A Perfect Life

by Raffaella Barker

  Sighing, he looks around the Travel Lodge room. Everything is nicotine-brown, even the telephone next to the bed flashing an intermittent yellow light. There is a maddening broken buzzing sound; sitting up, Nick rubs his head and allows desolation to seep into him. If any conspicuous way to make things worse were to emerge at this moment, Nick would use it. He experiments with fantasy, daring himself along a familiar tightrope; if the brownness of the room was to yield a bag of brown powder, for example, he could take it. If a gun glinted on the window sill, he could use it. What else? Ah yes, if the mini-bar was stocked with alcohol, he could drink it. Oh yes, hallelujah – there is the key. He unlocks it with ease, and the click of the key in the plastic-fronted fridge door awakens a thousand toxic memories and sets his senses on alert. Inside, there is a row of beer cans and the jewel-bright glint of tiny glass bottles of gin, vodka and whisky. With self-destruction on his mind and not much else, Nick grabs a can of beer and pulls the key from it. He raises it to his lips. He is about to gulp it down, thus annihilating for today at least the good that seven years of being clean has done him, when something in him tugs at his willpower. It is, he recognises, his Higher Power, zapping in to save him in the nick of time.

  ‘It works if you work it,’ he mutters to himself, feeling ironic, post-ironic and also hugely relieved. Today he is not meant to relapse.

  ‘What the fuck –’ Nick holds the can away from himself as if it is a viper, and leaps out of bed, staggering sideways into the bathroom, not taking his eyes off the lager can in his hand. Sweating and panting he lifts the lavatory seat and pours the brown liquid away from a height, gazing into the loo pan. It would be a good moment to cry, but instead he pees, thinking the release of any body liquid must be good. It is somewhat worrying to be looking into a lavatory pan and see it frothing with pungent brown. Nick gazes on, unable to move away from this depressing position, and gathering in his mind a thousand ways to feel sorry for himself. They all seem to stem from being surrounded by brown. The obvious thing to do to improve things would be to open the curtains, get dressed and get out of the Travel Lodge. But where shall he go? There is something intrinsically foolish about the position Nick finds himself in. Although he has always tried to cultivate an air of mystery and inaccessibility, by never saying where he is going to be, normally he is going somewhere and he is meant to be somewhere. So wherever he is has a purpose, even the negative one of not being where he is meant to be. Dragging his eyes away from the lavatory pan, he returns to the bedroom and lies down to dissect his options.

  Maybe he should go home. A bubble floats into his head with his house, the Mill Stone, picture-book perfect with the sunlight falling across the red brick, warming it, and some children tumbling pleasingly and in no way damagingly, across his immaculate lawn. The curtains are all shut in his mind, and the only animation is the somersaulting of the children. Then, like the beginning first act of a play, the curtains are swept back and Angel, her arms stretched the full span of the window, is hovering like her namesake, a twisted smile playing on her lips in the drawing room. Nick flinches involuntarily on his brown bed. God, how unbearable. No, he cannot go home. It is out of the question. He could go to the office, of course. Another bubble pops up in his mind, this one full of desks and noticeboards in an open-plan room with ten-foot-tall barn windows. In the corner, partitions separate a smaller room – and in his mind’s eye, Nick enters to find Angel and Nat Rosstein sitting at the large desk, on either side, facing each other, both of them looking as if they are about to rear up and fight. When Nick enters, they glance round but do not move. Nick sighs and continues. No, he cannot go to the office, it is also out of the question.

  In a welter of panic, Nick jumps off the bed and walks around the room, pausing in front of the blank screen of the television. He gazes at it for a while then turns it on. The caring expression of a true-life interviewer appears. The discussion underway is fathers’ rights.

