The Perfect Mother (35 page)

Daisy turns in her bed but she doesn’t open her eyes. She’s still sedated by the drug she took for the investigation yesterday: it’s meant to tranquillise you and help you forget what happened. I was worried they wouldn’t be able to get it into her, but they’re good at helping her with medicine here. They put the spoon at the back of her tongue and talk her through it with such patience. It takes an age but some of it stays down.

They let me go with her to the endoscopy suite. There were six of them in their blue surgical suits—several doctors, and Annie the nurse manager, and the consultant, a tall, quiet man with a shock of wild white hair. They sprayed Daisy’s throat with an anaesthetic spray. The endoscopy tube had a fibre optic torch at the end, manycoloured and glittery. I was told to sit by the wall to start with. You can imagine that parents might find it too upsetting to watch the tube go down. I carefully didn’t look at Daisy, just watched the television screen, the film of her digestive tract. It was the strangest thing, this journey through the body of my child. When they’d finished the endoscopy, the consultant said that was great, her stomach and oesophagus were completely normal, and did I want to sit closer and hold her hand for the second part, the colonoscopy. I moved my chair and I sat by Daisy’s bed and stroked her hair. Daisy moaned and protested but you couldn’t make out the words. Annie soothed her; the doctors talked together.

‘I can’t get into there.’

‘No. Well, you’re going backwards now…’
Afterwards, Annie came back with us and settled Daisy in bed. Daisy scarcely stirred.

‘We did so well today,’ said Annie, folding Daisy’s sheet neatly under her chin. ‘Well, I always say we, really it’s them, of course, we don’t have to go through it…She’ll have a nice long sleep now—she’ll be absolutely fine.’

Then Jason came, today in a Monsters, Inc. T-shirt, wheeling the blood-pressure machine. He fixed the machine to Daisy’s arm and frowned at the display. The machine thought it was still attached to a printer, he said. I wasn’t to worry if it asked me for more paper.

I sat in the armchair and wondered what to do now. My wrist was sore from stroking Daisy’s head. I realised I hadn’t eaten anything all morning, and I went to the hospital shop and got myself a sandwich and a magazine. I sat by Daisy’s bed, but I didn’t eat or read. I watched Daisy’s face. Her lips were white and rough, like someone who has been acutely ill. As Annie had said, she slept for a long time.

The Afghani woman drifted in through our door, her toddler clutching at her. Her veil had silver fringes. We smiled at one another, feeling a kind of closeness although we couldn’t talk together—sharing this thing, that we knew how it feels to have a child who is sick—and she touched Daisy’s face with a gentle finger heavy with intricate rings.

Rain ran down the window, though you couldn’t hear the sound of it. Every time the blood-pressure machine
gave a reading it beeped and flashed a display that said it was out of paper. I could hear conversations from the corridor. Jason was greeting somebody. ‘Hi, Carol! Not seen you for a while. Been having a career break?’ A doctor who talked rather fast was getting frustrated with a parent who didn’t understand. ‘Now, how can I explain? What we want to do is to stop him developing. The medicine is to stop him developing so his height goes up…’ Their voices seemed so far away.

I sat and watched the patterns the rain traced on the glass, and felt afraid. I kept thinking how they’d said they hadn’t seen anything abnormal. And that was good, of course, that was a relief; and yet at the same time it was frightening—because what if they never discovered what was making Daisy ill? What if even here, with all their dazzling panoply of interventions, their torches that can see inside you, their drugs that make you forget, they couldn’t find out what was wrong?

Around lunchtime, Daisy woke briefly.

‘I dreamed I had the endoscopy,’ she said. Her voice was hoarse.

‘You did,’ I said. ‘You’ve had it.’

‘Oh,’ she said. She frowned. ‘I can’t have. It was a dream, Mum.’

‘No, really. It’s all over and done with. Isn’t that great?’

She gave me a sceptical look, and went straight back to sleep.

It was late afternoon, and I’d just made myself a coffee in the kitchen down the corridor, when the consultant
came. I felt flustered and awkward, not knowing how to handle this situation—whether to stand up and give him my armchair, whether to offer him coffee.

‘Now, your little lady,’ he said, propping himself against the end of Daisy’s bed. He was wearing a faded sports jacket. He had Daisy’s notes in his hand. ‘As I said, her stomach and oesophagus seem fine. But the biopsies we took from her bowel do show she has a problem there. There are changes in the wall of the colon: she has inflammatory bowel disease, and there are also some of the changes you find in coeliac disease.’

