Yes, Daisy seems more tired, but all of the playground-parents say the same thing, and Jo has even taken to pretending Amelia is ill on the occasional Friday because it seems that a whole week of school is too much for her. Daisy is eating in the same way that she always does: three meals with supplements to help her to digest the food, and picking and grazing throughout the day, always notching up enough calories to satisfy Kate by evening. And if Kate has any doubt, there is always hot chocolate with whipped cream, marshmallows and chocolate sprinkles as an accompaniment to a bedtime story. So Kate has resisted the temptation to panic or to flap.
But, when looked at on the percentile chart, Daisy’s weight is certainly below where it should be. When Victoria comes in, she is matter-of-fact, and doesn’t seem unduly worried; but, with cystic fibrosis, they both know that nothing must be left to chance. Daisy has a chest X-ray to make sure there isn’t a problem in her lungs, which might have a knock-on effect on weight gain. Her supplements are checked again. There is a finger-prick test to check for diabetes – Daisy wails more than she usually does when she has blood taken, but as Victoria says, fingertips do really hurt if you hurt them. Daisy doesn’t answer but she glares. Kate keeps her face as calm as she can, strokes Daisy’s hair, and thinks of how this pain for Daisy is pain for her, too, though she doesn’t show it. Consenting to hurt in the name of health is an almost-impossible thing for a mother to do. And yet these clinic rooms are full of mothers being forced to do exactly that. Fathers too, Kate supposes. A flash of memory makes her close her eyes: the look on Mike’s face when he used to see her walking towards to him, the warmth she imagined was love, the way she thought, then, that love meant secrets, thrills and something to be won.
The results of the extra tests are all fine.
‘The guidance,’ Victoria says, ‘is that we wait for six months before making an intervention. But I suggest you see if you can get more calories into her diet. You know the drill.’ Kate nods. There will be extra cheese grated onto pasta, peanut-butter sandwiches while watching TV, nuts and dried fruits sprinkled onto breakfast cereal – all strategies that she uses already when she feels as though Daisy needs them. It’s not just a question of what she eats, of course, it’s a question of what she absorbs. Kate racks her brains for what else she can do for Daisy. Maybe a snack on the way to school as well as on the way back.
‘There’s another possibility,’ Victoria says, and she gestures to Kate to join her out of Daisy’s earshot.
Kate leaves the hospital doing a good job, she thinks, of looking calm, and appearing to have taken the information in her stride. But during the drive back to Throckton, as she tells her mother what’s happened, she starts to feel shaky. She thinks about all of the grim things that could happen if Daisy doesn’t gain weight, and she can barely breathe. Richenda doesn’t say much but when they wait for a traffic light to change, she takes Kate’s hand and holds it, tight.
‘I know it’s easy to say, but try not to worry,’ Richenda says, as she pulls up along the road from the school gate. ‘You’re doing all the right things. If you want to talk just let me know.’
‘I suppose it’s all the usual things. I feel like a terrible mother. I’m never going to get it right. It’s only going to get worse.’ A sob claws up and out into the air. Kate tries so hard not to worry about Daisy’s future.
Richenda holds Kate’s hand. ‘Why not give this afternoon a miss? It’s a beautiful day.’
‘I know.’ The sunlight of this bright, breath-brittle December afternoon makes Kate want to make the most of it. It’s a day to bundle up, and push Daisy on a swing, and then feed her hot chocolate and watch her face go from cold-pink to warm-pink. By the time school is over, the corners of the sky will be darkening, like the edges of a sheet of paper dropped into a fire. The parents and children will scurry for home, and the Christmas tree and decorations that ought to make the flat look cheerful will instead make the space feel cramped and Kate claustrophobic. Right now she wants nothing more than the sky above her and the sense that, under it, anything is possible in the wide world. If the illusion of freedom is all that she can have in her life, she wants to make the most of it.
Daisy stirs in the back seat, opens her eyes, slowly at first and then they snap wide with excitement. ‘Is it time? Have you got my costume? Miss Orr says . . .’
Richenda laughs. ‘How could I have forgotten it’s dress rehearsal?’ She says to Kate, ‘Say hello to Wendy for me. I can come over to your place later, when she’s in bed, if you like.’
