Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  *

  Kate wakes at noon. She lies still for a moment, waiting for a hangover to bounce into her stomach, yell in her ear, but she feels only the disorientation of being somewhere other than home. Perhaps she danced the wine away. Kate climbs over Melissa, who is asleep on her back, on top of the duvet, in her clothes. The rest of the house is silent. She showers, dresses, drinks some water, puts on her beloved-already new boots, and after texting Melissa to tell her where she’s going, walks down to the café round the corner. She orders avocado toast – wondering whether Daisy might be eating the same thing – and coffee, and scrolls through her phone. Richenda has sent photos of Daisy at the pantomime, clutching a programme and an ice-cream during the interval, and texted a report of her meals and sleep, too. And there’s a message from Spencer, hoping she is having a good time. She sends him a photo of her coffee, another of her boots. He sends her photos of his tea, his own feet, in trainers, because he’s about to go for a run. The intimacy of it, the closeness, makes her want to cry for her own loneliness. But then he asks how her diary looks for next weekend, and she texts her mum about babysitting, and just like that she has a date for Saturday. Kate has been on barely any dates in her life. Being with Mike, Daisy’s father, had been all secret dog walks and snatched sex. She had thought it was romantic, at the time. The terrible way it ended – her slipping and falling into the January water of a lake, Mike drowning while she lay unconscious on the bank – still makes Kate wake with a jolt and a stifled scream some nights. Over the last couple of years, she has been on a handful of dates, some with a fellow Open University student she had worked with on an online group project, one with a doctor at the CF clinic, who had asked her out when he finished his rotation there. The dates had not been terrible, but Kate had found herself wishing she was back at home. She’d decided that she wasn’t ready. She might be now. She replies to Spencer’s message, signing off with a kiss.

  Back at the house, people are moving into life, and after the basement has been cleared of bottles and cans, the ashtrays emptied and the spills blotted – a surprisingly quick and enjoyable task, between eight of them – someone puts on a film. They lie around, half watching, half chatting, Kate on the end of one of the sagging sofas, Melissa stretched out with her head on Kate’s lap; Kate thinks about the museums, the shows, the sights she should be seeing, and then she looks around at the affable group of people who are choosing this, and she can think of nowhere else she would rather be. She lets herself sigh. Melissa tilts her head to look up. ‘You see, babe?’ she says. ‘It’s all right.’

  *

  There’s enough time on Monday morning to go to a museum. Kate leaves the house at the same time as Melissa, walks her to the Tube, and stands on the pavement for a moment, feeling the relief of being a small person in a big place. Though Hollie asked about Daisy, no one here much cares about her life, about who the father of her child was. They didn’t really care about anything much, these friends of Melissa’s, except what was happening right now, and tomorrow, and whether it felt good.

  Kate should be more like that. She should make sure Daisy stays that way, too, not asking her to look forwards too far, or reflect too much. She shouldn’t be so hard on her, either. After all, it is unfair, when you think about it from her perspective, that Melissa comes to her party and she doesn’t go to Melissa’s. It’s OK to say you’re tired, to not want to eat sometimes, to cry with frustration because it’s raining or it isn’t Christmas morning and you had dreamed it was Christmas Eve, or because your llama socks are in the wash. Kate is an only child; one of her earliest memories is of being at school, and feeling a boiling rage that she has been put in a class with children. She realises now that she spent so much time in the company of adults that she thought she was one. From now on, she will make sure that Daisy glories in being a child. Play dates, park time, the soft-play centre in Marsham that makes Kate’s head ache.

  She gets to the British Library in good time, but her rucksack is too big for her to be allowed in with it. So she walks to St Pancras, buys a book, finds a table in a café, and reads, uninterrupted, for an hour and a half. Then she buys a slice of chocolate cake to take away, and asks the bemused waitress to wrap it in a paper napkin rather than put it in a box. Daisy knows how birthday cake is served.

