A Perfect Life

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘God, you’re a bloody bastard, Jem,’ she says. ‘Look, I want to clear up this dump so Gosha doesn’t grass me up. I’m going to have some people back this evening for a party after the pub. Gosha will be in bed and I don’t think she’ll hear them, but you never know. At least if I’ve tidied up I’ve got more chance of her doing what I ask. You can ask some of your friends, if you like.’

  The trouble is, my friends can’t drive yet. And none of them lives near enough to bicycle to my house. It makes me feel such a retard that we all have to ask our mums to drive us still, and then they pick us up from someone’s house and get in a real psyche if we’re drunk. It’s a lose-lose situation and it just isn’t worth trying to get anyone over.

  I tell Coral, ‘No, I’ll be all right, thanks,’ and then just to please her, I pick up three sweet wrappers, a yoghurt pot and an egg cup full of dog-ends and take them through to the kitchen. She is slamming plates in the dishwasher. It is a miracle they don’t break.

  ‘When are Mum and Dad back?’ I don’t care what the answer is, I just want to distract Coral. It works. She shuts the dishwasher and leans against it to light a fag. She offers me one and I take it. It is weird to be smoking in the kitchen.

  ‘Too soon. Well, Mum is. I don’t know what Nick’s doing. He’s never here at the moment.’

  ‘Yeah. It’s crap. It’s better when they’re both away. Mum notices too much on her own.’ I flick ash into the sink and zap the radio into life with the remote control. Coral turns on the tap and puts her cigarette out under it.

  ‘Mum is a real pain in the neck on her own,’ she says.

  Foss has left some snail shells on the kitchen table, and some twigs. I remember there is a wren’s nest in the greenhouse I want to show him, and I go out to find him. I know he will be in the dank green corner by the water butt, and sure enough I find him there.

  ‘Sssh, Jem. This is toad school,’ he whispers, pointing to where Ruby is crouched with a small stick pointing at three inattentive-looking toads. I must say, Ruby looks as though she might have crawled out from under a stone herself; her legs are pale green in the shade, and when she turns to look at me the bags under her eyes are almost bruises.

  ‘Hey, sis, you need an early night,’ I say. This is definitely my day for getting it wrong with sisters.

  She hurls a scornful glance in my direction and hisses, ‘Just be quiet. This is charm school and anyone who is rude becomes a toad and any toad who misbehaves becomes a Prince, but did you know that the way toads misbehave is by being polite and charming?’

  The pressure becomes too much for one toad and it flings itself into a patch of hogweed. Foss dives in to retrieve it, oblivious to the nettles among the foliage he is groping in. Foss never feels a thing. I always think it’s because he’s the youngest and he has evolved into this part-subterranean being because his life experience is that it just isn’t worth making a fuss. I feel like that most of the time myself, actually, but the girls never do.

  My job when Mum is away is to feed the sheep. It’s a miracle they are still alive, as I only remember about once every couple of days. Actually, it isn’t that bad; I usually feed them when I go to the shop and that’s almost every day because the only excitement around here is heading down to the village for a bit of commerce. Mum doesn’t like the shop selling us fags, but it’s tough luck. There are not many good things about being sixteen but buying cigarettes is one of them. The only reason I can afford the fags is that Mum and Dad have gone mad with dishing out cash at the moment. It usually means something is wrong, and if the wrong is proportional to the amount of money, then we are in for a major car crash in our lives. Mum has given me about forty quid in the last week or so and Dad has given me seventy. He actually gave me a fifty-pound note the other night on the way back from the stinking Gildoffs’.

  He said, ‘Here, Jem, this is some summer pocket money.’ Coral went mental, huffing in the car next to me, but she was glaring at Mum, not Dad, when she said, ‘Well, Mum. How about it? What happened to your promise that I will always get the same treatment as the others?’