‘Could I let you know?’ Hospital days wipe Kate out, and she has a lot to think about. Even when clinic goes well, she has been known to go to bed at the same time as Daisy. Kate has always assumed that it’s to do with being confronted by the many risks that she spends her days actively not thinking about – ensuring Daisy’s wellness while doing all she can to not dwell on the implications of her condition. And the bright airlessness of the hospital, and the sound of other children crying. But what might be hardest of all – Kate hates to admit it – is the overheard snatches of pairs-of-parents’ conversations that drift into hearing when her door is open. The call-and-response of worry and comfort, planning and thinking, makes her wish she was not so alone.
‘Of course.’
Kate gathers her handbag, Daisy’s schoolbag and costume, and Daisy herself, waves her mother goodbye, and presses the buzzer on the school gate before she has time to change her mind and head for the swings after all. She’s buzzed in, signed in, and walked down to the classroom.
The door grunts on its hinges. The reception classroom is empty. There are piles of school uniforms heaped on chairs. Kate takes off Daisy’s hat, scarf, mittens and coat, starts unbuttoning her cardigan, longs for summer as she wrestles her wriggling girl out of her tights. Everything feels difficult today. As she pulls Daisy’s vest straight before putting her into her dress, she looks over the familiar little body: barrel chest and long arms and legs, skin and eyes and hair as pale as her own, although Daisy’s smile – sudden, wide and certain – is all her father’s. Kate can’t see that she’s missed anything, and still can’t believe that Daisy is anything but well. Breathe, Kate, she tells herself, breathe. She slides the costume over her daughter’s head and fastens it at the back. Daisy smooths the skirt down. The silvery taffeta makes Kate’s fingers itch, though Daisy doesn’t seem to mind it, or is prepared to suffer for her art.
‘Come on, then. Shoes,’ Kate says. Daisy’s silver sandals were bought by Richenda to go with her birthday party dress, although in the event Daisy had gone barefoot, from lawn to bouncy castle to trampoline, for that whole day. Already they are getting too small. Surely, Kate thinks again – she’d said it at least three times to her mother in the car – it’s not that Daisy is gaining weight too slowly, it’s that she’s growing too quickly. Gaining weight slowly indicates illness; a growth spurt, surely, equals health. Richenda had nodded, but they both know that percentile charts don’t lie.
‘Mummy?’ Daisy is ready to walk down to the hall and join her class. Kate’s mind is still full of the weight of the morning, so she hasn’t thought about seeing Spencer. Yesterday, she’d let him know they might be late to rehearsal, practising the glacial politeness she’d seen her mother use on her father for years, and she’d been congratulating herself on how well she’d forgotten about him. How silly she was to even give him a second thought, to think a lonely coffee meant anything at all. It’s a good job she remembered that she has no time for men – is a disaster with them, anyway – before things went too far. Went anywhere at all.
And then he’s there, at the door of the school hall, smiling a welcome, with all of his tallness and his hair freshly cut, a shaving nick on his upper lip. Those eyes. That smell – soap, not aftershave, honest and clean. ‘Hello, Daisy,’ he says, nodding to acknowledge Kate, but managing to look at the tops of her cheekbones rather than her eyes.
‘Sorry we’re so late,’ Kate answers. ‘We had
to stick around for an X-ray.’
‘You’re just in time.’ Spencer flicks his gaze to Kate, meeting her eyes for just a second before looking back to Daisy and smiling. ‘Have you been practising your words?’
‘Tirelessly,’ Kate says. ‘Daisy?’
Daisy takes a deep breath, coughs, then, ‘Follow me!’
‘Perfect!’ Spencer says. ‘Lovely and loud. The mums and dads at the back will definitely be able to hear that, won’t they, Mum?’
‘They certainly will.’ Kate cringes as she always does when anyone other than Daisy calls her ‘Mum’ or ‘Mummy’. If a paediatric ward at a hospital can manage to use her name – to make her feel like an actual person in her own right, not just the owner of the uterus that grew Daisy – she doesn’t see why Daisy’s teacher can’t. But there it is. God, she’s tired.
‘Everything OK?’ Spencer asks, really looking at Kate this time. ‘Does she usually have an X-ray?’
