‘Very cheerful,’ Barbara Crawford, mother of the bride, had commented, wincing at the gaudiness of it all. Barbara herself tastefully overdressed in turquoise silk (‘Paule Vasseur,’ she murmured to Tracy as if it were a secret). It had been no parish tea affair for Barry and Barbara’s one and only, but a lavish case of overspend. Politely, no one mentioned that the bride’s belly was already straining at her wedding dress.

The bridesmaids’ shoes were burnt orange too, their pointy feet poking out from beneath jaundiced dresses that looked like the sunset at the end of the world. Their bouquets hung from their arms on ribbon-like handbags, big pomanders or perhaps colourful cannonballs. ‘I tried to suggest something different, I really did,’ Barbara Crawford said in the loudest sotto voce that Tracy had ever heard. ‘Amy was always so headstrong.’

Amy’s husband was called Ivan. Ivan the Terrible, Barry always called him, naturally. ‘Ivan? What kind of a name is that?’ he said to Tracy after Amy’s engagement was announced. ‘Bloody Russian.’

‘Actually, I think it’s because he had a Norwegian grandfather,’ Tracy said.

‘Norwegian?’ Barry said incredulously, as if she’d just announced that Ivan’s family came from the moon. Ivan was a financial adviser, Tracy had consulted him when she was wondering where to stash her annual ISA. ‘Pop in and have a chat, no charge for a friend of Barry’s,’ he said to her at the wedding. He seemed a nice enough chap, pretty harmless on the whole, which was about the best you could hope for from a human being, in Tracy’s opinion. Unfortunately, he went bankrupt shortly afterwards and lost the business. No one wanted financial advice from a man who couldn’t even keep his hands on his own money. Barry implied there was fraud involved but when Tracy went to see Ivan to retrieve some paperwork he explained that he had lost a flash drive with all his clients’ details on it. ‘Must have slipped out of my pocket,’ Ivan said miserably to Tracy. Most of his clients took away their business after that. ‘I would have done the same,’ Ivan said.

‘Not even a traditional fruit cake,’ Barbara fretted, coming across Tracy forking up the chocolate sponge and butter cream wedding cake.

‘Well, at least it’s not orange,’ Tracy said.

Of course, Tracy was in no position to make style notes about anything. Uncomfortable in a powder blue, polyester-mix two-piece that was giving off so much static she worried she would spontaneously combust before they got to the cutting of the cake. She’d bought a hat but didn’t wear it because it made her look like a man in drag. Tracy could count the number of weddings she’d been invited to on the fingers of one hand, whereas the funerals she had attended in her time were stacked to the rafters. Murder victims mostly. Never been to a christening. Said something about your life, didn’t it?

The burnt orange had been a particularly unfortunate choice for Amy’s friend Chloe Pallister with her mousy hair and tallow complexion. ‘Mother of the bridesmaid, never mother of the bride,’ Linda Pallister said, sidling up to Tracy, smiling hopefully. She didn’t have anyone else to talk to. Linda Pallister’s own wedding clothes, a black velvet T-shirt and a skirt that seemed to have been made out of tiedyed cobwebs, couldn’t have been more out of place. Linda was also sporting a large assortment of silver rings and bracelets as well as an enormous crucifix on a leather shoestring. The crucifix looked more like penance than religion. Linda had become a Christian in the eighties, an unfashionable decade for evangelism, although Linda had gone, uncharacteristically, for straight-down-the-middle C of E. No sign at the wedding of Linda’s eldest, Jacob. Tracy had heard a rumour that he was a bank manager.

‘Your Chloe looks lovely,’ Tracy lied.

If Tracy phoned Linda Pallister and started asking about Kelly Cross’s kids she’d be flagging herself up, wouldn’t she? What, one of Kelly Cross’s children missing? Why only the other day Tracy Waterhouse was asking me to count them! Tracy had nicked a kid. Didn’t matter how much you paid, didn’t matter how much you dressed it up with righteousness, it didn’t make it legal.

She took the kid for lunch in Bella Italia. Kid worked her way through her own weight in penne and Tracy nibbled on some garlic bread. She had lost her appetite. The kidnapper diet. Tracy had done them all in her time – grapefruit, F-Plan, cabbage, Atkins. Selfinflicted torture. She’d been a big baby, a big child, a big teenager, it seemed unlikely that she would suddenly become a small, postmenopausal woman.

In Gap, Tracy bought clothes for Courtney, holding them up against her to gauge their fit, rather than going by the labels which didn’t seem to relate to the kid’s actual size. ‘How old are you, Courtney?’

‘Four,’ Courtney said, more of a question than an answer. She fitted the ‘2–3 year’ clothes easily. ‘You’re small for your age,’ Tracy said.

‘You’re big,’ Courtney said.

‘Can’t argue with that,’ Tracy said. Unsure of the rules of engagement with a small child, Tracy had decided it worked best if they both pretended they were grown-up and conversed accordingly.

She bought more clothes for Courtney than she had intended, but they were so nice and pretty, the kind of clothes Tracy never had when she was a little girl. Half a century ago her mother had dressed her in limp pinafore dresses and nylon jumpers with brown lace-up Clarks shoes, a look which even a cute kid, let alone Tracy, would have had trouble pulling off. Her parents had been over forty when Tracy was born, already old before their time. ‘We’d given up,’ her mother said, as if it had been a relief to do so. ‘And then you came along.’

Her parents had been too much at war with each other to bother with their child. They had battled passively, locked together in silent hostility while Tracy lived in the solitary confinement of the only child. Tracy thought of herself as a war baby even though the war was long over when she was born.

Courtney wiped her ever-present trail of snot on the sleeve of her grubby pink top. Tracy would have to buy tissues, tissues were the kind of thing that people who looked after kids carried in their bags at all times. There must be a caravan of kid-related supplies that she needed but Tracy had no idea what they might be. It would be helpful if kids came with instructions and a list of requirements.

Tracy’s final purchase for Courtney was a red duffel coat in the sale, a garment that a younger Tracy, dreary in brown gabardine, had always coveted. The duffle coat had a soft plaid lining and real wooden toggles. It was an article of clothing that said someone cared. If it hadn’t been so warm in the shop she would have suggested the kid wear it straight away but Tracy could feel the sweat trickling uncomfortably down her back and the kid looked positively overcooked.

Tracy was flagging. She had read somewhere that shops and museums were the most tiring places for people. The kid looked dog-weary. ‘Do you want a carry?’ Tracy said.

Her knees almost buckled under the weight. Who knew a tiny kid could be so heavy? She had the gravity of a small, dense planet. Tracy staggered back to Mamas and Papas with Courtney in her arms and retrieved the car seat and fixed it in the Audi. She’d had the kid less than three hours and she felt mangled by exhaustion, no wonder the parents she saw in the Merrion Centre walked around like zombies.

She helped Courtney into the car seat, was surprised when the kid strapped herself in. Should they be able to do that? If you could fasten a buckle it meant you could unfasten one as well. ‘Don’t undo that,’ she advised the kid. ‘There are a lot of bad drivers on the road.’ The kid murmured a kind of assent. Her eyelids were blue with tiredness and she had the stunned look that Tracy had seen on abused kids. You had to wonder. It would hardly be a surprise, more likely than not, in fact. The things people did to kids could make your brain hurt. Hot needle, et cetera. Or maybe, like Tracy, the kid was just worn out with the turn the day had taken. It was four o’clock in the afternoon but time had become elastic, stretching out the day to infinity.