Nobody's Perfect

by Stephanie Butland

  ‘No,’ Kate says, and then she cannot help but cry, after all, feels tears sliding down her face. All the time that Daisy is in this stupor-sleep she isn’t eating and drinking. Although Kate understands intellectually that Daisy’s body is shutting down everything that’s unnecessary so that it can fight the infection, she feels as though she can see her wasting away.

  Richenda stands behind Kate, holds her shoulders hard, kisses the crown of her head. ‘She’ll be sitting up eating ice cream before you know it.’

  Kate doesn’t say anything. The idea of this frail little creature eating ice cream is as remote as the thought of the four-poster bed she woke up in.

  A nurse comes in with a smiling warning: it’s almost nine, visiting hours are over, Kate should settle in and get as comfortable as she can. Kate knows the drill: the uncomfortable UPVC-covered armchair that she’s sitting on will stretch out into an equally uncomfortable bed for her to toss and turn in. It doesn’t matter, so long as she is close to Daisy. But how quickly she has grown used to Spencer’s arms around her in the night.

  ‘Spencer’s still here,’ Richenda says. ‘Why not go and say goodnight to him?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ When Daisy’s sick she and her daughter are twin moons sharing an orbit. It feels as though, if she moves away, they will both fall. But there’s something that pulls her to Spencer now, too.

  ‘He’s just down the corridor. I’ll stay with Daisy. She’s sleeping herself better. She won’t know you’re not here.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Kate says again. Yesterday she didn’t mind leaving Daisy, and look where it got her. She looks at her mother, wishes she was seven, eleven, fifteen, and had no choice but to do as she was told.

  ‘Go on,’ Richenda says. ‘You might have a long few days. Go and stand outside and talk to Spencer. Breathe some fresh air and stretch your legs. Someone will come and get you if anything changes.’

  Kate and Spencer walk down to the main hospital entrance, past the shellshocked criers making calls, and the smokers with their grey faces and their bright dressing gowns, stamping their feet in the cold. They sit on a low wall, bordering a seen-better-days flowerbed.

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘It’s definitely pneumonia. She’s on an antibiotic drip and fluids. She’s stopped getting hotter but she isn’t cooling down.’ Her voice is steadier than she thinks it will be.

  Kate is looking at her hands. She hears Spencer exhale. ‘What do the doctors say?’

  ‘They say it’s good that she’s stopped getting hotter. We need to wait and hope that her lungs don’t get damaged. They might need to drain some fluid. It all depends.’

  ‘God, Kate,’ he says. ‘I can’t believe how quickly it happened. Overnight. Literally.’

  ‘I know.’ Kate has noticed, over the years, that whenever there’s a crisis or emergency with Daisy, everyone needs to go over their latest memories of her, look for details, for clues. ‘We shouldn’t have left her.’

  ‘We weren’t to know,’ Spencer says. Kate’s not so sure. But yesterday is another world, now. ‘Has this happened before?’

  ‘Well, she’s been in hospital with infections before, but she’s never had pneumonia.’ Kate feels her voice start to shake and tries to steady herself. ‘But pneumonia is pretty inevitable, at some point, with Daisy’s kinds of CF problems.’

  ‘And how are you doing?’ He pulls her close. She rests her head against his shoulder. An ambulance siren wails behind them.

  ‘I have absolutely no idea,’ she says, after a moment.

  She feels him nod. ‘Just remember,’ he says, ‘you’re not on your own.’

  Chapter 13

  Early February

  I

  T’S TWENTY-FOUR HOURS after admittance before Daisy opens her eyes. She’s on a drip to keep her hydrated, but the skin on her lips is still drying to a too-pale pink. Kate has found a lip balm in her bag and rubs a little of it along Daisy’s lips. It’s as she’s doing this that Daisy stirs and opens her eyes halfway.

  ‘Hello, sweetheart,’ Kate says. ‘I’m here. We’re in the hospital. Everything’s all right.’

  Daisy makes a tiny nodding motion before her eyes close again. ‘She opened her eyes,’ Kate says to everyone who comes in, as though the words are a protection, a charm.

  Spencer visits on Sunday afternoon, Richenda in the evening, and they all watch Daisy sleep. Kate won’t be moved from her chair, except to take a shower before her mother leaves. She eats little, says less. Daisy sleeps on.