  Oh God. Oh God. Fathers’ rights. Nick has never thought that much about his marriage, or his family, until recently. It all happened to him and Angel, it never felt as though either of them was driving it, it just happened. It was fate. They met. She was fleeing, though she did not realise it at the time. He was looking for something to fill his emptiness. They fell in with one another. Did they fall in love with one another? It is hard to remember, and impossible to know what real feelings he had then as Nick was off his head or drunk most of the time. Not rampagingly drunk, but the habit that formed in California of a beer or two at the restaurant he worked in while preparing lunches, became a beer or two for breakfast that was much improved by a vodka shot and a line or two of cocaine. Purely for flagging energy, not because he needed it. In fact, as a chef, there was no escaping drugs or alcohol, you needed them just to get your exhausted body through the long days and nights in hell’s kitchen. And the heroin he took was the only way to come down and forget. The only way to take time off.

  Being with Angel was such a soft ticket after that. Working for her family business was so relaxing. Nick spent many hours lying on the sofa in the office watching cricket on television, drinking and smoking a bit of heroin – purely recreationally as he told himself. He was waiting for someone to notice, he was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. No one did.

  The soft option turned out to be handcuffs, albeit made of elastic and profitably produced by Fourply. Nick didn’t mind, why would he? They were so comfortable and so seductive. His mother was in Switzerland on a religious retreat, and had no plans to come back. Nick sent her a postcard when he got married, and she sent one back a while later saying she had prayed for him and his bride. Everyone else seemed to think him so lucky it would have been absurd to rail against his new circumstances.

  So the scars from his chef’s knives healed and vanished from his fingers and Nick took up golf as a way of communicating with Angel’s dad Lionel in his last few years of activity. Aged twenty-eight he could easily have chopped off his arms and legs and not felt a thing, so removed from his heart had he become.

  Jem was born and Nick found that he loved him. It was the first sign he had had for some years that he could love. He thought of what Coral’s father had lost in leaving Angel. He did not want to lose that too. He stopped taking drugs and believed he had become a functioning human being, though he still drank vodka with his breakfast. Fathers’ rights. What rights might they be? Who has any rights over any other human being? The notion is absurd. Running his hands through his hair, Nick picks up his keys and walks out of the door of the Travel Lodge room. He has no idea what he is going to do next. He is utterly alone. Reacting without thinking, he punches Jeannie Gildoff’s number into his phone and presses the green button.

  Angel

  There is nowhere for Angel to hide. She feels hunted and fragmented, she really wants a cigarette even though she doesn’t smoke and she is unable to sit down or be still for a moment. If she does sit down, she ought to have a good reason, so she has a telephone like a relay baton in her hands at all times. When it rings she looks surprised, and immediately jumps up and begins marching to and fro again.

  ‘Hello? Who is this? Oh yes – I mean no – Nick isn’t here right now. I’m not sure when he’ll be back –’

  She clicks the off button with an air of finality. Nick will not be back soon. He has gone. The house is full of people. In the kitchen Gosha is sulkily washing up, her back radiating discontent and dysfunction.

  ‘She’s got an eating disorder,’ says Jem, this morning, having watched Gosha eat six pieces of toast and three bowls of Ricicles with cream and sugar on them.

  ‘She eats that amount every two hours or so every single day and she drinks about three cartons of apple juice a day and the only way she changes is the amount of spots she gets on her face.’

  ‘That is so mean.’ Angel stamps past him, sighing heavily. She wanted to stop and sit down in the kitchen, to drink coffee and read the paper by herself, but it simply isn’t worth
it with all those people in there.

  She is dressed – not very attractively – in the electric-blue towelling tracksuit she put on at six-thirty in the morning when she got up, intending to go for a run after giving the children breakfast. This outfit is demoralising, partly because it is a loud blue reminder that she had not gone for a run, and it is now midday and much too hot, and partly because it is supremely unflattering, whether she has been for a run or not.

  Three days have passed since Nick left and the unreality is becoming thicker. So what was a mist soon became a fog, and now a wall of opaque density between Angel and the world. It feels impenetrable. Unimaginable that she could go down to the village shop, buy some milk and announce to all present, ‘Nick and I are getting divorced.’

