Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  Daisy rushes in – ‘I can reach my peg and I don’t even have to stand on my tibbytoes!’ – and they leave, with Kate in a different kind of rush: mixed feelings and bitter tastes and high hormones. On the walk home, she tries to focus on the most important thing: she has no doubt that her daughter is going to be in safe hands with Spencer Swanson and Wendy Orr.

  *

  Getting ready to take Daisy to school the next morning, Kate puts on her usual lick of mascara, to make her pale eyelashes less eerie and her pale eyes stand out; she picks up a lipstick, but puts it down again. She’s a mother, a student, a feminist. She is raising Daisy to be as independent as she can possibly be. And she will never again be the girl she was, who thought only of a man, and sacrificed so much of her own life and others’ happiness for him.

  She persuades Daisy to stand still for long enough to take a photo of her in her school uniform, then bundles her into her coat. Daisy adds her butterfly wings; Kate cannot help but pick her up and take a selfie, which she sends to her mother, her father, and Melissa. Then she catches sight of the time – ‘Come on, Daisy,’ she calls, picking up the rucksack full of high-calorie snacks, carefully labelled medication, and a tube of hand sanitiser that Daisy is well-drilled in using. ‘It’s time to go.’

  Daisy-as-butterfly flutters through the town and into the playground, where, freed from her mother’s hand, she runs round the playground, laughing and jumping, chasing and being chased. Kate’s heart lifts as she watches. Around her, other parents, skittish and peaked, are making an occasion of First Day At School. There’s the twitter and grumble of conversation about time flying and getting to eat your lunch uninterrupted and how sad it is that they’re growing up and hahahaha perhaps we’ll have to have another one. Kate doesn’t join in.

  If she reminisced, it would be about the last time she stood in a school yard, when she was one of the brightest students in the sixth form, not so many years ago. Throughout her school days she had been marked out because she was clever and quiet and not one for the rough-and-tumble, shouting, chaos. She remembers standing apart with her small group of friends, or sitting on the steps reading a book. The university open days she went to when she was a sixth former thrilled her with the feeling that here, at last, was a place where she would thrive. Then came Daisy, and Kate went nowhere. But she cannot regret this path, not with her beloved butterfly-girl laughing and running around the school playground. Not when the sun is bright, and the day is new, anyway. It was different, last night, as she lay in the bath, having given up on her dissertation because she couldn’t get to the end of a thought, let alone a sentence. Then, she had felt tired, lonely, cold. Her great bid for independence – moving into her father’s flat while he worked abroad for a year – was not all that she had hoped for. At least her childhood bed in her mother’s home had been familiar. At least there had been the sound of the TV, her mother’s and stepfather’s voices rumbling companionably away downstairs. So last night Kate had gone to bed early, and lain awake listening to the laughter and music from the Italian restaurant below, wondering if this was the sum total of her life. Yes, this morning is better. She turns her face to the low September sun, closes her eyes.

  ‘Can you believe we’re here?’ Amelia’s mother Jo says, quietly, next to Kate. Jo and Kate met at a playgroup and have struck up a sort of play date-friendship, although their conversation seldom strays beyond their girls and Jo’s son, Jack, who is two years older than Daisy. Jo has at least a decade on Kate, and a lot of the things she talks about mean nothing to Kate, who has no responses to the tiresomeness of sisters-in-law, the problems of what to give as eight-year anniversary gifts, the bickering over whose turn it is to change the duvet cover. And, of course, Jo with her two healthy children and her kind husband, cannot understand what Kate’s life is really like. Jo does not need to worry about Jake and Amelia’s health the way Kate worries about Daisy’s. Jo doesn’t shy away from thoughts of her future, and the swallowing loneliness that she hardly dares name. But Kate and Jo listen to each other; they like each others’ children; they are kind. It’s something. ‘It seems like yesterday that she was born,’ Jo adds after a moment, but Kate can see that Jo is talking to herself, so she says nothing. Now Daisy and Amelia are studying the hopscotch pitch painted on the tarmac as though they are forensic scientists at a crime scene.