  Chapter 7

  Mid-December, the following weekend

  S

  PENCER RINGS THE BELL of the flat exactly on time. Kate is ready. She’s wearing the new boots, and the new dress, with a black polo-neck purloined from her mother’s wardrobe underneath. She was feeling happy – confident, even – until she started sorting out her handbag, which contained a colouring book and pens, three packets of raisins, wet wipes, a rattling tablet dispenser and a conker. Then she’d been hit by the enormity of having a life any different to the one she has now. A weekend in London once a year feels like the limit of her independence – an adventure, an escape, paid for with three days of feeling tired and unsettled, which of course makes Daisy unsettled in turn. The possibility of her everyday life being a new shape had felt, suddenly, impossible – not worth even trying for. She’d scrolled through the messages she and Spencer have exchanged since the kiss over a week ago, and decided that it would be rude to cancel. But she has no hope, anymore.

  She looks at herself in the mirror, checking her mascara, and attempts to give herself a stern look. Life is about more than men. She’s going to see a film and have something to eat. She fancies him. These are all normal things. If she had a normal life, then a date would have been much less of a big deal. But – especially without her dissertation – it feels as though all Kate has to think about, in the time she’s not absorbed by watching Daisy bounce on the trampoline or coaxing one more spoonful of guacamole into her, is Spencer. She owes herself, and Daisy, a better way of living than this. As she goes down the stairs to open the door, Kate straightens her shoulders. She’s not a besotted teenage girl.

  Except, when she sees him – when she notices that he looks nervous – she may as well be.

  ‘Hello,’ he says. ‘I’ve been looking forward to this.’

  ‘Me too,’ she answers, because whether this is a one-off or something more, she’s going to go honestly into it. ‘Though I had a bit of a wobble about it, just now. Come up.’

  He passes her and goes up the stairs. Kate closes the door and follows him, remembering the last time he was here. He has been scrupulously professional at school, but she’s caught a flash of warmth in his eye when he’s looked at her. In the living room, he turns and faces her. He doesn’t touch her but he’s close enough to. ‘Have you changed your mind? If you have, it’s OK. I mean’ – he laughs, shrugs his shoulders in a ‘how can I be making a mess of this already’ gesture – ‘I’d love for us to go out, but only if you want to.’

  And then, she realises how ridiculous she is being. Don’t people with kids date all the time? Isn’t Daisy safe and well right now? Isn’t she allowed to enjoy herself, for crying out loud? Life is short. Mike’s was. Daisy’s might be. (The floor convulses at the thought.) Why shouldn’t she go to the cinema two Saturdays before Christmas?

  ‘I want to.’ She steps forward and kisses him, before she can think about it.

  They’ve texted back-and-forth all week about what they might do: Kate had suggested a walk up to Beau’s Heights, thinking that they could take Beatle and Hope, but the weather forecast was for wind and rain. A mid-afternoon meal seemed an odd thing, and going for coffee not substantial enough when they had the afternoon and evening. I know it’s not very original, but how about a film, then dinner? Spencer had texted yesterday. So long as it isn’t a cartoon! Kate texted back, trying to remember when she last saw a film with a certificate higher than ‘U’ at the cinema.

  The nearby town of Marsham has two cinemas: the multi-screen that’s part of the new retail development on the outskirts, and the small independent cinema, lovingly restored to something that Kate suspects is rather better
than its former glory. That’s where they go. It feels very grown-up. The snacks are small pots of wasabi peas, jelly beans, rice crackers and chocolate-covered coffee beans. Popcorn is served in red-and-white candy-striped cones. Soft drinks come in glass bottles with the metal caps popped off and a paper straw dropped in. There are wines and beers as well as good coffee. It turns out that Spencer is a regular; the staff recognise him and he talks about the films he’s seen as they walk up the stairs to the balcony. They are hand in hand again, although they didn’t touch, by unspoken consent, as they walked through Throckton’s small town square to the place where Spencer had parked his car.

