A Perfect Life

by Raffaella Barker

  A quick coat of lime wash over the barn would give it a real lift and the whole thing could look like the Buddha Bar if they got that sea grass matting up from the cellar and put it down with a few beanbags and candles floating in a bowl or something. The familiar reflex of managing and perfecting kicks is like a buzz of adrenaline. Angel is hooked immediately; all that needs to be done is for someone to make a start, and who better than she? Coral and her friends can take over when they get up.

  Angel makes her way out into the yard. It is a softly beautiful day; the damson tree droops with purple fruit, their dusty lustre like cabochon garnets, Angel’s favourite stone. She pauses to look across the fields and the smell of autumn in the air fills her with a sense of aching loss. Blue smoke drifts from a bonfire, and otherwise everything is still, basking in gentle autumn sunlight. Reaching to unbolt the barn door Angel forces herself to remain focused on her plan. Doing something always makes her feel better. She just needs to get on with it. So it is surprising to hear a clear voice inside her shout ‘STOP!’

  ‘Why?’ Angel wonders, ready to dismiss the voice. Being busy, and making things perfect, is so reassuring, so familiar, so soothing. It’s like staying in a bath that is no longer hot enough – if she keeps all of herself submerged and tries not to create any movement on the surface, it is fine, but any unusual action which might bring her into contact with the world above the water will be uncomfortable and dreadfully cold. This is how she feels about being organised. Suddenly she is just too tired. None of it matters. Coral can do what she likes for her party, or she can do nothing, it is all the same to Angel. The thought of spending the afternoon scrubbing a barn for a bunch of teenagers is absurd, a mind-blowingly unnecessary and unrewarding project. But what can she do instead? How about nothing? There are a thousand things that need doing. Angel finds herself walking past them all, past the kitchen where Coral, Mel and another tangle-haired girl are coughing and shuffling food from the fridge to the table, their faces pasty with mascara rubbed beneath their eyes. Angel glances in, but backs out again. Her sympathy is roused by the skimpy neediness of their bodies in T-shirts and baggy pyjama bottoms, but it is subdued again by her own tiredness. And suddenly she is in bed, with the curtains drawn, sinking in, but so empty she can imagine evaporating and not being there in the bed when she wakes up and looks for herself. An out-of-body experience is how Jem would see it if she told him.

  ‘Hey, Mum, I’ve got you a cup of tea.’ Jem wakes her, a bit like a ministering angel, but only because he is wearing a white gown. It turns out to be a boxer’s satin dressing gown Angel has never seen before. Switching the bedside light on creates a well of warmth in the lilac shadows. It is late.

  ‘Are Foss and Ruby back?’

  ‘Yes. Foss is green.’

  Angel sips her tea. Jem sits down on the bed. His face has changed since the end of the summer, and features that were too big then, like his jaw and his ears, are now in proportion again. He is balanced between childhood and being a man. Not realising she is smiling fondly, Angel stares at him over her cup.

  ‘Why is he green?’ she asks.

  ‘Oh, he wanted to be an alien or a frog or something at the party they went to. He says he’s not going to bed, by the way, and he’s gone to help light the bonfire. Coral’s friends are all coming in about half an hour. Can you stop looking at me like that, Mum.’

  ‘Sorry, I was just thinking.’ Angel rubs her eyes, then jumps. ‘Oh my God. What time is it? We haven’t done anything! I can’t believe you let me sleep so long.’

  Angel slops her tea on the bedside table and throws off her duvet. Jem throws it back on.

  ‘Mum, chill out. It’s all done. Matt’s here. He got back an hour ago, and Mel has brought the drink and they’re setting up a tequila bar. Ruby’s dressed up as a belly dancer, and I wanted to know if you thought I should wear this?’

  Angel looks at him again. He stands up and turns around. She gets out of bed and switches the overhead light on. Jem fills a lot of the space in her room.

  She hugs him. ‘You look great,’ she says.

  Jem hugs her back. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ he says, and digging into his pocket, he takes a cigarette out and flips it from his hand up into his mouth. He grins at her, a measuring expression on his face, and says, ‘By the way, your boyfriend Jake called.’

