Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘But Daisy—’

  ‘Is going to stay with your mother and Blake. It’s all sorted.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. I went to see them. They said, of course they’d have Daisy.’

  ‘Oh.’ Kate is almost more touched by that than the plan to go away.

  *

  Daisy, predictably, is less impressed. ‘I thought we were going to make our own family,’ she says when Kate tells her that Mummy and Spencer are going away for the weekend.

  ‘Well, yes. But part of being our own family is that we can do different things. I didn’t come to the pantomime with you and Granny and Blake, remember?’

  ‘You were going to a birthday party.’

  ‘Yes, Daisy, but that’s not the point—’ Kate hears irritation in her voice, slows her breath. ‘You go to lots of birthday parties without me. You’ve got Mattie’s sports party next weekend and Jo is taking you.’

  Daisy looks as though she might cry. Kate takes a breath, tries to do better: ‘I know it’s all a bit strange, but we’ll get used to it. And Mummy needs—’ She stops herself before she can say ‘a break’. ‘Mummy and Spencer need some grown-up days. It’s like play dates.’

  When the time comes to drop her off at Richenda and Blake’s, Kate is worried for a moment that Daisy will refuse to get out of the car. (Complaining to her mother about her daughter’s obstinacy, once, Richenda had raised an eyebrow and said, ‘Well, I don’t think we need to wonder where that comes from.’ So Kate can’t really be surprised.) But Spencer takes Daisy’s case out of the boot, puts it on the pavement, then opens the door, bows, and says, ‘My lady.’ Daisy half laughs and unclicks her seat belt, and they walk up the path, the three of them together. Daisy is as end-of-the-week tired as usual, and the being-left-out grumpiness has abated rather than vanished.

  Kate is trying to be patient. Her hair is shiny from the cut she had today. The relief of going into Marsham, where she wasn’t at risk from Serena, Sarah and Cara smirking when she passed, had made her realise how on edge she was, and how tiring the whispering of Throckton can be.

  But they are not quite home free. Standing in the kitchen, unpacking medication and supplements, Richenda says, ‘This seems like quite short notice, Kate. Is Daisy OK about it?’

  Kate swallows her impulse to say that the time to mention this would have been when Spencer asked her to have Daisy to stay. ‘She thinks she should be allowed to come,’ she says.

  She hopes her mother will laugh – Richenda finds almost everything her granddaughter says to be funny or clever or both – but no such luck. ‘She’s had some big changes, Kate. Full-time school and now this.’

  ‘Now what? Her mother going away for two nights?’

  Richenda puts a hand on her arm. ‘No. Of course not. But you’re more – you have someone else in your life, taking your attention. She’s bound to find that unsettling.’

  ‘She still gets plenty of attention. More, if anything.’ Daisy and Spencer sometimes play Jenga in the evening, and Kate hears the crashes and laughter as she takes a shower. Spencer is teaching Daisy card games, too, and when the three of them play, Kate feels as though she is looking through a window into Spencer’s happy childhood. Her own parents could never have been civil for the duration of a round of seven-card brag.

  ‘It’s still change. And it’s all happening quite quickly.’

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Am I never to be allowed to have any fun? Kate thinks. Two nights in a hotel will be her first unencumbered adult holiday, unless you count sharing Melissa’s bed one or two nights a year. ‘Do you want me to tell Spencer to cancel?’

  Richenda sighs. ‘No, of course not. I just want to be sure that you’re not – that you’ve got your priorities right. And that you’re not rushing into this.’

  ‘I’ve had six years on my own, Mum. Did anyone question your judgement when Blake moved in?’ Richenda, who had spent decades putting up with Rufus’s infidelities and neglect, had recovered remarkably quickly after their split and soon begun a relationship with Blake. Throckton had raised its collective eyebrows, but if Richenda had cared she hadn’t shown it. She and Blake had married shortly after Daisy’s third birthday.

  Richenda sighs again, and then smiles at Kate. ‘Well, yes, they did. You’re right, Kate. Daisy will be fine with us. It’s just – I want you to be happy. And I want you to be careful. You could be both. It’s dangerous to put someone on a pedestal. Nobody’s perfect.’

