Perfect Day

sigh.
    She wants to ask if they can just start that bit of conversation again.
    ‘Perfect Day.’ It’s the song you would most want to have as your song and he’s chosen it for her, and she’s just ruined the most romantic moment in her life with heroin and swans.
    ‘You made me feel like a different person today,’ he says.
    ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘Happy,’ he says.
    Excitement zips through her. She wants to punch the air and shout, ‘Yes!’
    It’s so much of a compliment she almost feels it will bring her harm to acknowledge it.
    ‘I’m sure the weather helped,’ she says, idiotically.

Twenty

    The sky has clouded over and there’s a bitterly cold wind blowing against them as they walk back along the seafront. The sea is dark like pewter and a mist further out on the water makes it impossible to see where sea ends and cloud begins.
    Lucy dances along in front of them holding both Fizz Tweeny’s hands in hers, singing snatches from the theme tune to Disney’s Sleeping Beauty. It’s her video of the moment. Lucy watches videos with complete concentration as many times as it takes to know them off by heart, and then amuses herself for days acting out all the female parts. Sleeping Beauty is a good one because it has not only the princess, but the three old fairies, whose antics Lucy finds vastly amusing. She never takes the role of Maleficent, the evil fairy. She’s frightened by the thought of anything bad and makes an excuse to leave the room during the scary bits. Sometimes, just as she is drifting off to sleep, she confides to Nell,
    ‘You know what will happen to that wicked witch? Ben will kill her with his laser!’
    And Nell wants to say, you kill her! You don’t have to be beautiful and helpless, you don’t have to buy into Disney’s whole philosophy! But instead, she normally just says, ‘Good for Ben. Now, you go to sleep.’
    Nell wonders whether Chris has really promised to build Lucy a castle in the garden, or whether there’s an element of wishful thinking. She imagines a wooden castle with turrets, painted pink. They could make banners with invented coats of arms, and in the summer they could hold a theme party for Lucy’s class, with jousting on hobby-horses, paper crowns, Ribena in plastic goblets to look like wine, and coloured lights strung from the apple trees.
    ‘Mummy, come and dance with me?’
    Nell takes Lucy’s hands and they begin to waltz to ‘Once Upon a Dream’. It’s one of those moments that Nell feels she’s been put on earth to experience, twirling along an empty promenade with her child, hearing the thin little singing voice that manages to be high and flat at the same time, and watching Lucy’s face beaming at her in a bubble of salt-spray happiness.
    When Lucy reaches the end of the song, Nell observes that her puffed-out breathing returns to normal before her own does even though her cheeks are raspberry red from the wind.
    ‘We should live by the sea,’ Nell says, falling back into step with Frances . ‘Lucy’s healthier here after just one day.’
    ‘Move down. It would be so great to have you around. Although you’ll forgive me if I don’t encourage you to join my salsa class.’
    ‘Salsa class?’
    They turn off the promenade into the street which leads up to the square where Frances lives. There are a couple of for sale notices nailed to a post outside a dilapidated terraced house.
    Nell wonders what Alexander’s reaction would be if she were to go home and say, ‘Let’s move to the seaside.’
    She imagines his face lighting up and everything being all right again, then she remembers his expression late last night when she told him about the baby.
    The baby!
    She’s not sure whether she could go through all the business of moving while she’s pregnant.
    Maybe after.
    Lucy’s so happy at school, it would be a risk to move her now.
    All the pressing reasons for moving quickly give way to pressing reasons for staying put.
    ‘Maybe next year,’ she says to Frances , as she pushes open the door to her basement flat.

    ‘Can I watch Blue Peter, Mummy, before we go? Please, please?’ Lucy pleads.
    ‘I didn’t know Blue Peter was still on,’ says Frances .
    The front half of the knocked-through room, that stretches from the window below street level to the back garden, has a hard sofa covered in brown and cream bobbly material, the sort you’d never buy yourself, and an ancient television with a brown mock-teak casing.