  My fifty-pound note was too big to fit in my wallet. I rolled it up and tried to imagine what sniffing cocaine through it might feel like, but I could only imagine it to be like sniffing sherbet by mistake which makes you cry, or inhaling cigarette smoke up your nose, which also makes you cry, so I didn’t feel very authentic. I tried folding it in a concertina instead. Mum was having a go at Coral, leaning her elbow on the seat, twisted to more or less face us in the back of the car, her face looking pretty evil and not unlike the swivelling child in The Exorcist. Anyway, she had her teeth gritted when she said, ‘Don’t try and get clever with me, young lady. Emotional blackmail is not on. Do you understand me?’

  And she flounced herself round and put on her dark glasses in the front, even though it was late at night and dark outside. And blow me, then Dad got another fifty out and passed it to Coral.

  ‘I had one for you all along,’ he said.

  But Coral pushed his hand away and said, ‘I don’t need paying off, Nick,’ which was so rude I was gobsmacked. And stupid, I mean, if she didn’t want it, I would have had it.

  Mum and Coral have more rows than I have with anyone, but they also really like one another. Just as well.

  * * *

  Mum gets back from London far too early in the morning. Around twelve. I hear her because I seem to have slept in the playroom on the sofa, so her voice, shouting from the kitchen, ‘Hi, everyone, I’m back,’ is much closer than I want it to be. Luckily Coral is in there, so I don’t have to get up, but they don’t bother keeping quiet.

  ‘Hi, Mum, did you have a good time?’

  ‘Well, some of it. Boring at the bank, good at the hairdresser and I did some shopping. Look, I bought these.’

  There is a lot of rustling while Mum gets stuff out of a shopping bag. Coral chirps and gasps, the way girls do over clothes, then she starts laughing.

  ‘Mum, you’ve got a lot of stuff.’

  Mum laughs too. ‘Some of it is definitely coming your way. I mean, how can I have thought I would look OK in this? It’s like a horse’s hay net.’

  ‘No. It’s great, it’s a halter-neck. Look!’

  ‘Yes, I had a feeling that would be better on you. I wish you had been with me.’

  ‘Didn’t Nick come?’

  Mum laughs again. ‘No, he went to Birmingham yesterday.’

  ‘So why didn’t you go too?’

  ‘To Birmingham? No thanks. I’m on sabbatical exactly so I don’t have to go to Birmingham. Now tell me, what’s been happening here? Should I be suspicious that it’s so tidy?’

  She suddenly opens the door into the playroom and shouts, ‘Good morning, Jem.’ I groan and pull a cushion over my head, but not before I hear Coral giggling.

  ‘Yes, be very suspicious, but don’t worry, it’s fine and everyone has gone home.’ I am always impressed that they get on when they do. And relieved.

  Nick

  How many condoms is it reasonable to buy? One packet seems a bit un-macho; there are only five in a packet and five is somehow weedy and sissy. Two packets might be all right, but two the same or different kinds? Maybe the pack of twelve boxes is the best idea. Twelve boxes of five. Sixty condoms. Sixty shags. Chance would be a fine thing and he’d probably be dead halfway through, but there are worse ways to go. Nick picks up the pack and moves on to the painkiller section. He stares at the rows of coloured boxes, and when his arm reaches out to take one, he sees his hand, separate, brown and leathery-looking. His hand picks up the box and he almost drops it again – he cannot feel the cardboard in his hand, he cannot feel anything. Is a night once in a while with Jeannie Gildoff an affair? Is this guilt? A breakdown? Is this a heart attack? He can feel nothing, but feeling nothing hurts like a cauterised vein – a pulse denied and aching with molten blindness. He heads for the counter and pays, hardly pausing for the checkout girl to wrap his purchases and then he is in th
e main body of the station and walking towards the train.

  He is on the way home and he is numb. Angel doesn’t want to live with him any more. That’s what she said. Of course he heard her, but it was easy to pretend not to, easy to crank up a temper tantrum to eclipse her voice, her feeling, her truth.

  Nick has done this so many times he can feel the pattern before it happens – Angel tries to say something, having built up to it over some time, weeks, maybe, of sighing and reproachful looks, through which he is expert at maintaining a smooth exterior of denial. Of course he knows that she has something she wants to say, but he isn’t going to say it for her. How can he? Angel is always dissatisfied about something. And he is so tired of being sorry, of being in the wrong. Actually, he stopped saying he was sorry long ago, but he can’t remember when he stopped feeling it. That’s what happens with sex in marriage too; at some unnoticeable point it changes and just doesn’t seem worth doing again. It’s like getting a magazine on subscription – it’s always available, and desire doesn’t get a look in. Nick can’t remember when fantasy and his interior sex life became so much more than escapism. It must have been around the time he realised that Angel didn’t really fancy him.

