Perfect

by Rachel Joyce

  He has spent his adult life in and out of care. Years have passed and some of them he can’t even remember. After treatment, he could lose whole days; time was merely a selection of unconnected empty spaces. Sometimes he had to ask the nurses what he had eaten that day and if he had been for a walk. When he complained about memory loss, the doctors told him it was his depression. The truth is he found it easier to forget.

  All the same, it was terrible to leave Besley Hill for the final time. It was terrible to watch the other residents go, with their suitcases and their coats, driven away in minibuses and relatives’ cars. Some wept. One patient even tried to make a getaway across the moor. They did not want to go to family members who had long since abandoned them. They did not want to live in hostels or supported housing. After his reassessment, it was a social worker who found Jim his job at the supermarket. She was friendly with Mr Meade; they were in the same amateur dramatics group. And after all, she pointed out, Jim could live in his van. One day, if he wanted, he could get a mobile phone. He could make new friends. He could text them and meet up.

  ‘But I’m frightened,’ he had said. ‘I’m not like normal people. I don’t know what to do.’

  The social worker had smiled. She did not touch him but she placed her hands beside his on the table. ‘No one knows how to be normal, Jim. We’re all just trying our best. Sometimes we don’t have to think about it and other times it’s like running after a bus that’s already halfway down the street. But it’s not too late for you. You’re only in your fifties. You can start again.’

  The next time Jim passes Eileen, he averts his eyes and goes to wheel round her, when she pauses and says, ‘Watcha, Jim. How’s things?’ She is delivering a toasted sandwich to another customer.

  It is open and easy, her question. Nevertheless he can’t answer. He looks at his shoes. They are long and narrow. His trousers do not even reach his ankles. In the years since he was a boy, his body seems to have set its sights on the sky, rather than the suits and chairs that other bodies aim to fill. He buys boots and trainers a size too large because he is afraid his body will take him unawares and notch up a further inch overnight.

  Jim continues to stare pointedly at his feet as if they are very interesting. He wonders how long he can keep this up and whether Eileen will go soon.

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ she says.

  Even without looking at her he can see the way she stands, one hand on her hip, her feet squarely on the ground. The silence is unbearable.

  ‘See you around,’ she says at last.

  She is about to go when Jim lifts his head. It is too much to look her in the eye but he wants her to know – what? He tries to smile. Eileen is holding a seasonal sandwich with trimmings; he has his anti-bacterial spray. So it isn’t a big smile. It’s a minor exercising of his facial muscles. All he wants is for her to understand; though what he would like her to understand, it is hard to say. It’s a bit like waving a flag, his smile. Or shining a light through the dark. It’s like saying, Here I am. There you are. That’s all.

  She frowns at him as if he’s hurt.

  He will have to work on the smile.

  7

  A Close Shave

  ‘I THINK THERE has been a conspiracy,’ whispered James Lowe on Friday afternoon. The boys were bent over their desks, learning about cell reproduction and the amoeba.

  ‘A conspiracy?’ repeated Byron.

  ‘I think this is why there was no mention of the two seconds. We weren’t supposed to know the truth. It is like the moon landings.’

  ‘What about the moon landings?’

  ‘I read it was all made up. The astronauts never went there. They made a pretend moon in a studio and took photographs.’

  ‘But why were we not supposed to know about the seconds?’ whispered Byron. ‘I don’t understand.’ He didn’t understand either about the moon landings because he had his photographs from NASA of the astronauts and Apollo 15. They could not be fakes. His head reeled.

  The heat did not help. The air in the classroom was so hot and stiff it stood like something solid. As the week progressed, the temperature had soared. The sun had torched the land from a colour-bleached sky. At home the lawn was dull and scratchy under Byron’s bare feet and the paving stones on the terrace scorched like hot dinner plates. His mother’s roses drooped their heads as if they were too heavy; leaves withered from their stems and the petals on the poppies hung limp. Even the bees looked too hot to buzz. Beyond the garden, the moor was a patchwork haze of green and purple and yellow.

  ‘Why didn’t the government want us to know about the seconds?’ repeated Byron, because James was drawing a diagram and appeared to have forgotten them again.

