The Perfect Mother (15 page)

Fergal comes, with Jamie. He looks as though he’s been rushing—he hasn’t shaved; he’s wearing his leather jacket. He turns to me and smiles. I nod and try to smile but my mouth is tight and dry.

‘I can’t do this,’ says Daisy.

The bell goes. There’s a flurry at the gate, a sudden urgency, the late ones rushing in, hair and school bags flying. Suddenly I breathe out: I can’t do this either; I don’t know what possessed me, why it seemed so necessary to put her through all this. I bend down, put my arms around her.

‘Let’s go home.’

There’s a huge sense of relief in giving in; then, stitched into the relief, a slender thread of regret, a feeling that I
have failed: that we got this close, that she is dressed and here at the gate, that maybe I should have pushed a little harder.

‘We’ll crack this,’ I tell her, as we drive home through the traffic that’s thinning now school has started. ‘We’ll solve it. We’ll get there. I promise.’

I think how often I have told her this. She doesn’t say anything.

At home, she goes upstairs to change into her pyjamas, and I unpack her school bag and throw her lunch away. I take the matchbox out of her bag and put it back on the dresser. There seems no sense in keeping it—the seed and the paperclip and the feather have no meaning apart from the purpose for which they were collected—but I feel a thin scratch of psychic pain at the thought of just discarding them. I open up the box. The petal has the faintest flower scent, but it’s freckled with brown already.

I take Daisy a hot-water bottle and a drink of water. She’s sitting up in bed watching television. Her room is tidy because she doesn’t play any more, all her Lego and plastic animals still neatly in their boxes. It looks dull in the harsh April light, that seeks out all the dust and the flaws in things.

‘Mum, I want…’ She swallows. ‘Mum, give me…’ There’s a kind of fog in her face.

‘What is it, Daisy?’

‘I put him down here,’ she says. Her eyes are clouded. ‘I know I did…Mum, I can’t remember what he’s called.’

A thin clear shaft of fear goes through me.

‘You mean Hannibal?’

‘Hannibal,’ she says. ‘Oh. I couldn’t remember.’ She’s troubled. ‘Sometimes I can’t remember the words for things.’

I turn from her, looking round the room, looking for Hannibal: hiding my fear from her, pushing it away.

Hannibal has fallen under the bed.

‘There. I’ve got him. I bet he was lonely down there.’ My words, cheerful, unreal, seem to hang in the air between us.

I turn on her television and leave her.

The kitchen is messy with the remains of breakfast. I sit at the table and leave it all as it is. Dread washes through me, like some bitter fluid; it’s in my mouth, I can taste it on my tongue. Things come into my head: BSE, cancer, leukaemia, terrible things. When I was at nursery school, one of the helpers, a woman in her forties, had a brain tumour. She became rather quiet and fiddled too much with her glasses and had several minor car accidents and once or twice she fainted; by the time they found the tumour, there was nothing they could do. I try to remember if she used to forget things. And BSE—what are the early symptoms of BSE? Everything seems to start with depression, withdrawal, a difficulty in thinking, an ill-formed sense of something being profoundly wrong. My pulse skitters off and my stomach turns to water. This is one of the worst times; as I sit in my bleak kitchen in the hard spring light, all the dribbles of spilt milk and crescents of burnt toast on the table, and outside the spring wind and the silver birch holding the white of the
sky in the nets of its branches: when I start to think the very worst things, and there’s no help anywhere.

I find that I am praying. Mouthing the words like a child in school assembly. Or maybe not praying exactly—certainly not asking reverently or politely—but arguing with God, demanding, railing. Do something: help us. If you do by chance exist, which I very much doubt, why won’t you help us? What about that thing it says in the Bible? If you ask for bread you will not be given a stone. I’m asking, God. Just now I could do with some bread.

I’m whispering the words into the stillness of the kitchen. But my voice is swallowed up by the silence as though I never spoke.

The ring of the phone makes me jump. It enters my mind that it must be the school secretary: I haven’t rung her yet to say that Daisy is off again. I don’t know why she’s bothering me, when she surely must know what’s wrong. I almost don’t answer it.

‘Catriona?’

A man’s voice. It’s familiar, but I can’t place it. I feel a slight warmth of comfort, without knowing why.

‘Yes?’

‘It’s Fergal.’

I don’t say anything.