‘Oh,’ I said. I put my coffee down, very carefully. All I felt at first was a sense of surprise.

‘In this illness,’ he said, ‘the walls of the gut stop working properly, and become too permeable, so toxins get into the bloodstream and are carried round the body.’

He talked quite fast; I was struggling to understand.

‘So—is that why she gets all these different symptoms?’

He glanced down at her notes. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it would explain everything you’ve described.’

‘You mean, the memory loss and the pains in her limbs and everything?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘All those things. The treatment is a sulphur-based drug and she’ll probably need to take it for quite some time—I’d suggest a year at the least…’

Something in my expression made him pause.

‘Don’t worry,’ he said, ‘these drugs have been around for ages. We know they’re pretty safe.’

‘It’s not that,’ I said. ‘She finds it so hard to take medicines.’

‘I’ll give them to you in capsule form,’ he said. ‘You can split the capsule and mix the drug into her food.’ He wrote me the prescription. ‘You can get them from the hospital pharmacy.’

‘Right.’ It sounded so simple.

‘Now, these problems are probably secondary to her allergies,’ he said. ‘The blood test showed she’s a very allergic child. So you’ll need to change her diet. I suggest that you exclude wheat and dairy products to start with, and if that doesn’t do the trick, take her off soya as well. Allergies to soya are becoming very common—they seem to put it in everything these days. Our nutritionist will help you.’

I nodded.

‘I’ll see you in a month,’ he said. ‘D’you have anything to ask before I go?’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said. ‘Where does the illness come from?’

He smiled. ‘That’s a pretty big question.’

‘What I was wondering—could it be inherited?’

‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘There does seem to be a genetic link in this group of diseases. Has anyone in your family had a similar illness?’

‘My father,’ I said. ‘D’you think there’s a connection?’

‘Very likely,’ he said. He made a note in the file.

‘That helps somehow,’ I said. ‘It makes it seem less random. I wish I’d known before…’ And then, needing to explain, ‘I never knew my father, you see, I only
learned this recently.’ I feel my skin go hot. ‘I know that must seem odd, not to have known him…’

His eyes were on me; his gaze was warm, accepting.

‘Whether or not you knew him,’ he said, ‘he’s part of who you are. And what you pass on to your children.’

He closed the notes; he was about to leave.

And then I remembered what I should be saying.

‘I don’t know how to thank you…’

But he’d already gone.

I went straight to the pharmacy to collect Daisy’s medicine. When I got back to our room, I opened the bottle. The capsules were an alarming sulphurous yellow. I pulled one apart over the basin and some of the powder fell and smeared the side of the basin with a startling yellow stain. I dipped my finger in the powder and stuck it in my mouth. It scarcely tasted of anything—just a faint musty bitterness, easily disguised. I glanced across at Daisy, the pools of shadow under her eyes, her open, strained mouth; and I saw her as she once was, flushed and vivid—as she might be again. Something inside me was singing.

I lie and stare into the sepia dark. Daisy’s cards are arranged around the room, on every available surface, and here and there the light through the curtained window falls on them and glimmers. I can make out the shiny clown on Gina and Adrian’s, and, on the card her class sent, the letters that spell Get Well stuck down in coloured foil. And there’s one from Sinead that she drew herself
with gel pen, showing a frog who’s going into hospital. The frog has a suitcase and a bandage and a deliciously doleful expression. A familiar worry surges through me—worry about Sinead, and how she and Daisy will cope with living apart. For now, they’re being positive: Sinead is teaching Daisy how to text her, and they’re planning to talk on MSN every day, but I don’t know how they’ll react when it happens for real. On top of the television there’s a black and white card from Fergal and Jamie, a photo of a cat looking rapaciously into a goldfish bowl, that made us smile when we opened it. The biggest glossiest one of all is from Richard. Richard for now is being guiltily helpful, striving to do all the things that a caring father should, however semi-detached his situation may seem. He hasn’t told Gina yet that we’re separating—I think he dreads that—and I am co-operating by keeping up the pretence that all is well when she phones, which in some weird way brings him and me a little closer, as though we have become co-conspirators. Richard brought us here, though later today, when we will need a lift home, he has a business conference, so Fergal will collect us. And on the way home, if Daisy is well enough, we’re stopping at the petshop so she can choose her kitten.

