The Perfect Mother (12 page)

I sit by the window and flick through the Tuscany brochure, trying to lose myself in those sunflower fields and dazzling skies: trying not to watch her.

She picks up the spoon, looks at it for a moment, raises it to her lips. She takes the tiniest sip. Immediately she starts retching. She rushes to the sink. She’s shivering with nausea. I hold her, smooth back her hair.

‘We’ll leave it for today,’ I tell her. ‘You did so well.’

She’s retching still but nothing’s coming up. We go into the living room and I bring her duvet and wrap her up on the sofa. It’s
Diagnosis Murder
on the television. There’s always something so bleak about these daytime programmes: you think of all the other people who are watching with you, people who are old or lonely, people without purpose. I sit for a while with my arm around her. The nausea shakes her. The medicine has triggered her retching and now it won’t be stopped.

Eventually, I go to the kitchen to make myself a coffee. It’s only one o’clock, but the light is so low it feels as though dusk is falling. My house is drab in the raw grey light. Outside, water drips from the branches of the birch tree and the lawn is full of wormcasts. We’re stagnating here: life is passing us by. I let myself think for a moment of how Daisy’s life should be, of the rich familiar rhythms of primary school: choir practice and spelling tests and raw scraped knees from running and skidding in the playground, and noisy rainy lunchtimes, drawing extravagant cats on the backs of spare worksheets with Megan, squabbles and making up—not sitting wrapped in a duvet watching
Diagnosis Murder
and feeling sick. A sense of loss tugs at me.

The medicine bottles are lined up on the table, like a
reproach. The chemical sweetness of the one I tasted is still on my tongue. I wonder what happens now: I don’t know how to do this. Perhaps like with a baby—pinching her nose so she has to open her mouth, forcing the spoon in, tipping her head back, holding her while she retches? Is that what I have to do?

I pile the bottles up on the polystyrene tray and shut them away in the cupboard.

CHAPTER 13

W
hen Daisy is sleeping and Sinead is on the Internet—in theory researching a project on the Weimar Republic, though almost certainly on Facebook—I go up to the attic. Richard is still not home: there’s no one I can talk to. The night sky through the skylight is black and unforgiving, with spiky stars. I can still see Dr McGuire’s acute clever face, as though his eyes are on me. I feel a child’s futile rage: I’m repelled by his voice, and his coldness and the way he silenced me.

There are some narcissi that I had in a vase in the
living room. They’re fading now, and I’ve brought one here to draw. Maybe this will calm me. It’s waiting on my table. In the dim light you can scarcely see the stem, the flower looks as if it’s floating. I shall draw it in pen and ink, just tracing out the form, trying to capture that lightness, that lovely effortless intricacy, the way it moves upwards like breath.

I start to work, but the light isn’t good enough really, the overhead light bulb’s gone and I’m using just the table lamp; and I’m restless, full of anger, and the drawing goes all wrong. The shape that I draw is lumpen, solid; it sits squat on the page, weighed down and bulbous. I feel disgust with what I’ve done. I draw a line straight through the drawing, then again and again, all my anger coming out through my hand. I go on like a furious child, crossing out over and over, the feeling moving through me like a charge—my rage that Daisy is ill, that no one seems able to help us, that no one understands.

Then suddenly the mood burns out; it starts to seem strange, excessive. I put down the pen. I look at what I’ve done, my crossings-out. The lines are like hair being blown, like matted branches or the tendrils of vines. The misdrawn flower is hidden; only hinted at beneath this thick tangled texture of my crossings-out: a ghost-narcissus, a shadow. I find I’m drawing again, the pen moving over the page, adding to my drawing as though my hand is separate from my mind. The lines circle, swirl, the tunnels open out into whirlpools, labyrinths. There is a space in the centre of this shape, in the middle of the
vortex. I need to fill in the space: something has to go there. I doodle, playing around, almost at peace now, curious, waiting, the anger all out there in the lines on the page.

I look at what I’ve drawn. A face, young, bony, scared, with shadow patches round the eyes. A sharp face, like an alien in a cartoon: a thin wild child. I don’t know who she is, this child in the heart of the labyrinth.