  Mr Roper glanced up from his desk on the wooden dais at the front of the class. He studied the sea of small heads as if he was deciding which one to eat. James waited. When Mr Roper looked away, he explained: ‘In case people mount a protest. It’s bad enough with the miners. If things carry on like this, there’ll be another three-day week. The government don’t want any more trouble so they put the seconds in and hoped no one would notice.’

  Byron tried to return to his biology book but the diagrams meant nothing. They were merely shapes in the same way that words could become meaningless when he repeated them in his bedroom over and over. He kept seeing the little girl in Digby Road. Her picture was plastered over everything. Her dress caught over her knees, her socks gathered at her ankles, her feet under the wheel. He couldn’t keep quiet any longer. ‘James?’ he whispered. ‘I’ve got a problem.’

  James aligned his pencil with his rubber. He waited. When Byron said nothing, he asked, ‘Is it by any chance to do with the amoeba?’

  No, whispered Byron. It wasn’t; although now they were on the subject, he had to admit he was still confused as to how a single cell could decide to become two.

  ‘It’s very complicated. It’s a mistake.’

  ‘What is a mistake?’

  ‘It’s to do with the two seconds—’

  At this point something hard thwacked Byron’s ear and interrupted. He found Mr Roper looming over him with a dictionary, his face shiny with an anger that seemed to blacken his eyes and shorten his breath. Byron was given a hundred lines for talking during a lesson and another hundred for disturbing a classmate. (‘I must endeavour to be no more stupid than God has intended.’)

  ‘I could do your lines for you,’ James offered later. ‘It’s very quiet at the weekend. All I have is my scholarship work. Also,’ here he leaned so close Byron could see his tonsils, ‘I would not make any mistakes.’

  Byron thanked him but said Mr Roper would spot the difference. James was not the sort of boy who splodged ink or whose letters dangled at perilous angles, in the way that Byron’s were inclined to.

  ‘Are you seeing votre père au weekend?’

  ‘Oui, James.’

  ‘Moi aussi. Does he—?’

  ‘Does he what?’

  ‘Does he play games with you et choses comme ça? Does he talk?’

  ‘To me?’

  ‘Yes, Byron.’

  ‘Well, he is tired. He has to relax. He has to think about the week ahead.’

  ‘Mine too,’ said James. ‘I suppose it will be égal pour nous one day.’ Contemplating their futures, the boys fell silent.

  Byron had visited James’s house only once. The Lowe family home was a cold, new house on a small estate with electric gates. It had paving stones instead of a garden and inside there were plastic mats to protect the cream carpet. The boys had eaten in the dining room in silence. Afterwards they had played in the private road outside but it was a half-hearted game, almost solemn.

  The boys left school with no further reference to the two seconds or Byron’s secret. On reflection, Byron was relieved. He was afraid of burdening his friend with too much. Sometimes James trailed behind his mother with his thin shoulders hunched and his head low, as if his intelligence was all crammed into his satchel, and it
was a heavy thing to bear.

  Besides, Byron had other concerns. Now that school was over for the week, there was nothing standing between himself and his father’s visit. The slightest mistake, and his father would surely guess about Digby Road. At home Byron watched his mother arrange fresh roses from the garden and set her hair and his heart thumped. She rang the speaking clock to confirm her watch was punctual and while she swept from room to room, checking the handtowels were clean in the bathroom and straightening copies of Reader’s Digest on the coffee table, Byron slipped to the garage. Once again he scanned the Jaguar with his torch but there was no sign of the accident.

  They waited for his father at the station, along with the rest of the Friday-night families. It was still too hot to stand in the sun, and they hid in the shade of a fence at the end of the platform, a little apart. After all, his father dealt with people every day at the bank; he didn’t want to get off the train and find his mother chatting with strangers. While they waited she kept tugging her compact mirror out of her handbag and angling it towards her face, as if to check everything was in the right place. Byron taught Lucy how to tell the time by blowing the seedheads from a dandelion but the air was so thick and still they couldn’t seem to get them very far.