‘The X-ray was OK’ – Kate tries to keep her voice steady, and almost manages – ‘and I’ll talk to you or Miss Orr about the rest when you’re less busy.’
‘I do have camels to wrangle’ – Spencer glances over his shoulder to his nativity cast – ‘but you’re welcome to stay and watch. We could talk afterwards. You need to be back to collect her in an hour anyway, don’t you?’
‘Thank you.’ This small, unexpected kindness is almost enough to make Kate cry. She finds a chair at the back of the hall – a teacher-sized one, mercifully – and lets the sound of the rehearsal roll over her. She’s grateful for the general commotion, and she laughs, despite herself, at the sight of the shepherds bickering over which of them should hold the crook and which of them the lamb. The singing is enthusiastic and flat; Miss Orr is fulsome in her praise. But by the time the class starts on the second run-through, although her eyes follow the action and her heart is with Daisy, Kate’s mind is back in the hospital. She can’t stop thinking about the rest of what Victoria said – the part that Kate thinks she will keep to herself, because saying it out loud will hurt as much as hearing it did, and because saying it out loud might make it true.
Kate takes her time helping Daisy change her clothes, watching as the other children file out of the door to meet parents or grandparents or childminders, to be greeted with varying degrees of fuss and interest. When the last of Daisy’s classmates has been collected, Daisy fetches her coat.
‘We just have to talk to Mr Swanson for a minute,’ Kate says, ‘about what Victoria told us.’ She wonders where Daisy learned to roll her eyes like that. She hopes not from her. Melissa, maybe? ‘We won’t be long.’
But Mr Swanson is nowhere to be seen. ‘He’s had to go to a meeting with the Head,’ says Miss Orr.
‘Oh, he said at the rehearsal—’
‘I know, but something’s come up. I don’t know what, I’m afraid.’ Wendy smiles. ‘Will I do?’
‘Of course you will,’ Kate says. ‘I was just – well, never mind—’ And she starts going through the information from the day: the extra snacks that Daisy will need, at breaks as well as lunchtime now, and the fact that they will have to be even more careful about infection. Wendy nods and makes notes, and smiles in all the right places, and she is so very calm and capable that suddenly Kate is afraid that she’s missing the whole point of this, the importance. She has to make her understand. ‘When Daisy was two,’ she says, ‘I took her to a playgroup and there was a girl there with a cold, and I knew I should have taken her straight home again but I felt so’ – she shies away from ‘lonely’ – ‘I just needed a change of scene, even if it was only the church hall’ – she hears her voice start to sway but she can’t stop trying to explain – ‘and anyway, Daisy caught something, and although it was hardly a sniffle in the other little girl, not even a temperature, Daisy ended up in hospital on intravenous antibiotics for a fortnight with a chest infection.’ She wants to add a good, adult, responsible-mother sentence, the kind of thing she would suggest in response to a parent query on a CF forum: something along the lines of ‘so you see how important it is that we work together to make sure that Daisy isn’t vulnerable, because something that would have a negligible impact on a fully healthy child can be disastrous for a child with cystic fibrosis.’
But Wendy Orr, with her crocheted cardigan with dried paint on the sleeve, her smile that’s welcomed a thousand children with the same warmth and kindness-in-waiting, puts her hand on Kate’s arm and says, ‘How difficult this must be for you, Kate.’ She hesitates. ‘I should really call you Ms Micklethwaite when we’re in school.’
And Kate says, ‘Kate, please. It’s Kate.’ Because it’s ridiculous to have such formality with a woman who is her mother’s old friend and is becoming so important in Daisy’s life. Wendy came to Daisy’s birthday party, and has given Kate, shyly, an invitation to her and Jilly’s Christmas drinks party. Just because they are in a classroom, it doesn’t mean that they’re not friends. And then Kate’s crying, trying to cry quietly so that Daisy doesn’t notice, although Daisy is giving the dolls what sounds like a mighty telling-off so isn’t really paying attention to whatever the grown-ups are talking about. Kate is wiping her tears away before they’ve hit her chin, smiling an apology at Wendy without looking at her, because she knows that if she once looks properly at that kind, sympathetic face she will bawl.
