Perfect

by Rachel Joyce

  Perching on the very edge of his father’s chair, so as to cause the least offence, Byron took a sheet of thick white paper and his father’s pen. He drew a careful map, plotting the progress of the Jaguar along Digby Road with arrows. He marked the washing lines and the flowery tree. Then, with a change in the direction of the arrows, he showed how the car had swung to the left and rammed to a halt against the kerb. He drew a circle where they had left the little girl. She was just to the side of the car, where only he could see.

  Byron folded the map into his pocket and replaced the pen, dusting the chair with his shirt so that his father would not know he had trespassed. He was about to leave when an idea for a further experiment occurred to him.

  Kneeling on the rug, he lowered his upper body to the floor. He practised lying exactly as the little girl had done beneath her bicycle, on his side, with his knees tucked towards his chin and his arms curled round. If she had been all right the little girl would have got up. She would have made a noise. Lucy made an awful noise if you so much as scratched her by mistake. Supposing the police were searching for his mother even now?

  ‘What are you doing in here?’

  Startled, he turned to the door. Diana hovered at the threshold, as if she didn’t dare tread any further. He had no idea how long she’d been there.

  Byron flipped himself over and over, up and down the rug, to suggest he was a perfectly ordinary boy, albeit on the large side, who was playing a game. He went so fast that it burnt the bare flesh of his arms and legs, and made his head spin. His mother laughed and the ice cubes in her drink tinkled like shards of glass. Because she seemed happy he rolypoly’d some more. Then he knelt up and said, ‘I think we should go to school by bus tomorrow.’

  His mother was swooping to the left and right for a few moments because he had slightly overdone it with the rolling.

  ‘The bus?’ she said, landing upright again. ‘Whatever for?’

  ‘Or maybe a taxi. Like we used to do before you could drive.’

  ‘But there’s no need. Not since your father taught me.’

  ‘I just thought the change would be nice.’

  ‘We have the Jaguar, love.’ She didn’t even flinch. ‘He bought it so that I could take you to school.’

  ‘Exactly. The car is so new, we shouldn’t use it. Besides, he says women can’t drive.’

  At this she openly laughed. ‘Well, that’s clearly not true. Although your father is a very clever man, of course. Much more clever than me. I’ve never read a book from start to finish.’

  ‘You read magazines. You read cookery books.’

  ‘Yes but they have pictures. Clever books only have words.’

  In the silence that followed she studied her injured hand, twisting it palm up, palm down. There was nothing but the stream of light from the window, swirling with silver dust mites, and the insistent ticking of the mantelpiece clock.

  ‘We had a little swerve this morning,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s all.’ Then, glancing at her bracelet watch, she gave a gasp. ‘Goodness, it’s time for your bath.’ She snapped into being a mother again, like an umbrella shooting into the right shape, and smiled. ‘If you like, you can have crazy foam. Are you sure you didn’t touch anything of your father’s?’

  That was the most she said about the accident.

  The week continued and everything went on as before. No one came to arrest his mother. The sun rose, climbed in a wide arc, and set over the other side of the moor. Clouds passed. Sometimes they poked bony fingers across the flanks of the hills and sometimes they grew and darkened like a stain. At night came the moon, a pale copy of the sun, spilling over the hills in shades of silvery blue. His mother left the bedroom windows open for air. The geese cried out from the pond. Foxes yelped through the dark.

  Diana continued to do the small things she had always done. She woke to her half-past-six alarm. She swallowed her pill with water and examined her wristwatch in order not to be late. She dressed in her old-fashioned skirts, the way his father liked, and prepared Byron’s healthy breakfasts. By Wednesday the bandage had disappeared from her hand and there was no longer anything to link her to the morning in Digby Road. Even James seemed to forget about the two seconds.

