was set in the 1920s. It was good. Jane had somehow gotten out of the habit of reading for pleasure. Reading a novel was like returning to a once-beloved holiday destination.

Right now she was in the middle of a sex scene. She flipped the page.

“I’ll punch you in the face, Darth Vader!” cried Ziggy.

“Don’t say ‘punch you in the face,’” said Jane without looking up. “That’s not nice.” She kept reading. A cloud of strawberry-scented bubbles floated onto the page of her book. She pushed it away with her finger. She was feeling something: a tiny pinpoint of feeling. She shifted slightly on the bathroom tiles. No. Surely not. From a book? From two nicely written paragraphs? But yes. She was. She was ever so slightly aroused.

It was a revelation that after all this time she could still feel something so basic, so biological, so pleasant.

For a moment she saw the staring eye in the ceiling and her throat tightened, but then her nostrils twitched with a sudden flare of anger. I refuse, she said to the memory. I refuse you today, because guess what, I have other memories of sex. I have lots of memories of an ordinary boyfriend and an ordinary bed, where the sheets weren’t that crisp and there were no staring eyes in the ceiling and there wasn’t that muffled, draped silence, there was music and ordinariness and natural light and he thought I was pretty, you bastard, he thought I was pretty, and I was pretty, and how dare you, how dare you, how dare you?

“Mummy?” said Ziggy.

“Yes?” she said. She felt a crazed, angry kind of happiness, as if someone were daring her not to be.

“I need that spoon that’s shaped sort of like this.” He drew a semicircle in the air. He wanted the egg slicer.

“Oh, Ziggy, that’s enough kitchen stuff in the bath,” she said, but she was already putting her book down and standing up to go and get it for him.

“Thank you, Mummy,” said Ziggy angelically, and she looked down at his big green eyes with the tiny droplets of water beaded on his eyelashes and she said, “I love you so much, Ziggy.”

“I need that spoon pretty fast,” said Ziggy.

“OK,” she said.

She turned to leave the bathroom, and Ziggy said, “Do you think Miss Barnes will be mad at me for not bringing in my family tree project?”

“Darling, it’s next week,” said Jane. She went into the kitchen and read out loud from the notice stuck to the fridge by a magnet. “‘All the children will have a chance to talk about their family trees when they bring in their projects on Friday, March twenty-four’—oh, calamity.”

He was right. The family tree was due tomorrow. She’d had it in her head that it was due the same Friday as her dad’s birthday dinner, but then Dad’s dinner had been moved until a week later because her brother was going away with a new girlfriend. It was all bloody Dane’s fault.

No. It was her fault. She only had one child. She had a diary. It shouldn’t be that hard. They’d have to do it now. Right now. She couldn’t send him to school without his project. He’d be calling attention to himself, and he hated it when that happened. If it were Madeline’s Chloe, she couldn’t care less. She’d giggle and shrug and look cute. Chloe liked being the center of attention, but all poor Ziggy wanted was to blend in to the crowd, just like Jane, but for some reason the opposite kept happening.

“Let the water out of the bath, Ziggy!” she called. “We have to do that project now!”

“I need the special spoon!” called back Ziggy.

“There’s no time!” shrieked Jane. “Let the water out now!”

Cardboard. They needed a large sheet of cardboard. Where would they get that from at this time of night? It was past seven. All the shops would be closed.

Madeline. She’d have some spare cardboard. They could drive around to her place and Ziggy could stay in the car in his pajamas while Jane rushed in and got it.

She texted Madeline: Crisis! Forgot family tree project!!!!!!!!!! (Idiot!) Do you have spare sheet of cardboard! If so, can I drive around and pick it up?

She pulled the instruction sheet off the fridge.

The family tree project was designed to give the child “a sense of their personal heritage and the heritage of others, while reflecting on the people who are important in their lives now and in the past.” The child had to draw a tree and put a photo of themselves in the middle, then include photos and names of family members, ideally dating back to at least two generations, including siblings, aunties, uncles, grandparents and “if possible great-grandparents or even great-great-grandparents!”