One Whole and Perfect Day (17 page)
Now the phone began to ring. She leapt to her feet and ran blindly through the door; she knew it wouldn’t be Daniel, of course it wouldn’t be, yet all the same she ran, her heart thumping hard and fast, a quivery expectation jumping in her veins. The ringing ceased as she was halfway down the hall. The answering machine switched on, and Lily stopped dead as she heard her Nan’s small voice:
Marigold! Lily! Are you there? No? Oh how I hate these things,
hate them! Was that the beep?
‘Yes!’ muttered Lily furiously, through clenched teeth. Why couldn’t Nan, and Mum too, ever learn how stuff worked? Mum wouldn’t turn her computer on or off at work unless her assistant, Leonie, was actually in the room.
Can you pass on a message to Lonnie for me?
Nan’s little voice went on.
Can you tell him that silly old axe has gone?
Your pop’s axe? And remind him about the party, again – tell
him it will be all right to come. I’m sure we’re going to have a
perfect, lovely day
– the voice cut out.
Lily stood there in the cold silent darkness of the hall. ‘One perfect, lovely day,’ she whispered. She didn’t know exactly when Nan’s party had become important to her, only that it had. She kept dreaming of Nan’s garden, of flowers and streamers and fairy lights twinkling in the trees. And whenever she passed a house with balloons fluttering at the gate, her heart gave a tiny, aching lurch. Why shouldn’t
their
family have one brilliant, perfect day? Wasn’t such a day something everyone had a right to, a day you could always remember, no matter what happened to you, ever after in your life? A
whole
perfect day?
Because that was the problem with the Samson family celebrations: they were never whole. They might begin well – that day when Pop and Lonnie had quarrelled had begun hopefully, with fine summer weather and the pleasure of seeing Nan again, and the beautiful house and garden, and even (for a few moments anyway) Pop. But always, midway through the afternoon, there’d be raised voices, tears, and, worst of all thought Lily with a tiny shiver, that sudden small indrawn gasp from someone who’d discovered a secret it was better they’d never known.
She walked down the hall and picked up the phone. She dialled the number of Lonnie’s boarding house and then listened to the ringing go on and on and on. No one was at home, obviously; Lonnie was out with Clara, and all the other boarders would be out with their girlfriends, and the landlady would be out with the person Lily’s nan would call her ‘gentleman friend’. Lily was the only one who could always be found at home.
She slammed down the receiver, turned away, and as she did so, caught a sudden shocking glimpse of her face in the mirror on the wall. Oh – oh,
God
! Her cheeks were bright red, her eyes had gone small from crying, small as black buttons, gleaming crazily. Her face had always reminded her of some other person’s, someone she couldn’t quite put a name to, whose identity was like a word caught on the tip of her tongue. Now she knew who it was.
Pop. She looked like Pop! Pop in a rage, red-faced, button-eyed – all she needed was the crewcut.
No wonder Daniel Steadman wasn’t interested.
‘I can’t bear it!’ cried Lily, and as if in sympathy, her knee began to itch, she bent and scratched, forgetting all about her jagged nails. They snagged, she felt a ladder running in her tights, her best ones that she’d worn specially for the Drama Society, for Daniel Steadman, just in case he happened to notice her on her way to the prompter’s box.
And he hadn’t been there! Lily sank down on the floor and began to sob again.
Someone knocked on the front door.
Daniel Steadman was burning.
Burning, burning.
He’d started burning in double Chem this morning. Feeling woozy too, so that he’d wondered for a moment if he’d inhaled something poisonous in the air of Mr Culloch’s lab. But nobody else had seemed affected. All the other kids looked perfectly normal, though oddly separate from Daniel, as if he was standing behind a wall of glass. ‘Are you all right?’ someone had asked, and Daniel couldn’t tell who it was because his eyes had gone all blurry, and anyway the voice sounded a very long way away.
‘Yeah, I’m fine,’ he’d answered, because he hated people fussing, and saying you felt funny always caused a fuss.
‘You all right?’ someone else had asked, louder, and a face came close to him, a woman’s face, the face of Ms Esterhazy, the school librarian.
Daniel had stared round blearily. He was in the library, so it must be third period and he was frightened because he had no memory of getting here. ‘I’m fine,’ he’d said again, and Ms Esterhazy had slapped her cool hand against his forehead as if she was his mother, and said, ‘No, you’re not, you’re burning up,’ which was funny because although he’d been burning just a moment ago, now Daniel was shuddering all over with cold. ‘I’m sending you to Mrs Palmer,’ Ms Esterhazy had said.