  ‘I am happy. Or I would be if people would understand that I’m not a child and I know my own mind.’

  Spencer puts his head around the kitchen doorway, tilts his head. Kate knows he means ‘let’s go’, and just that second of unspoken communication thrills her. She can do anything, now, with Spencer’s support; a career, a different life seem possible. But first – a weekend away.

  ‘I think we’ll try to get ahead of the traffic, Mum.’

  ‘Very wise.’

  Daisy follows Spencer into the kitchen, throwing Kate a bruised look. Kate holds out her arms. She loves Daisy with her whole heart, of course she does, but Daisy is only five. Kate is allowed to overrule her.

  ‘Don’t worry about us,’ Richenda says, kindness in her tone now; Kate knows that she wants to part friends. Reaching for Daisy’s hand, she smiles back at Kate, then looks down into her granddaughter’s face.

  ‘We’re going to have a lovely weekend, aren’t we, Daisy? We might go to the pottery café, I thought.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Kate and Richenda exchange a look. It’s Daisy’s favourite place, usually.

  Richenda picks her up. ‘Right, let’s say goodbye to Mummy and Spencer. We’ll see them on Sunday.’ She pauses, and puts a hand on Daisy’s forehead. ‘Is she a bit warm?’ she asks Kate.

  ‘It was warm in the car. She’s fine.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  Spencer’s hand is on the small of her back; they can be at the hotel in an hour and a half if they are lucky. And Daisy is growing stronger every day. The winter is almost over, and the antibiotics are doing their work.

  Kate kisses her daughter’s pink cheek, which is plump and giving. Her first ever romantic weekend away beckons. She’s bound to be nervous, bound to overthink. And, like Melissa says, she deserves a bit of fun.

  *

  By six o’clock that evening, they have checked into the country house hotel that Spencer found a late deal on. Kate had transferred her half of the money to him the evening before, and felt the gentle relief of not having to be in charge, for once. It had felt like a lot – £150 – but how would she know, really, what dinner, bed and breakfast in a hotel should cost? She’d taken some extra money out of her savings at Christmas, in case she needed it, and she hadn’t, so it feels less reckless to spend it on herself like this.

  Their bedroom is in a turret. The bed is huge and has twisting oak posts and Liberty-print bedding. The bath has clawed iron feet and candles all around it. And the views from three sides, over the South Downs, are mesmerising in their stillness and muted tweed colours.

  They look out of the window for what feels like a long time. A cloud drifts across the sky: it seems first to be a dragon, then breaks apart into a series of little submarines. Kate feels suddenly shy. She has shaved her legs and armpits – she doesn’t usually bother – and bought sheer black tights to wear with the pale green dress and black heels she bought for her mother’s wedding. When she left the hairdresser, she had bought pretty, matching underwear in a silvered sheen, and a new multi-pack of lace-edged knickers to wear with her good black bra. Maybe it’s being out in the world with Spencer that makes her self-conscious. It’s hard not to feel that she is being watched. It almost feels like a test – will they love each other, away from the school, their homes and the watching eyes of Throckton?

  Spencer, standing behind her, his arms around her waist, exhales. ‘This is perfect,’ he says. And all of Kate’s w
orries disappear. Because it is. He’s talked to her when she’s been tired and cross. The first time they kissed she was wearing pyjamas, and a cardigan with a hole in it and dried porridge on the sleeve. She’s seen him snappy when he’s hungry, quiet when he’s preoccupied by the unpredictable malice of a primary-school-staffroom. She’s offered him cream for the eczema at the base of his back. There is nothing to fear in the intimacy of this weekend – it can only be a good thing. Sometimes things look good because they are good, Melissa says.

  Kate leans back, rests her upper body against his chest. ‘Perfect,’ she says.

  *

  It doesn’t stay perfect for long.

  When Kate wakes up the next morning, dry-mouthed from wine, and makes her way to the bathroom, she sees her phone, which she had switched to silent when they went to bed, alight with a call. Her mother. There’s no way Richenda would ring at 7 a.m. unless something has happened to Daisy. The call ends before Kate has time to answer it, and she sees eleven missed calls from 5 a.m. onwards and remembers – the impact of what she’s done makes her hands shake as she picks up her phone – that she had said she would send her mother the details of the hotel when they arrived. She forgot. Or perhaps it hadn’t seemed important – she always has her mobile with her, anyway.