  They are in the front row of the balcony, in one of a row of sofas made for two. Spencer sits down and crosses one leg over the other. He puts an arm across the back of the sofa and smiles up at Kate. ‘Come and get comfy,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen this.’

  ‘I feel as though I must have done,’ she says, ‘because everybody has, haven’t they? But I have no recollection of it, at all.’ She’d asked her mother, when she dropped Daisy off, if she would have seen It’s a Wonderful Life, but Richenda could only shrug and say probably, but that was the sort of thing her father would have taken her to. Although Kate’s parents stayed together until the year after Daisy was born, Kate had never had any illusions that they were happy. She can’t remember the three of them doing anything as everyday as going to the cinema together. Family weddings, school events, yes. Even summer holidays, in a house in France, where her mother would read in the garden and her father would walk in the hills, and the three of them would eat together, each with their own book beside their plate at the table. On the nights when she worries about Daisy having only one parent, she remembers her own upbringing, and consoles herself that what she is doing surely can’t be worse than the want-for-nothing low-level unhappiness of her childhood.

  ‘Then you haven’t seen it.’ Spencer shakes his head. ‘I think you’d know if you had. I’m glad I get to introduce you to it.’

  Kate starts by sitting at the end of the sofa, leaning against the arm, but it’s a piece of furniture that’s used to having couples in the middle of it, so it tilts her towards him. She tries sitting forward but it feels as though she’s ignoring him.

  ‘Kate’ – he is smiling, his gaze on hers – ‘it’s a long film. I’m not going to jump you in a cinema. Come and get comfortable.’ So she fits herself into the space beneath his shoulder, and feels how warm he is against her.

  ‘Don’t go to sleep,’ he says into the hair above her ear as the lights go down. ‘Twice looks like carelessness.’

  *

  There’s a tapas bar in the basement of the cinema, and after the film they eat and Kate cries when she talks about it and Spencer smiles and teases her a little bit. The way he talks about food, and insists that he won’t drink at all because he’s driving, makes Kate think that her parents will like him, too. She tells herself off for getting ahead of things.

  ‘I don’t know much about you,’ she says, in the lull between plates being cleared and coffee arriving.

  Spencer tilts his head, half smiles. ‘I bet you do.’

  Kate laughs. ‘I thought we didn’t listen to gossip.’

  He smiles, the crooked tooth catching the light. ‘Well, of course we don’t. But if you had – what would you know?’

  ‘OK,’ she says, ‘if you’re sure.’ He nods, smiling still. Kate tries to remember what she’s heard and what she’s imagined, and separate the two. ‘Spencer Swanson. No information on possible middle name. Estimates as to age vary, but the consensus is somewhere between twenty-five and thirty-two—’

  ‘Thirty-two? I want to know who said that so I can make their child’s life a misery.’

  ‘Born in Dorset, or maybe Devon, grew up in Scotland, possibly Edinburgh, mentioned a sister in conversation at parents’ evening, last job was in a school in west London, may or may not go swimming, may or may not have a tattoo—’

  His eyes are watching hers, again. Kate thrills at the feeling of it, tension under her skin, heat in her mouth. She remembers how often people tell her how brave she is, as she fights this and that battle for Daisy. Well, bravery comes in more than one form. ‘—Cannot be found on social media. No information available as to relationship status.’

  Spencer smiles and takes Kate’s hand across the table. Afterwards, in the morning, she’ll remember that although she might have been tipsy, he was as sober as could be. He could have no excuse; he must have meant to take her hand, to talk the way he did. ‘Spencer Alexander Swanson. Nobody thought about my initials when they were naming me so I have the choice between SS and SAS. Born in Swanage, in Dorset, to a Dutch mother and Scottish father, twenty-nine years ago on the seventeenth of May. My mother didn’t settle on the south coast so we moved to Edinburgh when I was four, just before my sister Annie was born. I chose her name. She’s named after one of the trucks in Thomas the Tank Engine.’

