The Perfect Mother (28 page)

‘D’you have a sofa? Daisy could sleep on a sofa.’

‘Well, if you’re sure,’ she says. ‘I’ll make her nice and
comfortable. Don’t you worry, Trina, I’ll get something sorted. You’ve got my address, have you, darling? You got my postcards?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now, listen carefully, darling. You need to get the bus to Charlottenburg. They might try to tell you Zoo—but Zoo station isn’t very nice, darling, there are lots of drug pushers there. Go to Charlottenburg, and take the S-Bahn to Hackescher Markt—and then you take the tram up Prenzlauer Allee…’

I write it down.

‘We live on the fifth floor,’ she says. ‘The name is Mueller. You have to ring the bell and there’s an intercom thing.’

‘Don’t worry. We’ll manage.’

‘Now, the airport’s very busy, Trina. Keep an eye on your bags. You can’t trust anyone nowadays.’

‘We’ll be all right.’

‘And, Trina, look, where I live, it used to be the East, of course, but you mustn’t let that worry you. We’re really coming up in the world here now. It’s not at all like you’d think. This afternoon, then?’

‘Yes. This afternoon.’

I put down the phone. My whole body is trembling.

I fetch my credit card and go on the computer. I’ve never done this before: Richard’s always made our travel arrangements and I’ve never flown without him. But it’s all so easy. There are still seats on the afternoon flight to Berlin. It lands at Tegel Airport. I can check in online, and I’ll have to pick up our boarding passes once we get to Heathrow.

I get the Yellow Pages and look for a taxi firm. There’s a name I recognise, from when we last went to Tuscany. I ring; this too is easy. I have an hour and a half before the taxi comes.

I have a sense of triumph: I am high, pure, clear; I can do anything. I pack my hand luggage first: credit card, money, passports. I take some phone numbers—Nicky, Fergal. Then I find a bag, start flinging things in. I don’t know what to expect, how hot it will be or whether it might rain. I just throw in whatever comes to hand—two skirts of mine, not bothering to fold them, some T-shirts of Daisy’s from the tumble-dryer; and I put on a brown silk dress I have that works for any occasion.

And then I can’t postpone it any longer—the thing that I am dreading. I go to Daisy’s bedroom.

She’s slumped in her bed.
Jeremy Kyle
is on, but she’s playing with her Nintendo. I take her cut-off jeans and a polo shirt from her wardrobe and put them out on her bed. Her eyes are on me, dull, a little suspicious. Suddenly I can’t believe what I’m doing: it seems delinquent, wild.

‘Why am I getting dressed?’ she says.

‘Because you and I are going on a trip.’

She frowns. ‘What sort of a trip?’ She’s wary. I know she thinks this is cheery adult-speak for something unpleasant—a doctor, clinic, blood test.

‘Not what you think. We’re going to the airport.’

At once she sits upright. Her eyes are wide.

‘We’re going to fly to Berlin,’ I tell her. ‘D’you think you can manage that?’

Her eyes hold me; her whole face gleams.

‘Berlin,’ she says. The word is like a sweet she’s rolling round her mouth.

For a moment I think that she will accept it and I won’t have to explain. But then a shadow moves across her face.

‘Why are we going now?’ she says. ‘Is it because I’m ill?’

‘Kind of. Dr McGuire and Dr Watson want you to go into a hospital.’

‘To stay?’ she says.

I nod. ‘It’s a place for children with psychological problems.’

‘I’m not making it up, Mum,’ she says.

‘Of course you’re not. But anyway I don’t think that place is right for you. I don’t want you to go there.’

She looks at me, accusingly. ‘So are we running away?’

‘No. We’re going to see your grandmother.’

A stern frown creases her forehead.

‘But she was horrid to you. You keep on telling me.’

‘Yes. But people change. Maybe we’ll find we get on better now. And she really wants to see you. I rang her just now and she said how very much she wants to see you.’

There’s light in her face: this pleases her. ‘Really?’

‘Really.’

‘D’you think she’d like it if I wore my red denim jacket?’

‘I’m sure she would,’ I tell her.

Her school bag is on the floor by her bed. I tip everything out of it.

‘You can take this bag to keep with you on the plane, for Hannibal and some books. D’you want to pack it yourself?’

