Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  Amelia mumbles something that might be a ‘thank you’ into Jo’s neck, and Kate laughs. ‘A pleasure, Amelia. We’ll see you at school on Monday.’

  She walks to the gate with them, and watches as they head off down the road, tries not to think about how they are going back to the other half of their family, a father/husband and brother/son, when she and Daisy will soon be back in the flat on their own. Kate doesn’t mind. Or at least, she would rather be alone than unhappy with someone. But it would be nice to put Daisy to bed and come back into the living room to find another adult she could roll her eyes at, drink wine and look back over the day with. Jilly and Wendy leave, too, full of thanks and embraces, Richenda and Wendy promising that they won’t leave it so long next time.

  Kate is just about to walk back around to the garden when she hears someone calling her name. ‘Kate. Kate! I’m here!’

  ‘Melissa!’ Kate’s friend is carrying a balloon and a bottle of wine, and wearing a dress that almost touches the pavement. It’s unclear whether she’s dressed up for this party or is coming from a ball that has overrun. Kate hugs her, tight, and her friend’s earrings, great metal stars, press into her cheek. She’s the only person Kate knows who smokes. The clinging smell, woven in with perfume and whatever Melissa puts in her hair to keep it so perfectly tumbled, makes Kate feels like a child and an old woman rolled into one. ‘I thought you’d forgotten!’

  ‘I wouldn’t forget Daisy’s big day,’ Melissa says. ‘I’m not late, am I?’

  ‘Well – it finished at four.’

  ‘What time is it now?’

  ‘Half four.’

  Melissa looks as disappointed as Daisy was when she realised the big trampoline couldn’t come back to the flat with them. ‘God, Kate, I’m sorry. I thought it started at five. I honestly did. I thought I was early.’

  Kate laughs. ‘How many five-year-olds’ parties start at five? Don’t worry. Everyone’s gone, so it works better this way anyway.’

  Ten minutes later, Kate is watching Melissa and Daisy on the trampoline. Melissa has tucked her dress into her knickers, much to Daisy’s delight, and the two of them are shrieking as they try to coordinate their bounces. Kate loves that Melissa is here, however tired, however hungover. Melissa’s silver block-heeled boots are abandoned at the side of the trampoline, and Kate wonders where she bought them. But then she imagines herself in all the places she goes – school yard, playground, café, hospital, shops, park – and realises that one pair of scuffed brown boots and one pair of black plimsolls are really all she needs. Before she can follow this trail too far, Melissa does a forward-roll back onto solid ground and runs barefoot across the lawn to her friend. ‘I thought you and me could go out tonight. Are you up for it?’

  ‘Where?’

  Melissa shrugs. ‘Dunno. Does it matter? Somewhere we can talk properly. It’s been ages.’

  Kate nods. ‘June, I think.’

  ‘No!’ Melissa looks shocked, but she’s the one who has been travelling for three months, so she shouldn’t be. Kate was touched that she sent postcards to Daisy, bright scenes of Eastern cities, parakeets and sun bears, mountain ranges. ‘DAISY!’ she had scrawled on the back of them. ‘LIFE IS AN ADVENTURE!’ Or ‘AUNTIE LISSA IS BEING VERY NAUGHTY!’ ‘Then we definitely need to go out. Will your mum babysit?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate says, by which she means, my mother has turned her pale house and beautiful garden over to five-year-olds and strawberries and chocolate and shouting for the afternoon so she might want a quiet evening. It’s probably not fair to even ask.

  *

  ‘God,’ Melissa says, five hours later, sprawled on Kate’s sofa in Kate’s only set of matching pyjamas, ‘your own place. I’m never going to manage that in London.’

  ‘It’s not really mine,’ Kate says. She was tipsy when they left her mother’s, at 6.30, having spent a cheerful hour helping to clear up and finishing the Prosecco as they did so. She managed to get to the point where she was floating above her worry, rather than feeling it drown her. Then she and Melissa had shared a bottle of red wine with their meal in the Italian restaurant. The pasta had soaked up some of the wine, but not all. They are now on the only alcohol in the flat – a bottle of Cointreau that her father had left in the cupboard. She wishes she’d made herself tea, instead, but it seemed too late, or too pointless, to stop drinking. ‘I’ve got it while my dad’s abroad. I don’t know what will happen when he gets back.’