  Only Byron kept remembering. Time had been changed. His mother had hit a child. Byron had seen and she had not. Like a splinter in his heel, the truth was always there, and even though he tried to avoid it by being careful, sometimes he forgot to be careful and there it was. He tried to do other things, playing with his soldiers or practising a magic trick to show James, but the images kept bobbing back, small details, as if they belonged to him now. The little girl’s striped school dress, her black plaits like liquorice, her socks at her ankles, the spinning wheels of her red bicycle. You could not do a thing without consequences. It was like Mr Roper giving you lines for being an ignoramus, or Byron throwing a stone over the fence at the pond to watch the rings of water as they opened like flowers. Nothing happened by itself. And even though it was not his mother’s fault, even though no one knew about the accident, there must be repercussions. He listened to the clocks all over the house, ticking and tocking and chiming their passage through time.

  One day – if not now, then in the future – someone would have to pay.

  6

  The Orange Hat

  JIM SPRAYS A table beside the window. Once. Twice. He wipes. Once. Twice. He has his own bottle of anti-bacterial multi-purpose spray and also his own blue cloth.

  The early December sky is thick with snow that does not fall. Maybe there will be a white Christmas. It would be something to have snow for his first time in the van. Customers dart across the car park, carrying recyclable bags and small children, their bodies pinched against the cold as if the air is made of pepper. Some of them have Christmas-themed scarves and hats and one little girl is wearing a set of antlers that keeps slipping sideways. Beyond all this, the upper peaks of Cranham Moor jut towards the sky. The greens, yellows, pinks and purples that were brackens, heather, wild orchids and grasses have been burnt by the cold to brown. In the distance he can make out Besley Hill and the construction vehicles that circle it. Rumours are, it will be an estate of fifteen five-star luxury homes. Since the building of Cranham Village, there have been new developments all over the moor. They emerge from the earth like fragments of exposed bone.

  ‘Haven’t you got a job to do?’ says Mr Meade, appearing from behind. He is a small, neatly moustached man who keeps his own set of parking cones in case of emergency.

  ‘I’m s-s—’

  But Mr Meade interrupts. Everyone does. They don’t want to see a man stuttering so hard over words they look painful. ‘And by the way, Jim, your hat is skew-whiff.’

  Jim’s hat is skew-whiff because it is too small. It is also not technically a hat, at least not a serious one. It is orange, like his staff T-shirt, his staff apron and also his staff socks, and it is made of meshed plastic in the approximate shape of a trilby. The only person who does not wear the hat is Mr Meade because he is the manager. After all, you wouldn’t expect royalty to wave flags or hang up bunting; it is up to everyone else to look patriotic on their behalf.

  Jim straightens his hat and Mr Meade goes to serve a female customer. The new cook is late again.

  It is not as if the café is busy. Despite the recent refurbishment, there are only two men with coffees and they sit so still they could be frozen solid. The most alive thing here is the fibre-optic Christmas tree, positioned at the top of the stairs to greet shoppers as they arrive from the supermarket below, and blinking a festive passage from green to red to blue. Jim squirts and he wipes. Twice. Once. It is acceptable to do it like this at work. It is like using a magic plaster until he returns to the van and can perform the rituals properly, the full twenty-one times.

  A slim hand tugs at his sleeve. ‘You missed my table,’ a female voice is saying. It’s the woman Mr Meade has just served. Jim recoils from her fingers as if burnt. He can’t
even look her in the eye.

  The inpatients used to walk side by side at Besley Hill. Never touching. If the nurses helped them dress, they took it steadily, not wanting to cause alarm.

  ‘Can you see?’ The female customer asks the question as if he is stupid. She points towards a table in the middle of the café, positioned exactly halfway between the window and the servery counter at the opposite end. Her new coat is already draped on the back of a chair and she has left her coffee on the table, beside the condiments and paper sachets of sugar. He follows her and she lifts her cup so that he can clean. If only she wouldn’t stand so close; Jim’s hands tremble. She sighs impatiently.

  ‘Quite frankly, I’m shocked at the state of this place,’ she says. ‘They may have spent all that money refurbishing but it’s still a tip. No wonder no one comes.’

  Jim squirts. Twice. Once. He wipes. Twice. Once. In order to relax he empties his mind, just as the nurses used to tell him. He thinks of white light, of floating, until he is yanked to the present by a further disruption: ‘Fucking steps. Oh. Oh. Oh. Fuck this.’

