There was something wrong with her eyes: they felt sticky, as if her eyelids were glued together. When she did manage to open them, blinking rapidly, everything was blurry and cloudy at the edges, like she was looking at the bedroom through the bottom of a milk bottle.
An insistent beep was coming from nearby, but Eve couldn’t work out where. Her hand scrabbled around under the duvet and knocked against something hard: the edge of her phone. She brought it to her face, realising her alarm was going off, but not sure how to stop it. As she stabbed at the screen with her thumb, the door burst open and light flooded into the room from the landing.
‘Mummy! I haven’t got any pants in my drawer – where are all the pants? Where are they? Where are the PANTS?’
Daniel threw himself on top of her, and she knew with sudden, horrifying clarity, that she was going to be sick. She pushed him away and staggered into the en suite, colliding with the doorframe so hard that, even through the fog of a hangover, she knew she would later have a purple, flowering bruise on her shoulder. As she knelt over the toilet bowl, Daniel was still bellowing at her from the bedroom.
‘No pants! No pants! No pants!’
When the retching came to an end, she wiped her mouth with loo roll and leant back against the wall; there were prickles of sweat breaking out on her forehead and her heart was beating so fast, she was short of breath. Shit, what had she done?
‘I want breakfast!’
‘Go and get some,’ she called out, her voice too loud in her own head. ‘I’ll be down in a moment.’
But she couldn’t move. Her stomach was churning and the room was on a slant: the walls tipping up and down at either end. It reminded her of a fairground ride she’d been on, years ago when she first met Ben. They’d stood around the inside edges of a big empty barrel which began spinning until it was going so fast that, when the floor dropped away, centrifugal force kept them pressed against the sides. She’d screamed so loudly she thought she might burst her own eardrums. It was a mistake to think back to that ride: she rolled over towards the toilet seat and threw up again so violently that her stomach muscles felt they were being ripped apart.
When the spasms finally stopped, she hauled herself up to the basin and scrubbed at her face with a flannel drenched in cold water. Looking in the mirror, she saw her skin was so pale it was almost grey, and her hair was matted against her face.
‘Eve, you bloody idiot.’ She suddenly realised why everything was blurry, she still had her contact lenses in. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d forgotten to take them out before bed; mind you, she couldn’t remember the last time she’d got this trolleyed. Her eyes were so dry she had to dig a fingernail under each lens to lever it out.
Right; this was good, she was making progress. Now she had to get to the kitchen. She breathed deeply, in and out, and started to go down the stairs, stopping and sitting still a couple of times until everything around her stopped spinning. When she eventually walked into the kitchen, putting both hands onto the table and supporting herself on it, Daniel was mashing Frosties into a bowl with a yoghurt, most of which seemed to have gone on the floor.
‘Mummy, your breath smells horrible!’ he said. ‘You’ve got to get ready because we can’t be late today – you know that. But I haven’t got any pants. Find me some pants!’
‘Why can’t we be late?’ whispered Eve, tasting the fur on her tongue as it rasped against her teeth.
‘For the zoo!’ yelled Daniel, banging his spoon against the side of the bowl like a gong. ‘We’re going to the zoo!’
Fuck. Today was the class trip to Bristol Zoo.
‘Noooo.’ She collapsed into a chair.
‘Yes!’ said Daniel. ‘It’s going to be brilliant. I’m sitting with Robbie on the coach, and you’re coming too!’
There was absolutely no way she could go on a school trip today. Eve didn’t even know if she could make it back upstairs to her bedroom, let alone have a shower, get dressed and put on make-up. She certainly couldn’t drive her son to school or sit on a coach with Mrs Russell and thirty frenzied six-year-olds. Her head was pounding, her stomach churning, her legs so wobbly she wasn’t sure they could hold her up. Fighting down waves of nausea, she forced herself to think.
‘Daniel,’ she whispered. ‘Go upstairs and get my phone for me, please. It’s on my bed. I need to call Robbie’s mummy.’
An hour later, Juliet was at the door, being so wonderfully sympathetic that Eve felt like a fraud.
‘You look dreadful,’ she said. ‘Go back to bed. I’ll find Mrs Russell and explain. Do you think you ate something dodgy last night?’
