The Perfect Mother Read Online Free PDF Page B

matter?’
    ‘I feel sick,’ she says.
    ‘Are you worried about something?’
    She shakes her head.
    ‘You’ll be fine once you get there. You’ll see Abi and Megan, catch up with everything.’
    Her tears always bring a lump to my throat, and then a kind of worry that she has such power over me, a feeling that this shouldn’t be, that it’s weak, ineffectual. I know I’m overprotective, that I find it hard to tolerate my child being unhappy. That I’m not like other women, with their anoraks and certainty. I know this is a flaw in me.
    We park down the road from school. I give her a tissue and she wipes her eyes.
    ‘Is my nose red?’ she says.
    ‘You look great,’ I tell her.
    ‘You didn’t answer my question, Mum,’ she says.
    In the road outside school, there’s the usual stand-off, two lines of traffic facing one another. There are parents who persist in dropping their children here, optimism triumphing over experience; they hoot futilely but nobody can move. Children mill round in padded winter coats, some of them newly purchased and a little too large; they’re moving fast and anarchically, as though the wildness of the weather is inside them. People have changed over the holiday. One child looks cute in new glasses, another has visibly grown. Natalie’s mother, who so liked my house, is pulling at a frenetic puppy. Someone else, hugely pregnant in December, has her immaculate baby in a sling. The baby still has that translucent unfinishedlook, so you feel if you held his hand to the light, perhaps you would see straight through. The sight pulls at women’s eyes and the same expression crosses all their faces, eyes widening, as though this is still a surprise. Crocuses are coming up in the lawn in front of the school; they have the tender colours of paint mixed with too much water, a fragile buttery yellow, and purple, pale as the veins inside a woman’s wrist. It’s only been a fortnight, and there’s so much that is new.
    We’re holding hands as we walk towards the gate; her hand is tightening in mine. I look down at her. Her face is set, taut.
    ‘D’you want me to wait with you till the bell goes?’
    I offer this as a choice, though really I have no choice: her hand is wrapped around mine like a bandage. She nods but doesn’t speak.
    We stand there together by the gate as the children surge forward. The wind blows my hair in my mouth, but I’m holding Daisy with one hand and her lunchbox with the other, and I can’t push it back. My black denim coat, though stylish, is a little too cold for the day. We hear broken-off bits of conversation, blown round us like fallen leaves. Someone is making a complicated arrangement for tonight, involving tea and maths and ballet classes; someone else had fifteen to dinner for Christmas, and honestly it was like a military operation…
    Over the heads of the children, I see the back of a man’s neck, his leather-jacketed shoulders, his rumpled head. It’s Fergal with his little boy. He must have walkedstraight past me. This makes me uncomfortable. I don’t know if he’s forgotten me, or simply hasn’t seen me. I start to feel unreal with no one to talk to.
    And then Nicky is there, her children tugging at her, the ends of her stripy scarf streaming out behind her. Her smile warms me through.
    ‘Wow!’ she says. ‘So this is the coat. Fabulous! I am green. ’
    ‘Thanks,’ I say.
    As always she’s rushing, everything on the most feverish of schedules, dropping off the boys before jumping into her car and heading off to her other life at Praxis, the advertising agency. But she sees that Daisy is troubled and she ruffles her hair with her hand.
    ‘Not feeling too good, lambchop?’ she says. ‘Trust me, you’re not the only one. I hate the first day of term. Neil had to positively kick me out of bed.’
    She pats Daisy’s shoulder; Daisy doesn’t turn to her. The boys pull at her, and she’s off, her scarf fringes flapping.
    The bell