Free Perfect Day by Imogen Parker Page A

expect she didn’t know what size I was.’
    ‘Try them. You’ve grown.’
    Reluctantly, Lucy steps into the jeans. They’re still loose but they stay up. Nell pulls a long-sleeved white T-shirt over her chest, then takes her into her arms and gives her a squeeze. Lucy’s body is bony, like a bird’s, but her hug surprises with the strength of her affection. Suddenly Nell’s excited about introducing her to Frances .
    ‘I think you should get dressed too, Mummy.’
    The almost adult concern for the propriety of things amuses Nell.
    ‘I thought I’d go in my nightie .’
    Lucy’s face trembles between amazement and tears. ‘Tricked you!’ says Nell.
    The child’s gloriously disproportionate laughter gives her a belt of joy, and for one sweet moment, nothing else matters.

    In the car, Nell likes to listen to Heart FM. She knows she ought to be listening to the Today programme, absorbing politics and literature and forming opinions about current issues, but she always chooses a bit of sentimental singing instead. On Heart FM, almost every track makes her remember some seminal moment of her life.
    ‘I love this one!’ she cries, as the DJ announces Hurricane Smith’s ‘Oh Babe, What Would You Say?’ She played it so repeatedly that her father actually confiscated it for a weekend and she sobbed in her room, bereft of Hurricane’s blandishments, thinking she would die from missing him so much.
    The DJ talks over the last few bars and says the date of the single. Nell calculates that she must have been nine, the age when you fall in love with a pop star. Now, she wonders why on earth he was called Hurricane, and as the thought surfaces, she can hear her mother’s voice, the same all those years ago as it is today, saying, as if to offer proof of her vinyl lover’s unsuitability, ‘What sort of a name is Hurricane, anyway, darling?’
    It’s something she’s noticed recently, that she’s beginning to think and say things that have a small aftershock of déjà vu. She thinks it must be the first sign of middle age, but she feels too young to be middle-aged, much younger than she recalls her parents as being when she was young. She wonders whether they thought of themselves as young then, and whether deluding yourself that thirty-seven is still young is further proof of senescence.
    ‘I’m Not in Love’ is on the radio. It was at the top for weeks, Nell thinks, and it was always the last song at the youth club disco. Even then she found it a bit of a dirge, but now she wails along with the chorus, telling herself that she loves the words in an ironic way, until Lucy says,
    ‘Stop that, please, Mummy.’
    ‘When I was young, this was on Top of the Pops,’ Nell explains.
    ‘Where was I?’ Lucy asks.
    ‘You weren’t born then.’
    ‘Was I a baby?’
    ‘No. Only later.’
    ‘When I was a baby, did I cry a lot?’
    ‘Not really,’ Nell lies. She reaches her hand back and squeezes her child’s knee. ‘You were a good baby, and now you’re a good little girl.’
    ‘Was Lizzy Angel a baby?’
    ‘No,’ says Nell.
    That seems to satisfy Lucy, who looks out of the window and says, ‘I Spy fifteen horses in that field.’ She’s getting ten points per horse.
    ‘Fifteen? Did you count them?’ asks Nell sceptically. ‘One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen!’ Lucy races through the count even though they’ve long passed the horses’ field.
    ‘Oh well, that’s a hundred and fifty points then,’ says Nell, a little wearily.
    When she invented the I Spy game with points, she didn’t expect Lucy to cheat so unashamedly, and the target of a thousand for an ice lolly seemed an almost unimaginable score.
    ‘ Lizzy Angel saw a polar bear. How many points for a polar bear?’
    ‘You don’t get polar bears on the M23,’ says Nell.
    ‘Look!’
    Sure enough there’s a lorry overtaking them with a blue polar bear logo on its