Poppy wet the bed again in the night. I carried her to the bath and washed her down. I dried her and pulled on a clean pair of pyjamas, murmuring to her all the while as reassuringly and lovingly as I could. I carried her to the soft chair near the window and stripped her bed, giving silent thanks for the plastic sheet.
When the bed was ready again, I picked Poppy up, but when I tried to put her back in her bed, she wouldn’t let go and started crying desperately. I could feel her sharp little fingers clutching me so tightly that it almost hurt. To release her, I would have had to prise the fingers off one by one.
‘It’s OK, honey.’
I carried Poppy through to my own bedroom and laid her down and fetched a large bath towel and spread it under her. I switched the light off and got into bed beside her. Poppy was already asleep, but still whimpering. I could feel the vibration of the sobs rippling through the bed.
For what felt like hours, I thought about our situation. It couldn’t go on like this. I needed help, but what kind?
Finally I slept but it was as if I was continually waking and sleeping for the entire night, until what was real and what was a dream became confused.
When I properly woke, I felt as if I was being dragged into the light out of a deep, dark cave, my eyes glued together, my head stuffed with spiky straw. Poppy was clambering over me and began bouncing on the bed. After a few heavy jumps, she lost her balance and fell heavily across me. I felt an impulse of anger and then remembered the events of the night and the anger changed to relief. Wild boisterousness was way better than last night. Anything was better than last night.
I looked at the clock. I had forgotten to set the alarm and it was ten past eight. There wasn’t much time. I felt sticky and battered. I had the quickest of showers and then carried Poppy into the shower too, and washed her all over while she yelled furiously and squirmed beneath my hands.
I pulled on my clothes and found underwear and a pinafore dress for Poppy. Breakfast was a cup of coffee for me and a bowl of cornflakes for Poppy. Finding Poppy’s school folder and her jacket, remembering the bag of dressing-up clothes, remembering my laptop and school lanyard, and getting out of the door was so frantic that it was only once we had collected Jake, and were halfway to school, that I realised that Poppy seemed a little more like her old self, looking around and commenting on almost everything she saw: a woman on a bicycle, another woman leading one very small dog and one very large dog.
‘That’s the baby dog,’ Poppy told Jake.
I tried to explain that there were different kinds of dogs and that different breeds of dogs were different sizes. Poppy was still looking around and I wasn’t sure if she was paying attention.
‘I did see a lion,’ she said suddenly.
‘What? Where?’
‘I did see a lion and…’ Poppy was frowning with effort. ‘And a parrot. And a dog. And a…’ There was another pause as she searched for the word. ‘A fant.’ She paused. ‘An elfant,’ she said.
‘That’s a lot of animals.’ I was quite impressed with Poppy’s vocabulary. ‘Where did you see them?’
Poppy gazed at me as if she were baffled by my ignorance.
‘They live in the zoo.’
I found it difficult to reply to this. One of the things parents did with their children was to take them to the zoo, and I had vivid memories from my own childhood of the sour reek of the lion house and the shrieks of monkeys. I remembered feeding time when a white tiger had clambered up a tree trunk to retrieve a joint of meat. But even as a child I hadn’t really enjoyed seeing animals behind bars. So I had never taken Poppy to a zoo and I was almost certain that Jason hadn’t either. And Laurie wouldn’t have taken her, not without saying.
‘Did you go to the zoo with your school?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ said Poppy. ‘When I used to be a lion.’
‘No,’ said Jake equally firmly.
It was hard to believe Poppy. Normally even the most routine school excursion needed parental permission and form filling. Was it possible that the school had taken the children to the zoo and I hadn’t known, and Poppy was only mentioning it now? Probably she was making it up, imagining it from a book or something, but after I dropped Poppy and Jake off and left Jason and Emily’s cast-offs with the nursery assistant, I approached Lotty. She had a mildly harassed air and looked worried when she saw me. I knew the feeling. Parents were usually bringers of bad news.
‘It’s really nothing. I just wanted to ask about something Poppy said on the way to school today. She said she’d been to the zoo. We’ve never taken her to one. I wondered if somehow she might have gone with the school without me realising?’
‘Don’t worry. We’ll send you a form.’
‘What do you mean? What form?’
‘It won’t be for ages. We told them about going to the zoo next term. We talked about what they are, what animals are there, we’ll get them to draw pictures and then we’ll go and see them. But you’ll get a handout with all the details.’
I was so confused by this that I couldn’t think of anything to say, but it didn’t matter because Lotty had run across the classroom to rescue a little boy who had clambered onto a table. I left the school feeling like I was in a fog.
Suddenly I stopped. There was nothing wrong with Poppy. And I knew what I had to do.