  Spencer turns in the bed, reaches out for her. They haven’t fallen asleep together naked since that first night he stayed over at the flat. With Daisy liable to come in search of her mother before the alarm goes off, pyjamas seem safest. She holds his hand, calls her mother with the other.

  ‘What’s happened?’ she asks, as soon as the call is picked up.

  ‘Kate, it’s Blake. Everything’s fine, but we’re at the hospital.’

  ‘That doesn’t sound fine. Is Mum there?’ Kate likes Blake, a lot, but he’s not the person she needs right now.

  ‘She’s with Daisy. I stayed in the car so I could keep calling you. Daisy’s got a temperature so we brought her to the hospital.’

  Kate frees a hand from Spencer, puts Blake on the speakerphone, starts to cast around for something to wear. Last night’s underwear, yesterday’s jeans. Spencer sits up.

  ‘What’s her temperature?’

  ‘Thirty-eight and rising when we got her here.’

  ‘Right. We’ll meet you there.’ She presses the button to cut the call off, and grabs her suitcase from the bottom of the wardrobe.

  Spencer hasn’t got out of bed, though he’s sitting up, rubbing the night from his face with the heels of his hands.

  Kate says, ‘We need to go to the hospital.’

  He swings his legs to the floor. ‘Shouldn’t we have some breakfast, first? Thirty-eight isn’t that high, is it?’

  Kate pauses and looks at him. He can’t have understood. ‘It’s a danger for Daisy. You know that.’ Tights, dress, shoes go into her case; she goes to the bathroom to collect her make-up and toothbrush. She was going to have a lovely, long bath this morning. That doesn’t matter now.

  He’s waiting when she comes out of the bathroom; he’s pulled on his jeans, is still shirtless. He pulls her to him, kisses the top of her head. ‘Not the morning we were planning, hey?’

  ‘No’ – she sags into him for a minute – ‘not at all. I’m sorry.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ he answers. ‘But are you sure we shouldn’t have breakfast first? It’s a bit of a drive.’

  Kate looks at him, she is ragged and taut with worry. ‘Seriously?’

  It’s the first time that she hasn’t been the one to notice the signs of an infection that’s feisty enough to overcome the antibiotics that Daisy takes every day. Usually, it’s flushing cheeks and more frequent coughing ramping up over the course of a few hours, and Kate is always on the lookout for it. As she watches Spencer apologise to the receptionist for their sudden departure, she wonders if she would have spotted the problem more quickly if she had been single, still. No, she tells herself. Then, with a nauseous honesty, yes. She tells herself that there’s no point even thinking that. Then she thinks it again. The important thing is that Daisy is in the hospital and Kate is not there with her.

  ‘You’re quiet,’ Spencer says, as they pull out of the hotel gates.

  ‘I’m not really up for chit-chat.’

  ‘I meant, do you want to tell me about it?’

  Kate is not so much thinking as remembering the last time this happened, last May, when it seemed as though summer was on the way, and she was less worried about coughs at playgroups, hand sanitiser, and whether Daisy might be looking peaky. And then she had gone to wake her daughter one morning and found her wilting; pale-faced apart from the bright spots in the middle of her cheeks. The blue vein across the top of Daisy’s nose that only shows when she’s ill had stood out like a river on a map. Her breathing had been laboured and too fast, her hairline damp, and her hand, when Kate took it, as hot as a stone in a fire pit. These are the things Kate is thinking about as they leave the green-grey of the moors behind them and approach Marsham. She cannot even begin to explain.

  Something in her whispers that if she hadn’t had this weekend planned, she’d have been more worried about Daisy’s temperature. Now she thinks back to the drop-off at her mother’s; she realises she should have taken more notice of her daughter’s clinginess, her lack of enthusiasm for the pottery café. She should have listened when her mother mentioned that Daisy felt warm. In retrospect, she can remember that there had been the beginning of a blue pallor at her temples.

  She rests her head on the cold, car window. ‘It’s horrible when Daisy is ill,’ she says.

  ‘You’re not on your own,’ Spencer says.