‘From the school gate. Remember? We met at your carol-singing party?’

‘I know who you are.’

It sounds a bit abrupt: I worry he’ll think he’s upset me.

There’s silence for a moment, as if he’s working something out.

‘I’ve wanted to say this for ages,’ he says, ‘but I’m sorry if I alarmed you with all that stuff about The Poplars.’

There’s such warmth in his voice; I want to wrap it round me like a blanket.

‘That’s OK,’ I tell him. ‘It was just a bit of a shock.’

‘When I saw you at the gate today, I thought I might ring.’

‘That’s sweet of you.’

Another silence. I can sense his uncertainty.

‘Are you OK?’ he says then. ‘You don’t sound OK to me.’

‘No, I’m not.’

His warmth loosens something inside me. There’s a sob in my voice.

‘It’s Daisy?’ he says.

‘I’m so scared.’ I find that I am crying. I don’t know if he can hear it over the phone. ‘She’s started forgetting things. What does that mean—forgetting? I keep thinking such terrible things.’

‘Of course you do,’ he says. ‘Anyone would. That doesn’t mean you’re right about those things.’

His voice is level, soothing; and he takes me to a safer, gentler place. Somehow, talking to him, I start to feel that maybe I’ve been hysterical—I even imagine, for a glimmer of a moment, that one day we will be through this, through to the other side—that this will all be something that has happened, part of our history.

Immediately I am stronger, clearer, seeing a way forward. ‘I know what we need to do really,’ I tell him.
‘This doctor we’ve been seeing—he’s just no help at all. I guess we need to see someone different. I need to go back to our GP and ask for another referral.’

‘That sounds good,’ he says.

‘I’m being pathetic. It’s just a bad day. I mean, most sick kids get well in the end, don’t they?’

‘Of course they do.’

‘I’m not like this usually. I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be,’ he says. ‘Look, I mean what I said—about coming round. You could bring Daisy if she wants to come: Jamie’s got the world’s biggest collection of Zelda games.’

‘She’d love that.’

It’s the end of the conversation, but I’d like to keep him there for a moment, fending off the fear.

‘Well, look, take care,’ he says, and ends the call.

Afterwards I sit in the silence for a moment, thinking how things used to be—how they might be again.

There’s a photo on the mantelpiece: Daisy at four, in muddy yellow wellingtons. I took it at the farm park. We had a season ticket, and we often spent afternoons there in the lazy easy year before she started school. There were geese on a pond, and goats and fabulous peacocks. Daisy loved the goats. I found them rather alarming, with their hard insistent heads and the agitations that would ripple like a sudden wind through the group of them and the way they chewed your clothes. But she’d always want to pet them, to rake her fingers through the coarse hair of their coats; and she’d laugh when they pushed at her with
their lean bony flanks or when she fed them and they nibbled her fingers. Once we saw two kids that had just been born, shaky with newness but avidly sucking at their mother, the placenta spilled in the straw, glossy and marbled with colour, inkily blue and magenta, lavish and shocking. There was a smell of birth, a hot rich smell of mingled hay and blood, both intimate and strange. Daisy went as close as she could, watching, intent, wide-eyed. That’s how she was then—always, from very little, fearless, curious: wanting to reach out to the world, to dig her fingers in. At two she’d climb to the top of the climbing frame and let go with both hands and stand there flushed and laughing, so I’d constantly have to be biting back the instinctive words of warning. And if she ran off, you’d always have to go after her, she’d never come back on her own.

One day, when she was three, Adrian and Gina took us for a picnic tea in the New Forest. There was a broad expanse of grass, like a great wide cloth thrown down, stretching almost as far as you could see. Animals grazed there, cows with blotched coats, and horses. It was one of the last days of summer, the sun low in the sky, laying golden light across the land. Gina had brought an elaborate picnic, with a checked cloth and different kinds of salad all neatly sliced and segregated in various plastic containers; I as usual had contributed the pudding, a tarte tatin I’d made. Adrian, who didn’t much like picnics, had some white Burgundy in a cooler, to compensate for the afternoon’s irritations, all the twigs and insects. We ate and
drank, and sat around in the sunlight, talking vaguely, flicking through the papers. Sinead sprawled on the grass, intent on some teen ghost story; Daisy, in red dungarees, worked her way determinedly through a packet of ginger biscuits. Then, as if in response to some irrefutable inner prompting, she licked the crumbs from her fingers, and got up and started to run. Her long hair streamed behind her. I watched her, small and blonde and intrepid, moving across the grass between the slow laconic cows, the red of her dungarees singing out, and the brightness of her hair.