Mrs Palmer taught Home Economics in junior school, but she also had a certificate in First Aid and manned the school sickroom, small as a cupboard, underneath the stairs. Mrs Palmer didn’t ask if he was all right; she said, ‘What have we here?’ – the same thing she’d said to Daniel back in Year 7 Home Economics when he’d opened the smoking oven to find his pizza on fire. Then she clapped her palm to his forehead like Ms Esterhazy had done – her hand smelled of warm dough and some kind of spice. Ms Esterhazy’s had smelled of paper and the kind of fishy glue they used in the library; a glue that Daniel’s cat Ernestine loved. Ernestine had eaten the spines of
So You Want to be an Actor
and
Contemporary Australian Drama.
‘You’re coming down with something,’ Mrs Palmer had decided. ‘Mum at home?’
Daniel had nodded. Wednesday was Mum’s half day.
‘Lie down for a bit,’ Mrs Palmer had suggested, and Daniel lay down on the short little bed which must have been meant for Year 7s because it didn’t have room for his feet, and the next thing, like magic, he’d been in Mum’s car heading down Millward Street towards Dr Ryla’s surgery.
‘Chicken pox!’ Dr Ryla had roared. ‘We don’t often see chicken pox on a strapping lad your age!’
Dr Ryla’s voice was so loud it had made Daniel’s ears ring, and it must have penetrated the door of the surgery, because when he and Mum emerged into the waiting room there’d been smiles and giggles all round, and a tiny little kid had pointed at Daniel and bellowed, ‘You’re not allowed to
scratch
!’
Mum had said it too. ‘You musn’t scratch,’ she’d warned him the minute they got home. ‘Otherwise you’ll scar.’
‘Scar?’ That sounded terrible – like the Middle Ages, like the Black Death. When all he had was a little kids’ disease. ‘Scar?’ he’d asked again.
Mum had nodded, scarily. ‘It leaves little pits in your skin,’ she’d said.
But how could you stop from scratching, when your whole skin felt on fire? The itching had eased after Mum dabbed on the lotion, and Daniel had been able to get some sleep, but now, waking, he was on fire again. He raised a hand to scratch, and saw, in the dim half light of the room (he must have been asleep for hours) that his hand had swollen, swollen so monstrously that it looked like a great red club, and his other hand was just the same.
Daniel screamed.
Footsteps sounded in the hall; the light flashed on.
‘Are you all right?’
Daniel made choking noises. He tried to point to his hands, but you can’t point when your fingers have gone . . .
‘Daniel?’
He held up the big red hands.
His mother laughed.
Laughed.
Had the world gone mad or something? Or was he still asleep and in a nightmare?
‘Oh,’ she chuckled. ‘Isn’t that a good idea?’
‘
What?
’
‘Your old boxing gloves. To stop you scratching. I dug them out of the cupboard when you were asleep, and put them on for you!’ She looked really pleased with herself, and though Daniel had never been a violent person, he really felt like killing her.
‘Want anything?’ she asked. ‘Want some scrambled egg?’
The very thought made his stomach turn. ‘Not hungry,’ he croaked at her.
‘Some junket?’
Junket?
He hadn’t eaten junket since pre-school. Junket was a kiddy food, like chicken pox was a kiddy disease. If his mates at school found out, he’d never live it down – they’d make chicken noises as they passed him in the corridor, they’d flap their arms like wings.
‘How long does it last?’ he muttered.
‘The chicken pox? Or the itching?’
‘Both.’
‘The itching should go away in a few days, if you don’t scratch. And you’ll feel better too.’
‘How long will I be off school and stuff?’
‘Three weeks.’
‘Three weeks!’
‘If you don’t scratch, that is. Then it could be longer.’ She smiled at him tenderly. ‘Sure you don’t want anything. Some milk?’
‘No. I mean, yes, I
am
sure I don’t want anything. Especially not –’ his stomach churned again – ‘milk.’
She laughed again. How heartless she’d become! Just because he had a kiddy disease. She’d giggle, he could almost hear her, when Dad got home and she passed on the news.
‘Juice?’ she asked him sweetly.
‘No!’ he roared. ‘I don’t want anything.’