She nods, gets out of bed. She starts to choose books from her bookshelves, her book of Celtic tales, two books about cats. The bag will be heavy, but I just let her take them; I can carry it for her. Hannibal goes in the top.

And then she turns to me; her face is dark with worry.

‘But what about Sinead?’

‘Sinead will be at Sara’s.’

She zips up her bag. ‘I wish Sinead was coming,’ she says. ‘And Dad. I wish they were coming with us. It won’t be fun without them.’

Guilt washes through me.

‘I know, sweetheart. But if we’re going to go, we have to go today.’

‘Dad and Sinead will miss us, won’t they?’

‘Yes, they probably will.’

She looks at me for a moment, an intent, questioning look. Then she shrugs a little.

‘OK,’ she says. ‘Well, don’t just stand there, Mum. I’m going to get dressed.’

When the taxi comes, we’re waiting in the hall. The driver is a woman, scrubbed and genial.

‘You’re certainly travelling light,’ she says as she carries our bags to the car. ‘I wish they were all like you, I must say. So where are you going?’

‘Berlin.’

‘Oh. Berlin.’ Suddenly, she is serious. ‘My cousin was there in the forces, before the Wall came down. It freaked him out, he said. If you went to the East in the train, they locked you in.’

‘Yes, I’d heard that,’ I tell her.

She checks we have fastened our seat belts.

‘It must have been so weird,’ she says. ‘Before the Wall came down.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It must have been.’

‘It’s the families I feel sorry for,’ she says. ‘All the parents and children. All those poor people who lived there, who couldn’t visit their families.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘That must have been hard for people.’

She starts up the engine.

Daisy loves the glamour of airports: the glittery shops selling suntan oil and sarongs that are patterned with pictures of tropical islands, the computer screens with their lists of resonant destinations. We wander round the shops, and I buy her a Pokémon magazine, and we go to a café and toy with some tough chocolate croissants. People look at us benignly—anxious mother and pale fragile child. They don’t know about us.

As we go through passport control I am seized by a sudden fear, that I am being watched or followed, that somebody will stop us, that this man will not let us through. I see it all so vividly—how he takes our passports away while the other passengers stare at us, quite openly and curious, for now we are not like them, we have crossed to the other side. How he leads us off to a small bleak room, and asks me questions to which there are no good answers. But none of this happens; he grins at Daisy, says how he likes her jacket, waves us cheerily through.

Daisy has a window seat. As the plane taxies we watch the film about what to do in emergencies. Daisy is conscientious, and pulls out the card of instructions from the net pocket in front of her.

‘Look,’ she says, waving it at me, gleeful. ‘They made a mistake here, Mum.’ She’s pleased with herself: she loves to come across misprints in anything official. ‘It says that if there’s a person with a child, they need to fix their oxygen mask before they fix the child’s.’

‘That’s what they always say.’

‘No, Mum. You should see to the child first,’ she says sternly.

‘But the mother has to look after both of them, and if the mother can’t breathe she isn’t much use to her child.’

This doesn’t satisfy her. ‘I think she should help the child.’

The plane speeds down the runway. She watches through the window, relishing the thrill of take-off, as I used to do. I remember the very first time I flew, when Richard and I went to Venice for our honeymoon, and how he loved my ignorance and my delight in everything; and, when he saw how charmed I was by the inflight meal with all its cups and packets, how he smiled and pulled me to him and pressed his mouth to my hair.

The light through the window glosses over Daisy’s pallor; her eyes shine with pleasure. She looks for a moment like a healthy child. I peer across her as the land opens out beneath us, the patterning of fields, green and brown and bleached-blond, the scribble of
wood and hedge. The plane tilts and banks. Daisy grins, unafraid.

We cross the bright white line at the edge of the land, and the sea is spread below us, placid and gleaming. The waves near the shore are white and still, as though sketched with chalk by a child; or as they might have been drawn on some faded sepia map, fabulous with dragons, at the rim of the charted world. Through the window of the plane it is all blue and silver, and suddenly my heart is light, as though we are set free.

CHAPTER 35

T
egel Airport seems quiet after Heathrow. An official takes our passports and studies our faces to see if we match our photographs. I try to breathe and look at ease. But then he waves us through.