I stood, rather reluctantly, warm with Adrian’s wine. ‘I guess I should go after her.’

Gina looked up from her
Sunday Telegraph.
‘Don’t worry, Catriona, they always come back,’ she said.

‘Daisy doesn’t. She just keeps on going.’

‘No, dear, really, you don’t need to worry,’ she said. ‘Little children never run far from their mothers. I read it in Penelope Leach.’ She took off her glasses and polished them on her cardigan. ‘Richard always came back,’ she added contentedly.

Richard, hearing his name, put down the
Business News.
‘Just relax, darling.’ He yawned. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine.’

‘I guess so.’ But I didn’t sit.

‘Any time now,’ said Gina. ‘Just you see. She’ll turn round any moment.’

We watched, but Daisy kept on going, diminishing in the distance, a little red dot with flying yellow hair.

‘I think I should get her,’ I said.

I walked, at first, so as not to look overprotective—
thinking how Gina might turn to Richard with a slight knowing smile. But Daisy was moving rapidly, running straight into the sun. I called but she ran on, not hearing, not aware of me, or choosing not to hear. I wasn’t gaining on her. I started to run. But the grass, that had looked so beguilingly smooth, was rough and uneven to run on, and the light was dazzling, meaningless dark shapes skimming across my sight. I ran faster; I was becoming short of breath, my chest was tight from running. I had a sharp urgent fear that I would never catch her, that I’d lose her there in the sunlight, that she’d disappear in the brightness and go away from me.

And then suddenly I was almost on top of her. She heard me, put on a spurt of speed, let out a gleeful shriek. I flung myself at her, the momentum of my running carrying me forward so both of us toppled and fell. I remember how warm and solid she felt, and her smell of ginger biscuits and sun-warmed skin, and the sound of her breathy laughter. I’d like to be there again, everything restored.

CHAPTER 19

I
t’s Dr Carey again, in her crisp red jacket. But today she isn’t smiling.

‘I haven’t brought Daisy,’ I tell her. ‘I thought it might be easier to talk without her here.’

‘Absolutely,’ she says. ‘So how are things?’

‘She’s just the same,’ I tell her. ‘We went to see Dr McGuire.’

‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I have a letter from him.’

I know what I will say: I have rehearsed this.

‘I felt he didn’t listen. I’m really not at all happy with what he’s doing,’ I tell her.

Her eyes are on me. This doesn’t seem to surprise her.

There’s a thick hot smell in the surgery, as though the smell of an earlier patient, someone unwashed and anguished, has lingered on in here. A slice of sunlight falls across the floor.

‘I rather gathered you had a difficult time,’ she says. She takes a typewritten sheet from Daisy’s notes and smoothes it with her fingers. I can tell that she’s read it already. ‘Is Daisy taking her medicine now?’ she says.

‘She can’t, it makes her sick.’

‘I think he’s worried she isn’t taking her medicine,’ she says. ‘Most children of eight can take medicines.’ There’s certainty in her voice. ‘If you’re firm. You need to give them a reward, like a sweet or a biscuit.’

‘That doesn’t work,’ I tell her.

There’s an edge to my voice, perhaps. A slight frown creases the skin between her eyes. She’s looking at the letter.

‘I need to tell you what it says in here,’ she says. ‘I’m afraid he does mention…’ She hesitates. ‘He does say that he thought you were quite demanding.’

I hate that word: it triggers a brief wild rage. I’m the girl in the ad, who could be rather demanding: the girl that nobody wanted, although she smiled and smiled.

‘That’s utterly unfair.’

She gives me a wary look, from under her eyelashes. She’s flushed as though she’s nervous.

‘And that you wouldn’t let Daisy speak for herself.’

‘She was really scared. She was trembling. Of course I would speak for her.’

She shakes her head a little. ‘Children of eight are perfectly capable of speaking for themselves.’

It’s happening again: the consultation is slipping away from me.

‘But doesn’t he say anything else—you know, about the illness?’

She’s wearing a low-cut T-shirt under the jacket. There are weird red blotches on her neck and chest.