This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘Yes!’ James shouts from the other end of the room and I glance up just as he punches the air. ‘Chelsea are through!’

  He’s sitting cross-legged in front of the television, checking the football results. Fluff from the white fake-fur has spread itself across the floor and little clumps have stuck themselves to the back of his T-shirt. I should have sewn on the furry patch last, after I’d done the arms. I’ll be clearing up white fluff for evermore.

  The phone starts ringing. I am re-threading the needle to start on the legs and James is idly flicking through the teletext. No one moves to answer the phone.

  I look at James as I hold up the needle. My neck is stiff from leaning over and I flex it from side to side. The phone rings and rings. Looking at him, I wonder if he even hears it.

  ‘James,’ I say. ‘James, I’m in the middle of sewing. Could you get it?’

  He makes a noise that is half huff and half grunt and reluctantly gets to his feet. His socks are covered in white fluff. Still staring at the TV, still holding the remote control in one hand, he picks the phone up from the windowsill with the other and puts it to his ear.

  ‘Hello,’ he barks into the handset, then comes over and hands it to me. ‘It’s for you,’ he says.

  It’s her.

  Mrs Partridge’s voice rattles down the line and I hold the phone close to my ear. For some reason I don’t want James to hear. He’s curious, I know; he looks at me as he goes out into the kitchen. He’s looking at me still as he comes back again with a bag of pistachio nuts and a bowl. He stands in the middle of the room with the bowl at his feet and half-reads the teletext and half-listens to me as he splits open nuts with his teeth and spits the shells down into the bowl.

  She’s checking I’m still coming on Tuesday. She’s upset; her voice is higher, louder than usual, and I press the phone against my ear to try to muffle it.

  ‘Of course I’m still coming,’ I say, because that is the easiest – the only – thing to say right now. But then she tells me Heddy’s had a bad turn; she needs me to come and see her, she says. She didn’t like to bother me so soon, and at the weekend too, but she hasn’t been able to think about anything else.

  ‘I see,’ I say into the phone. I look at James and he raises his eyebrows at me as he drops another nut shell into the bowl.

  ‘I’ve been worried sick, all weekend, worried sick,’ she tells me, and I wish James would go away. ‘I went to see her on Friday. I always do, you know, every day. Just in the holidays it’s difficult, you know, with Nathan at home . . . but I always go when I can, always . . .’

  I hear her sniffing, then she’s gone for a second. James is losing interest now; he’s flicked the TV back onto normal and is switching through the channels. When Mrs Partridge comes back on the phone, her voice is shaking, shockingly so.

  ‘On Friday the buses were running late,’ she says, ‘I missed the connection in Fayle. I didn’t get to the hospital until gone twelve. She must have thought I wasn’t coming. She’d split open a yoghurt pot and cut herself with the plastic, all over her chest and her neck. I heard her screaming out when I got there. Nathan, she was calling, Nathan. Over and over. Heartbreaking, it was, heartbreaking.’ She breaks off again and I hang onto the phone, frozen. ‘They put her to sleep. She didn’t know I was there, and then I had to get back again for Nathan, before she woke up. And I couldn’t go back at the weekend, because I had Nathan to look after. I phoned them, but they tell me nothing on the phone. She’s fine, they tell me, but she isn’t. She isn’t fine.’

  James has stopped spitting out nut shells now. He switches the TV to standby, then drops the remote control down beside the overflowing bowl and goes out into the hall to get his BlackBerry. For a second I relax a little, but then he’s back with it, walking around the room as he checks his emails.

  ‘God, that’s awful,’ I say, and for the moment I mean it.

  And then I regret it.

  James looks up from his BlackBerry and I avoid his eye as Mrs Partridge says: Could I come tomorrow? Could I, instead of Tuesday? Could I come tomorrow, come to St Anne’s with her, because it’s no good her going on her own, she can’t make head or tail of what they’re doing to poor Heddy.

  ‘No,’ I snap down the phone, and even James looks startled; poor Mrs Partridge is silenced. ‘No,’ I say again, softer this time. ‘I can’t – not tomorrow. I’m sorry, but I’m busy tomorrow, all day.’ And I am. I’ve a full day lined up: I’m shopping first thing, then Arianne’s got Tumbletots at eleven, and we’re going back to Tasha’s for lunch after that. Tasha’s got some wood-floor brochures that she wants to show me. And Thomas has swimming lessons after school.