  On Monday, Spencer arrives after school. He brings a card, made and signed by Daisy’s class. ‘I see the hand of Wendy,’ Kate says, as she looks at the butterflies that she can imagine everyone was encouraged to draw. The thoughtfulness of it makes her tearful. Everything makes her tearful, today: now that Daisy’s temperature is coming down and her breathing is easier, Kate can start to let go of some of the pressed-down fear that’s clogged her since the Saturday-morning phone call.

  ‘Wendy and Jilly send their love,’ Spencer says. ‘And they said they’d love to come in as soon as you and Daisy feel up to it. Lots of the parents are asking after you both.’

  ‘I feel as though nothing but this room is real.’ Kate lets go of Spencer’s hand to press her palm to Daisy’s forehead. The chart at the foot of her bed tracks her temperature, taken by nurses at twenty-minute intervals; but Kate still needs to check for herself. She trusts the feeling of Daisy’s skin on her palm more than she trusts a thermometer. ‘Is that weird?’

  ‘That’s not weird,’ Spencer says, and his voice is soft, partly because no one can help but be quiet around Daisy, even though she’s clearly so soundly asleep, and anyway they would really all rather she was awake. ‘So long as you don’t forget about me when I’m not here.’

  ‘Of course not.’ Kate thinks about her flat and Spencer’s, about school, about the trampoline in her mother’s garden, Beatle and Hope snuffling in hedges on walks. She shakes her head as though dislodging a dream.

  ‘Daisy looks so little.’ Spencer holds Kate’s hand, tight.

  ‘Yes,’ Kate says. ‘Well she is, really. We forget.’

  He’s brought a brie-and-bacon on walnut sandwich, and although Kate doesn’t think she’s hungry she eats it all.

  ‘I spoke to your mum. She’s coming in with clean clothes for you both, and magazines and fruit. She says she wasn’t sure if your phone was on, but to text her if you want anything else, or I’ll let her know when I leave.’

  Kate thinks about saying, all I want is for her to get better. Instead she nods. Spencer says, ‘All of these things must seem so trivial, when you’re sitting here.’

  He’s next to Kate, on an orange plastic chair. Now that she’s finished eating, he’s holding her hand. But they are both looking at Daisy, as though she is a film about to start.

  Kate says, ‘Yes.’ Then, ‘Are you OK?’ It feels as though they should have been able to have some more plain sailing before they hit their first storm.

  ‘Don’t worry about me,’ Spencer says. ‘I’m fine. Or at least I will be, when you two are.’ She tucks her head onto his shoulder, swings her legs across his knees. He strokes her hair. Kate breathes deeply for what feels like the first time since she got here. You two. ‘That feels nice,’ she says.

  ‘I don’t suppose you got a lot of sleep again last night.’

  ‘No.’ It had been another night of listening to Daisy’s hot, too-fast, too-shallow breath, and trying not to imagine it was getting faster or shallower.

  ‘Well, why don’t you close your eyes now,’ Spencer says, ‘and I’ll wake you if anything changes.’

  ‘I can’t,’ Kate says.

  ‘You can,’ Spencer says. ‘You can trust me, remember.’

  When Kate wakes, she can tell it’s evening even though the light in the hospital room doesn’t change much. She sits upright almost before she’s woken. ‘It’s OK,’ Spencer says, ‘she’s fine. There’s no change.’

&n
bsp; ‘Oh. OK,’ Kate says. But if there’s no change, then Daisy isn’t fine at all. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Half eight,’ Spencer says. ‘Your mum’s been and gone.’

  ‘You could have woken me,’ Kate says.

  Spencer is standing, stretching; he fills the space, makes Daisy look even smaller. Kate sits on the edge of the bed and takes Daisy’s hand in her own. Clammy and hot, still. Daisy’s breath comes and goes like wind crossing water. The doctors want to drain some fluid, tomorrow. Kate, who does her best to be unflinching, cannot imagine how awful that will be.

  He smiles. ‘We did try,’ he says, ‘but you looked so shattered that we didn’t try very hard. She said’ – he holds up four fingers, counts things off as he speaks – ‘all of your things are in the bag, she’s working tomorrow but she’ll come in in the evening, she spoke to your dad and he sends his love, text her if you need anything.’

  Kate nods. ‘Was she OK?’