I look at my picture, and see that it is interesting—the vortex and the child. I draw another child, and another, tiny, in the margins of the picture—but these are complete, not just faces, their bodies twisted, shadowed. I’m doodling really, not trying, letting it happen. The children’s arms and legs are slender, sharply angled; their limbs fly around, they are full of movement, of energy, but there is nowhere they can go to, they are trapped, imprisoned, by the lines like tumbled hair or forests. They surprise me, yet they are also familiar: as though I dream these children sometimes, and then forget my dreams.

These are the only people that I have ever drawn.

I sit for a while and look at what I’ve done. I think of things. The closed door, the saucepans tied to the doorhandle that would rattle if you touched it. The smell of scorching dust on the flimsy electric fire. The woman in the flat next door who sat smoking on her sofa. I feel a trace of what I felt then: the pressure on my chest. But this is tolerable; I can bear it now. As though these thin, trapped children have begun to set me free.

I tear the page out of the sketch pad and take it downstairs
and stick it up in the kitchen. I want to see if I’ll like it in the morning.

Richard comes home at ten. I need to talk about Dr McGuire, but I know this isn’t the time; his eyes are smudged with tiredness. He sits down heavily at the kitchen table. I get some ice from the freezer for his whisky, and he notices the picture. He looks at it for a moment, with a kind of concentration I find surprising.

‘I didn’t think you drew people.’

‘No, I don’t. Well, I never have before.’ The compulsion to be self-deprecating washes through me. ‘It’s just a little sketch I did—I wanted to try something new.’ And, when he says nothing, ‘What d’you think? Don’t you like it?’

He nods, as though he’s giving some assent or recognition.

‘It’s good,’ he says. ‘In fact it’s very good. It’s very well drawn.’ He takes a long indulgent sip of whisky; the tension in him starts to ease away. ‘But to be honest, darling, it’s not my kind of thing. I liked the flowers better.’

CHAPTER 14

‘
H
ow’s Daisy?’ says Nicky.

She’s ordered a plate of mussels and chips to celebrate the end of her detox diet. The shells of the mussels are shiny and black like her clothes.

‘Much the same. We’re seeing Helmut on Friday.’

‘I’m sure he’ll be able to help,’ she says. ‘He’s wacky but it works.’

A rangy waiter lights our candle, a tealight in a tumbler; you can feel the heat of it on your skin if you lean across the table.

‘Is Richard being nice?’ she says.

‘He just keeps saying it’ll all be OK. Sometimes I think if he worried more, then I wouldn’t have to.’

Shadows move across the poster on the wall behind her; it shows a louche blonde woman who’s wrapping herself lasciviously around a bottle of Pernod. Little tealights glitter in Nicky’s eyes.

‘He adores you,’ she says irrelevantly.

‘We saw Dr McGuire,’ I tell her.

‘How was it?’

‘I didn’t like him.’

Nicky considers this, tearing at a mussel with her teeth; her crimson mouth looks briefly predatory.

‘Some people I know went to see him,’ she says. ‘Their son was diabetic. They said he was good—very thorough. I guess he’s one of those guys that people either love or hate.’

‘Maybe.’

‘From what Kim said, I guess he sees himself as a bit of a crusader.’

‘God knows. I thought he was foul. He wouldn’t listen to me.’

Her face is intense with concern. She puts her hand on my arm.

‘You have to be really assertive, Cat. You’re just too nice, sometimes.’

I ask about Simon. She leans towards me; her voice is hushed and secret. Things have progressed, she tells me: they made love on her desk after work, while the cleaner was in the corridor. I sense her excitement, shot through
with a kind of fear: her pupils are dark and vast when she talks about him.

‘What if Neil finds out?’

‘He won’t,’ she says. ‘How could he?’

I ought to tell her to stop—I know that’s the best friend’s role, to issue the warnings—but somehow I can’t do it. I wouldn’t want to take the shine from her.

She takes a long swig of Cabernet Sauvignon.

‘It’s the old story, how it happens,’ she says. ‘I mean, once you’ve been there, you start to see it everywhere. You have these babies and slob around in tracksuits and you think you’re anaesthetised, you just don’t get why anyone bothers with sex. Then your youngest starts at nursery and you up your hours at work and buy yourself a lipstick. And you’re chatting to some guy about the October spreadsheets, and you’re very aware of the way he pushes up his shirt-sleeves, you can’t take your eyes off his skin.’ She’s leaning towards me across the table, her dark hair swinging above the flame of the candle. For a brief, wild moment, I fear she will catch fire. ‘And then the libido you thought had gone AWOL for ever sneaks up behind you and hits you over the head…It’s danger time for marriage, when your little one starts nursery. Good thing the guys don’t know.’

