Chapter 36 Max
Max
‘Daze. Wakey wakey.’
I sit on the edge of Daisy’s bed as I attempt to wake her up. I can’t see much in the dim, star-scattered glow of her rotating night light, but I can see she’s out cold. I shake her shoulder gently. ‘Come on, sweetheart. Time to get up.’
She gives me a piteous moan.
‘I know, honey. You’re tired. But if you sit up for me, I’ll help you get dressed.’ I lean in closer. ‘I’ve got your uniform on the radiator. It’s nice and warm.’
When she whimpers, I put my hand to her forehead to brush her tangled curls off her face and stop dead.
Because her skin is hot as fuck.
Not a normal, sweaty, hot.
An ominous hot. Dry. Like her little body is overheating. It’s the kind of heat from which no good can come.
Fuck.
‘Stay there,’ I whisper, and throw myself down the stairs, two at a time, so I can call Molly.
‘Mol,’ I say when she answers. ‘It’s Daisy. She’s burning up.’
‘Oh no. She said she was feeling a bit rubbish last night. Does she have a fever?’
‘I don’t know. I think so? She’s bloody boiling, but it feels… scary when I touch her skin.’
‘I know. It’s horrible,’ she tells me. ‘Do me a favour and take her temperature for me, then we can give her some Calpol if she needs it.’
Molly talks me through where to find the first aid kit, how to put a fresh filter on the ear thermometer, and which button to press to get a reading. She sounds a million times calmer than I feel. My movements are jerky. Clumsy.
I race back upstairs with the thermometer in one hand and a bottle of Calpol and a syringe in another, my phone wedged between my ear and my shoulder. As Molly’s soothing voice talks me through my steps, I carefully stick the thermometer into Daisy’s ear and press the button. She doesn’t even stir.
It beeps, and I pull it away. ‘Thirty-eight-point-five,’ I tell Molly.
‘Okay,’ she says on a sigh, and I hear the relief in her voice. ‘So she’s got a fever, but it’s not a total disaster.’
‘Seriously? She feels boiling hot to me.’
‘I know. It often feels worse than it is. Hopefully it’s just a bug. Do me a favour and try and get a syringe of Calpol into her? Then you can just let her sleep it off.’
I eye the bottle of bright pink liquid warily. This could backfire all over me. ‘Won’t she go ballistic?’
‘Hopefully she’ll drink it down while she’s half asleep. She loves that stuff.’
I fill the syringe, the revolting smell of synthetic strawberries hitting my nostrils, and slide a hand under Daisy’s back so I can pull her up. Once I have her wedged into the crook of my arm, floppy but upright, I put the syringe to her mouth.
‘Here you go, sweetheart,’ I croon. ‘Just get this down for me, and we’ll have you feeling better in no time.’
To my delight and amazement, she sucks on the syringe and I despatch the meds down her throat as evenly as I can. As far as I can tell, she’s still fast asleep. What a little superstar.
I lay her back down again and have another feel of her forehead. She’s still bloody hot. I don’t like this. I don’t like this at all.
I sneak out of the room. ‘All done,’ I whisper to Molly.
She sighs. ‘Amazing. See? You’re a natural.’
‘I don’t feel like a natural. I feel like a total imposter, like you shouldn’t be leaving me alone with your sick little girl. Honestly, Mol, I have no clue what I’m doing. What if she gets worse?’
‘If she gets worse, you call me, and I’ll come home. Okay? But it doesn’t sound too serious.’
‘Tell me you’ve done this before. Tell me you know what you’re talking about.’
She laughs. ‘A million times. Do me a favour and take her temperature again in twenty minutes, half an hour? Hopefully it’ll have improved.’
‘Of course.’ I will check that little girl’s temperature every five minutes until I get some peace of mind. There’s no way I can relax for a second, knowing she’s sick. How does Molly bear the stress?
I realise she’s still talking. ‘I’m going to call Cassandra, see if she can swing by and pick up Toby. Do you think you can stay home today with Daze?’