  ‘We’re all upset.’

  Kate nods, mute with tears. Spencer, still standing, opens his arms; she stays, sitting on the edge of the bed, one hand on Daisy’s, but she puts her head on his chest, her ear fitting against the small soft triangle where his ribcage moves apart. And none of them move until the nurse comes in at nine and says, softly, that visiting hours are over.

  Chapter 14

  February

  I

  T TAKES LONGER THAN any of them had hoped to get Daisy well again, and this is the first time in her short life that, as Richenda says, she seems to be crawling, rather than bouncing, back. Kate doesn’t look when they put the chest drain in, but holds Daisy still when she mewls and stirs in her sleep. That evening her temperature falls off the plateau and starts to drop. Blake is the one to see her open her eyes this time, while Kate is in the shower. ‘I told her you were washing your hair,’ he says, ‘and she nodded and said something about shampoo. Then she went back to sleep.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really.’ Blake looks a little pink-eyed. Kate would like to think Daisy looks better, but apart from those cheek-spots fading she’s too pale for comfort, and too still for her mother to think of her as being recovered.

  *

  After ten days in hospital, when Daisy can sit up on her own and talk for more than two minutes and is asking for food rather than having it coaxed into her, they are moved to a room which opens out onto a small garden. The room is for those who are in hospital for months. Although Kate is glad of the extra space and the not-entirely-successful attempts of the hospital Friends to make the place feel more like a home, she is determined that they won’t stay there longer than they have to. Daisy doesn’t belong in a hospital. Kate has raised her to be a well child, and a well child she will be again. Kate walks into the garden and looks up at the sky while Daisy sleeps. There’s a small trampoline, with a handle, on the corner of the grass; Kate longs for the day she will see Daisy bounce again. The air is February-cold; she texts Richenda, asks her to bring in Daisy’s hat and mittens, the bright blue coat with furry hood that she loves. She cannot believe that her daughter was made for the constraints of this kind of life. As for Kate, her brain is withering, her body is tired. And of course it doesn’t matter – nothing matters, except Daisy getting better – but at the same time, it does. Kate is human. She wants the life she’s glimpsed.

  Six rooms open onto the garden and the children in them must take turns to be outside, as the risk of cross-infection is so great. The idea is that Daisy can play out in the struggling sunlight, but more often than not all Daisy can manage is to walk out of the door and then sit on Kate’s knee while they look at a book. It’s fresh air at least, Melissa says; she’s come up for the weekend to see Daisy, and has brought Kate a bottle of wine buried in a bag of colouring books and sweets. ‘I’m not in prison.’ Kate laughs. ‘I’m allowed a drink.’

  ‘Feels like prison, mate.’ Melissa is wearing a pair of Dr Martens that she has painted stripes onto, jeans, a striped shirt and a silver sweater, and the bowler hat; Kate feels memory rise like nausea when she thinks of that weekend, and how she resented being recognised as ‘the one with the kid’.

  ‘It’s not too bad.’ Melissa has arrived just before their designated hour in the garden. She sits with Daisy on her lap, and the two of them play I Spy, and yawn, and eat Jelly Babies out of Melissa’s upturned hat, which Kate has spritzed with sanitiser and lined with a sterile cloth. ‘What a pair we are,’ Melissa says.

  ‘What a pair,’ Daisy agrees.

  ‘You haven’t got a hangover, though, have you?’

  Daisy holds up her arm. ‘No, I’ve got a cannula.’

  Daisy dozes off a few minutes later, and Kate and Melissa sit in silence in the sun. ‘If you don’t mind,’ Kate says, ‘I might go and have a quick shower.’

  ‘Not so fast, cowgirl.’ Melissa looks at Kate sideways. ‘I think we need to talk.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘Well. About you. About Spencer. And the two of you.’

  Kate shakes her head. ‘Well, I don’t really know how I am, except tired and a bit less terrified than I was two weeks ago. Spencer’s been amazing.’

  ‘I’ve heard that.’ There’s a dryness to Melissa’s tone that Kate doesn’t like.

  ‘Have you been talking to my mother?’

  ‘We’re just worried, Kate. I mean, he seems great, but—’

  ‘That’s because he is great. He’s been here every day since Daisy got ill, Melissa. I started my period and when I asked him to get tampons he asked what size. He’s been amazing. He loves us.’ Why can’t people just be happy for me? she thinks

  ‘Nobody’s doubting his amazingness in the current situation,’ Melissa says. ‘And I’m happy for you, I really am. But – Daisy aside – isn’t it a bit fast?’