  ‘No,’ Kate answers, and she puts her hand on Spencer’s, briefly. She cannot help but think of how he didn’t really understand what the urgency was, that he would have eaten a full cooked breakfast before setting off if she hadn’t objected. She’s silent for the rest of the journey, as she runs through all she always does for Daisy, and wonders what crucial thing she has forgotten. Daisy had her flu jab, as normal, at the onset of winter. She had her pre-school boosters, too. Her weight is going up. Her cough is no worse. Kate has even been thinking that they are getting on top of it at last, or that as Daisy was growing her lungs were strengthening. They have such a slick routine with nebulisers and daily physiotherapy that it is never forgotten. Richenda took Daisy swimming last weekend, but she always asks about the chlorine levels in the pool to make sure that they are high enough, and keeps Daisy away from anyone who so much as sniffs. Kate can’t think of anything that they’ve missed. It seems too unfair that the price she should pay for finding someone who really loves her, is feeling that Daisy will suffer.

  Spencer pulls up at the hospital entrance as Kate undoes her seatbelt. Now that she’s here, her panic is winning out, and she wants nothing more than to run to Daisy’s side, to make sure everything that needs to happen is happening, fast. No one should be handling this, except Kate. She should never have left Daisy. Spencer says, ‘I’ll go and park. Will you be in A&E?’

  Kate spits out a laugh. The thought of Daisy’s depressed immune system in a room full of people ill enough to be sitting in a hospital emergency department on a Saturday morning is unthinkable. ‘No, we’ll be in the CF unit.’

  ‘I’ll come and find you,’ Spencer says, but Kate has already slammed the door, and is running into the hospital’s main entrance.

  *

  Richenda and Blake are waiting in one of the isolation rooms. Blake gets up to let Kate sit, and Richenda passes Daisy, who is in her arms, across to her mother. Kate wishes for a wriggle, but feels only still, hot weight. She holds her daughter’s hand and imagines that she is drawing the heat and the infection out into her own body, pulling it through Daisy’s skin into her own, sucking illness out of her little girl, drawing danger away.

  Being in the cystic fibrosis unit is like stepping outside of time. Sitting in a hotel restaurant, eating tiramisu from Spencer’s spoon, saying yes to another glass of wine because
there is nothing to do tomorrow morning except lie in bed, nursing a gentle hangover, phoning down for room service – that feels as though it was a thousand years ago. There is only here, and now; and it’s the only place Kate can be, and the only place she can ever imagine being.

  Daisy doesn’t flinch when the cannula goes in, and Kate feels something in her break at the sight. The diagnosis of pneumonia is swift, but once the treatment is given there’s nothing to do but watch and wait. The antibiotics run from a plastic pouch into Daisy’s veins as she sleeps. And Kate watches, by the bed, as people come and go. Richenda steps out and Spencer steps in, puts a cup of tea into her hands, places a bottle of water and a sandwich next to her. He doesn’t try to talk, just sits alongside her. He takes the tea away when it’s cold. And so the day passes.

  Daisy’s breath rattles her and her cough shakes her and the nurses come and go. After three hours her temperature has stopped rising, but it doesn’t drop, either. ‘That’s a good sign,’ Victoria says when she comes to check in at the end of her shift. ‘It shows the antibiotics are working. Let’s hope they get a hold overnight.’

  ‘What do we do if they don’t?’ Kate asks. It sounds like a matter-of-fact question in her head but her voice has tears in it when she speaks. She doesn’t like it when a doctor says hope. Hope should be for parents: doctors should be certain, in control.

  ‘We try something else,’ Victoria says. ‘But let’s give this a chance first.’ Kate nods. She knows the philosophy with acute infection: treat first, refine the diagnosis later. Don’t waste a second in case it turns out later that that was the second you needed.

  Spencer steps out of the room when Richenda returns, having been to Kate’s flat for toiletries, pyjamas for her and Daisy, books and snacks and the pillow from Daisy’s bed: ‘I thought she might feel more comfortable.’ Kate dare not cry, because how would she stop? Richenda says the usual things: don’t worry about anything and Daisy will be fine. Kate nods.

  ‘Have they said how long you might be here for?’ Richenda asks.