Perfect Day

Lucy suffered anaphylactic shock for the first time. The duty of sorting the place out stretched endlessly before them. It was winter. It was always dark.
    Ironically, Nell remembers considering a trip to the supermarket a delightful escape. The brightly lit aisles of Sainsbury’s in Camden Town were an Aladdin’s cave of new experience after the monotonous task of bagging up the life of a woman she had barely known. She even recalls the decision to purchase peanut butter. It was Alexander who spotted Sun Pat on the shelves and became quite animated, brandishing a jar in his hand, telling her about the peanut butter and banana sandwiches that his mother used to make them on Saturday evenings, and how he associated the taste of peanuts with the whirring music of Dr Who.
    Nell felt happy that he was finally discovering ways to unlock memories of good times. She coaxed him to talk about other little bits of routine he and his mother had shared, offering silly little stories from her own childhood in exchange as they mooched up and down the aisles, with Lucy babbling away in the trolley seat.
    Perhaps it was she who even suggested that they buy the peanut butter.
    She wonders now whether the image of him holding up the jar, which seems so fundamental to their history, would have simply been erased by her memory if nothing had happened afterwards.
    At teatime she smeared peanut butter onto slices of fresh white bread and dolloped wet spoonfuls of mashed banana on top. She remembers hesitating before picking up the plates to take them into the front room, fear sweeping through her that he might think she was trying to usurp his mother.
    But then he called out, ‘Any chance of a peanut butter sandwich?’ And she picked up the plates and carried them through, brushing aside the ominous feeling.
    She heard Lucy’s reaction before she saw it because it was so dark in the room with the curtains drawn against the London rain and the news flickering on the television.
    The sound of a baby trying to breathe through windpipes that are fast closing up is unimaginably terrifying. First she picked Lucy up and shook her, thinking that she had something stuck in her throat, then Lucy threw up all over her. Still the horrible rasping struggle for air. She shouted at Alexander who was standing as if his feet were stuck to the carpet: ‘Get an ambulance!’
    And Alexander running out into the quiet side street as if to flag one down, and returning with the next-door neighbour who drove them all to the Royal Free. She remembers sitting in the back seat of a car that smelt of dog and shouting at Lucy, ‘Breathe. Keep breathing!’
    And Lucy’s frightened wail.
    If she’s crying, she’s breathing, if she’s crying, she’s breathing.
    She remembers running into the Casualty area and shouting for a doctor — ‘This is an emergency. My baby’s going to die!’
    Doctors shouting, adrenalin going in, Lucy in a nebulizer, the distorted shape of her swollen mouth and neck, the vigil that began crouched over a plastic pod that has gone on ever since.
    It wasn’t until several hours later that Nell noticed that her own sweater was crusted with baby sick, and that she had left the house with no shoes on.

    * * *

    ‘Eat up, Mummy,’ Lucy says. ‘I want to play on the beach.’
    ‘OK,’ Nell agrees.
    ‘Have you finished?’ Frances asks Nell, looking at the barely touched plate of food.
    ‘Yes.’ ’
    ‘You OK?’
    ‘Fine,’ says Nell, automatically.

Thirteen

    ‘How do I look?’
    Kate is standing awkwardly in front of him, hands by her side. Her face has a delicate pink tinge, like the edge of a rose petal, and her eyes are sparkling from the unaccustomed lunchtime drink.
    ‘Lovely!’
    ‘No!’ she blushes deeper pink. ‘I meant , do I look like the sort of person who would shop here?’
    He tries to see her objectively. The jeans jacket, black T-shirt and skirt make her look like a slightly less tarty Spice Girl. The scab on her knee and the big clompy boots make her look like an errant teenager from EastEnders .
    ‘I want to feel what it’s like to wear something that costs a thousand pounds,’ she says. ‘I’ve never dared try anything on in here before.’
    He knows what she needs.
    ‘Are there shoes here?’ he asks.
    ‘There’s about an acre over there,’ Kate tells him.
    ‘Let’s go there first.’
    ‘You can always tell someone’s class by their shoes,’ was one of his mother’s few pieces of