‘I think I must have done,’ said Eve, sitting at the bottom of the stairs, watching Daniel struggle with the Velcro straps on his shoes, but unable to lean forward and help him. ‘Maybe some prawns?’ She hoped Juliet would keep looking at her and not down the hall into the kitchen, where two empty wine bottles were lying on the floor by the back door.
‘Prawns can be nasty,’ said Juliet. ‘Hope you feel better soon, I’ll drop him home later. Come on, boys!’
Daniel ran back to give Eve a hug. ‘Sorry you’re sick,’ he said. ‘I wish you were coming to the zoo, Mummy.’
The look on his face made her eyes fill with tears. ‘Me too,’ she whispered. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Back upstairs, curled in a foetal position under the duvet, she began to cry: huge heaving sobs of humiliation and self-loathing. Keeping her eyes closed to stop the room spinning, she imagined Daniel arriving at school, and the look on Mrs Russell’s face as Juliet explained that his mother wasn’t going to make it. Why did this have to happen today, of all days? She hadn’t exactly been looking forward to spending a day at the zoo with a bunch of manic children, but at least she would have been giving something back: stacking up a few parental Brownie points. Now, in the eyes of Mrs Russell – who already disliked her anyway – she would always be the mother who let them down at the last moment.
She groaned and buried her head in her pillow, smelling her own rank breath.
But worse than that, she’d let Daniel down. He’d been so excited when she announced she was going on the trip: off-the-scale excited. He’d ran into the garden shrieking and bunny-hopping down the lawn toward the swing. ‘Mummy’s coming to the zoo!’ he’d yelled. ‘My Mummy. Is. Coming. To. The zoo!’
Daniel was due to stay at Ben’s tomorrow night; please let him not mention this to his father. Ben wouldn’t guess she’d been laid low by alcohol, rather than a sick bug, but she had failed her son in a massive way and the last person she wanted to hear about this was Ben. Right now, she needed to be as good a mother as she possibly could in his eyes.
Although, in her own defence, he wouldn’t win any awards for the world’s greatest father. He still hadn’t returned her call. What a shit. Maybe she should have explained what it was about, but she shouldn’t need to do that in order to make sure he got back to her. If she left him a message, it was only ever going to be about Daniel; she’d long ago given up trying to pretend they could have normal conversations about their lives or work or anything that was happening in the world.
Eve stared at the glass of water on the bedside table: she really ought to make herself drink some of it, but her guts flipped at the thought. She would call Ben again later today, when she was feeling a bit more human, tell him about the child psychologist thing. They needed to decide what to do, how to deal with whatever was affecting their son’s behaviour.
She knew her priorities had been all wrong over the last few days; her mind had been full of Flora’s letters, but she must prioritise Daniel. She was still shocked at the conversation she’d overheard him having with his teddy – even though he’d seemed to recover more quickly than she had from the upset of that afternoon.
At some stage she must tell him she’d heard what he was saying, so they could deal with it and move forward, but so far cowardice had won through, and she’d said nothing. Every evening she tucked him up in bed, kissing the soft skin on his cheek and wrapping her arms around him as he drifted off to sleep, full of guilt that she hadn’t addressed all this stuff yet again. But what was the point? Daniel would just tell her that Ben and Lou were forging ahead with their plans to move, confirming that all their futures were about to change dramatically.
Eve looked at the clock beside the bed: it was nearly 10am. The class would be on the coach en route to Bristol Zoo, maybe even there already, with Mrs Russell lining up the children and reminding them to stay in their pairs and pay attention.
As she rolled over again in bed, her head thumped, but at least she wasn’t feeling sick anymore. There were paracetamol in the bathroom cabinet, in a minute she would force herself to get up and take some. Outside, she could hear a lorry driving down the street, car doors slamming, the muted voices of people laughing and talking as they went about their business.
She pictured the empty wine bottles downstairs in the kitchen. She never normally drank that much, especially during the week: a glass or two of wine was her limit. Well, this would teach her. The irony of it all wasn’t lost on her: she’d been reproaching Flora for drinking at Three Elms, for behaving badly and disturbing the other residents. But sitting on her own last night, feeling sorry for herself, Eve had done exactly what she’d been telling her own mother was unacceptable.