Perfect Day

him feel safe. He used to think it was the glimpse of her vulnerability that attracted him, but perhaps it was not. Perhaps that was merely what allowed him to admit that he liked her. Or maybe she was the first woman who let him see both sides of herself , and asked to see both sides of him.
    Images of Nell flood through his mind: Nell breastfeeding Lucy in Italy, a serene madonna with a backdrop of soft Umbrian hills; Nell standing slightly awkwardly in a bar in Borocay , her face lighting up in the dingy smoke, like a Botticelli angel emerging from a cloud; Nell sitting under a white cherry tree in Ueno Park, smiling and smiling like a bride.
    His love for her did not die, he realizes, it just withered like blossom on a branch, and was waiting to burst into flower again when it was the right time.

    And then there was Kate. Kate the guardian angel who saved him from denying his existence.
    Alexander suddenly understands how adulterous husbands can tell their wives, ‘It didn’t mean anything.’
    Because it didn’t. Not as far as his relationship with Nell was concerned. It was nothing to do with Nell.
    But he doesn’t think that he will try to explain it to her.

    His hand reaches for the passport that’s still in his jacket pocket. He was free to leave, but he chose to stay. He chose to be responsible, not to run away.
    It feels good.

    Nell is standing in the place where a three-piece Irish band was playing the last time they were here.
    She and Lucy had left him to deal with getting the car unclamped. Bastard traffic wardens!
    When he came looking, he spotted them here, dancing a little jig together, holding hands. There was a crowd of people sitting like an audience on the bank of steps that leads up to the pier, watching.
    Nell bent and scooped Lucy up and danced with her in her arms; they were laughing delightedly into each other’s faces, their joy making the air around them sparkle. He watched them for a little while, a spy in the crowd of millennium revellers, feeling so proud, and so very lonely.
    Now the pier is deserted. An empty crisp packet blows around in circles at the top of the tier of steps.
    ‘Have you been waiting long?’ he asks her.
    ‘Not too long,’ she says, her face lighting with a smile that disappears almost instantly as he approaches, as if she hasn’t seen him for a while and isn’t sure what their relationship is.
    He goes to kiss her. The kiss falls on her cheek as she turns quickly, tossing the car keys up and catching them in one hand.
    ‘You look very happy,’ she observes.
    They start to walk away from the river.
    ‘It’s quiet, isn’t it?’ she says.
    She never feels comfortable with silence.
    He reaches out and catches her empty hand in his. It’s such an unexpected gesture, she flinches, stops, looks at him anxiously.
    ‘Nell, I’ve been thinking,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we go somewhere lovely to live and have this baby?’

Thirty

    Kate’s applying a coat of shiny scarlet polish to the nails of her left hand. Her fingertips feel cold as the varnish dries. She shakes her hand to make the process quicker and glances quickly around the perfumery department. No-one’s seen her. There is no-one there, she suddenly realizes. No staff, no customers. She has the whole department to herself. Emboldened, she squirts her neck with Calvin Klein’s Eternity, but she can’t smell it. She picks up the bottle again, squirts it on her left wrist, feels the coldness, waits a few seconds, as Marie has told her to, so that the alcohol evaporates, but still there’s no smell. Nothing. She picks up the bottle, sniffs the stopper. Nothing. They’ve filled it with water. Or maybe they’re tricking her.
    She’s not alone.
    At the Clinique counter, Jimmy’s sitting on a high stool, drawing a picture on the white counter. As she comes closer, she sees that he’s not using crayons for his work of art, but lipsticks. The tops are strewn all around the picture, like so many felt tip pens. He’s holding the stopper of a nail varnish pot, a full brush of pearly blue about to drip.
    ‘Jimmy!’
    ‘I need some blue for the sky, Mum.’
    ‘It’s stealing!’
    He looks at her left hand, insolently, as if to say: Well, what are you doing, then?
    ‘Come on,’ she says, holding out her hands to jump him down from the stool. ‘Let’s go home.’
    ‘This is home, Mum,’ he says.
    Together they walk through the store, and he’s showing her everything.
    ‘This is