  The only thing that seems like yesterday to Kate is yesterday. Her stomach is still roiling at the thought of Spencer; the way she felt when she was close to him, how he became cold when she mentioned gossip, as though she had accused him of something. Perhaps she had. Sometimes, Kate’s mother reminds her – mildly, gently – that the world has moved on since Daisy was born, and Kate might not be the hot topic she once was. It’s certainly true that silence no longer washes before her; the whispers in her wake seem to have stopped. But she is still a little to one side in the world. And whatever her mother says, she knows that if someone was describing her, it would be as ‘Kate who was supposed to go to Oxford but then she got pregnant and it turned out the father was that policeman who died. And the little girl has cystic fibrosis.’ She tries not to care. She knows there are things she could add, if this is to be her biography: that she still dreams about drowning in a freezing January lake, that she is determined that her degree will start to turn her into the woman she was always meant to be, that she loves her daughter beyond all that she thought was possible, and that there are times when she would do almost anything for a heedless afternoon with no one to think about but herself. That she was not ready to be the adult she is; when she wakes in the post-drowning-nightmare darkness she sometimes wishes she could go back to being seventeen, and do things differently.

  And then the bell rings, and Daisy rushes towards Kate to be de-winged and cuddled and to tolerate a kiss. As Kate watches her go – an unexpected catch in the hollow of her throat, an emptiness in her stomach more significant than she had ever thought it would be – she thinks she feels herself being watched. She doesn’t look, because she doesn’t know whether she will be more disappointed if Spencer Swanson is looking at her, or if he isn’t.

  Chapter 2

  Mid-September

  ‘T

  HANK YOU SO MUCH, Mum,’ Kate says to Daisy’s beloved granny as she lets her into the flat, one Saturday two weeks into term time. ‘I have no idea how I let myself get so spectacularly behind on this dissertation.’

  ‘Always a pleasure to spend time with Daisy,’ Richenda says, and then she strokes her hand down Kate’s arm, looks at her in a way that makes Kate want to ask if she can pack up the flat and come home. ‘Is it just the dissertation?’

  For a moment, Kate wonders if her mother somehow knows that her daydreams about Spencer Swanson can stretch what should be a fifteen-minute dash around the supermarket into a dazed half-hour of wondering what it’s like to sit down to a meal every evening with someone whose main topic of conversation isn’t butterflies or mermaids. But then Richenda adds, ‘I know Daisy’s birthday is a strange time.’

  Kate nods. The anniversary of Daisy’s birth is also the anniversary of her cystic fibrosis diagnosis, of Kate’s shock and fear as she discovered exactly how wrong her fantasies about birth and motherhood were, and how much more than love and care Daisy was going to need to allow her to grow up safe and strong.

  ‘Yes,’ she says, and she looks away, remembering how naive she was, how quietly and solidly her mother had been at her side. The flat has got itself untidy again, clothes clumping the radiators and mugs on the coffee table, a messy pile of half-unpacked shopping on the kitchen counter. Kate never thought about all the care she got from her mother and Blake when she lived with them. Not just the housekeeping, the bills being paid, the magical replenishment of teabags, toothpaste and printer ink, but the feeling of not being alone. She laughs, touches her mother’s arm in return. ‘And having my own place takes a lot of time.’

  Richenda tilts an eyebrow, smiles back. ‘I’m saying nothing. How a
re you getting on?’

  ‘I think I’m nearly there,’ Kate says, ‘but it’s the last bits, the references and the notes and the pagination and it all just seems to take so much longer than you think.’

  Richenda nods. ‘Yes, things like that always do, don’t they? I was setting up a spreadsheet yesterday. Two hours, just vanished.’

  ‘Daisy, Granny’s here,’ Kate calls, and Daisy rushes out of her bedroom, and is up and in Richenda’s arms in a heartbeat.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart. How’s school?’