  He can’t continue. He steals a sideways glance at the rude woman but she wears an appalled look and so do the two male customers who previously appeared refrigerated. They all stare at the Christmas tree at the top of the stairs.

  ‘Bugger me,’ it says.

  Jim wonders if Mr Meade knows that, as well as flashing, the tree both talks and swears, when the face of the new cook, Eileen, emerges over the steps. She hauls herself to the top as if she has climbed a bare rock face to get here.

  ‘Fuck this,’ she says.

  Flash, flash, flash, goes the Christmas tree.

  She is not supposed to use the customer stairs. She is supposed to use the staff stairs. It is enough to give Jim the jitters. And she has also interrupted the rituals. He must squirt again. Wipe again—

  ‘I don’t have all day,’ says the female customer. ‘Would you please get a move on?’

  He tries not to think about Eileen but she is like the approach of a badweather front. It’s hard to pretend she isn’t happening. Sometimes he hears her laugh with the two young girls in the kitchen and there is something so chaotic about the noise, so joyous and unequivocal, he has to cover his ears, waiting for it to pass. Eileen is a tall, big-boned woman with a stiff shower of titian hair – a darker shade than the regulation hat – that shoots from a shocked-white parting in the centre of her head. She wears a holly-green coat that puckers at the seams in its effort to contain her.

  ‘For heaven’s sakes,’ the female customer almost shouts. ‘I’m only asking you to wipe my table. What’s wrong with you? Where’s the manager?’

  Eileen frowns as if she has heard. Then she begins her approach to the kitchen. She will have to pass right next to him. Jim begins again. He squirts and he wipes. He must empty his mind—

  ‘Hurry, hurry, will you?’ repeats the rude woman.

  Despite the solidity of Eileen, she is surprisingly nimble and the rude woman is directly in her path. Why doesn’t she get out of the way? Why doesn’t Eileen go a different route? At this rate, she will ramrod the rude woman. Jim’s breathing comes faster. His head bangs. If the woman doesn’t move, if he doesn’t do this right, something terrible will happen.

  Left, right, left, right. Left, right. His arm jerks so fast the muscles feel on fire. His fingers tingle.

  Eileen is almost at his side. ‘T-table,’ he mouths. The wiping is clearly not working, so he needs to do the words as well. ‘Hello—’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ says the rude woman, stepping closer in order to hear. As if through an opened sluice gate, Eileen lumbers past. The crisis is over.

  Whether Eileen hits the chair by accident or design is unclear but, as she passes, it rocks and sends the woman’s coat slithering in a silk puddle to the floor. ‘Fuck it,’ says Eileen, not stopping. It rhymes with bucket.

  This is a disaster. The crisis is not over at all.

  ‘Excuse me,’ says the rude woman, only in a shrill way so that the two words take on their opposite meaning. ‘Excuse me, madam, aren’t you going to pick that up?’

  Eileen does not stop. She keeps walking towards the kitchen.

  ‘Pick up my coat,’ orders the woman.

  ‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ says Eileen, over her shoulder.

  Jim’s heart gallops. The coat lies at his feet. ‘I will not have this,’ says the woman. ‘I will call the manager. I will lodge a complaint.’

  ‘You do that,’ says Eileen. And here – oh no – she stops walking away. She turns. Eileen is looking at the rude woman and the rude woman is looking at Eileen and here, in the middle, is Jim, squirting and wiping and whispering Salt Pot hello, Canderel hello, to make things right. If only the coat would magic itself on to the chair. He closes his eyes and gropes in his pocket for his keyring. He thinks of duct tape and being calm but none of it works. The woman will be hurt. Eileen will be hurt. The supermarket customers and Mr Meade and the girls in the kitchen will be hurt and it is all Jim’s fault.

  He stoops for the coat. It is like water in his fingers. He folds it over the back of the chair, only his hands are shaking so hard the coat slips off, and he has to stoop again and lift the coat again and hang it again. He can feel the women watching, both Eileen and the customer with her metallic voice. It is like being peeled. He is more them than himself. Then the rude woman sits. She folds her knees but she doesn’t say thank you.