  I don’t tell Mrs Partridge all this. I don’t see why I should. I listen to the silence now in my ear, and I try telling myself that I don’t need to feel guilty, or to make excuses. I do have a life, and I didn’t ask for the Partridges to come barging into it.

  ‘It’ll have to wait till Tuesday,’ I tell her, and I’m too annoyed to feel any pity for her as she sniffs and sighs and mumbles her disappointed ‘Yes, dear, thank you then, dear.’

  ‘Shit,’ I mutter as I switch off the phone and drop it onto the floor beside me.

  ‘Well?’ James says, and throws himself down onto the sofa, still looking at his BlackBerry. He’ll be checking the football results again now; he always does this, as if they might differ from the results on the TV.

  ‘Well, what?’ I pick up my sewing and ram the needle into Baloo’s tail.

  ‘Well, who was that?’

  ‘Family friend,’ I say, sticking that needle in and pulling it out again; in, out, in, out. Family pain-in-the-neck, more like.

  ‘Going to tell me what’s going on, then?’ he murmurs and I look up at him. He’s not even paying attention, not really. I can see his eyes flickering as they read that tiny screen, his face intent, absorbed. I am a byline, a little extra on the outside, as usual.

  I am not in the mood to be entertaining. I am not in the mood to talk to half a person. The annoyance I feel towards Mrs Partridge, and myself, transfers itself onto James now. ‘Girl I was at school with is stuck in a mental hospital, and her mum wants me to help get her out,’ I mutter and James laughs; it catches in his throat and comes out on a snort.

  ‘Never thought of you as the altruistic type,’ he says.

  I stare at him. ‘Why not? I helped that cat that got hit by a motorbike, remember? It was me who called the vet. And I do loads for the school.’

  ‘Yes, I know, but that’s animals and children. What I meant is I can’t see you helping some nutter.’

  His words make me flinch. The easy way in which he says them makes me flinch. They’re throwaway words, that’s all. I look at him sitting there with the foot of one leg propped up on the knee of the other, and one arm resting across the back of the sofa, bent at the elbow, hand thrust into his brown ruffled hair while the other hand plays away at that computer propped upon his thigh – his latest toy. I look at him and I wonder: when did we become so lost under the weight of our lives?

  ‘I didn’t say she was a nutter.’ Something in my voice makes him glance up.

  ‘You said she was stuck in a mental hospital,’ he says.

  ‘Yes,’ I say, and I have the strangest feeling of something hollowing out inside me. ‘But things happen, sometimes, to people.’

  James is looking at me now, properly. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you,’ he says. ‘I’m just surprised you’re getting involved, that’s all.’

  ‘I’m not getting involved,’ I say, and turn back to my sewing, subject closed. I can feel James watching me, as if he’s going to say something else, but I keep my head down, concentrating on my work. After a moment he gets up from the sofa and goes out to the kitchen. In the silence of the house I hear the click as he opens himself a beer.

  I sit there on the living-room floor with felt and thread and fluff all around me and I am busy, busy, but my head is full of all the things that H
eddy Partridge and her mother know about me, and James doesn’t.

  And I’m thinking about Heddy trying to cut herself up with the edge of a yoghurt pot. A yoghurt pot! A yoghurt pot would be plastic and flexible; you’d end up having to hack at yourself to get anything bigger than a scratch.

  You’d never get a good cut with a yoghurt pot. And I should know.

  Later, when I’ve given up on the sewing, I run myself a bath. I lock the door, which I don’t normally, and wait in the steam as the bath fills up, then slide myself in.

  I wish I could wash out my head. I wish I could wash Heddy out of my head, and Mrs Partridge and all the horrible stuff that comes with them. The past is the past – gone. When my parents moved away to Devon, I thought my ties with Forbury were finally cut, forever.

  What was it Jane and I used to say to each other when we caught the bus and the train together to get to the tech in Redbridge, when everyone else just stayed on in the sixth form or quit school altogether? That’s it: you can take the girl out of Forbury, but can you take Forbury out of the girl?

