A Perfect Life

by Raffaella Barker

  ‘Cat’s intestines?’ What sort of school is it that she and Foss go to? As far as Nick can remember it used to be quite normal, so what’s with all the foulness?

  ‘Yes, he had them in the classroom one day. I really like Tom Peel, you know, Daddy. The cat’s intestines weren’t real.’

  ‘Oh. Good. What were they for, then?’

  ‘Oh science, I suppose. Actually, I think the day you took me he had a huge snail. Do you remember? But it wasn’t real.’

  It wasn’t real. What is real? Nick wonders, and what the fuck is he going to do with Ruby and Foss? It is Saturday morning, ten-thirty. They have already spent a couple of hundred quid in Woolworth’s, it’s raining, and Angel is not expecting them back until Sunday night. They think he knows what he is doing; worse still, they trust him to know what he is doing, and he has no idea. Indicating out into the traffic on the main road, Nick pauses as a lorry swishes by. He pulls out behind it; the wipers clean an arc like a curtain, pulling back over and over, rhythmic and repetitive.

  ‘Anyway, Tom Peel has got freckles and he had to wear a hair slide and pretend to be a girl in our drama lesson because he was being Achilles when he’s on the island of Skyros and he is hidden among the maidens and then he can’t resist catching the ball they throw.’ Ruby giggles at the thought. Nick glances across at her and can’t help laughing too. God, she is cute. He feels he has made a terrible mistake until now. He has not noticed the full extent of Ruby’s adorableness. He needs to catch up.

  Suddenly he knows what they should do.

  ‘Let’s go to the Larkham lighthouse. Maybe we can stay the night there. I’m sure someone told me it’s a bed and breakfast.’

  Ruby is dubious. ‘But it’s raining. Do they work when it’s raining? I think it’s a waste of money to have them on when it’s raining. And is it expensive to go to bed and breakfast? Tom Peel went in a taxi to his dad’s house in London and it cost one hundred and forty-five pounds and his dad paid it himself, well, I think—’

  Foss interrupts with elliptical assurance from the back. ‘No, they are meant for rain because storms are when they get wrecked. Ships get wrecked in storms, don’t they, Dad?’

  ‘Mmm.’ Nick shoots the car into a garage forecourt. ‘Go and buy some sweets,’ he says, giving Ruby a fiver. ‘I’ll wait here.’

  Ruby is gleeful. ‘Five pounds. Yippee! Shall I give you change, Daddy? Or is it two pounds fifty each? I think Foss is a bit young for that many sweets, you know.’

  Ruby jumps out of the car and opens the back door for Foss. He climbs out and puts his hand in hers and they walk into the garage. Nick bangs his fist on the steering wheel and grits his teeth, pinching the bridge of his nose. He shuts his eyes and sadness like a blade pierces him. Just now he cannot remember why this has happened. What is he doing on a rainy Saturday with Foss and Ruby and no Angel? He cannot feel any faith in his ability to function, to be with the children, to survive the next twenty-four hours. It’s just too lonely. He bangs his fist on the steering wheel again and reaches for his phone. He doesn’t have anyone to call, but using it is one of his pain-masking reflexes. He turns it on; it beeps a message.

  ‘Hey there, Nick, it’s Carrie from Holder and Casey in New York. It’s kind of early here, but I didn’t get a chance to call you yesterday, and I thought you would want to know as soon as possible that all the paperwork you signed last week is in place now and the deal is through. Your keys are here. Congratulations.’

  Carrie. Honey-blonde hair and red knickers. A lovely afternoon a while back. He hadn’t seen her when he was signing, a thin man had dealt with him, but it was nice to hear her voice. Nice but not the answer. None of it is the answer. Nick turns off his phone again and finds he is crying. He puts his head on the steering wheel and does not try to fight it.

  Angel

  Rain. Closing all the open windows, running around the house to pull them shut, Angel enters empty room after empty room. How strange to be in the house for a whole weekend with no one here. There are so many things to do and now she can get cracking. The first place to tackle is her study, where the filing needs a good two hours, then there is washing up and tons of jam to make. The damsons are building up, creating an arson in fruit bowls around the kitchen, and she has a recipe for pear and ginger pickle that she wants to try out. Angel sits on Foss’s bed, and her strength seeps out, down to her feet. The sensation is like wearing Wellington boots full of water. She draws her feet on to the bed, musing about jam jars and wondering if she is the same person as the Angel who used to think nothing of making ten pounds of jam in a morning. She feels as if that part of her had been removed surgically, and replaced with a cavern of black. She shudders, not wanting to investigate any black right now.