I refill her glass for her. Her lips have left a crimson stain on the rim.

The rangy waiter puts some music on—a singer I know but can’t name, a low voice, smoky with sadness. We listen for a while.

‘It’s different for you and Richard, of course,’ she says then, responding perhaps to some hesitancy in me. ‘You’re just so good together. You’re made for each other.’

I shrug a little; I don’t know how to respond. Sometimes I wish she wouldn’t say these things, about how good my marriage is. It’s a superstitious fear, perhaps—as though even to put these thoughts into words might make something start to unravel. Nobody’s marriage is perfect.

She puts her hand on my wrist.

‘Hell, I’ve been going on and on. I’m such a selfish pig. When you’ve got so much to cope with—you know, with Daisy and everything.’ She forages in her handbag. ‘I’ve brought you a book,’ she says.

She hands it to me. It’s called
You Can Heal Your Life
and on the cover it has a rainbow heart.

‘The woman who wrote this is a healer,’ she says. ‘She believes that we create whatever happens to us. By the way we think. I know it sounds mad, but I’m sure she’s onto something.’

I leaf through the book. It’s full of words like
vibrant
and
abundant.
When I look at it, I feel tired suddenly.

She’s watching me. ‘I mean, perhaps it won’t mean anything to you. But I found it great when I kept on having those migraines, and I did some work on myself—you know, about my dependency issues and stuff—and I think it really helped.’

‘I thought it was Helmut who helped.’

She grins. ‘Well, maybe a bit of both…’

At the back there’s a list of symptoms and their causes.
I look up Nausea. It says nausea is caused by ‘Fear. Rejecting an Idea or Experience.’ I wonder what Idea or Experience Daisy is rejecting.

‘It’s sweet of you,’ I tell her. I put it in my handbag.

Outside on the pavement, car headlights sweep across us, and there’s a sudden smell of spring and a lemon moon that hangs low in the indigo sky. You can see the blotches on the moon, like features on some far-off face whose expression is unguessable.

‘Give Daisy a kiss from me,’ she says. And goes, all thrilled and shiny, leaving me alone.

CHAPTER 15

T
he next day Daisy goes to school, walks straight in without crying. Hope surges through me as I watch; just for a moment, I can believe that all our troubles are over.

At half-three I wait anxiously for her. She is pale but smiling. She has a woven friendship bracelet that Megan has given her, and a parents’ invitation to a karaoke
Sound of Music
organised by the PSA, and a letter about a sponsored matchbox competition, in aid of a school in Africa, which she thrusts at me. They have to see how many things they can fit into a matchbox—no body parts, medicines
or animals allowed—and there will be a prize for the child who has the biggest collection.

‘This’ll be fun. We’ll start tonight,’ I tell her.

She shakes her head; she says her stomach hurts. When we get home, she goes to her room and lies in bed watching television.

I take her some toast and a hot-water bottle to hold against her stomach. She’s watching a programme on organ donation.

‘This looks depressing,’ I tell her.

‘It’s interesting, Mum.’ Her face is serious, composed. ‘There was a woman whose little girl died of cancer and she had the little girl’s cornea donated, and she worried that she might not be able to see when she gets up to Heaven. I worry about that too. But you probably would be able to, wouldn’t you?’

‘Of course you would,’ I say brightly. But I hate this conversation.

In the evening, her stomach ache gets worse.

‘There must be something you can do,’ she says.

I tell her we’ll have to try the medicine again. She acquiesces. I choose a different one, the chalky one that sticks to your teeth. I have some idea that this is meant for stomach pain. She is meant to take two spoonfuls three times a day. I kneel beside her, pour a few drops in the spoon. There is juice and a chocolate flake for afterwards. She takes the tiniest sip and swallows and retches it up. She goes on retching all evening. I sit with her and stroke her back and read from her fairy-tale book. She finally gets to sleep at half past eleven.