  Can you indeed?

  Heddy didn’t go to college. Heddy left school at sixteen and got a job in the baker’s down the High Street. I remember my mum telling me she saw her in there sometimes, serving behind the counter. And I remember thinking I bet she ends up eating all the cakes. I saw her once, one morning when Jane and I were on the bus to the station to catch the train. She was walking along the main road to the High Street, bundled up in a short, thick coat that didn’t quite cover her orange uniform. She’d got her apron on too, ready for work, and flat, black, old lady’s shoes. Comfy shoes, just right for standing up in all day, serving cakes. She walked like she was in a hurry, head down, leaning forward slightly. Mustn’t be late for work, I suppose.

  I looked at her trundling along as Jane and I rode by on the bus. And I just felt so glad that she wouldn’t be there in my life any more, watching me.

  Because that is what she was always doing, watching me. At ballet, at Brownies, right through school – even secondary school, where we were in different streams, she’d be there at break, somewhere in the near distance, big eyes getting a look at my life.

  She came into the toilets once when Jane and I were talking by the sinks. It was a private conversation. We were talking about our boyfriends. Actually we were talking about sex.

  ‘Have you really done it?’ Jane said, and right then Heddy walked in, big ears flapping. I sighed, Jane sighed, I folded my arms and we waited for Heddy to hurry up and go back out again.

  ‘Honestly, some people have no consideration, butting in on a private conversation,’ I said, and we stood there listening to Heddy trying to pee quietly. It seemed ages before we heard the scrunch of hard toilet paper and the resistant crank of the chain.

  ‘She just wants to hear your answer,’ Jane said.

  So I bigged it up. I said, ‘Oh yes, Paul’s amazing. He goes on for hours. And hours. He can’t get enough of me.’ And so on. I said it just to shock Heddy. To see her red face when she came shuffling back out of that cubicle.

  And she always seemed to be near the bins at lunchtime when I threw my sandwiches away. One bite we allowed ourselves, Jane and me, then into the bin with the rest. You’d think it was a crime from the expression on Heddy’s face, if you ever made the mistake of looking at her. But you couldn’t be as thin as we were and eat lunch – any fool knew that.

  She was always watching us. I expect she wished she could be like us, but what chance did she have?

  She watched us at break, when we pushed up our sleeves, to look at the cuts on our arms.

  I close my eyes and her face is there inside my head. I open them again and she is still there, big eyes seeing too much.

  We all used to cut ourselves in my group – Jane, Amanda, Cathy and me. It’s just what we did; it was a phase, if you like. We started doing it in the fourth year; just little cuts, to our arms. We had quite an arsenal of weapons between us, stored in our pencil cases: razor blades, scalpels, drawing pins, and I had a big old metal compass with a long, sharp point.

  We’d sit in maths or geography or biology, or whenever we were bored, and push back the sleeves of our cardies just a little way and dig away at the skin there, to pass the time. Small cuts, mostly; it becomes hypnotic, scratch, scratch, scratching away. You go into a sort of trance and the pain is a very fine thing, a very controlled thing, when drawn from you stage by tiny stage, each gentle movement of the blade or pin, or whatever, pushing just that little bit more into the soft, pink skin. It’s a challenge, too, managing that pain – you know, resting that arm on your lap, hidden by the desk, cutting away and keeping your face totally blank. You cannot show the pain, ever; secrecy is a big part of it. We’d test ourselves, push ourselves. You cut, the pain rises, you keep your face calm, serene – to achieve this you have to stop breathing for a minute, then as the pain ebbs you can take in just shallow, small breaths, and then you cut again.

  Cathy was brilliant at keeping her face blank. To look at her, you’d never know what she was doing under her desk, not at all. Then suddenly her eyes would fill with tears – big, blue eyes she had, like the Virgin Mary, and when she cried her face still stayed impassive, not a muscle flickered. Those tears just hovered on her lashes and rolled over.

  Mostly we just did this in class, then at break we’d compare our work and describe the pain and all wish that we could be as composed as Cathy, and cry without having to sniff or get red-eyed. But I started doing it at home, in my bedroom. I’d sit cross-legged on my bed, in front of my mirror, and watch my face as I cut myself. It became quite an obsession, watching as my eyes registered the pain and absorbed it. I told myself I was practising. I wanted the perfection of an expressionless face; I wanted the power.