  ‘Good!’ Daisy says. Kate wonders how the other parents – the ones who aren’t in receipt of a daily briefing from Wendy Orr – cope with knowing as little as she would know if Daisy was her only source of information about school. But although Daisy doesn’t give much away in answer to questions about her day, she is keen to pour her own drinks, all of a sudden, and has explained to Kate why it’s important to let someone else finish talking. Daisy often sings a song about a butterfly that Kate has never heard before, and spends time at bedtime telling her mother about the story Miss Orr is reading at school. It fills Kate with an optimistic melancholy. What she wants is for her daughter to have a good life independent of her mother. What she hadn’t realised is how empty that would make her feel.

  ‘You can see how school is.’ Kate nods towards the fridge covered in pictures and paintings. Richenda laughs.

  ‘I was thinking I’d take her swimming?’

  ‘Sure. She’s been a bit tired, but nothing worse.’ The people who love Daisy live in dread of chest infections, coughs and colds, which will render Daisy pale and peaky, with a line in her arm to deliver antibiotics more efficiently.

  ‘Good. Could you go and get your swimming bag, Daisy?’ Richenda puts the little girl down as Kate organises supplements and tablets into the sections of a container. ‘I’ll take her to the spa at the hotel. I can give her tea, too, if that helps.’

  ‘That would be a massive help,’ Kate says, ‘thank you. I can’t thank you enough, Mum, really.’

  Daisy lands with a jump and a bounce at her grandmother’s feet. ‘I’m ready!’ she says. And just like that, Kate is alone.

  It ought to be a pleasure. Or at least a relief. Her degree, begun when Daisy was eleven months old, had at first felt like a lifeline: an escape from the small and often frightening world of caring for her daughter, and permission to herself to start living her life, in part, for herself. Then it became a refuge from the loneliness and isolation she felt as her friends started to graduate and go out into the world and her own life shrank. Kate studied, and she remembered how she loved to learn; how once, she was the most hard-working, the most promising in her class, and no one doubted how well she would do. But lately, she’s lost interest. It all feels pointless.

  Kate has been too tired to work in the evenings when Daisy’s gone to bed, instead spending too much time in the CF chatrooms that she moderates, or sending Instagram posts to Melissa, both ways of distracting herself. The six hours when Daisy is at school seem to drain away like bathwater. She had intended to fill them with work and walks and reading, and forging a new version of herself that was more than a wrung-out mother. Often she walks back to school at 3 p.m., trying to add up the time she has spent, always seeming to have an hour spare after she has subtracted going to the supermarket, researching jobs and postgraduate training on the internet, sorting washing, updating Daisy’s food diary, messaging with Melissa. All things she would normally do around Daisy’s day. Plus, she’s planning for Daisy’s birthday next weekend. She’s allowing her mum to fuss about food and games, but she’s still been spending way too much time on presents and procrastinating over what kind of cake to order from the bakery and café next door. And now, the deadline for her dissertation is looming, waiting. It’s her final piece of degree work, and it’s on the portrayal of disability in print media. She’s already had one extension for it. She’ll get comments on this draft, rewrite it as necessary – she hopes that not much will be necessary – and then that will be it.

  Kate knows she should be proud. But she isn’t. It all feels like an anticlimax. And she’s angry with herself, too, at how much time she spends thinking about Spencer. She’s always aware of him at pick-up time. He is sometimes moving around the classroom, tidying and sorting, but more often talking to parents. Often it looks as though he is being besieged by two or three flirting mothers, clamouring for his attention like ducks chasing bread. These women are all married: Kate assumes they are doing it for the thrill rather than with any serious intent. Not that it’s any of her business. And she isn’t one to throw stones.

  And anyway, she knows that she made a terrible impression on Spencer when they first met. She still cringes when she thinks of it. And she thinks of it a lot. And then she is annoyed with herself, because she is not going to be this woman. She will not define herself in relation to a man; she will not make it seem to Daisy that everything she does is a way of killing time until Love Comes Along. What’s the point of being a mother who seeks to show her daughter that it’s possible to be complete and equal in the world on her own terms, if she starts mooning around like one of Disney’s pre-liberation efforts at the first sight of a single man?