  He walks down the platform, glancing in the carriage windows, idly wondering what or whom he might find on this train. Does the 4.15 to Waterbeach contain his destiny? Why not? Anything is possible. Nick realised that Angel didn’t want to sleep with him a couple of years after he got sober. She had presumably never wanted to, it was just that he hadn’t noticed before. He did his best not to give himself a hard time about it. He was having a hard enough time staying clean. Of course the whole process was a big deal. He knew from his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings that many relationships foundered and collapsed when the drinker stopped drinking, but he was determined that he would be different. He had rescued Angel, and having rescued her, they had built a life together. Now he was rescuing himself. Nick gave up drinking the year Ruby was born. He and Angel then entered a second honeymoon phase – almost more honeymoon than the first, and they began to experience life together with no rows over drink, and fell into the trap of believing that alcohol had been what was wrong. They wanted to be happy together, and so they did not notice that the chemistry just didn’t work for them.

  He peers in the window of one carriage, but sees a young family settling at a table, the father removing a rucksack from his back and pulling a baby from a kind of holster on the topside of it. One, two, three tiny children. A mother with a halo of black curly hair and a huge pouting mouth. The father long-haired, craggy-faced, and fit. He looks to Nick like a climber, though maybe it’s all the heavy-duty nylon baby kit. Nick decides not to go into this carriage. Why would he want to spend a train journey with a load of small children when he can spend it in peace flirting with a pretty girl? He just needs to find one. He moves on to the next carriage.

  The one thing Nick has always been pretty sure of is that he is appealing to women. Maybe it’s the direct way he looks at them, maybe it’s something in his pheromones, but Nick has never had any trouble attracting women. Keeping them used to be another matter, but then he found Angel. His view on himself was always that he was in tune with women, but he didn’t see the large boulder in the midst of the ebb and flow of every relationship he had ever had. He did not recognise that the chase was the bit he liked, and once he got her, whomever she might be, the sexual charge began to diminish like a worn-out battery. He was too busy believing his own press release – that he was an understanding new man in shining armour, who had taken the road to recovery and was on course for the Holy Grail of successful intimacy.

  If Jem, on a male-bonding exercise such as gathering wood or rolling the lawn into perfect stripes, says, ‘Mum’s in a real psyche,’ Nick is the first to say, ‘Yes, we must ask her what the matter is. She won’t come out of it unless we talk to her you know. That’s what girls are like.’

  There are no girls luring him into any of the carriages. He finally boards the train and walks down inside. The scent of coffee lingering, the trace of musky bodies and synthetic perfume in the carriage mingled with the oily heavy smell of the tracks and the engines oozing through the open windows, catches in Nick’s throat. He passes a pair of boys Jem’s age, heads bent together over a mobile phone.

  ‘Send her a text.’

  ‘No, fuck you. You send her a text, you fancy her. You got her number.’

  ‘Yeah, but what shall I say?’

  Nick feels it is very important that Jem understands what women like. Above all, possibly even above oral sex – though sixteen is not the time for Jem and he to talk about that, and indeed when would be? – what women value most highly is communication. It is odd, given his belief that all women love oral sex, that he does not know if it is true of Angel. He wonders briefly if finding this out could be the key to their problems. But it seems more likely that the key to their problems is lost for ever. Anyway. Having given this understanding to Jem, and even knowing it himself to be one of the great truths in the world, has not helped Nick to feel it or act on it.