‘Of course. I’m on it. But—what do I do? Can I feed her? Do I need to wake her up, or should I let her sleep?’
‘All I can tell you is to play it by ear, and use your judgement.’
Use your judgement. A more inane phrase was never uttered. I have no fucking judgement, because I have no fucking clue.
‘You need to do better than that,’ I growl, and she laughs again. She seems tickled by my stress.
‘The best advice I’ve ever heard for when they’re ill is treat the child, not the symptoms. Let her sleep; just keep an eye on that fever.
Once she’s awake, follow her lead. If she wants to eat, let her eat.
If not, don’t stress. Just try and keep her fluids up.
If she’s generally well within herself and on decent form, you’re all good.
Kids get sick. They’re pretty resilient. She’ll be fine.’
‘She’ll be fine,’ I echo cynically as I hang up.
Would you know? Her mother was right. Daisy’s fine.
I get Toby off to school. Cassandra turns up at the front door with a full face of makeup and thoroughly eye-bangs my t-shirt-and-pyjama-bottom-clad body as I stand at the door and see Toby off.
Jesus Christ.
I feel completely violated.
Now I know how women must feel every day.
Daisy sleeps in till nine, and I may or may not make good on my promise to myself to monitor her temperature every five minutes or so.
In fact, I bring my phone into her room and sit myself on her bedroom floor.
There’s no way I’m leaving her alone when she’s ill.
I take her temperature so often that I could plot a graph with readings nought-point-one degrees apart.
As it comes down to a level my fevered browsing of the Mumsnet website deems ‘safe’, I allow myself to relax a little. And by the time she’s awake, she’s well enough rested that it takes the edge off however crap she’s presumably feeling.
Not to mention, the realisation that she’s avoided a day of school and the prospect of a day in front of the TV have her ecstatic.
‘I’m staying at home?’ she asks for the fourth time. ‘Wiv you?’
‘Yeah. That okay with you, princess?’
‘It’s good wiv me,’ she tells me before coughing chestily all over me.
Nice.
We have a pyjama day, and it’s fun. Daisy’s on decent form, all things considered.
She’s happy but clearly wiped out, so we turn on the tree lights in the living room, and put the TV on in there instead of the den, and burrow under her pink-and-white duvet as she nibbles half-heartedly on the buttered toast she insisted she wanted.
We watch Encanto.
Twice.
And, when Molly gets home with Toby, she finds me on the sofa, watching re-runs of Grand Designs, an unconscious Daisy sprawled over my chest.
I’m pretty content, actually, and if the barn refurb on screen wasn’t so compelling, I would have been tempted to take a nap myself. Daisy’s keeping me cosy, and her body temperature has stayed low enough that I’m not too worried about our bodily contact overheating her.
She’s so relaxed, so innocent in her sleep, that it makes something warm and right unfurl in my chest. I stare in awe at her tiny face, so alike her mother’s.
I map the blue veins on her eyelids. The thick golden-brown eyelashes fanning her cheeks.
The impossibly fine baby hairs at her temple.
She’s so tiny. So fragile. And yet resilient as fuck.
This is all so new to me. I don’t know how to do this. How to enjoy her without freaking the hell out every time she gets a cough or her body temperature spikes. How to straddle that exhausting emotional whirlwind of adoration and gratitude and terror.
And yet, today’s felt like a test that I’ve passed. I’m sure, given Molly’s reasonably blase attitude to Daisy’s fever on the phone earlier, that most experienced parents would consider it a minor test, but I feel like a champion. A little girl was sick on my watch, and we made it through.
Molly clocks our little scene, and her eyes go feral.
I raise my eyebrows in question as Toby clatters in behind her. ‘You okay?’
‘Yeah.’ She swallows. ‘You just look very… sweet with her, that’s all.’
I grin. I haven’t even had a chance to shower today, but I have a feeling I’m doing it for my girlfriend right now.
