In this scene, Anna is thrown into the horrifying world of children’s parties…

The woman who opened the door was almost-forty, with waywardly frizzy hair the colour of cork floortiles pinned in a tumbling knot on the back of her head. With her scrubbed-looking face and primary coloured clothes she looked like a children’s TV presenter from the early Seventies, when the trendiest you got was the aptly-named Susan Stranks on ‘Magpie,’ who’s been left under the hairdryer too long. Under one arm she was gripping a small child, and was preventing several more from bursting out of the doorway with her sturdy green dungareed legs. She peered in a frankly hostile way at Michael and me, but when her gaze fell on Lily she was all smiles.

            “Oh, Lily! Hello! How is Lily today?” Lily stared at her. The woman wiggled her fingers. “Can you wave? Hello, Lily! Wave at Jasper!” She grabbed the chubby arm of the tot she was holding and pumped it up and down vigorously. Jasper grunted and struggled to be released.

            “I’m Michael Taylor, Lily’s father,” said Michael. “And this is our friend Anna.”

            The woman continued to direct her comments at the child in the buggy.

            “It’s Daddy!” she confirmed. “Granny said Daddy would be bringing you today, didn’t she Lily? Do come in.” We assumed this meant adults as well as child, so when she started to reverse slowly into the brood of children behind her we followed her into the temporarily cleared space. “I’m Jasper’s-Mummy-Cynthia!” she bellowed over the racket as an afterthought.

            The room we entered looked to the inexperienced eye like the opening scene of ‘Saving Private Ryan.’

            Children of all sizes screamed and rushed about in a frenzy, leaving skid marks of trifle and I shudder to think what else on the stripped, varnished floorboards. The older children were screeching around in an E-number frenzy, apparently oblivious to the screams of their younger siblings as they were trampled underfoot. At the end of the day they would surely be permanently entangled together, like those knots of rats tails you see in books about the paranormal.

            The noise was incredible: at any given moment I would say that fifty percent of those present were in tears (and I’m including adults as well as children) and balloons were bursting like artillery shells. A CD player on a shelf was proving to be a popular target; every five minutes some brat would wander over and whack the volume right up, causing the Spice Girls to spice up everyone’s lives at a volume louder than the average land mine.

            I couldn’t quite believe I was in this hell-hole of my own free will.

Michael had called me the morning after our meeting in the pub. He apologised at having to leave so abruptly, and suggested meeting up the following Saturday.

            “I’m going to a party,” he said. “And I wondered if you’d like to come too?” That sounded fantastic, and I had just the most perfect little red dress that I could wear; maybe I still had time to make an appointment for a haircut in the afternoon, too.

            “The party’s in Highgate,” he said. “At three o’clock in the afternoon.” No time for the haircut, then. “And I have to warn you that the majority of the other guests will be between one and three years old.”

            “Sorry?”

            “It’s a birthday party for one of Lily’s little friends from the playgroup,” he explained. Oh, marvellous. I mentally put the little red dress back on its hanger.

            “My Mum keeps accepting these invitations on my behalf, and only telling me about it at the last minute,” he said, by way of apology I presumed. “It’s a complete set-up. I’m usually the only man there for a start - most dads have got football or the pub or something blokeish to do on a Saturday. So all these mums either look at me like I’m an escaped child molester, or else they try to Brady Bunch.”

            “They what?”

            “You know, they get the idea I’m there trying to find a ‘lovely lady’ to get together with to form a ‘lovely’ ready-made family. That’s what my Mum’s hoping for, anyway.”

            This was all I needed to hear to persuade me to go with him. Although the idea of spending part of my precious weekend at a children’s birthday party was less appealing than sharing a nice bottle of Chianti with Hannibal Lecter, I couldn’t leave Michael to the mercy of these predatory single females. What if he fancied one of them? And anyway, I reflected, it mightn’t be so bad: probably all the kids would play quietly in one room and the adults could get to know each other. Two of them in particular.

            So here we were, in the living room of Jasper’s-Mummy-Cynthia; probably a beautiful home in normal times but today knee-deep in wrapping paper, food and upturned infants, and with an overwhelming smell of poo.

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