  The children all know – well, they know something is either happening or not happening and each of them is responding in a uniquely demanding fashion. Foss has found a tin of blackboard paint and has painted the door of the car with it. Now he is watching Jem as he writes ‘FOSS STONE TAXI 7p a ride’ in yellow paint on the newly black door of the silver car. The more Angel laughs, the more furious Ruby becomes.

  ‘Mummy, why do you find that kind of thing funny because it isn’t and it looks really stupid having a car like a taxi which isn’t a taxi and how would you like it if you had to go to school in that and have all your friends give you seven p and I would make it forty-six because then you might get enough to buy an ice lolly and –’

  ‘MUM! If you don’t stop Ruby going on like that I will strangle her and shoot her and I will have a criminal record and never be able to go to America and it will all be YOUR FAULT!’ bellows Jem. He has only ever been angry about three times in his whole life as far as Angel can remember. He is communicating through a loudhailer left over from the fête Angel and Nick hosted in the garden last year, and his booming amplified voice is the only effective competition to his music, turned up to full volume since the morning Nick left.

  Coral has vanished. Like a cat, her sixth sense for crisis took her into hiding two days ago. She isn’t answering her phone, but she has told Jem she is in Cambridge staying with Matt. Angel is too pole-axed to do anything. Indeed, she feels grateful that one of them is away; the remaining three still outnumber and overwhelm her.

  The only way to live through the next nanosecond is for Angel to put down the phone and walk out of the back door and keep walking. Once on the path, she begins to run down the drive, and although the words ‘It’s all your fault’ pound unhelpfully around her in time with her feet, she is away out of the garden gate and up the hill towards the church before any of the children notice.

  Going running creates Angel’s safety net, and within the parameters of running she can exist and know she will not unravel, no matter how far-flung her reality becomes. She is hot now, the tracksuit like a damp towel draped around her legs, heavy, slowing her so her rhythm falters and she gasps for breath. When keeping going gets hard Angel could slow down and walk for a while and then run again, or she could breathe and count. In. Out. One, two, three, four. In. Out. One, two, three, four. And she will get through the struggle and reach the next level. Rather like the children’s PlayStation, she thinks inconsequentially.

  Slowing down and walking, then trying to run again, has never appealed to Angel. To her it seems harder, and is imbued with failure, to stop and start rather than to keep going through and get out on the other side. Just keep going. Just keep going. She has been running for ten minutes, the tightness in her chest is burning to bursting point, expanding out of her lungs and vanishing into her veins in a throb of adrenalin. And at the point where it is impossible to go another step, it changes, she changes, and her warmed muscles stretch and flex, her lungs inflate and sink into a rhythm as she breaks through effort into ease, her body working with her mind so she can float for three miles, probably more. Breathing evenly, Angel inhales warm sunshine suffused with birdsong and the dusty-bronze hot smell of harvested corn. Her legs have taken her automatically on her favourite circuit, and she breathes deeply to start the steep incline to the church on the top of the hill, the different vital muscles on the back plane of her body flaring and contracting to change gear. The flooding serotonin delivers an emerging sense of well-being and hope and the possibility of competence. Angel finds these feelings both comforting and seductive. Being fit is not the main reason for Angel’s running; she runs for the fix, the high, the mood-altering endorphins pumping through her and making her a smoother, more energetic, clear-minded version of herself.

  There was a time when Nick came with her, although he never ran, insisting that he was not built for it, and all the years of smoking would drag him down to the ground and beneath it into oblivion. Whistling and riding with no hands he would accompany her on a bicycle, herding the dog, dragging his feet, pedalling up from behind her and wolf-whistling. There was one autumn evening when she ran round a corner and into a team of ramblers. Nick zoomed past as she was negotiating them and called out, ‘Nice tits and arse you’ve got there, pussy cat.’ Angel started laughing, running faster to push him off the bike, but though he dawdled for her to almost catch him, he had no intention of actually letting her.