  ‘It is thirteen o’clocks,’ sang Lucy. ‘It is fifteen o’clocks.’

  ‘Shh now, you two,’ said their mother. ‘Here comes the train.’

  Car doors flew open from the station forecourt and mothers and children burst on to the platform. Where before there had been white heat and stillness and silence, there was now colour and movement and laughter.

  There was an occasion when they had been late, back in the days before his mother could drive. Seymour had said nothing in the taxi because it was not polite to air grievances in front of strangers, but at Cranham House he had railed. Did Diana not know how humiliating it was to be the only man left standing on the platform? As if she didn’t care? No, no, she kept saying; it was a mistake. His father wouldn’t stop. A mistake? Could she not tell the time? Was that another thing her mother had failed to teach her? Byron had hidden beneath his bedcovers, hands jammed over his ears, in order not to hear. Every time he listened he could hear his mother’s cries, his father’s roaring, and then later another sound, an altogether quieter one from the bedroom, as if his father was fighting for air. It often went like this.

  The train stopped at the platform. Lucy and Byron watched carefully while the other fathers greeted their children. Some did it with shoulder pats, some with embraces. Lucy laughed out loud when one father slammed his briefcase to the ground and scooped his daughter into his arms.

  Seymour was the last. He moved the length of the platform with the sun behind him so that it was like watching a shadow advance and all three of them fell silent. He made a moist shape with his mouth against his wife’s cheek. ‘Children,’ he said. He didn’t kiss them.

  ‘Hello, Father.’

  ‘Hello, darling.’ Their mother touched her face as if to repair the skin.

  Seymour took his place in the passenger seat with his briefcase parked on his lap. He watched Diana hard, the way she twisted the key in the ignition, and adjusted her seat, and released the handbrake. All the time he watched, her tongue slipped in and out of her mouth, licking her lower lip and hiding again.

  ‘Mirror, signal, manoeuvre,’ he said, as she pulled out of the station forecourt.

  ‘Yes, darling.’ Her fingers were trembling on the wheel and she kept tucking her hair behind her ears.

  ‘You might like to get in the left lane now, Diana.’

  The air seemed to chill at weekends. Byron noticed his mother often fingered the neckline of her cardigan when his father came home.

  Despite Byron’s fears, the visit appeared to pass smoothly. Lucy said nothing about Digby Road. His mother said nothing about the Jaguar. She parked it where it belonged in the garage and there was no mention of the way it had skidded to a halt. There was no mention of the two seconds. Byron’s father hung his business suit in the wardrobe and dressed in the selection of corduroy trousers, Harris Tweed jackets and silk cravats that were his country garments. Clothes on his father were always stiff, even when he was supposed to be relaxing. They looked less like clothes and more like cardboard. He read his newspapers in his study and, accompanied by Byron’s mother, he took a Saturday afternoon stroll down to the pond to watch her throw corn for the ducks and geese. She in turn laundered his shirts and smalls and it was like knowing the Queen was in residence, except that it was his father’s underpants hanging in the sunshine instead of the Union Jack. It was over Sunday lunch that things went wrong.

  Seymour was watching Diana serve vegetables on to his plate. He asked Byron how he was progressing with his scholarship work only he was staring at his wife’s hands, the way she spooned the potatoes one by one, so that it took Byron a moment to realize his father was waiting for him to reply. Byron said he was doing well. His mother smiled.

  ‘As well as the Lowe boy?’

  ‘Yes, Father.’ The windows were open in the dining room but it felt unbearably close. The heat was like soup.

  Byron couldn’t understand why his father disliked James so much. He knew there had been a telephone call after the incident with the bridge, that Andrea had complained, and that his father had promised to fence in the pond, but everything was resolved after that. The two fathers had shaken hands at the Christmas Party and agreed there were no hard feelings. Since then, Seymour said Byron should make other friends; the Lowe boy was full of inflated ideas, he said, even if his father was a college man and a QC.

  Diana untied her apron. She sat. His father sprinkled salt over his roast chicken. He spoke about the troubles in Ireland and the miners, how they both had it coming, and his mother said yes, yes, and then what he said was ‘Tell me about the new Jaguar.’