  Once, I went too far.

  Once, I was sitting on my bed and drawing a fine line along the inside of my arm with a razor blade, just up from the wrist, when I wondered what would happen if I pushed the blade a little deeper in.

  Now I know there is a whole network of veins in there and I don’t know which one I split open, but the blood rose up frighteningly easily. I watched it, pushing itself out, seeing how far upwards it came before it flattened out and ran. I held my arm out, keeping my hand down and turning it as the blood trickled in rivers over my skin. I cupped my hand to catch it, sickeningly warm, in my palm.

  Calm, I was, at first; detached. I knew I wasn’t dying. The blood was coming out too slow for me to be dying and the cut was too high up, too slightly off-centre. But then it dripped onto the floor, onto my nice cream carpet, and panic flashed through me.

  I clenched my fist, feeling the blood sticky between my fingers, and ran downstairs. My dad was in the dining room; he’d got the Sunday papers spread out over the table. He looked up as I burst in. I shoved my wrist out in front of me and instantly he was on his feet, knocking his chair back to the floor, running after me. I turned and ran down the hall, out of the house, racing barefoot down the drive, and he was right behind me, chasing me, down the road and into Fairview Lane.

  I ran as fast as I could for that little distance, swept up in my own hysteria, and then I stopped, right outside Heddy Partridge’s house. My dad was right behind me. I wanted to be caught now. I wanted to see the pain and fear on his face, justifying my own, but when I turned I saw my dad’s feet in just their socks and even though I wasn’t dying, I felt as though I ought to be. I had to follow the drama somewhere and, as my dad reached out to me, the heat rose up my limbs in pins and needles, blackening into my head, and I let myself fall.

  Instantly my dad was there, lifting me up like I was five, not fifteen. I heard his voice, but he was speaking to someone else, not me; he was saying, ‘Let’s get her inside’, and someone else was muttering, ‘Dear, dear, dear. Here, in here . . .’

  I felt myself laid down, on a sofa. I kept my eyes glued shut. I wanted to be dead, or nearly dead. I felt I owed it to myself, to everyone now. But the b
lood was drying on my arm, I could feel it, tightening up. Someone had got hold of my hands; they turned them, carefully. I kept my arms limp, not moving as cool water was washed over my stinging wrist, then a cloth pressed down.

  ‘She’s okay,’ my dad said, and disappointment made me open my eyes.

  I was in Mrs Partridge’s front room. Heddy Partridge, her brother Ian and a pile of old newspapers had been moved off the sofa, to make room for me. The television was on, far too loudly, even though Mr Partridge was dead and gone now. Ian was still watching it, but Mrs Partridge, Heddy and my dad were all looking at me.

  The drama was over now, and I was in the wrong place.

  And my dad was saying these weird, out-of-place things now. He was saying, ‘How are you, Mrs Partridge? How are you managing?’, as if she was the one in crisis, right now, not me.

  And she was saying back, ‘We get by. We get by.’

  ‘If there’s anything that you need . . .’ my dad said and I shut my eyes again, tighter, wishing myself not okay, wishing myself dead in fact, but with the sunken feeling that even dead wouldn’t be enough. I felt hollowed out, pared down to nothing.

  My dad left me there while he went home to collect his shoes, my mother and the car. My wrist had been wrapped up in a yellowing old bandage. Mrs Partridge and Heddy soon stopped watching me, and started watching the television instead. Mrs Partridge perched on the arm of the sofa, by my feet. Heddy stood beside Ian, feet planted wide apart, stomach sticking out and arms folded, face blank. No one sat in Mr Partridge’s empty chair.

  I turned my face into the sofa to cut out the glare of the television and I wished I could cut out the sound. The material next to my face smelled of biscuits and socks. I was humiliated beyond belief. This was no place to die, or not to die.

  My dad drove me to Casualty, with my mum in the front next to him; no one said a word. There we waited among the sprained ankles and chopped-off thumbs until a nurse taped together the edges of my pathetic little cut. A doctor told me that I would be referred to a counsellor, though I could tell no one was really worried about my mind.