  ‘Come on, chase me more,’ he begged, teasing her. Nick used to make her laugh and blush like she did when she was sixteen at school in Ely and was a magnet of attention for the motorbike boys by the bus stop.

  The path ahead narrows, a grassy slope takes Angel down to a shady ride between two swollen cornfields, swaying and whispering in anticipation of harvest. Her awareness shifts to the front of her body now and she breathes and pulls back a little to change the pace for going downhill. Beneath her feet, old tractor tyre ruts mould hard furrows into the dusty earth and although it would be exhilarating to let momentum take her faster and faster, she steadies the tempo and runs on at the same speed, focusing all her balance and energy on not stumbling or falling. The path changes again, becoming smooth and narrow, dark grey and cool, like damp unworked clay, and Angel turns in beneath a canopy of twisted crab apple and willow trees snaking back towards the village. Her breathing is even and strong but her calf muscles ache, her lower back thuds with each pace, and sweat sits like a dead skin waiting to be shed, all over her body. It is hot; Angel is thirsty. Ahead of her the dappled shade is cool and inviting. At the end of the path the road becomes visible. The school caretaker’s cat is lying in a pool of sunshine outside his gate, writhing to massage its back in the warm sand scattered on the road. Angel picks up speed when her feet hit the tarmac, and she runs the final five minutes home faster and faster, her breath pumping out of her and her feet flying. Getting home is a prize, and she stops short the moment she passes the garden gate, bent double, panting, reeling with exhilaration and breathlessness. If nothing else works again today, this alone is a success.

  She opens the door into the kitchen and finds Foss and a tin of black paint occupying the sink together. Gosha is waving the barbecue tongs and saying, ‘Take off the clothes for the bin.’

  ‘No. I like them.’ Foss squats on the draining board, his feet in the sink, and hammers the lid back on to the paint pot. He waves at Angel.

  ‘Mum, can you put this paint back in the garage? I’ll need it again soon. Gosha is really annoying me.’ He glares at the au pair, swatting away the tongs she has near his T-shirt.

  ‘GET OFF!’ he roars. Angel takes the paint tin and puts it outside the back door. She smiles at Gosha. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll get the clothes off him,’ she says, still smiling automatically.

  ‘Come on, Foss, you can come in the shower with me.’

  ‘And my clothes?’ Foss looks defiant.

  Angel looks at him; it means a lot to him. What does it matter to her? ‘Yes. And your clothes.’

  Jem

  There is something wrong with my parents. There is something going on. It doesn’t feel as though anyone is in charge any more. Mum wanders around on the phone all the time. Her hair is bigger than her face by mi
les. I reckon she has got really thin and she should watch out or she’ll end up like one of those scrawny old bags who are too brown and wear loads of jewels and bracelets in Hello! magazine. I think they are usually celebrity mothers – that sort of thing – and they all live in Miami. Anyway. What is good, though, is that going nuts has made Mum very generous. This morning she gave me forty quid to go and buy some food for a picnic and she said I could keep the change. So I am on the way back from the shop now. I had to walk because my bike has two punctures, and actually I wanted it to take longer because I can’t stand being in the house with the little ones all the time. Mum doesn’t even ask me if it’s all right for me to look after them, she just treats me like another babysitter. I think she forgets that Gosha is here and works for her. Gosha just goes and sits in front of the TV all day. Yesterday she ate two buckets of raspberry ripple ice cream. I really mean buckets as well. They are on offer in the Spar and the ice cream must be made of pig slurry or something, because they only cost one ninety-nine for the most enormous bucket, big enough to turn upside down and make into chairs. Ruby’s got one for her dolls to sit on outside the kitchen door this morning, and four dolls fit on it, no trouble. Anyway, whatever. Gosha managed to eat two whole bucketfuls yesterday. God knows where she was sick, or even if she was sick, but I reckon she must have been. Actually, I reckon she’s bulimic because nobody could eat what she does and stay a reasonable size and she is quite small.