  The red flannel sheet is soft and cosy; Foss’s bed is surprisingly comfortable. Angel pushes aside a festoon of camouflage netting and gets under the duvet. She has never lain in this bed before, or even slept in this room, unless it counted to perch on the bed to read a story to Foss. The eaves create a ceiling like the Egyptian pyramids upside down, and along their sharp sides, clouds and saints float. Foss’s neon set of saints, given to him last Christmas by Nick’s mother, Naomi.

  When Nick told Naomi that he and Angel were getting divorced, she sighed and walked out into the garden and on into the nearest field. Nick said it was ghastly. He felt she was passing on the news to God and getting His spin on it, and when she came back in she just said, ‘I pray for you all,’ as if the plague was coming their way.

  Bloody typical, thought Angel. She and Nick used to laugh about the remorseless nature of her piety. ‘She is so full of sack cloth and ashes she’s got no room for a heart,’ was one of Nick’s descriptions of his mother. Angel misses Nick’s spiked humour often. She has a lot of it in her head, and sometimes she plays it back. She feels less overwhelmed now, to think of leaning on him in bed, his arm round her, whispering because Naomi was staying with them, sleeping – or probably praying – in the next room. He was talking about his mother’s reaction to his father dying,

  ‘But Naomi could never throw her arms open and comfort anyone, she always acted as if pestilence was on its way.’ Nick laughed, Angel whispered, ‘Shh! She’ll hear us.’ Nick rolled over beside her, pulled the sheet over both of their heads, and said in a voice full of laughter, ‘I reckon in another life she probably served the Last Supper. All her human kindness is based on the belief that others are heading for acute suffering. And only she knows it’s coming.’ It must have been six years ago, but Angel can feel their shared laughter like a real presence now.

  Curled up in Foss’s bed, Angel has no desire to witness her mother-in-law’s pity for her and Nick. Angel wishes that the world would just let her get on with life without showing its kindness. She prefers judgement to kindness at the moment. Yesterday’s encounter at the school gate was classic.

  Foss and Ruby were on the climbing frame, Angel was loitering, reading some bumph from the Parents’ Association about a nature night and feeling guilty as usual when a flurry of energy and a smell of nappies rushed up to her. It was Nicola Hallam, Foss’s best friend’s mother.

  ‘Angel, Angel, God, I am so sorry. I’ve been meaning to catch up with you but everything’s been so busy. You poor thing, you’ve got so thin, is it stress? I don’t know how you can bear to go through with it.’ Nicola pushed back stringy hair and thrust out her ample hip to balance the large toddler more easily on it. Her whole demeanour radiated honesty, goodness and bafflement at Angel’s inexplicable behaviour.

  ‘I’m not a bit surprised you’re looking haggard, though, it’s just such a nightmare getting divorced, it’s so awful for the children. Listen, I’ve got to go, I’m making chocolate ladybirds for the school nature night, but call me if you want anything, and some evening when Hamish is away you must come and have supper.’

  Angel’s rage was so intense she had to hold on to the school railings for a moment to stop herself pushing Nicola over or pull
ing her hair. Thankfully, another mother reversed over someone’s bike, so no one noticed and Angel bit her bottom lip and whispered in her head, ‘Actually, fuck you, Nicola. And fuck you for meaning well, too. And fuck you again for only wanting me to come to supper when Hamish is away. Are you scared I might try and tempt him away from you? Please don’t worry, I wouldn’t touch your pompous husband with oven gloves on.’

  Listening to the rain beating the end of summer into the countryside and on to the house, Angel hugs a small khaki frog and rolls her eyes. Of course it doesn’t matter, and now, with distance, she can smile and be grateful that Nicola had got in her car, blithe and unaware of her death stare. In fact, it is good to feel a bit of clean contempt for Nicola and her narrow-minded view of the hazards of life with divorced women in the area. But yesterday evening the anger had rolled on, grumbling like thunder in the back of Angel’s mind as she grated cheese over cauliflower, erupting in a mini-storm when Foss and Ruby said in unison, ‘Urgh, it’s cauliflower cheese and we hate it.’

  ‘Oh shut up!’ Angel threw the wooden spoon across the room. It landed in the dog basket. Foss and Ruby looked at it, looked at one another, and began to laugh.