  ‘Come on,’ Melissa says, ‘you’re a trust-fund babe and you know it.’

  ‘Hardly.’ Kate has the money her parents had saved for her university years and her future, which they had signed over to her on her twenty-first birthday. She knows she’s lucky – knows, too, how easy it would be to fritter it all away. She tries to stick to her monthly budget of benefits and takes a small amount of fun money, less than the annual interest on her savings; she manages it most of the time. If she can ever get a job, a mortgage, then she should be able to afford a flat in Throckton. Yes, she knows she’s lucky. It’s wrong to envy Melissa her freedom. Wrong to think of how this crazy-feeling night is one of Melissa’s tamer evenings. And wrong to resent her friend for that. And yet, it’s hard not to.

  ‘Even so,’ Melissa says, topping up both of their glasses and opening a sharing-size bag of crisps. ‘I’m never going to have a place of my own.’

  ‘Daisy lives here,’ Kate says, glancing involuntarily at the bedroom door, even though Daisy will be fast asleep in her bedroom at her granny’s.

  ‘You know what I mean though. You’re lucky. Well, sort of.’

  Kate lets it pass. ‘Where’s your internship, again?’

  ‘Oh!’ Melissa sits up straighter, as though her boss is about to walk in. ‘Interiors magazine. Seven hundred people applied. Thirty of us at the selection day. The money’s terrible, but—’ She shrugs. Kate knows what the shrug means. It means that Melissa can afford this time; that she is investing in her future, making the most of her opportunities, safe in the knowledge that this is the first step on the glittering pathway that leads her out of university to – well, to anywhere she wants to go. She’s the opposite of Kate, who has completed her own degree in snatched corners of time, reading in hospital waiting rooms and making notes for essays while listening to the soundtrack of whatever Daisy is watching on Disney Plus. And whose path to anything feels impossible. She wants to cry.

  This is why she shouldn’t drink.

  When Melissa holds out the bottle, Kate reaches her glass to meet it.

  ‘You should come back to London with me tomorrow,’ Melissa says. ‘Meet the gang. You’d love them. They’ll love you. There’s—’ And she goes off into a rambling description of her housemates. Two of them are in a band; another one is a waiter in a place where he regularly makes two hundred pounds a night in tips; another (or maybe the waiter) has a YouTube channel and might be getting a job as a TV presenter. They’ve all graduated in the last couple of years. The only rule they have is about everyone who is home in the evening eating together. Kate looks around her flat; thinks about how living away from home might be less lonely if she was part of a chaotic, clever, ambitious group of people who, if Melissa is to be believed, are having the time of their lives, and don’t plan to stop any time soon.

  ‘I don’t think I could,’ Kate says. ‘School on Monday.’ On Sunday evenings, once Daisy is asleep, Kate has a routine: sorting washing, shopping lists, checking whether she needs to order more medication yet, looking over the diary where she keeps a note of anything relevant to Daisy’s health. It’s all tedious and necessary admin that means she isn’t chasing her tail all week. And Melissa will go back to her place in east London and – well, Kate doesn’t quite know what will happen then, but she knows that Melissa will pretty much please herself. Her drunken brain imagines a velvet beanbag, candles in vintage French-jam jars, a dark-eyed man playing a guitar, a selection of bohemian knickers drying on a radiator. Don’t be ridiculous, she tells
herself, it won’t be like that at all. It will smell of old food and they will always be bickering about who puts the wrong things in the recycling. There will be a lightbulb in the hall that has needed changing since they moved in, but no one has remembered, or bothered, or cares enough. When you come home drunk you will fall over someone else’s shoes. She closes her eyes.

  *

  The next thing Kate knows, it’s 11 a.m. on Sunday. Church bells might have woken her, or it might be the pinging of messages on her phone. She can’t focus. Hauling herself to a sitting position on the sofa, she looks around for Melissa, but sees only the tipped-over Cointreau bottle and a cigarette stubbed out on the draining board. Kate told her she couldn’t smoke in here. The kitchen window is open and the cool, almost-October air snakes around Kate’s ankles.

