A Perfect Life

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘But Mum, we’ve been looking for an hour and we don’t know how long he was gone before that.’

  Ruby is a curve of dejection sitting on a plastic box by the creek. ‘I prayed to St Anthony so hard. I even told him Dad would do a credit card thing when we get home. Mummy, I’m hungry, and I want to go home. I want Foss and I want to go home. Please.’

  She begins to sob huge heart-wrenched gulps. Angel put her arms around her and Ruby is spindly and fragile like a bird.

  ‘I think you’re right, Jem, we had better call some help.’ Almost gagging, Angel holds tighter on to Ruby. This cannot be happening, it just can’t. But it is.

  ‘OK.’ All emotion leaves Jem’s face, and he lights a cigarette as he waits for his call to be answered. Watching him, with the flashing sunlight behind him making her squint, Angel notices that he is different. The square of his shoulder hunched as he smokes and talks, is an echo of Nick long ago.

  Nick

  When does an encounter become a fling, a fling an affair, an affair a relationship? When Nick called Jeannie Gildoff this morning and asked her to meet him for lunch here at the motel, were his motives the same as they are now? Over the years they have had the occasional shag. Usually in London, when Jeannie is shopping or getting her hair done and Nick is on his way somewhere. They meet to fuck, and both of them have known that is as far as it goes. Or it always has been. This, though, could be different. For a start they are not in London, they are in the bedroom Nick is living in while his marriage shifts and cracks, perhaps irrevocably. And all the occasional shags add up in the end to something more. Or they don’t. Jeannie is neat when she walks into his room; a mint-green handbag swings on her arm, she is wearing a red dress, her hair is flicked up at the ends. She smiles nervously, Nick takes in narrow ankles, black soft leather moccasin shoes and a cardigan swinging on her shoulders. Today she reminds him of someone, and as he kisses her cheek he remembers who it is.

  ‘You look like Olivia Newton John in Grease,’ he volunteers. ‘Before she was corrupted.’ Instead of stepping away from her, he moves closer, holds her waist and kisses her mouth. She tastes of coffee and biscuits.

  ‘Seems pretty appropriate,’ she replies when they stop kissing, and moves back, sliding her cardigan off. Her bare arms are brown and slim. No one has been in this room with Nick before; her presence is exciting, her whole posture, straight and supple, indicates strength and he always finds her cool exterior erotic.

  ‘OK, Nick, what’s going on? Did you get Peter’s message about tennis this afternoon?’

  ‘Yeah, I asked Coral to be my partner. I’d like to play you, Jeannie.’ Nick slouches against the wall, looking at her, giving nothing away because he doesn’t know what he is thinking himself.

  ‘What do you actually want from me?’ A sweep of black liner on Jeannie’s eyelids contributes to Nick’s sense that she is from another age. He wonders if she is wearing one of those satin all-in-one underthings called a kitten or a teddy or some such small cuddly name. He is not certain he wants her enough to go through with this today. The potential for complication is huge. And today of all days, when he has said he is going home to discuss whether or not he is really splitting up with Angel. He is unable to deal with reality right now; he knows that is why he called Jeannie. What he wants from her is oblivion.

  Jeannie walks over to the window, tapping her fingers against her still-folded arms. She has freckles on her throat and the curve of her lower back flows into her rounded high arse. Oh, what the hell. He moves behind her, splaying his hands on her hips, sliding them round over her dress on to the flat of her stomach. She sighs, he whispers into her neck, ‘Sex would be nice,’ as she arches her head back and pulls in her stomach. He moves his hand further down, pulls up her skirt along her thigh and reaches between her legs. She has no knickers on.

  ‘Sex would be fine,’ she whispers back as his fingers slide up inside her. He is still behind her, his erection pressing against her. He unzips his trousers and groans; the fabric of her dress is cool and sensuous against his skin. She tries to turn round in his arms, but he wants her from behind.

  ‘Stay there, I’m going to make you come,’ he breathes, biting her shoulder, one hand still moving, rubbing her between her legs, the other on her breast, stroking her through the thin fabric of the dress. No bra either. This is fantastic, just fantastic. Jeannie is trembling; he runs his tongue along her jaw, she bites her lip and groans, rears her arse towards him. He pushes her forward so her arms rest on the window sill and light falls in stripes through the blinds. Nick lifts the skirt of her dress up, closes his eyes and pulls her on to him, both hands on her waist, as he slams his cock deep inside her and holds her on him as she comes. She wriggles, gasping, and he fucks her, his rhythm fast, the sensation of her climax pulsing against him exciting, bringing him to sudden, intense orgasm.