  Angel took a deep breath, counted to ten and walked out of the room. ‘I must not take it out on them,’ she intoned, marching around her usual cooling-down loop. First out to the hen house, round the washing line, and back into the kitchen again. The anger subsided, rolling like a metal pinball across the floor of her mind while she bathed the children and put them to bed. She hugged them for twice as long as usual, because they were going to Nick to stay away for the first time.

  Rage flared again when she listened to her messages later in the evening.

  ‘Look, hi, Angel, Nix here. I’ve checked the diary and I’ve got an evening next week when Hamish won’t be back until about eleven, so why don’t you come for early kitchen supper at about seven-thirty and we can have a baked potato and a chat and I’ll be tucked up in bed by the time Hamish gets home.’

  ‘I would rather suck shit through a sock,’ said Angel out loud to her answerphone, pleased at last to use the phrase she had relished Jem using when asked to Jeannie Gildoff’s son’s beach party. Stupid cow. And Angel went to bed, glad she was getting a bit of spirit back, and poised to do battle.

  Today, though, she is not so sure. The emptiness of the house is shocking, its silence rising inexorably, filling every room.

  The phone rings; Angel can’t be bothered to move. It is probably Jake, and she doesn’t want to tell him she is on her own. She wants to be on her own. Acknowledging this feels new, exciting and good. Angel stays curled up in Foss’s bed, listening to the rain dripping and spattering from the gutter outside. She will get up when she wants to. Or not.

  Nick

  Sunday morning, another shop. This time the newspaper shop in Larkham. Nick goes in while the children listen to Just William in the car. He buys crab lines, sherbet fountains and the Sunday papers. Nick has a warm sense of contentment, which reminds him of the TV advertisement he had known in his childhood. The advertisement showed a boy who had eaten Ready Brek cereal going to school with a red and yellow glow around him.

  Staying the night in the lighthouse was a success, though in the night Foss had woken, wailing dry-throated and empty, his eyes wide with fear in the dark and calling for Mummy. Sleep-fogged, Nick didn’t think or panic. He knelt by Foss’s bed in the silver black night and put his arms round him.

  He felt his small ribcage shake and he whispered, ‘I am here and you are safe,’ over and over while Foss heaved with sobs. After a while Nick lay down on the bed, curving around Foss tucked in a ball under the blankets, and fell asleep. In the early dawn the smudge-blue daylight filtered in over Nick, and the roar of the heating starting up warmed his body; he was chilly in boxer shorts and a T-shirt on top of Foss’s bedspread. It was six in the morning. Nick thought about getting back into his own bed, but when he moved his arms, Foss stirred and wriggled closer to him. Nick smiled and drifted back to sleep.

  Breakfast is in the parlour, a round room with curved windows like something out of Beatrix Potter. Knives and forks clattering and the whisper of conversation at the other two tables create a soothing atmosphere inside which echoes the gentle motion of the sea outside. Foss, his bad dream forgotten, sits on the floor next to the table arranging his collection of razor shells from beachcombing the afternoon before. Ruby orders porridge, to the astonishment of the landlady, and is discussing the Spartans.

  ‘Daddy, if we go on holiday, please can we NOT go to Sparta. It’s really harsh there with rules for everyone. You know if you are a boy in Sparta you are taken away from your mother aged seven and sent off to try and survive, and if you are a girl you have to do wrestling EVERY DAY.’

  She pauses to receive her porridge, and Nick coughs and turns away so she doesn’t see him grinning as she tucks her napkin into her T-shirt like Desperate Dan.

  She is only silent for a moment: ‘We have to say, “For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly thankful,” at school,’ she says. ‘Should we say it at a hotel too?’

  Nick considers his own beliefs. ‘Uh. I’m not sure. I think God usually knows what you are feeling, but there’s nothing wrong with telling Him as well,’ he says, surprised to find that is what he thinks.

  ‘OK, hands together, then,’ says Ruby, bending to tug Foss’s T-shirt. ‘Come on, Foss, we’re saying Grace.’

  ‘But I’ve already had breakfast,’ objects Foss.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Ruby laughs. ‘We’ll do the other one, then. The one for when you’ve finished.’ She turns back to Nick. ‘This one is almost exactly the same so you’ll have to listen carefully. “For what we have JUST received may the Lord make us truly thankful”.’