Fergal’s friend, the gallery owner, came to see me last week. His phone call panicked me: the house was in a muddle, Sinead was packing to go to Sara’s and I was doing the washing ready for coming here. I worried what to wear, and whether he’d think my coffee cups too garish and my house too full of braid and flowered fabric. I
didn’t know how he’d expect me to show my pictures, so I simply spread them out on the dining-room table: the ones where the children are trapped and imprisoned in mazes of matted branches; and the latest ones, that I’ve done since coming back from Berlin. These are a little different. These children play, though it’s like the play in nursery rhymes—sometimes grotesque or savage, and full of breakages and reversals. And there are toys and animals here: masks like the ones on our wall, and a cat playing the violin and a monkey on the drums, like my mother said she saw in that Berlin toy department. And I’m using colour again, acrylic paints with that sweet complicated smell that always makes me think of Miss Jenkins’s lessons.

The gallery owner was called Mark Ewing. He had neatly pressed combats and close-cropped hair. I don’t think he noticed my curtains and he didn’t drink much of his coffee. He spent a long time looking at my drawings, and talking to me about what I liked to draw, and what other art I’d done, and whether I’d had any formal art education. I thought he was just softening me up, preparing me for the moment when he’d give me a thoughtful look, compassionate but pained, and say, To be honest, this isn’t the kind of thing I’m interested in—but the best of luck for the future…But then he started to talk about money, about the price he would put on my drawings and whether I’d be happy with it. I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation. The sums he talked about amazed me. ‘I think we need to aim high,’ he said. ‘These are exceptional.
’ There was a brief moment of thrill, a rocket-burst of starry glitter that dazzled in my mind. But then the weight of doubt: I wanted to tell him—No, you’re getting this wrong, these are just doodles I did, jottings from the inside of my head, you’re taking them far too seriously. Honestly, I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, I just sit down with a pencil and muddle through. No one will part with good money for my drawings. No one. I wanted to say all this, urgently, compulsively, but I remembered what Fergal keeps on saying, about how I do myself down, and I smiled and didn’t say anything.

He talked about the catalogue. We could write something together, he said, about where your drawings come from. That all helps, he said. That would be good publicity. People like to know where you get your inspiration from; people like stories. Tell me, is there a story to go with these pictures? Yes, I told him. Yes. There is a story.

The heat has made my throat dry: I know I’ll never sleep without a drink. I slip noiselessly out of bed and into the corridor. In the darkened room next door, the Afghani woman and her son are presumably still asleep. I pass the playroom, where the staff are sitting and quietly talking together; the ward notes are spread out on the table where, in the daytime, children play Monopoly. Their voices sounds significant in the night, hushed and profound, as though they are sharing a secret. They look up and smile as I pass, with a kind of intimacy, a recognition that we are the only ones who are awake here.

In the kitchen I don’t need the light to see by: there’s a reflected glow from the London streets in the sky. I get myself some juice and stand there for a moment, looking out at the apricot dark, thinking of all the people who are up now, like the nurses down the corridor: working, keeping things going. There’s a thrill to cities at night, the way they never sleep, and the streets that are never entirely unpeopled, with all their dazzle and neon. Like on one of those postcards my mother sent from her last surprising home, showing Kurfürstendamm and Unter den Linden at night-time, with their extravagant lights and sharp dark shadows, and a wide bright sunset sky above the Reichstag.

Last week I had another letter from Berlin. But not in my mother’s handwriting, so I knew what was in it before I opened it up. It was from Karl. She’d been rushed into hospital, he said; she died in her sleep, it was all very sudden. The funeral was on Thursday. If I wanted to come, he could pick me up at Tegel Airport. PS. She had told him about Daisy’s illness, and he hoped she was feeling better. I wrote back straight away. I said I was sorry that I couldn’t come, but I had to go into hospital with Daisy; I knew he would understand. I said that, as he probably knew, my mother and I hadn’t always had a very good relationship, but I was glad I’d come to see her and that we had been reconciled. I added that I knew she was happy with him—that in many ways her life had been hard, but her years with him had been her happiest. Maybe this too, I thought as I wrote, like so much else in
my life and my mother’s, was a lie or an evasion, but on balance I thought there was something in it and I wanted to give him comfort.