  Angel raises her eyebrows. Jem raises his back.

  ‘Yes, Mum?’ he says politely.

  ‘He is not my boyfriend,’ says Angel, throwing a pillow at him. ‘We are friends. That’s all.’

  ‘Whatever,’ says Jem and, grinning, walks out of the room.

  So now she knows what he has been thinking. Angel sits down on the bed again. Jem has presented her with the memory of an encounter she had not thought of for years. It must be the dressing gown, or maybe the heart-breaking hope that is youth. Or maybe it was the mention of Jake and the possibility attached to him. Twenty years ago, when Angel was at art school, about to finish her degree, and she went to an election-night party. It was the only time in the whole of her adult life that Angel had shown an interest in politics, and even then her interest was purely a reaction against her father, who had six months earlier given a large amount of money to the Conservative Party to coincide with his inclusion on the New Year’s Honours List. She could not even remember who was standing for Prime Minister. Anyway, it didn’t matter. What mattered was the boy. A beautiful boy.

  Now, lying back down on her bed and closing her eyes to focus her mind, she cannot remember his name. But he had sexy, sleepy eyes and he was wearing a white dressing gown over his clothes. At the party they leant on a window sill together and looked out at swans floating past on the river beneath the derelict shoe factory next to the art school, and they talked about belief. Angel must have been drunk, because she often was then, but despite this she could remember what happened. She could see him by her side as they walked along the river towards the house she shared, and his dressing gown gleamed in the street like the swans had gleamed in the water half an hour before.

  At the door of her bedroom, a chance remark by Angel brought them to the election, and by the time they were inside the door, he was defending the Conservatives and sounding just like her father when he said, ‘And there will come a time when you will change.’

  But he was beautiful, tall and lean and she wanted him. Inside her room, he asked her what she had voted.

  ‘I didn’t get round to it,’ she replied, reaching up to take off his dressing gown.

  ‘You didn’t? Think of the suffragettes who died so that you could have the vote.’ He took off her shirt and pulled down her bra so it fell like a lace belt around her waist and he licked her right across both nipples then picked her up in his arms. She kissed him back, wanting him and pushing him away at once. He put her down close to the bed.

  ‘It’s my business and my choice,’ she said, but maybe he didn’t hear because he was taking off his shirt over his head then folding his strong arms around her. Too tight. Her breasts hurt, pressed hard against him, but it was exciting, too. She struggled, he held her tighter. His eyes mocked her. He bent and kissed her hard, and bit her lip gently.

  ‘Doesn’t sound like choice, it sounds like apathy to me.’ He kissed her breasts again, and he bit her nipple this time. She gasped, throbbing everywhere, wanting and not wanting pain and pleasure from him. His mouth was on hers, and his hand on her breast massaging softly where he had bitten.

  ‘I don’t like you,’ she said, and pushed back out of his arms. He laughed and pulled her back towards him. She was curious and afraid. Her body wanted him; his hand moved down between her legs and she squirmed away, avoiding showing him how turned on she was. The conflict was arousing her more; she ran her hands down his stomach and pushed her fingers down inside his jeans. He took them off, and pulled her skirt up like a fan around her. They lay together on the bed; he moved on top of her, pushing her arms flat on the pillow behind her head. She looked at his face, an
d all his beauty was just bits of flesh bolted together, and his eyes were flint-cold, oily with desire, and they flickered across her like a snake’s tongue. And she realised that she was probably looking at him in just the same way. She wanted him. She didn’t like him. She had never fucked someone she didn’t like before. It turned her on.

  It is funny now, twenty years later, but she remembers how powerful she felt when he came. It was her only one-night stand, and it was great sex with a man she never wanted to hear from again. In fact, this is the first time she has so much as thought of him in years.

  She gets up and goes downstairs. In the hall it is difficult to navigate the lower stairs as a bank of beanbags and cushions block the way. A small green goblin and a mysterious belly dancer with a purple veil are dragging them out through the kitchen to the barn, where music pulses fast and erotic in the gathering dusk.