  Nick puts his hands together, conscious of the elderly birdwatching couple to his left who are smiling indulgently. He suddenly wishes Jem was here too.

  ‘I know another prayer too,’ Ruby says after a moment’s contemplation. ‘It goes, “Hail Mary, mother of Grace, please find us a parking space.” It’s Catholic, I think. Mummy taught it to Foss and me when we went to London. How many do you need to know to be a qualified nun?’

  ‘How many what?’

  ‘Prayers,’ says Ruby, pushing her empty bowl away.

  ‘I’m not sure. Why don’t you ask my mother, St Granny, I mean?’ says Nick.

  ‘Good idea. I’ll write her a postcard on a picture of a church as well,’ says Ruby. ‘She’ll like that.’

  ‘She will,’ Nick agreed. Ordering more coffee, he wonders how he has managed never to notice before how easy it is to have a nice time.

  Jem

  I always thought being seventeen was going to be the best thing ever. I know it sounds stupid, but it was the birthday, apart from twenty-four, which I haven’t got anywhere near yet, that I have always looked forward to. I think it comes from living in the middle of nowhere and knowing that the day I am seventeen I can get in a car and go – admittedly with L plates and a co-driver – but I can actually leave home with horsepower. So how it turned out to be so crap is a mystery. It’s always in half-term, so when I asked Mum if I could have my first driving lesson on my birthday I was gobsmacked when she said, ‘Your birthday is a bit of a problem this year, Jem.’

  I was on the phone. I was lying on my bed in the cell that is my room at school, and I was looking at my Led Zeppelin poster. Coral gave it to me at the beginning of term. One of the guys looks a lot like Dad, and the sad thing about that is that the picture was taken in the seventies and Dad still looks like that. I have told him he looks like the guy in Thin Lizzie, which I thought would get him down to the barbers right away, but he seems to be grateful for any personal remark that isn’t an outright insult.

  Anyway, Mum sounds like she’s swallowed some great lump of bread, all snuffling, and then I realise she’s crying. SHE’S crying and it’s MY birthday they’ve cocked up. What has she got to cry about? I shoul
d be crying. Actually, at the time of the phone call I had no idea I should be crying or that there was anything to cry about but I did know that she shouldn’t be.

  ‘Mum, why are you crying?’ It’s so horrible when Mum cries and it’s worse on the phone because if I am there at least I can see when she stops.

  ‘I don’t know, tired, I suppose,’ she sniffs.

  ‘So why is my birthday a problem?’

  ‘Dad is taking his furniture out of the house on that day to put in the cottage he’s moved into at Jenny’s.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘No one realised until too late to change it.’

  Fucking great. That’s my family all over these days.

  So in the end, here we are on my birthday having supper in the Chinese restaurant in Cromer. And Mum and Dad are both here, but Dad looks like his eyes are about to pop out of his head he is so unrelaxed, and Mum is trying to be jolly, which of all the ways Mum can be, has to be the worst.

  ‘Now, has everyone got what they want? Foss, stop that, please, it’s Jem’s birthday.’

  Why that is relevant to Foss flicking some small camouflaged army man into the special fried rice is a mystery to me. Coral and Ruby are listening to Coral’s iPod. Coral has not said one word to Dad since he turned up at the restaurant, even though she talked all the way here about how great life is in Sheffield and how we are all missing the point by not being in the North.

  ‘I think I’ll stay up there when I finish,’ she says, chin up, looking at Mum with defiance.

  ‘Well, if you like it as much after three years as you do after three weeks, you would be daft not to,’ says Dad. He orders a Coke and drinks it in one big swallow. Coral looks as though she is going to punch him for a minute, then she relents and laughs.

  ‘I guess you’re right, Nick, but it is really good fun,’ she says. From her that is like handing out the biggest olive branch on the tree. Dad looks like Christmas has come, he is so bloody pleased she is speaking to him. He orders another Coke. He looks a lot older than usual, I think it’s his hair. Or maybe the popping eyes. Mum looks weird too. She’s got a new posture. I reckon it’s to do with yoga, but she always looks as though she has been arranged at the moment, and she turns her whole body when she’s talking to you, not just her head. I prefer not to look at either of them, so I gaze at my favourite thing in this Chinese restaurant, a gold-framed picture of 3-D swans in front of a waterfall. The swans ripple across the water past lily pads. It is a combination of kitsch art and computer-game graphics that I love.