After a few moments Kate is steady enough to sort-of-smile and says, her voice shaky, ‘I’m sorry. It’s been a long day. I’ll write it all down for you and Mr Swanson and bring it in tomorrow. Come on, Daisy, let’s go home. Shall we watch a film and have tea on the sofa?’
‘Yes please!’
‘We’re here to help,’ Wendy calls as they leave. Kate nods and raises a hand in acknowledgement. She’s full of thanks, though she can’t express them at this moment. She’ll find a way – Christmas presents, a letter to the Head to say how wonderful Wendy is. And she will start facing down the gossips who talk about Wendy’s engagement to Jilly, which happened during October half term. She knows what it is to be gossiped about. She sees that turning her back on those conversations isn’t enough. From now on, she’ll intervene. Every time.
Daisy looks at her mother with perplexity, asks, ‘Are you poorly, Mummy? Because you should have told them at the hospital, and they could have given you medicine.’
Kate has a rule about digestible honesty, so she takes a breath, and says, ‘I’m not poorly, but being in the hospital has made me feel a little bit sad and cross inside, and maybe that shows on the outside.’
‘It will be all right, Mummy, it always is, you know.’ Kate recognises her own words coming back to her through her daughter, and nods, and realises that Daisy’s lungs haven’t had a lot of exercise today, so she races her to the corner, and then lets herself be chased all the way home. Kate reminds herself of her own strength. She can do it. And anyway, she has no choice.
Chapter 5
Early December, the same day
O
NCE DAISY IS IN BED, Kate takes a shower and changes into her pyjamas, even though it’s barely eight, partly because she thinks she might go straight to bed but also because she’s not quite sure what to do with herself. She didn’t think she would ever miss her dissertation, but this would be a perfect time for losing an hour to repagination, proofreading, or anything else that would distract her sad heart and preoccupied brain without asking too much of her intellect.
Kate pulls out her laptop, thinking about posting on one of the CF forums and asking for advice – but she knows what the advice will be and, anyway, she can’t bear the thought of writing the day down, making a fact of it, especially the part she didn’t tell Wendy, or her mother.
She puts the TV on, but it feels like nothing but noise. She has no energy for other people’s lives right now, and pre-Christmas specials bear no relation to her own life. She hadn’t even wanted to put the Christmas-tree lights on tonight, but Daisy had insisted. Now she’s inclined to turn them off, but she can’t
be bothered to crawl under the branches to reach the socket. Kate was so happy when she and Daisy moved into the flat at the beginning of August. She thinks of how gladly she packed away her father’s gloomy tartan cushions and replaced them with silver-grey faux-fur ones; what a pleasure it was to take down his abstract paintings and hang framed vintage Greenpeace posters in their place; how she filled the tasteful sparseness of his shelves with photographs of her and Daisy’s life. The day the lightbox she had ordered arrived, she had opened the packaging and thought she was happy: she and Daisy had spelled out their names and made space next to the photo of the two of them on a teacup ride at the fair the previous summer. Now she sees how pointless this idea of home is. What does it matter where she lives if she can’t keep her daughter safe and well? Maybe she should have stayed with her mother. Maybe she can’t be trusted on her own.
Torn between going to bed or breaking her no-drinking-alone-on-weeknights rule, Kate is picking idly at her nails when the doorbell rings. She hopes, uncharitably, that she isn’t about to get a visit from carol singers, or a PTA member on a mission, or even someone delivering a Christmas card that she wasn’t expecting and will have to reciprocate. She almost doesn’t go downstairs – she wants nothing more than to pretend she’s not in. But the fairy lights are a bit of a giveaway.
What’s waiting on the other side of the door is both better, and worse, than anything Kate has imagined. Because in none of Kate’s daydreams about Spencer turning up at her door has she been wearing floral pyjama bottoms, a striped vest top, and a cardigan with a frayed hem. Her hair is damp and the coldness of the air on her scalp makes her feel as vulnerable as if she was naked. She wonders if she’s dreaming – not an idle fantasy-daydream, but one of those semi nightmares that comes sometimes, as she’s drifting off to sleep, where one minute she is walking through her everyday world and the next, something slips out from beneath her and she is plummeting into water, cold and black.
Nobody's Perfect Page 5
