work out: sex, or something else, more obscure, more troubling.
‘I know you,’ he says suddenly. ‘Don’t I?’
I laugh politely. ‘I don’t think so.’
Someone is leaving. The door opens, the cold and the night come in.
‘I do,’ he says. ‘I’m sure I know you. I recognise your face.’
He’s staring at me, trying to work it out. It sounds like a come-on, but his look is puzzled, serious. The fear that is never far from me lays its cold hand on my skin.
‘Well, I don’t know where you could have seen me.’ My voice is casual, light. ‘Perhaps the school gate at St Mark’s? Daisy goes there.’ But I know this isn’t right, I know I’d have noticed him. ‘Nicky says that’s where your little boy goes,’ I add, trying to drag the conversation away to somewhere safe.
He shakes his head. ‘Jamie doesn’t start till after Christmas.’
‘You’ll like it,’ I tell him. ‘Daisy’s eight, she’s in year three, she has the nicest teacher…’
But he won’t let it rest. ‘Where d’you work?’ he says.
‘I don’t.’ Then, biting back the urge to apologise for my life, which must sound so passive—‘I mean, not outside the home. I used to work in a nursery school before I got married. But that’s ages ago now.’
‘It wasn’t there. Forget it. It doesn’t matter.’
But I’m upset and he knows it. He tries to carry on, he asks what I’m painting now, but the mood is spoilt, it can’t be restored or recovered. As soon as he decently can, he leaves me. All evening I feel troubled: even when the singers have gone, calling out their thanks and Christmas wishes, setting off into the snow which is falling more thickly now, casting its nets over everything, under the chill thin light of the moon of beginnings.
We stand there in the suddenly quiet room. It looks banal now. There are cake crumbs on the carpet, and every glass has a purplish, spicy sediment.
‘I’ll do the washing-up,’ says Richard.
Normally I’d say, No, let me, you sit down, but tonight I give in gratefully. Sinead goes to help him.
I turn off the light again, and the firelight plays on every shiny surface. My living room seems like a room from another time. I stretch out on the sofa. Daisy comes and folds herself into me. Her limbs are loose, heavy, her skin is hot and dry; I feel her tiredness seeping into me.
‘Did you enjoy it?’ I ask her.
To my surprise, she shakes her head. In the red erratic firelight, her face looks sharper, thinner. Little bright flames glitter in her eyes. Suddenly, without warning, she starts crying.
I hug her. ‘It’s ever so late,’ I tell her. ‘You’ll be fine in the morning.’ She rubs her damp face against me.
I don’t want her to go to sleep unhappy. I can never bear it when she’s sad—which is silly really, I know that, because children often cry, but I always rush in to smooth things over, want to keep everything perfect. So I try to distract her with shadow shapes, the animal patterns I learnt how to make from a booklet I bought from the toyshop in Covent Garden. I move my hands in the beam of light from the open door to the hall, casting shadows across the wall by the fireplace. I make the seagull, flapping my hands together; and the crab, my fingers hunched, so it sidles along the mantelpiece; and the alligator, snapping at the board games on the bookshelf. Daisy wipes her face and starts to smile.
I make the shape of the weasel; we wait and wait, Daisy holding her breath: this is her favourite. And just when you’ve stopped expecting it, it comes, the weasel’s pounce, down into some poor defenceless thing behind the skirting board.
She lets out a brief thrilled scream, and even I start a little. Yet these animals, these teeth, this predatoriness: these are only the shadows of my hands.
CHAPTER 2
Sinead comes into our bedroom in her dressing gown, her face and hair rumpled with sleep.
‘Cat. Dad. Daisy’s ill.’
I’m reluctant to leave the easy warmth of bed, and Richard, still asleep, curving into me. It’s one of those quiet days after Christmas, the turn of the year, when all the energy seems withdrawn from the world. A little light leaks round the edges of the curtains. I turn back the duvet, gently, so as not to wake him, and pull down my nightdress, which is long and loose, like a T-shirt, the kind of thing I started to wear when Daisy needed feeding in the night, and then got rather attached to.
I go to Daisy’s room. The stars glimmer on her ceiling in the glow from the lamp I leave on all night. I push back the curtain. Thin gilded light falls across the floor, where various soft toys and yesterday’s clothes are scattered. Her favourite cuddly sheep, Hannibal, is flung to the foot of her bed. He owes his name to Sinead, who once saw The Silence of the Lambs illicitly at a friend’s house, having promised they were borrowing 27 Dresses. Daisy is still in bed, but awake. She has a strained, stretched look on her face, and her eyes are huge, dilated by the dark.
‘I feel sick,’ she says.
‘What a shame, sweetheart.’ I put my hand on her forehead, but she feels quite cool. ‘Especially today.’
‘What day is it?’ she says.
A little ill-formed anxiety worms its way into my mind.
‘It’s the pantomime. Granny and Grandad are taking us.’
‘I don’t want to go,’ she says.
‘But you were so looking forward to it.’ Inside I’m cursing a little, anticipating Richard’s reaction. ‘Snow White. It’s sure to be fun.’
‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘I can’t, Mum. I feel sick and my legs hurt.’
Daisy always gets nauseous when she gets ill. They each have their own fingerprint of symptoms. Sinead, when she was younger, would produce dazzling high temperatures, epic fevers, when she’d suddenly sit up straight in bed and pronounce in a clear bright shiny voice, the things she said as random and meaningless as sleep-talk, yet sounding full of significance. Daisy gets sickness and stomach aches. She’s been like that from a baby, when she used to get colic in the middle of the night, and I’d walk her up and down the living room with the TV on, watching old black and white films, or in desperation take her into the kitchen, where the soft thick rush of the cooker hood might soothe her at last into sleep.
I go downstairs to make coffee; I’ll take a cup to Richard before I tell him. It’s a blue icy day, the ground hard and white, a lavish sky; but the fat glittery icicles that hang from the corner of the shed are iridescent, starting to drip. Soon the thaw will set in. It’s very still, no traffic noise: the sunk sap of the year. With huge gratitude, I feel the day’s first caffeine sliding into my veins.
When I go back upstairs with the coffee, Sinead has drifted off to her bedroom and her iPod.
Richard opens one eye.
‘Daisy’s