  After fifteen minutes of half-hearted work in the flat, Kate picks up her laptop and bag and heads for the neighbouring café. Her favourite place to work, a table tucked around a corner from the main shop and communal table, is free. Kate likes the background noise of the café better than she likes the silence of her flat. Her sandwich – brie and bacon on walnut bread – is better than anything that she would, or could, be bothered to make herself. She has only so many hours, only so much energy. After Daisy, and studying, there is little to give to the kitchen. On most Sundays they have lunch with Granny and her husband, Blake. Mondays are for pasta followed by whatever leftover pudding they brought home the day before. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday are a rotation of baked potatoes, stir-fries, things with oven chips, and Daisy’s favourite food in the world: macaroni cheese. Friday night is pizza and movie night, which at the moment means Margherita and Moana. Kate’s fridge and cupboard are mainly snack storage systems, full of dried fruit and cereals and peanut butter and cheese and loaves of bread from the bakery – anything that will get enough calories into Daisy to help her grow. She has gold-top milk delivered by the local dairy, and buys comb honey whenever she finds it at the farmer’s market, as Daisy will eat it in cut-up squares on a fork.

  Kate soon settles to work, checking footnotes and making a list of what’s missing to add later. She’s so absorbed that it takes a moment to become aware of someone standing over her. When she does notice, she assumes that Angie has come to take her plate, or to deliver another coffee, which panics her because when she placed her order she had asked for a coffee in an hour and she can’t believe that time is passing so quickly. But when Kate looks up from her laptop she sees Spencer Swanson, and her stomach has a mild convulsion and her panic, brought on by being confronted by the man who’s fast become her idle fantasy, must show in her face because he holds up the hand that doesn’t have a coffee cup and saucer in it, and says, ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, I just saw you here and it seemed rude not to say hello.’

  ‘Hello,’ Kate says. She wonders about explaining the one-hour coffee thing, but decides it will make her sound a bit odd, although not as odd as something along the lines of how she thinks she has probably dreamed about him every night since she met him, which is the other option her brain is offering. So, she says nothing else. She smiles, though. It looks as though Spencer is going to move past Kate to an empty table behind, but then, ‘It’s your hair,’ he says, unexpectedly.

  Kate looks up at him again.

  ‘There are so many people I’ve met that I can half-recognise, or that I’m ninety per cent sure of who they are when I see them outside school, but I’m not quite confident enough to talk to them. But that hair of yours. It could only be you.’

  Kate says, �
�I know. Daisy and I could never have a life of crime.’ The two of them have the same pale, fine, silver-cream-blonde hair that makes people look twice. Daisy likes to wear hers in two bunches high on her head; Kate lets hers swing straight to her shoulders, or tucks it behind her ears, where it doesn’t stay, slithering forwards again when she moves. ‘Would you like to join me?’

  ‘You look as though you’re busy,’ Spencer says, but he doesn’t say no, and he doesn’t move away. Kate closes her laptop, puts her notebook on top of it, and tries to forget the general attractiveness of Spencer and remember that he is trying to make a home in a new place. According to Jo, who is more plugged into the playground grapevine than she is, he’s from Dorset via Scotland and taught at a school in west London before life blew him to Throckton. No one seems to know exactly why or how he came to be here; even the chattiest and most assertive of playground parents have not been able to find a connection with a Throckton resident, a holiday in the area, any kind of reason for Spencer Swanson to have considered moving here. If Kate can figure it out, she’ll have something to offer the playground mothers who never quite let her in. And maybe if she talks to him, she will stop thinking about him so much.

  ‘I’m just finishing an assignment. I’m nearly there,’ she says. Spencer sits opposite her and puts down his coffee. As he stretches his legs he kicks her ankle, and somewhere in the flurry of I’m-sorry-did-I-hurt-you and really-it’s-fine they both relax. For a moment at least.

  ‘Daisy is such a pleasure to have in my class,’ Spencer says. ‘You must be really proud of her. And—’

  ‘Please don’t say something about disabilities,’ Kate says, trying to keep her voice light. Spencer looks at her. He seems to contemplate her for a long time.

  ‘I was going to say: and she probably knows more about butterflies than the Natural History Museum.’ If Spencer’s voice is a colour it’s a pale, bruised violet.