  Excitement catches in Angel’s throat. Even though she is under strict instructions to stay at the other end of the house and not talk to anyone, a party is a party, and Coral has pulled out all the stops.

  ‘Hey, Mum, what do you think?’ A cloud of citrus perfume, and the sugared smell of cosmetics mingled with tobacco, envelop Coral and Mel. They are both sparkly-eyed and with their skin gleaming, anticipation in their pouts and their laughter, and even the provocative way they blow a kiss to extinguish the candle guttering by the barn door. They prop themselves in the doorway and light cigarettes, looking out, chattering to one another, their eye make-up flashing kingfisher-blue above smooth cheeks. Anticipation and sex, promise and risk hang in the air, heady and exciting, intoxicating as champagne. Angel folds her arms then unfolds them and enters the barn. Wisps of sleep hang around her, and she feels clumsy and slow. The beams twinkle with fairy lights, the space smells of sea and flowers, and someone has artfully heaped cushions on a velvet bed in one corner.

  No words come to mind for Angel, just a sense of relief that she hasn’t had to do anything, and a proud welling of recognition that Coral can make things nice herself. She wishes Coral’s father could appear – probably, she thinks dryly, on a cloud of mind-altering drugs, but it would be satisfying to share with him the celebration of their daughter becoming an adult. Angel finds it odd to think of Ranim now with no heightened feeling. He would be middle-aged, late middle-aged, and he has missed out on knowing Coral. The sadness Angel feels in this thought is for Coral, not for him.

  Having dreaded this rite-of-passage moment ever since Coral embarked on adolescence, Angel now finds herself accepting it easily. Maybe the morphine of tiredness is colouring her reaction, or maybe recognising this change is making her tired, Angel isn’t sure which. She sits on the purple velvet bed and looks up at the sparkling stars Coral has hung from the beams. She is not responsible and it’s a good new feeling. This is Coral’s evening and Angel does not need to do anything to make it happen or to make it a success.

  Jem

  Waiting outside the headmaster’s rooms for another sodding lecture is just so pointless. I don’t know why they bother. Mum doesn’t care if I smoke, Dad smokes and he used to jack up heroin every day, so what does it matter if I go and smoke a roll-up on the River Fields? It’s not illegal. I am sixteen. I’ll soon be seventeen. I don’t want to be here anyway. It was all right getting back here after the summer. In fact, it was good to be away from everything at home. I didn’t have to think about Mum and Dad at all. But now I miss home, even though it’s weird there.

  School is run by a bunch of losers. I mean, who cares if you walk on the grass or don’t do up your shoelaces? And the new kids are so tedious and they’ve got over that silent and polite bit when they first arrive, and now they are all acting like they are auditioning for Just William. Someone told them about speech day and how these guys took a car to bits and took it up the octagon tower of the cathedral and reassembled it there and now they never stop taking things to bits. It is so random.

  ‘Ah, Jem, come in, please.’ Mr Manson – named after a serious killer, according to Dad – pokes his head out of his door. I hadn’t noticed before how tall he is, but his head appears round the door miles above where I was expecting to see it. In the room he waves me to sit on the sofa, where I know from past experience that if you throw yourself into it, you more or less vanish. It is so deep your feet don’t touch the floor, which is a disadvantaged position to be in. This time I just sit down perched on the edge.

  ‘I am sorry to see you again, Jem.’

  Jesus. What kind of life is this? I mean, do I need to be called into rooms by people just to be told they don’t want to see me?

  ‘I’m sure you are, sir,’ I say, as a silence yawns between us. There is no way I am going to look at him, though his small eyes are fixed on me the whole time. I find a carved bunch of grapes on the fire surround and look at that. Mr Manson’s swivel chair is to the right of the fireplace. He moves in it and it creaks. From the corner of my eye I notice that the arm rests are engulfed by his massiveness, and the stand with its little wheels looks way too small. It will tip up soon, I hope.

  ‘Your parents have written back to me in response to the last letter I sent about your smoking. I dare say you have spoken to them?’