  She closes the window, switches on the kettle, and checks her phone. There are two messages. One, from her mother, reminds her that lunch is going to be at two o’clock today because Blake has worked an overnight shift; and the other is from Melissa, saying she has decided to get an earlier train, because she needs to do some stuff before the gig later, but Kate can come down any time she likes. For a moment, Kate is tempted to follow her to have some fun – her mum could be persuaded into another night of looking after Daisy, and Kate could be home in time to pick her up from school tomorrow – but then her stomach reminds her of how much she had to drink last night, and there’s the pull of loneliness that comes when Daisy isn’t here. It’s Richenda who will be enjoying the post-birthday excitement, the exploring of gifts unopened at the party yesterday. Kate does all the day-to-day drudgery, and all of the worrying (well, most of it). At some point today she’ll have to get Daisy’s food diary out, and try to remember everything she ate yesterday, and the times she took her medication. And in between looking at presents at her mother’s, later, she’ll have to make sure she asks what Daisy has eaten. She can’t even fully enjoy the good stuff. She’s always monitoring, or making sure of one thing or another.

  Kate fills a mug with water from the tap and drinks it down. Her head pulses, her throat feels raw. God, was she smoking last night? No, she wouldn’t have. It’s just the laughing, the talking, the – she checks Spotify on her phone – yes, the singing along to the music they loved when they were in the sixth form: Katy Perry, Mumford & Sons, The Wombats. Well, she’s allowed to enjoy herself. She thinks of Daisy’s warmth, how there is nothing better. And then she thinks about Melissa, heading back to London, and about how seeing an old friend will probably be forgotten already, while to Kate yesterday evening was the most grown-up fun she’s had in months.

  There’s no point in turning up at her mother’s in this state: Kate will only get a disapproving look, and maybe a chat about not taking Richenda for granted (fair enough) and being a responsible parent (not fair at all). She goes to run a bath, texts Melissa to say that she’ll come to see her soon, and takes some painkillers. At least the hangover has taken her mind off Spencer Swanson. See? She hasn’t thought about him at all today, not until right this minute.

  Chapter 4

  Early December

  T

  HE CYSTIC FIBROSIS CLINIC visit on the first Thursday of December begins like any other of these routine appointments. Richenda drops Kate and Daisy at the main doors of the hospital, and when they get to the CF unit they are greeted and shown to their room by Chantelle, Daisy’s favourite nurse.

  Daisy immediately lets go of her mother’s hand and takes Chantelle’s. ‘I am a star,’ Daisy says. ‘A star, Chantelle!’

  ‘You sure are, Daisy.’ Chantelle laughs.

  ‘Daisy’s the star in the school nativity,’ Kate explains. ‘We’re going to the dress rehearsal, after this.’

  ‘And I thought it was an example of her robust self-esteem.’ Chantelle grins as she opens their consulting-room door. Because of the risk of cross-infection between cystic fibrosis patients, each family visiting the clinic has its own room; Daisy and Kate will stay put, while the nurses, physiotherapists, social workers and consultants move from one patient to another as they are needed. Kate thinks of how this has become the norm for her – as normal as clubbing or speed dating is for Melissa. When she last went to see her GP, she had been disorientated by the waiting room full of shared air and shared coughs, something that she rarely experiences these days. When she was pregnant, everyone told her that having a baby would change her life. No one – including her – had known how many tiny differences Daisy would make. Not even a waiting room would seem normal again.

  Daisy is unpacking colouring books, pencils and a box of dried fruit from her backpack. She had been tired that morning, and so consented to sit on Kate’s lap long enough for Kate to brush her hair properly, to a silvery sheen, rather than only giving her time to get the worst of the tangles out and put her bunches in before wriggling off in search of something more interesting to do. In the small, stuffy room at the clinic, Kate puts her hand on her daughter’s crown and knows that a hand on her own head would feel the same dense smoothness beneath it. Oh, how she loves this child. And how she wishes things were different. She is not always sure which things.

  ‘Right, Daisy, I just have to go away for a few minutes, and when I come back we’re going to do the usual,’ Chantelle says. ‘I’m going to weigh you and measure you and we’re going to blow into the machine, and spit in a cup, and I’ll listen to your chest and feel your tummy.’

  Daisy nods, already colouring in. ‘Any problems?’ Chantelle asks Kate. ‘How’s school?’