‘Right,’ she said coldly. ‘There’s water by your bed.’ She tiptoed to the door. ‘Shall I put out the light?’
‘Yeah.’ Daniel took a sip of water from the glass and let his head fall back against the pillows. Three
weeks.
Daniel liked school; he’d be bored to death at home. And he was in Year 11; he’d miss things. Already, today, he’d missed rehearsal for the school production. Three weeks more and they’d get someone else to play his part.
Besides, there was another reason he didn’t want to miss rehearsals – a wave of wooziness surged beneath his burning forehead – a special reason. Only what was it? He couldn’t remember, except that it had something to do with a voice, a beautiful voice, the most beautiful voice he’d ever heard.
Whose voice? Everything had got all vague and cloudy. Did chicken pox destroy your mind? Had Mum put something in that glass of water? Tablets from Dr Ryla? The wooziness flowed over him. His eyes closed. In less than a second, Daniel Steadman was asleep.
It was a quarter past six and Marigold was late. She hurried into the washroom, fumbling in her handbag for lipstick, comb and blusher. Getting home late was one thing – getting home looking a wreck could bring on the kind of lecture from Lily that Marigold was tired of hearing: how Marigold was overworked and underpaid and should get herself a better job. ‘With your qualifications, Mum . . .’
Marigold was in no mood for such a lecture this evening; she’d had a hard, exhausting day. Captain Cuthbert had asked her to marry him again and become quite stroppy when Marigold had refused. Old Mrs Nesbitt had wandered off and the police had taken the whole afternoon to find her, then Mr Roberts had mislaid his special coffee cup, the one his wife had given him for their last anniversary. Red in the face and shouting, he’d accused Mrs Nightingale of stealing it, even though Marigold and the little circle of old people ringed round him could clearly see the mug-shaped bulge in the pocket of his old tweed jacket.
‘It’s there,’ Marigold had said gently. ‘It’s in your pocket, Mr Roberts.’
He’d pulled the mug out and turned it wonderingly in his hands. ‘How did it get there?’ he’d asked them. ‘How?’ and the astonishment in his voice, the expression in his moist blue eyes had reminded Marigold of Lonnie when he was little – the time he’d touched the iron and burnt his fingers. ‘But it hurt!’ Lonnie had kept on saying, in exactly the same wondering way. ‘Mum, it hurt!’
Then her mother had rung up again to remind her once more to tell Lonnie to come to Pop’s party.
‘So Lonnie and Dad have made it up?’ asked Marigold.
‘Not exactly, dear, but –’ Here the line had crackled, her mother’s voice slipping away into the void, and the door of Marigold’s office had burst open and Leonie rushed in with the news that poor old Mrs Nesbitt had been found. ‘At the crematorium, can you imagine, Marigold! The cops told me she was looking at the wreaths – “Happy as Larry!” they said.’
Now Marigold studied her face in the washroom mirror. She did look awful. She looked, as her dad would say, like something the cat had dragged in. Lily would say it too. As she stroked on blusher and applied her lipstick, Marigold remembered how Dad had hated her wearing makeup while she was still at school, so that coming back from Saturday outings with her friends, she’d had to scrub her face in the Ladies Room of the local railway station before going home for tea. How strange it was that now she was putting
on
makeup so that her
daughter
wouldn’t rouse on her the minute she walked in through the door . . .
‘The evenings are drawing out, don’t you think?’
Startled, Marigold looked towards the shadowy place at the end of the room, from where the voice had come. A tall old lady was standing in front of the last washbasin, surveying Marigold with glittering green eyes. She held a comb in one hand, and from the crown of her head, long rippling waves of soft white hair flowed down past her waist: she looked beautiful and unearthly, like an elderly Rapunzel watching at the window of her tower. Who on earth? And then Marigold recognised the smart navy dress the old lady wore, with its neat crimson leather belt and trim.
Mrs Nightingale. She’d never seen Mrs Nightingale with her hair loose before; normally she wore it in a braided coronet above her ears. What was she doing in here so late? ‘Haven’t your children come to collect you?’ asked Marigold.
Mrs Nightingale placed her comb on the ledge of the sink and began to braid her hair. ‘Why should they do that?’ she asked, and Marigold felt a twinge of panic. Was Mrs Nightingale’s memory beginning to slip? Was she back in the past, like so many of the daycare centre’s clients were; back in the time when they had been the ones who did the collecting, picking up the children who now collected them?
