Sunday Breakfast

© Barbara Cooper 2006

Daisy has been up all night with her six year old son, Tom, who has a fever. She is exhausted. She had hoped he would be better by now but he is still troubled and hot. Another sleepless night is impossible to contemplate. While she waits for her egg to boil for breakfast, she switches on the TV. A serious man in a grey suit is talking. She catches a few words: 'There is no need to panic.' She is too tired to understand what he means.

The egg is ready. She slices some bread and cracks the shell, dips the bread in the yolk, begins to feel a little better. The egg is good, freshly laid only two or three days ago. Before the fever, Tom had collected it himself from their neighbour, Mr Meredith who keeps five speckled hens in his backyard under a canopy of chicken wire, cooped between the bins and the back door; they cluck and peck, laying their eggs in the dust and grime of the city.

As she finishes the egg, Tom appears in the doorway, sneezing. Daisy's adoptive parents, who brought her out of Africa, think that Tom was an accident, a mistake. They are wrong. Tom is part of Daisy's plan to give herself a family of her own. She has no way of tracing her own parents, who, twenty two years ago, came together somewhere in Africa and then were gone again. It was a brief, hasty union and her mother didn't want her. Her own real family is Tom.

Tom himself is the result of a quick fuck up against the wall in the car park behind the flats, when Daisy was too drunk to know who it was; slept in someone's back garden and back to school in the morning. She didn't tell anyone, even when her belly ripened and she was scared as hell. She walked to the hospital while in labour, and nobody knew. And there he was in the hospital cot, a perfect baby boy, hers and hers alone, her body and her blood, her family at last. She would not let anyone or anything take him from her.

The social workers tried.

'You're too young, dear,' they said. 'Put him up for adoption, make somebody happy, a beautiful baby like that, no problem.'

'No,' she said. 'He's mine and I'm keeping him.'

She has to be careful all the time and do everything right and Mr Meredith helps her. She knows they're checking up on her. If she slips up, they'll take him away, put him in care, and she'll be alone, her plan spoilt.

The grey man on the TV says, 'There have now been 100 recorded cases of bird flu in St Albans.'

'Go back to bed,' she says to Tom.

Mr Meredith appears at the door.

'Morning,' he says.

His bald pink head shines, his yellow cardigan is neatly button, his glasses glint. He lets himself in. He carries a shopping bag.

'You don't look too well,' he says. 'Not ill, are you?'

He removes his glasses, breathes on them and polishes them with a white handkerchief, perches on a stool.

'You've got to look after yourself,' he says cheerfully. 'I've brought you some precautions, just in case.'

'That nice man from the government said not to panic.'

'Ah, well,' says Mr Meredith, replacing his glasses, 'you can't be too careful. How's Tom? I haven't seen him for a couple of days.'

He tips up the shopping bag and strews the contents across the breakfast bar. 'A bird flu survival pack,' he says, showing her one item one at a time.

'Respirators, hand hygiene, goggles, face masks.'

'I don't need them,' says Daisy.

'I'll leave them with you,' he says.

When he has gone, she pushes the survival pack and the remains of breakfast to one side. She rests her head on her arms and closes her eyes and sleeps a deep, dark sleep full of fever, delirium, sneezing ghosts and coffins full of eggs and feathers. Tom wanders through a churchyard looking for his grave, crying because he can't rest. She tries to reach him but cannot hold him, he slips through her fingers in the wet grass, he drifts between the stones, a wraith, smoke-like, almost gone, all she has left of him is his voice, crying...

She wakes with a start, sending the bread knife flying, the egg shells scatter, a spoon clatters to the floor, a plate shatters. The TV is still chattering. 'Government inspectors,' says the man in grey, 'domestic poultry...'

She runs to Tom's room. His skin is damp, he coughs in his sleep, his hair sticks to his forehead. His breathing is rough and shallow. She pulls him from the bed, holds him fast. It isn't Tom crying; it's Daisy.

Now she feels the panic, rising through her body. It falls again then rises further this time, gripping her stomach, sinks, then again higher, clutching at her chest, her heart. If she loses Tom, she loses everything. She puts him down and stands, but her legs are shaking. Her head feels huge. She tries to breathe slowly. She walks to the door unsteadily, goes downstairs one step at a time like an old woman, gripping the banister. She finds the vodka in the cupboard. It gives her courage for what she has to do.

She picks up the bread knife, goes round the back, up the alley, through Mr Meredith's gate. Mr Meredith is standing in his backyard.

'I'm going to kill your bloody hens!' she shouts at him. 'You can't,' says Mr Meredith.

She waves the bread knife at him, making him flinch.

'Yes, I can.'

'I've done it already.'

She turns to the hen coop. Feathers are flying.

'I wrung their necks. They're all dead.'

Mr Meredith is pale and smaller than he was when she last saw him, twenty minutes ago. His glasses are on the ground, his cardigan lop-sided. Beads of sweat gleam on his bald head. His eyes are red and swollen.

'You're killing my Tom!' she shouts, her anger against the hens turning on him 'He's dying up there because of you.'

Kind Mr Meredith, who is her friend, who cheers her up, helps to sort out her papers, protects her from the social workers, now stands helpless among the debris of his speckled hens, their beaks, feet and feathers. They lie bedraggled and lifeless on the ground.

Her rage lunges at him with the knife, two hands on the handle, aims for his chest. He falls. She falls on top of him, her full weight behind the knife. The knife goes through. Blood appears on his yellow cardigan. His blue eyes gape at her, his mouth open. She watches his face.

After a while she feels someone watching her. The knife is fixed. She gets to her feet with Mr Meredith's blood on her hands.

It's Tom in his pyjamas.

'I feel better now,' he says. 'I want my breakfast. Are there any eggs left?'