  ‘Fine, I think, but it’s such a big change. For both of us. Daisy loves it but she’s really tired.’ Chantelle nods and touches Kate’s elbow. The nod and touch, Kate knows, are meant to convey that Chantelle understands all that Kate isn’t saying. Kate tries not cry in front of other people, but she knows that now, if Chantelle asks her how she is, her composure will melt away like snow in salt water. She would soon be sobbing as though she were the child here, over Daisy going to school, about the relief at being able to have some time to be alone, about her loneliness, and how sometimes it feels as though she is only now beginning to understand what parenting this child means.

  Kate turns away, looking over Daisy’s shoulder as she starts to put a collection of small cuddly toys in a row. ‘Schools’ is her daughter’s new go-to game.

  The CF clinic routine begins. Daisy stops playing for long enough to submit to being weighed, measured and examined. She coughs on command and answers Chantelle’s questions about what she eats and what she does at school. Chantelle and Kate go through Daisy’s supplements and medications, and the diary that Kate keeps of Daisy’s food intake, her sleep patterns, her activity and physiotherapy. It all goes along as usual, until Chantelle shows Kate the weight chart with today’s data added.

  ‘Her weight gain’s dropping off,’ Chantelle says. ‘Probably nothing to worry about, but I think you need to see Victoria.’ She makes what Kate hopes is a better-safe-than-sorry face. ‘She’s with another patient at the moment, but I don’t think she’ll be long.’

  ‘If you think that’s best,’ Kate says.

  As they wait for the consultant, Kate looks at Daisy for signs of anything she’s missed. The skin below her daughter’s eyes looks blue-green under the harsh hospital lighting, her veins showing through; but Kate thinks she probably doesn’t look her best in this light, either. Daisy is thinner, certainly, but taller, too: Richenda said only yesterday how she is growing like a weed, and Kate had felt proud that her daughter was thriving, despite everything.

  Daisy sits on Kate’s lap and dozes while they wait. Getting up to be at the hospital for nine means an early start, and Kate too feels the lack of sleep and the warmth of the room relaxing her. She had learned calmness, the hard way, after Daisy was born. Knowing that she was the only one truly responsible for her baby – although she had caring grandmothers for parentheses, was watched from a safe distance by Kate’s father, and by friends like Melissa – she had become th
e parent Daisy needed. She is the parent who asks questions, rather than the parent who frets and cries. Once, Jo commented on Kate’s strength and said she didn’t think she could cope the way Kate did. ‘You could if you had to,’ Kate answered with a shrug. ‘I’ve never had the luxury of falling apart.’ Never had the luxury of other things, either, she had thought: Jo and her husband’s weekends away to spas and European cities make her want to cry with envy. Kate can’t imagine ever having the things required to do that: money to be reckless with, headspace to be away from Daisy without worrying about her, someone who she wants to give a weekend to. (She imagines her and Melissa in somewhere like Prague or Milan, Melissa sleeping until noon then trawling markets for vintage fur coats, fuelled by vodka shots. And Kate in her wake, texting her mother and longing for coffee and time to read her book.)

  As they wait for Victoria, Kate focuses on the child in front of her, the one she loves without end, despite all the ways she feels her own life has been compromised. She doesn’t believe that Daisy has a serious problem: she would know, because since Daisy’s birth Kate has watched her for signs of difficulty as though both of their lives depended on it. Because they do. It’s second nature. It’s habit. It’s tiring and it’s tiresome, but it’s what Kate does. Getting drunk with Melissa after Daisy’s party was probably the only time she’s actually done anything spontaneous for years, and heaven knows she paid for that with the lecture from her mother about mothering not being something you can take or leave and, worse, missing out on seeing Daisy bouncing on the trampoline in her pyjamas the next morning. (‘I didn’t abandon her in a layby,’ Kate had grumbled. ‘I left her with you, and you’ve always said you’re happy to have her.’ ‘Yes,’ Richenda had replied, holding steady eye contact even though Kate longed to close her eyes, or look at her shoes, or anywhere except her mother’s cool, I-see-your-bullshit gaze, ‘and that’s true, but you didn’t give me any notice, or really any choice, and that’s not how this should work. I know you think you have to take advantage of seeing Melissa when you can, but if she’s really your friend she will understand that you can’t jump whenever she tells you to.’)