  * * *

  Six missed calls from Jem’s phone to his make Nick feel hunted and guilty when he picks up the messages after a game of tennis with Coral. Since this morning, when he had to listen to a message recording an argument between Foss and Ruby over a pair of swimming goggles, he has dodged family calls. They are at the beach with Angel, he will see them later, and he will deal with them then. Not now. Jeannie and Peter cancelled in the end. Jeannie, brisk and to the point, called an hour after she left the motel and said, ‘I don’t want to play tennis with you today, so I told Peter we’d take a rain check. See you around, Nick.’ Nick was intensely relieved. He likes risk, but a game of tennis with a woman whose smell is still on him and her husband, is to Nick’s mind more or less perverted. Anyway, he doesn’t know what his next move is with Jeannie, though she is a great lay. In the end, he plays singles with Coral. He thrashes her. He is feeling great, pumped full of testosterone, sex and success as they walk home from the village court.

  He will talk to Angel; maybe there is a chance that they will iron out the problems and he will have his life back. Extra-marital sex? Well, maybe he will stop that. It might be enough to take Angel to a few new places and seduce her. The motel room would be a good place to start. Lost in thought, he is surprised to be home already when they walk in through the gate. Coral turns to face him, a challenge glinting in her eye.

  ‘Nick, I’ve decided I’m telling Jem and the others that you’re not my dad. It’s not up to you and Mum, it’s up to me, and I’m going to tell them today.’

  Nick’s instant thought is, Bloody typical of Coral to muscle in and take over as the big story of the day, and his next thought, hard on the heels of that one, is, Good, that will take the limelight off me and Angel.

  ‘If that’s what you want to do, you have every right to do it,’ he says to her. ‘But just out of interest, why now?’

  Coral blinks, and waits, shifting uncertainly, twirling her tennis racquet. She looks at him, measuring him up for a moment.

  ‘I have had enough of the lies in this family,’ she says, flouncing up the drive, making it clear the conversation is over.

  Nick finally listens to the last of Jem’s messages, the first to beep into his phone, at about five in the evening. Foss has been missing for two hours, but Nick is unaware of this and unable to detect the level of anxiety in Jem’s brief words.

  ‘Dad, we’ve lost Foss. We need you to come now.’

  Another bloody mini-drama like Coral’s. Not that Coral doesn’t have a point, but why now? There have been eighteen years available for this. Dismissing her from his thoughts for the time being, and Jem for that matter, Nick decides to have a shower. He does not listen to the previous five messages.

  As it turns out, it is the best thing he could possibly do. By the time he has shaved and changed, and is just walking out of the house to his car, Angel and the children are back. They look terrible. Foss and Ruby are crying, Jem is white and silent, Angel gets out of the car without even turning the engine off and lifts Foss out of the back.

  ‘What on earth has happened?’ Nick doesn’t know who
he is asking; his heart is thudding, all of them are here, no one is bleeding, but a lot is wrong.

  ‘What happened to Foss?’

  Angel looks at him and says shortly, ‘Can we take him in first?’

  Foss is black from head to toe, though tears have cleaned small white paths on his face. Nick slowly begins to realise that the drama was real. He feels equal measures of sympathy for Angel and inadequacy in himself. He should have known. Poor Angel. Christ, if only he had known.

  ‘I’m going to give him a bath and put him to bed.’ Angel’s voice is tired and soft. To Nick, it burns like a brand on his conscience and the pain makes him angry. He tries to open the doors into the house for her, but she has done it already, kicking hard with her bare foot, and she starts up the stairs, murmuring to Foss, kissing his mud-caked hair.

  Nick goes back out to the car, unease creeping closer, making his skin crawl.

  ‘What’s happening?’ he says again. He can hear Coral upstairs with Angel; her voice floats out of the bedroom window.

  ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘Oh Mum.’

  Ruby doesn’t run to Nick like she usually does when he has been away; she remains in her car seat, uncharacteristically wearing her seat belt, with tears coursing down her face. Jem gets out and slams his door, raising pink-rimmed eyes to meet Nick’s for a second. Nick tries to win a smile.