‘How about you, mate?’ I ask Toby in a whisper. ‘How was your day?’
He trudges towards me, head down, and throws himself into my free side with enough force that I let out a soft oof.
‘Fine,’ he mutters into my armpit, his voice muffled.
My eyebrows wing up again, and Molly hesitates. ‘I don’t think he’s having a great time with the nativity rehearsals.’
That gets my attention. I poke him in the side. ‘That true, mate? Is that little dickhead giving you a hard time again?’
‘Max!’ Molly says, shocked, but it gets a small giggle out of Toby.
‘Tell me,’ I say to him.
He stays where he is. ‘He’s being mean to me,’ he tells my armpit.
‘Mean, how?’
‘He keeps poking me. And the other day he even pinched me, and he said my glasses were gay.’
What the actual fuck? I tense and look at Molly for backup.
‘You know gay is not a bad word, right, baby?’ she asks him.
‘Not even in the slightest. Nobody should ever use a word like that in an attempt to make someone feel bad. We’ve had this conversation.
Jess and Zoe are gay. Is there anything bad about them?
Categorically not. It’s just something people are. ’
‘I know that. But he said it to try to make me feel bad.’
‘I know he did, buddy,’ I say. Little shithead. ‘And that’s on him, not you. Have you told Mr Pratt?’ I give his appropriate name the emphasis it deserves.
‘No.’ His voice is so low I can barely hear it. ‘But I told Mummy I don’t want to do the nativity anymore, because it’s making me feel anxious, and she said I can’t quit.’
Molly and I exchange another meaningful glance, and I press my lips together.
It’s clear as fuck that Toby has anxiety about most things.
While I know next to nothing about parenting, and I also know it’s healthy and helpful for him to have language he can use to describe his feelings, I can’t help but suspect he drops the A-word for effect from time to time.
‘Look, mate.’ I hesitate. ‘Your mummy has a tough job, because she wants to protect you from everything that makes you sad, or anxious, or worried. Of course she does. She’s your guard dog, and she won’t let anyone hurt you.
But she also thinks you’re a superstar, and you have a big, exciting life ahead of you.
So she also has to be your cheerleader, and she has to be the one to persuade you to take chances in life.
‘If she lets your anxiety drive your decisions, then you’ll live a small life, and you deserve so much more. So it’s a bit of a balancing act for her, to be honest. She has to protect you when you need it, but she also has to be the one to give you a little push from time to time so you can fly.’
I say all this in a low, confiding tone, my head bent over Toby, and I’m not sure when his issues blurred into mine.
Because, for all my bluster, Molly’s having to deal with the same shit second time around.
The reason I sacrificed my happiness to avoid having children was fear.
I was terrified of feeling too much. Of opening my heart up to emotions and pain and trauma the like of which it would never recover.
I was too scared to really feel, to really live, and I’ve been running ever since.
Living a life that, on the surface, was exciting, altruistic, but that realistically was emotionally curtailed.
I’m damned if I’m going to let Toby do the same.
When I look up at Molly to see if I’ve overstepped, those beautiful blue eyes are limpid with unspilt tears.
She gives me a you’ve got this nod, and I continue.
‘You deserve to be a part of that nativity, to have your chance to shine. There’s no way your mum’s going to let you miss out on all that fun just because some little f—idiot is making your life tough. Got it?’
He nods, but I sense reluctance. I smooth a hand over his soft dark hair.
‘But, and it’s a big but, there’s no way your mum or I will stand aside and let anyone hurt or bully or intimidate you. Which is why I am going to have very firm words with Mr Pratt tomorrow morning at drop-off. Okay?’
‘Okay,’ he parrots, and I rub a soothing hand down his narrow back.
It’s not until I’ve extricated myself from Daisy and found Molly in the kitchen that she pushes me against the AGA and kisses me hard before her sweet lips whisper in my ear.
‘You’re so getting blown tonight it’s not even funny.’