Perfect Day

pollen bursting out early. If only the rain would come and wash it away. Try to make her life as normal as possible. What’s normal about praying for rain at three in the morning, when you don’t believe in God?
    ‘I think I’m ready to go back to sleep now,’ Lucy says. ‘Will you hold my hand?’
    Nell props up the child’s pillows and switches off the bedside light. The mobile of fluorescent planets that Alexander bought her when they went to the Science Museum recently glows feebly for a few minutes then fades.
    Nell strokes Lucy’s forehead. The salbutamol has worked, she notices. Her breathing is miraculously even now. Nell lies down on the floor next to the bed and takes the hand that has slipped out from under the cotton sheet.

    Nell wakes up when something soft falls on her face. Its cross-stitch eyes stare silently into hers. Lizzy Angel. Nell’s stiff from lying on the stripped wood floor. Her right arm, which she has been using for a pillow, has gone to sleep. The quality of the air tells her that rain has come and gone. A sudden awareness of silence alarms her. She sits up quickly. Lucy is sleeping peacefully.
    Fear is a relatively new emotion to Nell and she finds it difficult to judge. Before Lucy’s first admission to hospital, she had never been truly frightened. There was a ghost story they used to read at school at Christmas called ‘Lost Souls’ that gave her a shuddery feeling and made her look over her shoulder at night. She used to think that was what fear was. Now she knows that fear is a tiny body in the middle of the white hospital bed with a nebulizer mask over her face; fear is being totally powerless; fear is trying to maintain a calm , soothing façade while terrible, unthinkable thoughts tumble through your conscious mind. Sometimes Nell wonders if the shock of that first hospital visit actually altered her own brain chemistry, changing her personality from fundamentally easy going to fundamentally anxious. These days, she jumps at any unpredicted sound and leaps when somebody touches her if she is not expecting it.
    Nell gets up, tiptoes to their bedroom. She almost trips on one of the shoes Alexander has casually dropped, as he does all his clothes, leaving a trail to the bed for her to collect up each morning like litter. I Nell drapes the peach dressing gown over a chair * and slips in beside Alexander, curling her front round his warm back.
    ‘Everything all right?’ he murmurs as, still sleeping, he registers her presence. m
    ‘Fine,’ she says, automatically.

Four

    Alexander wonders if there comes a point in every relationship where the things you used to love about someone become the things you hate.
    He watches Nell pretending to sleep. He knows that she’s pretending because she’s breathing heavily and deliberately. When she’s really asleep, she makes no sound at all. The first few times they slept together, he used to take her pulse if he woke in the middle of the night, just to check that she was still alive.
    He longs for her to sit up and shout at him, but she is not selfish enough to demand retribution for his behaviour last night. She knows that the sensible thing to do is to talk it all through over the weekend. He used to love her good sense. But now he wants to shout at her:
    I don’t know if I want to have another child.
    I don’t know what I’m doing with my life.
    I don’t know if I still love you.
    Nell sighs and turns over like sleepers do in films. It’s a silly situation, her pretending to sleep, him pretending not to know. He finds himself about to pretend to wake her to share the joke. But he does not, because if he does, they will have to have a proper conversation and he’s terrified in case the bit about not knowing if he loves her comes out.
    Maybe Nell doesn’t know whether she loves him any more, but he doesn’t think so. Nell is able to voice problems and make it possible to continue afterwards. Come down this road with me, she says, it’s dark and kind of scary, but I’ve got your hand, and at the end of it we may find something we really want. He’s not so brave. He fears that if he says what he’s thinking, there will be no future, and no way back, and he doesn’t know if that’s what he wants.
    He doesn’t plant the customary kiss on her temple in case she decides to open her eyes.
    In the kitchen, he swigs from a container of orange juice, skips his usual bowl of cereal, makes a dash for the front door.
    It