  ‘Whatever has happened to you lot? You look like you’ve been to war. I’m not even getting a look in!’

  Jem glares, but his voice does not match the anger in his eyes; it is flat and wiped out like Angel’s.

  ‘We lost Foss. We looked everywhere and we didn’t know he had fallen in the sinking mud. A man digging bait found him. We thought he was dead when they got him out. He had to have the kiss of life, but the ambulance says he’s fine now. I had to cancel the coastguards.’

  He stops and walks past Nick, then turns back to him. ‘Why didn’t you call me, Dad?’ The break in Jem’s voice freezes Nick.

  Cooking pasta, not the spare ribs Angel had prepared, Nick strains his ears to hear where everyone is. In fact, he knows. They are all in the bedroom with Angel. Actually, they are all in the bed, and Foss, like some Renaissance cherub, is propped in the middle, swathed in pashmina shawls and being stroked by his siblings. Nick knows this because he has been in attendance with a tray. It was Coral’s idea to make hot milk and honey, and Ruby’s addition was blackberries.

  ‘It’s like in Peter Rabbit after he was in Mr McGregor’s garden. They are good for shock,’ she explained, running upstairs with a bowlful. Nick feels that blackberries being ripe already as it is still only bloody August, is pretty shocking in itself, but no one is in a mood for jokes, and he isn’t really either, though he has always enjoyed guillotine humour. Or is it gallows? Maybe both were used. He must look it up some time.

  So this is it. Funnily enough, Foss’s drama has changed everything in an unexpected direction. When he got home today, Nick thought that he wanted to plead with Angel, he wanted to create a chance to try and make it all work again. He was under some sort of illusion that they were still good together. But now, alone in the kitchen with Angel and all the children upstairs, he is defeated, lonely, and to be brutally honest, not especially interested. Why should he be? Angel has made it very apparent that she doesn’t need him any more. Time to be realistic here. And it doesn’t much matter now when it is that they talk about it; the details are unimportant.

  With this thought he pours the pasta from the colander into a bowl containing cream and grated cheese and yells up the stairs, ‘Come and get the Last Supper!’

  They are all too far gone on shock to notice that Nick was not up to the challenge of spare ribs and he still cannot resist gallows humour.

  Jem

  I can’t believe it. After all the drama of today, not to mention letting me down for about a week and behaving like a total jerk, Dad has now been to play tennis with Coral so he’s not playing with me tonight. I am sick of being the most invisible member of this family – no, actually I am sick of being a member of this family, full stop.

  Mum and the little ones are having a baby bunny nesting party in Mum’s bed, and I hung out with them for a while, but there is only so much of the Mary Poppins film I can bear. Coral is being all whispery and twitchy and Dad’s having a born-again house-husband moment in the kitchen.

  I wish I could get out of here. I can’t even get out of my head, because I’ve lost the bit of dope Coral got me and she is way too grumpy for me to ask for more. I would probably be back in Mum’s room watching Mary Poppins if I hadn’t remembered the spray paint.

  * * *

  Shit. If I had known what was going to happen there is no fucking way I would have sprayed even one letter of graffiti on my bedroom wall. But I didn’t know. I was like one of those lambs to the slaughter they have in the Bible or Aesop’s Fables when Coral came into my bedroom. I was about to listen to ‘All along the Watch Tower’, so as well as everything else, one of my favourite songs has been ruined for ever now.

  ‘Jem, I’ve got something I want to tell you – oh my God, what are you doing? Mum will kill you!’ She is all angles in my room, and she is looking angry.

  ‘Why? It’s my room, I can do what I want.’ I don’t like Coral criticising me, and the graffiti looks good. I’ve only written ‘Dub’ and ‘vole’ as a kind of practice, and then I was going to do some lyrics. She sits on the bed, and Mum comes in too, holding Ruby’s hand. Ruby is all clean now, pink and soft in her pyjamas with clean hair.

  ‘Supper’s ready.’ Dad appears too, finishing off the audience, and my room is suddenly small and cramped. It stinks of paint.

  Jimi Hendrix begins singing, ‘There must be some kind of way out of here.’

  If only.

  Coral says, ‘Good, now everyone’s here. Jem, you need to know something. Nick is not my dad.’ And she folds shut her mouth and clenches her fists as if she is about to be tortured.