  Byron’s stomach lurched. His insides flew away.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Diana.

  ‘Do the mothers still notice?’

  ‘They all wish they were as lucky as me. Sit up straight, please, Byron.’

  He stole one glance at Lucy. Her mouth was clamped so tight her lips looked in danger of shooting towards her ear.

  ‘I thought we might take her for a spin after lunch.’

  ‘Do you mean Lucy?’ said his mother.

  ‘I mean the new Jaguar,’ said his father.

  His mother cleared her throat. It was the smallest noise but his father’s head shot up. Setting down his knife and fork, he waited, eyeing her carefully. ‘Has something happened?’ he said at last. ‘Has something happened to the car?’

  Diana reached for her glass and maybe her hand gave the slightest tremble because the ice cubes tinkled. ‘I just wish—’ Then, whatever she wished, she appeared to think better of it and braked mid-sentence.

  ‘You wish what, Diana?’

  ‘That you would stop calling the Jaguar a she.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  She smiled. She reached for his father’s hand. ‘It’s a car, Seymour. It isn’t a woman.’

  Byron laughed because he wanted his father to see the remark was not personal. In fact it was ha ha so hilarious you had to grip your stomach and howl. And considering the potential seriousness of the situation, it was also extremely clever. For someone who claimed to be uneducated, his mother was full of surprises. Byron caught Lucy’s eye and nodded, encouraging her to join in. Relief at not speaking the secret possibly got the better of both of them; Lucy was laughing so hard she appeared screwed up with it and her plaits were tipped with gravy. When Byron stole a sideways glance, he found his father’s upper lip had congealed. It was beaded with small drops of perspiration.

  ‘Are they laughing at me?’

  ‘Of course not,’ said his mother. ‘It really isn’t funny, children.’

  ‘I work all week.’ His father spoke carefully, enunciating the words as if they were difficult shapes between his teeth. ‘I do it all for
you. I bought you a Jaguar. None of the other men buy their wives a Jaguar. The chap at the garage couldn’t believe his ears.’

  The more he said, the older he seemed. His mother nodded her head and kept saying, ‘I know, darling, I know.’ There was an age gap between his parents of fifteen years but at that moment he seemed to be the only parent in the room. ‘Please. Can’t we do this after lunch?’ She threw a look at the children. ‘Black Forest gateau for sweet. Your favourite, darling.’

  His father tried not to look pleased but it came out anyway, forcing his mouth into an infantile shape that looked pasted upside down. Thankfully here he picked up his knife and fork and they finished the meal in silence.

  This was how it was with his father. Sometimes a child seemed to leap into his face and Seymour would grimace in order to push the child away. In the drawing room there were two framed photographs of him when he was a boy. The first was taken in his garden in Rangoon. He was dressed in a sailor suit, holding a bow and arrow. Behind him there were palm trees and large flowers, with petals the size of hands, but from the way he held his toys, away from his body, it looked as if he did not play with them. The second had been taken just after his parents had stepped off the boat in England. Seymour looked cold and frightened. He was staring at his feet and his sailor suit was all wrong. Even Seymour’s mother was not smiling. ‘You don’t know how lucky you are,’ his father sometimes said to Byron. ‘For me, it was fighting all the way. We had nothing when we came back to England. Nothing.’

  There were no photographs of Diana. She never spoke of her childhood. It was impossible to imagine her being anything except a mother.

  In his bedroom, Byron re-examined his secret map of Digby Road. He wished Diana had not commented on Seymour’s habit of referring to the car as female. He wished he had not laughed. Of all the times to disagree with his father, this was surely the worst. It gave Byron a low, loose feeling in the stomach that reminded him of the way he felt about the cocktail party his parents had given for the Winston House parents the previous Christmas. Downstairs he could hear voices from the kitchen. He tried not to listen because his father had raised his voice but Byron found that even when he hummed he was still hearing. The lines on his map began to swim and the trees beyond his window were a scribble of green against the blue. Then suddenly the house fell so silent it was as if everyone had melted into dust. He tiptoed to the hall. He couldn’t even hear Lucy.