We buy a travel card and take the bus to Charlottenburg Station, just as my mother told me. We are tired now; we stare silently out of the window at the cobbled side streets, the canal, the hoardings; at Charlottenburg Castle, pale and splendid, that I recognise from one of my mother’s postcards. Daisy is intrigued by the foreignness of everything:
the street names and the hoardings, the German posters for
Hannah Montana.

At the station we take a train with red and yellow carriages, which seems to have come straight out of an old spy movie. Through the window we glimpse vast city vistas, building sites and distant opulent buildings and the shining glass on massive office blocks, all the glamour and frenzy of the city. Alongside the track there are graffitied walls and flats with sun-awnings, and from a balcony at the top of a block of flats someone has hung a sheet that says ‘Tuck Capitalist Overkill’ in shaky black letters.

At Hackescher Markt we find the tram stop out of the back of the station. It’s hot, waiting here. The sky is white, hazy, and it’s hushed for a city, only a handful of other people waiting. The tramlines sing at the approach of the tram.

Our carriage is almost empty. Behind us a man with a ponytail and guitar, who has guessed or overheard our Englishness, announces, ‘Ladies, I play some things for you.’ He sings Bob Dylan,
Shelter from the Storm,
his voice reedy, mournful. The tram swings round and starts to climb, and he comes down the carriage and asks for money for the music, though with the air of one who has few expectations. I give him a handful of coins—perhaps because we are strangers, feeling a need to be generous, to placate.

We chunter up the hill, up Prenzlauer Allee. I’m unsure exactly where the Wall used to be, but it’s easy to tell we are now in what once was the East. There is an air of
neglect, a lot of boarded-up buildings. We pass what looks like a public park with many tall trees and darkness under the trees, where nothing has been tended: the brickwork is crumbling in the perimeter wall; the intricate iron gates are red with rust. The sense of hopefulness I felt in the plane has all seeped away from me.

When Knaackstrasse shows on the indicator at the front of the tram, we get up at once, long before the stop, as you do when you are travelling to a place you do not know. And we step out, and the tram pulls away up the straight line of the street into the glimmery white distance. It is completely quiet. Daisy grips my hand.

We cross the road, walk down a side street. The road is cobbled, and the pavements are broken and uneven, and tawny flowers with a musty smell grow up through the gaps in the paving stones. The blocks of flats here are five stories high. They have metal shutters across the ground floor windows, and all have been floridly written over with rainbow graffiti as high as the reach of a hand. You can tell these buildings were splendid once. Some of the façades have been done up with fresh stucco the colour of clotted cream. But there are many buildings where the stucco has peeled off entirely, as though the façade has been flayed. These buildings have an injured look, the brickwork worn and soot-blackened. You cannot believe that people live in such ruins. Above us, a little girl steps out onto the balcony of one of the ruined blocks. She is wearing a long dress, perhaps a party dress, rose pink, sprigged, and she has her hair elaborately piled up. She
leans on the railing next to a bleached wicker birdcage with no bird inside; she is still and serious, looking down into the street. She and Daisy are instantly aware of one another: they stare with open curiosity. Daisy turns to me, gives me a quick complicit smile. We look up again, and the little girl has gone, as though we dreamt her.

We pass a patch of waste ground where there are very tall trees, far too tall for the city, as though they’ve been left to grow wild, like trees in a forest—chestnuts, and planes with blotched bark, and limes that litter the streets with the pale question-marks of their seed-cases. Small dun-coloured birds scatter in front of us, casual, light as leaves, and the pavement is dappled with sunlight yellow as butter. There are no cars on the road, and hardly any people. A blind girl in a short gold dress walks past us, her male companion guiding her, his hand on her arm. She has a festive look; they are going, I think, to some celebration; her eyes, which are like slits, scarcely opened, are elaborately painted with shiny make-up. Ahead of us a young man crosses the street, walking through a slice of yellow light, holding a bunch of gaudy sunflowers wrapped in green tissue paper.

I’m so convinced she won’t be waiting for us that I’m planning what to do when we ring her bell and there’s no answer—where will we stay, what will we do, adrift in this strange city?

Daisy is tired now, pulling at me. ‘Is it much further, Mum?’