  At the kitchen, Eileen pauses. She turns her face towards Jim and gives a broad smile that lights up her face. Then she thumps open the door and disappears. Jim is so shaken he needs fresh air but he mustn’t. He must wipe another table and this time he must get it right.

  ‘Why do you have to do the rituals?’ a psychiatric nurse asked once. ‘What do you think will happen if you don’t?’ She was a pleasant-looking girl, fresh from training. She said he was over-catastrophizing, he must confront his fears. ‘Then you will see them for what they are. You will see the rituals make no difference.’ She spoke so kindly about his fears, as if they were a piece of furniture he could move into another room and forget, that he wanted her to be right. She obtained permission from the doctors to take Jim to a railway station where people freely came and went, where there was no opportunity to check the hidden spaces and secure exits and entrances. ‘It’s all in your mind, you see,’ she said, as they stepped off the bus and crossed the station forecourt.

  But here she was wrong. There were so many people, there was so much chaos – there were fast trains, and busy platforms, there were pigeons missing feet, broken windows and cavernous air vents – that what he learned that morning was that life was even more hazardous than he had previously realized. If anything, he had not been worrying enough and neither had anyone else. He had been under-catastrophizing. He must do something. He must do it immediately. Racing to the restroom to perform the rituals in private, he had narrowly missed colliding with a steam urn in the station tearoom, thereby causing major injury to a roomful of commuters. It was too much. Jim pressed the station alarm. An hour later – after the arrival of so many fire engines there were delays to all south-west services – he was found in a tight ball under a bench. He never saw the fresh-faced nurse again. She lost her job and that was another thing that was his fault.

  Later, Jim is fetching a new roll of blue paper towels for the lavatories when he overhears Eileen again. Now she is in the kitchen, next to the supplies cupboard, talking to the two young women who are responsible for the dispatching of hot food.

  ‘So what’s with Jim?’ he hears her ask. It’s a shock to hear her use his name. It suggests they have a connection and they clearly don’t.

  He stands very still, with the roll of blue handtowels clutched to his stomach. It isn’t that he wants to eavesdrop; it is more that he doesn’t want to be here and acting as if he isn’t appears to be the best alternative.

  ‘He lives in a van,’ says one of the girls. ‘Over o
n the new estate.’

  ‘He doesn’t have a house or anything,’ says her friend. ‘He’s just parked there.’

  ‘He’s a bit—’

  ‘A bit what?’ says Eileen impatiently because whatever it is that Jim is, no one seems prepared to voice it.

  ‘You know,’ says the first girl.

  ‘Backward,’ says the other.

  ‘Jim has tissues,’ corrects the first girl. And then he realizes he has misheard. Issues are what she has said he has. ‘He’s been up at Besley Hill most of his life. When they closed it, he had nowhere to go. You have to feel sorry for him. It’s not as if he’d hurt you or anything.’ He had no idea she knew all this.

  The second girl says, ‘He plants things. Bulbs and seeds and that. He buys them cut price in the supermarket. Sometimes he gets manure and stuff. It smells like shit.’

  Eileen makes a noise that is so ragged, so colossal, it takes him a moment to realize what it is. It’s her laugh. It isn’t unkind, though. This is what strikes him. It is as if she is laughing with Jim, and this is strange but he isn’t laughing. He is crushed to the wall against a blue roll with his heart beating like an explosion.

  ‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ says Eileen. ‘How the fuck is this hat supposed to work?’

  ‘We use hairgrips,’ says the first girl. ‘You have to stick them right through the rim.’

  ‘Stuff it. I’m not wearing the fucker.’

  ‘You have to. It’s regulations. And the net cap. You have to wear that too.’

  Jim fails to hear what happens next. The door shuts and their voices snap out of hearing; they are a sound but without distinction, just as the rest of the world disappears when he is planting. He waits a little longer and when it is safe, he delivers the roll of blue crêpe paper to the lavatories and disinfects the sinks and taps. For the remainder of the morning, Jim wipes tables and carries trays to the young girls in the kitchen who have described him as backward. The customers come and go, but they are few. Beyond the windows, the snow cloud is so heavy it can barely move.