I started to reply, but Lucy beat me to it. ‘Ah leave it, Christine. To be fair, you don’t usually vaccinate for chicken pox anyway.’
At this, my ears pricked up. ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, turning to her. ‘What’s that got to do with the Coopers?’
Rosie’s allergy or the fact that she couldn’t be immunised wasn’t common knowledge amongst the school community, mostly because of the inevitable negative reaction it provoked amongst parents. And I didn’t want my daughter to be singled out in any way because of reasons she (or I) couldn’t control. So when before Easter the school secretary had sent out Health Service permission forms for the MMR booster to be carried out in the school, I had quietly marked an X in the ‘Decline’ box and forgotten all about it.
But now I couldn’t help but wonder if perhaps the Coopers and I had something in common.
‘But Madeleine and Tom don’t believe in vaccination full stop,’ Christine said bitterly. ‘Complete nonsense. Not to mention irresponsible.’
My mouth went dry. So while I’d had no choice but to opt out of the standard vaccination programme, it seemed the Coopers had wilfully declined.
‘Don’t believe in… you mean the Cooper children haven’t had shots – for anything?’ I asked, feeling more than a little unnerved.
This was what Greg and I had worried most about – the idea that so-called ‘herd immunity’ wasn’t guaranteed to protect Rosie so long as there were parents who chose not to participate. Yet I couldn’t condemn the Coopers for anything when I didn’t know the reasons. For all I knew, their children might also have some kind of autoimmune condition or other valid reason not to go along with protocol.
‘Yep. Apparently they don’t trust the HSE and the pharmaceutical companies, even though all that controversy over the MMR jabs was written off yonks ago.’ Christine rolled her eyes. ‘Give me a break. They’re just lucky this time that chicken pox is fairly harmless.’
This time.
I swallowed hard, not sure what to make of this.
‘Well, I hope Kevin avoids it anyway. Nasty, scratchy dose,’ I mumbled sympathetically. ‘But not too hard on the kids if it’s mild enough.’
Lucy had gone unusually quiet and, sensing she was uncomfortable with the discussion, I decided to change the subject. ‘Oh look, they’re starting,’ I said, turning back to the ballet class and feeling bad for bringing all this up in the first place.
But Christine wouldn’t be diverted. ‘A bit poorly my ass. Kevin was saying that Clara was coughing the day before that too,’ she said. ‘What kind of mother sends a sick child to school so she can go off to flatter her own ego? And what kind of parents take their kids out of class for an extra week over Easter so they can go and sun themselves in Florida?’
I remembered Rosie saying something about Clara being absent the first few days back after the break, but hadn’t realised it was because she was still on holiday. Must be nice to be able to fly off somewhere warm and sunny for so long. I could only dream.
‘Ah, Christine, it’s not as if the kids missed that much for the few extra days they were away,’ said Lucy. ‘And in fairness to Madeleine the other morning, she really didn’t think there was anything to worry about…’
‘Oh save it, that’s no excuse. A blind man could see that the child was coming down with something, though of course maybe those Prada sunglasses her mother likes to wear messed up her eyesight…’
‘Christine, seriously,’ Lucy reproached, ‘there’s no need for that. I know Madeleine. If she honestly felt that Clara was ill, she would have cancelled the TV thing, end of story. As it was, the little dote just had the sniffles and a bit of a temperature when I went to pick her up.’
‘Well, Kevin said he spotted a cluster of spots on her neck. And if a five-year-old can see it, I don’t understand how the child’s own mother—’
‘That could just be heat rash from the temperature,’ I said matter-of-factly. ‘Pox don’t cluster.’
‘Thank you, Nurse,’ Lucy chuckled, evidently hoping to lighten the mood. ‘In any case, Christine, Maddie was distraught and full of apologies when she got back from Dublin,’ she insisted. ‘She couldn’t have known.’
As Christine muttered something unintelligible, a thought started rattling around in my head. It was what I had just said: that chicken pox didn’t cluster.
They don’t, I reminded myself. There were just individual sores when the rash popped up.
I nodded, affirming my own train of thought. Christine’s son was probably just being a typical five-year-old boy. Making everything seem more dramatic and exaggerated than it actually was.
Returning my attention to the studio where Rosie practised, I smiled with appreciation as she pirouetted gracefully. She did a slight bow in front of her teacher and classmates and then returned to the barre.
Whereupon once again, almost absent-mindedly, my daughter raised her arm and scratched her back.
Rosie turned over in bed and pulled the covers up over her head. Shoving her face into the pillow, she tried her hardest to stifle the sound of her cough. She rolled over onto her back, then sniffled and pulled her leg up to her chest, so she could scratch her knee.
She didn’t feel well.
And she was very itchy.
Rosie had noticed when she got home from ballet and started undressing to put her pyjamas on that she had some little red dots on her arms. And there were a few on her chest, too. She was sure that if she turned on the light and looked at her knee, she would probably find some spots there too.
But her mum said that you couldn’t get chicken pox twice.
Rosie felt worry build in her chest. She really didn’t want chicken pox again. It had been miserable the last time. She couldn’t stand the thought of being cooped up in bed, not being allowed to play with her friends or her dinosaurs, and having to take long, warm baths just to try to ease the itch that came with those yucky blisters.
She shuddered, thinking about it.
Maybe she was just tired. That had to be it. It had been a long week and maybe she was just feeling a bit worried because her friend Ellie wasn’t well and then Clara had gone home sick the other day too.
Kevin hadn’t looked like he was sick though – and he said he’d never had chicken pox before – so how could she get them twice?
She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, trying to calm herself. That was what Mum had told her to do any time she was feeling overwhelmed. Of course, she had told her that because of what she had seen with her dad, but Rosie supposed that trick could be used in this situation as well.
Taking one, two, three deep breaths, she closed her eyes in the darkness and willed herself to go to sleep. In the morning, everything would be fine. She would feel better.
But then her eyes sprang open as it felt like something had bitten her on the back. She cranked her arm around awkwardly to shove her hand up the back of her pyjama top to reach the area. Once the itch was scratched, she ran her fingers over her skin and felt a few flat bumps. There were more of them all over her too, she just knew it.
Breathing hard again, she whispered to herself like her mum told her to do when she needed to calm herself down. ‘You’re fine, just go to sleep. Everything is OK. You don’t have chicken pox. Everyone