  Kate laughs. ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Seriously. Annie lives in Cardiff now, with a man none of us like, two children of her own and two stepchildren. My parents still live in the house we grew up in, in Edinburgh. I taught in a school in west London for a few years’ – he hesitates, looks away – ‘but the density of people there got to be too much for me. And there’s no air.’

  ‘I don’t like London for long,’ Kate says, ‘except for the museums.’ She remembers school trips to the Natural History Museum, everyone else dying to escape to the shops but Kate in love with the colours of the building, the endless samples of rocks and creatures brought back from all over the world, a miracle of knowledge. One of her favourite memories of mothering is the first time she took Daisy there, told her to look at the walls, and watched her face open with delight as she spotted the monkeys carved into the stone, scurrying up arches and along architraves. The journey is just too far to make it a comfortable day trip, but they do it now and then anyway. Last summer they had house-sat for a friend of Richenda who lived in Clapham, and for three days had done everything they could think of to do in London, but the Natural History Museum had remained Daisy’s favourite place. They’d looked at the butterflies, pinned out in ranks and rows, Daisy spelling out the names and Kate laughing at the clumsiness and, sometimes, beauty of the words her daughter was enunciating with such care.

  Spencer nods. ‘It’s OK for the first term. Then it gets so that you’re always breathing in something that you don’t want to.’ There’s a pause. Kate wishes she hadn’t interrupted. She wants to know more, but she doesn’t want to ask too many questions. Then Spencer holds her hand a little tighter, and says, ‘Has a certificate for swimming a mile and a junior lifesaving award, almost certainly lapsed. Single at the moment, but is hoping that that will change, very soon. And if you want to know whether there’s a tattoo, you’re going to have to find out for yourself.’

  Kate looks at him, looks away. He’s so at ease, so flirtatious, that for a moment she wonders whether she is making a mistake. Maybe seducing mothers is what he does. A sort of game. ‘I don’t think I’d want to have a tattoo,’ she says. ‘I’d be scared of the pain.’

  Spencer leans back in his chair. ‘I think there’s a lot that people say about tattoos that they could also say about children,’ he says, ‘“they might really hurt” being one of them. And, “what if you change your mind later?” works for tattoos or children.’

  Kate laughs. “How do you know for sure?” she says. ‘And “how do you choose who you make it with?”’

  Spencer smiles. ‘Tenuous, but I’ll allow it. “Will you regret it when you get older?”’

  ‘What if you don’t like it once it’s done?’ Kate says. And then she remembers being pregnant with Daisy, the way her father tried to make her change her mind, the palpable disappointment of her teachers: ‘It’s not the sort of thing I’d expect from you.’

  ‘You’ll be stuck with it for life, you know.’

  As soon as the
words reach her, Kate feels her stomach plummet. Daisy’s life expectancy isn’t something she wants to think about: she pushes her worries about it away, every day, and focuses on keeping Daisy safe. Any other way is unthinkable.

  She tries to smile, but Spencer has read her expression. ‘Kate, I’m sorry. I was just being silly. I didn’t mean to—’

  ‘Honestly, it’s fine. It’s just that now Daisy’s here it’s so hard to think about the way people talked about her. Before she was born.’

  His hand holds hers, more tightly. ‘The last thing I want to do is upset you.’

  ‘I know.’ Kate makes herself look up at him, and can’t help but smile at the concern in his face. ‘I’m not upset, exactly. Just—’

  Spencer takes her other hand. ‘Shall we go for a walk? We could get some mulled wine at the Christmas market.’

  He doesn’t press her for conversation, and they wander between the stalls. Kate buys Daisy a wooden bauble with her name on it; Spencer buys an elf hat with ears for himself, for the last day of term.

  ‘Do you know what’s been lovely, about this afternoon?’

  ‘Tell me.’ Spencer has tucked her arm into the crook of his elbow.

  ‘I haven’t worried once about what my dissertation result is going to be.’