  Have I? Why did they write to him? I don’t think anyone mentioned that they were writing to him. Mind you, I hardly ever speak to them anyway any more. Dad’s been away for so long that I wonder if he’s really in jail, not in America at all, and Mum can’t be bothered because she’s too busy getting divorced and talking on the phone to her friends. And probably getting together with Jake, though I asked her at Coral’s party when I was pissed and she said she was just friends with him and we had nothing to worry about or some crap like that. Anyway, she isn’t so busy she hasn’t got time to interfere right now. Manson is looking at me just like I imagine his serial-killer relation looked at his victims.

  ‘I shall read it to you,’ he says.

  ‘Good,’ is all I can think of to say. He gives me a filthy glare – more hostile than murderous – and he reads:

  Mr Manson, I was surprised and disappointed to receive your letter concerning Jem and his inability to follow the school rules. I feel Jem has huge integrity and that given the right support, he will do well in the rest of his school career. If you decide to ask him to leave, you will be doing him a great disservice.

  I can’t believe Mum has done this. For a moment I wonder if Manson made it up, but, weirdly, he is frowning too. I would have thought he would be pleased to get Mum backing him up like this. She has betrayed me. I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, look at the other things she’s done without telling me. I feel like all my escape routes have been blocked and I am stuck in childhood with stupid rules for the rest of my life.

  My next thought is maybe she is on my side in some coded way, but that, too, has to be banished when Manson folds up the letter and presses his fingers together. It would be too much to say that he looks triumphant, but let’s say he certainly does not have the air of someone who has just been warned off by a kid’s parents. And that’s the other thing. Has Mum told the school that she and Dad are getting divorced? I wonder why I hadn’t thought about it before. But if she has, they will all be expecting me to crack up, so I may as well get on with it. God, why does everyone expect so much of me? I just want to get on with my life and my mistakes. I wonder where Dad is?

  Nick

  Driving is good. Ruby up in front next to him, Foss in the back. Straight to Woolworth’s to get one of those DVD players that go in the car, and a stack of films featuring slugs and molluscs. That sorts Foss out; Ruby is different. And the way she is different is that she is like Angel. Guiltily, Nick tunes back in to her monologue; he has not been listening since they left Woolworth’s. He has been thinking about Angel’s back, her lower back – a part of her body she has never seen. A part of her body he always felt had been created to have his hand placed upon it. This morning she bent to pick up Foss and kiss him goodbye and when she lifted him into the car h
er T-shirt rose halfway up her back and he wanted to touch her there more than he had wanted to for years. Why is that? Why want her now? She is unavailable. What is the fucking point?

  ‘DADDY! LISTEN. I AM TALKING TO YOU!’ Ruby waves her pale blue cap in his face, calling him to attention.

  ‘Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, Ruby?’

  ‘You know Tom, don’t you?’

  ‘Uh.’

  She has her large grey eyes fixed unblinkingly on his profile. He has no idea who or what she is talking about. There are no references in that sentence, no clues. Maybe Tom is the man who now puts his hand on the small of Angel’s back and pulls her towards him –

  ‘Anyway, Tom sits next to Michael and he’s got dark hair. It’s darker than fairy hair usually is – he had the cat’s brain, remember?’

  Christ. Doesn’t sound Angel’s type, unless she’s gone very Aleister Crowley, but maybe Ruby’s talking about a horror film.

  ‘Cat’s brain?’

  Ruby nods, distracted. ‘Yes, but they’re not real. You know Mrs Peel, she’s the one you asked about my piano music?’

  Nick spots the clue – this is school she is talking about, not a film. ‘Oh yes,’ he says untruthfully.

  ‘Well.’ Ruby crosses her legs, brushing her skirt smooth and the gesture is so familiar to Nick as the way Angel punctuates conversation, that it is hard to believe this is not her beside him in the car. He pulls himself together, making an effort to bring his mind back to Ruby here and now. There is no more Angel in his car. That is finished. Ruby chatters on.

  ‘Mrs Peel is Tom’s mother – did you take me to school the day when he had cat’s intestines or was it Mummy?’