  Kate really, really doesn’t need this. And Melissa should know better. She knows what Kate has been through; knows how lonely she has been. ‘First of all, there is no “Daisy aside”. Secondly, Spencer and I love each other, and we make each other happy. I don’t know why that’s such a bad thing. And I don’t remember being invited to judge your boyfriends, or my mother asking for my permission before she moved Blake in.’ Kate hears stubbornness in her voice, tastes tears at the back of her throat. ‘And, I seem to remember that you were the one who was encouraging me to go for it. I don’t need this, Melissa.’ She slumps in her seat.

  Melissa, trapped under Daisy’s weight still, leans sideways so that her head is on her friend’s shoulder. ‘I’m sorry. I suppose I was just thinking – if something seems too good to be true, then maybe it is. It doesn’t feel like we know much about him.’

  ‘I do,’ Kate says.

  She feels Melissa nod against her shoulder. ‘Well. That’s good. Why don’t you go and have your shower?’

  *

  Kate, under the nurse’s supervision, puts the drugs into Daisy’s PICC line via the cannula four times a day, flushing it with saline solution afterwards and imagining that she can see the shiver travel up Daisy’s arm when the cool salt water goes in. The results of the X-rays show that Daisy’s lungs are clearer but not yet clear: she needs to stay in hospital until the doctors are satisfied that there’s no immediate risk of a recurrence, and she’ll need intravenous antibiotics for a while even after she goes home.

  Because their new room is designed for patients who need long-term hospital care, it is more spacious than the acute one and has a real bed for Kate. She and Daisy sometimes doze in the afternoons, before the next round of visitors come. They watch films in the evenings.

  ‘This is bloody awful, but it’s also quite nice,’ Kate says to Spencer one evening as Daisy sleeps. ‘I feel as though I’m in a little nest away from everything else I should be caring about.’ Kate pops out for a walk around the hospital perimeter sometimes, when there are others around to keep Daisy amused; Spencer persuaded her out for lunch, once, while Richenda entertained Daisy with a pom-pom maker. But this room has become her
world.

  In the end, the decision about going to graduation was taken out of Kate’s hands. There’s no way she could – would – leave Daisy. She hasn’t been worrying about what she should do next, or what’s going to happen with her and Spencer. Because he’s utterly there, utterly theirs, and indulging in even the smallest doubt about him feels as though she is doing him a disservice.

  Spencer laughs. ‘I feel as though I can’t wait to get you out of here. Partly for obvious reasons’ – he gestures to the bed where Daisy is snoring, now, one arm flung above her head – ‘but mostly so I can have sex with you five times a night every night until we’ve made up the deficit.’

  ‘We haven’t exactly had a honeymoon period, have we?’ Kate says.

  ‘We’re having a real life,’ Spencer says, ‘and that’s better than anything.’

  ‘You’re perfect,’ Kate says, and she kisses him.

  There’s a tap on the door. ‘Ten minutes,’ calls the nurse.

  Chapter 15

  Late February

  ‘O

  H,’ SPENCER SAYS, DROPPING in after school the following week, ‘I forgot your shower gel. I’ll text your mum and ask her to bring it when she comes in tomorrow.’ Spencer and Richenda seem to be getting on well enough, and he’s even befriended Kate’s father, who called while Kate was brushing her teeth one evening. Melissa has asked after Spencer, too, which Kate has taken as tacit acceptance of him being part of her life. All in all, Kate cannot remember what she ever did without Spencer, is glad that she will never have to manage on her own again. When she looks at Daisy, now, she no longer searches for Mike’s smile, or wonders what would have happened if things had been different. Rather, she looks back at her eighteen-year-old self with disbelief, with pity. Sometimes she wonders whether she should get in touch with Mike’s widow, and say, properly, that she is sorry.

  ‘And I brought your post.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Kate kisses him. Daisy, colouring in a horse with four, different coloured legs, glances up with the slightly puzzled expression she always has when she sees her mother being affectionate with someone else. Kate thinks she will get used to it. Well, she’ll have to. She smiles at her daughter, takes the envelopes from Spencer.