  ‘I am sorry, darling, we should have told you a long time ago.’ Mum hugs me, and her soft arms flop against the stone pillar I have become.

  ‘He IS my dad,’ says Ruby, never one to be left out. And she scuttles over to Dad. He has his hunted expression on. I never thought he would look like that over something to do with me.

  For some reason I ask what is in my head. ‘Are you my dad?’ and Mum bursts into tears, as does Coral.

  Dad nods. ‘I think you should all come downstairs and we can have supper and talk,’ he says. This is when I feel like a slaughtered lamb. We all follow Dad down to the kitchen and sit round the table.

  ‘Where’s Foss?’ is my next ludicrous utterance. I have no idea what is going to pop out of my mouth, and my whole body feels as though it is moving through cotton wool. No, make that mud. Like the mud Foss was stuck in today.

  ‘He’s fast asleep,’ says Mum in her soothing voice – and her tone is about as inappropriate as a sledgehammer at a fairy tea party of Ruby’s.

  ‘Shall I explain to Jem and Ruby?’ Coral is calm now. Mum and Dad are cowering at the table, but they don’t look at one another once. Ruby seems to have taken the news in her stride and is twirling spaghetti on her fork.

  Mum just nods, and pushes her pasta away. Dad sighs, and shovels his into his mouth.

  Coral reaches out and puts her hand on mine. ‘When Mum and Nick met, Mum was pregnant from her old boyfriend Ranim. He lives in India and though Mum really loved him, she couldn’t find him to tell him about me existing. Nick came along and rescued Mum from being a single mother.’

  So Coral is some sort of fairy-tale heroine. Neither Mum nor Dad says a word. None of it is great, but the worst thing is that they all kept this secret from me. Rage, like a red mist heating my brain, begins to swell. I get up from the table and slam out of the door. On the other side I kick it and yell, ‘Why didn’t you tell me? What else is there that I have not been told?’

  I kick the door again and Dad scrapes his chair back, shouting,
‘Cut it out, Jem. You are way out of order.’

  ‘Fuck you, Dad.’ Even through my anger I am quite shocked to hear myself say that, but I can’t help it. They should have told me.

  Angel

  It is his back view. Nick in the grocery shop in town. Angel saw his car when she was parking, so she knew he was there, but buying groceries was never an occupation she would have imagined Nick engaged in, especially now he has been living at the Travel Lodge for three weeks. He is at the checkout, and even though it is only twenty odd days since she last saw him, he looks different. His hair is lank, and his shoulders rounded. He is wearing a grey patterned jumper, a middle-aged man’s golfing sweater, the sort of thing her father used to wear. Angel taps him on the back, having fixed a smile ready on her face. Nick turns and the sweater is tight on the swell of his tummy, a swell new to him like a pregnancy and echoed like a pregnancy in his jowls and on his cheeks. An extra layer of Nick. There was definitely enough of him already, Angel thinks spitefully. She gasps, realising she is shocked, groping for a proper reaction to unexpectedly bumping into her husband when she has broken up with him. Nothing adequate springs into her mind, just a sliver of meanness, a small shaft of anger that he has stepped into her consciousness when she was not expecting him.

  ‘Hi, Angel.’ Nick blinks, stepping back to look her up and down. Aware of this familiar routine, Angel shrinks inside; she had seen him do this so many times and now she is another woman for him to look at.

  ‘You look well,’ he says, his demeanour rueful.

  ‘Thanks.’ The silence needs to be filled, and Angel is smarting from the pain this encounter is bringing. Determined not to allow anger to erupt, and wanting to protect herself, Angel retreats behind a wall of breezy civility, treating him as though he is a passing acquaintance. She smiles brightly, and says, ‘It’s very nice to see you, but I’ve got to go and buy some mousetraps.’ She hears herself and has to shut her eyes for a second to regain sense; it may be self-protection, but this is going nowhere and she wants to laugh to break the tension. Nick looks nonplussed, as well he might, Angel thinks. He turns back to the waiting cashier. The shop is about to close, so will the hardware shop across the road. It is true that Angel does not want to miss the mousetraps. And she is flailing for things to say to Nick; ironic and yet it sort of makes sense that with the whole of their life together behind them, it is hard to pick a topic to start with. Impossible, in fact. Angel feels unequal to the challenge.