  ‘And one thing is certain, you can’t do oral sex and talk both at once.’ He grins to himself, stuffing the paper bag from the chemist into his briefcase as he sits down in the restaurant car. It is four o’clock, so he can have tea. Nick has a rare moment of feeling good about himself and spreads out his newspaper on a table laid for four. The napkins are shaped like swallows in flight. Nick is still smiling to himself when he looks up straight into the blue gaze of a waitress. At last, a pretty girl. Mid-twenties, small tits like cupcakes, small arse, small body. Delicious hair, blonde but with dark roots. She brushes a strand behind her ear and another bit falls on the other side. He imagines it sweeping across her naked shoulders, though she is in fact dressed. That doesn’t matter, he can see all of her, as if the green-leaf print uniform is transparent. She blushes, looking directly at him; her eyebrows are dark, straight and very fine, her skin glows with luminous health.

  He wants her. He wants her to fill the hole that Angel not loving him leaves; he wants her to test drive the condoms – oh, what the hell – he wants her because trains are horny and she is sweet and young with soft pink lips and hair tied back waiting to be let loose. Slowly, without taking his eyes from her sweet open face, Nick lifts the swallow-shaped napkin off the table and slides his fingers into the folds. With almost no resistance, it falls open, snowy white and soft.

  Angel

  Angel deliberately brings a wicker basket into town today for her shopping. Releasing Foss and Ruby with Gosha at the toy shop, she heads for the WI market. The basket is a part of the uniform here, or rather the armoury, as the Friday rush requires invincible purpose and forward planning just like a battle, Angel always thinks. Angel loves the WI market and there is no part of it that she leaves untouched in her shopping, from the brightly coloured hand-knitted doll’s clothes she buys for Ruby to the glistening cakes and jars of perfect jam. Superficially, the market suggests timeless nostalgia and an otherwise lost decorum, but really it is ruthlessly organised, financially successful and almost, cutting edge – Angel’s finest moment was her purchase of a knitted iPod cover for Jem last term.

  The church hall doors are open, some bunting flaps halfheartedly, and a queue of shuffling elderly ladies inches its way in towards tables covered with gingham cloths. Smiling in response to the nods and smiles all the ladies greet one another with, Angel allows herself to be carried along into the room. She struggles out of the queue at the sausage roll section, extracting herself with difficulty to reach the edge of the table, slowed by the deliberate obstacles created by carefully wielded baskets, umbrellas and elbows.

  The wicker basket is heavy, but full of the spoils of war, and Angel lugs it along cheerfully. The best find today is a caramel-coloured jersey for Foss, so stiffly acrylic that it stands up by itself, but adorable, and he will look like Jeremy Fisher in it. Walking down the high street Angel feels happy. The café is nois
y and hot, she threads her way through to the courtyard at the back, and sees Jenny at a table in the shade. Jenny and Angel have been friends ever since Coral and Jenny’s daughter Ally were at primary school together and Coral joined the pottery club that Jenny had at her house after school on Tuesdays. Jenny’s bracelets jangle when she and Angel hug, and Angel breathes in deeply, loving the smoky tea familiarity of her scent and her gentle voice.

  ‘Angel, I’ve been thinking about you so much, and look at you, you’ve got so thin.’ Jenny pats Angel’s shoulder as they sit down.

  Angel presses her hand. ‘Oh God, it’s so nice to see you, I feel as though I’ve been locked up. You look lovely, Jenny, I like your earrings. How is everything? Coral said to say “Hi” to Ally.’

  ‘Thank you, thanks to Coral.’ Jenny radiates calm and peace. Angel suddenly feels that sitting with her is like sitting in the sun. A waiter hovers, they order coffee and look at one another.

  Angel grins. ‘God, the school holidays are mad, aren’t they? I just hadn’t realised quite how consuming they are before, I suppose I’ve always been working for part of the time.’

  Jenny nods. ‘I know. When Ally was small I used to get up at five every morning to have some time to myself. I think everyone finds some sanctuary somewhere. Yours was probably work.’

  ‘And yours. How is the Art School?’

  ‘Well, it was demented at the end of term, but now I am free until October and the new term, the new intake and the beginning of another year.’

  Their coffee arrives. Angel looks around and sighs. ‘This is so nice,’ she says.

  Jenny smiles too, and says, ‘So, tell me about what’s happening. Steve’s been finishing the barn, driving me crazy because he is so perfectionist, but it’s done, so we have just got to sweep up the rubble and you can come and have supper.’