This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  Back home I felt 100 per cent like the silly drama queen I was. My dad settled down again to his paper, looking paler and tired and in need of a whisky. My mother fetched him one. Then my dad put down his paper again and looked at me, and my mum stood beside him, looking at me too.

  ‘Why?’ my dad asked. Just, Why?

  Not How are you?, as he’d asked the Partridges. Not How are you managing? Oh no. For me just this, this one word: Why?

  But I had no answer to give him, so I went up to bed and tried to block it all out in the dark.

  I lie right back in the water and stretch my arms out, palms up. The scars on my arms are hair-thin. You’d hardly even notice them, unless you looked. I told James I got them in a childhood accident, falling through a glass door.

  I had to go to see a counsellor in Redbridge for six weeks, standard-issue course for an attempted suicide. I went on Thursdays, leaving school ten minutes earlier than everyone else to make sure I didn’t miss the bus. I told my friends I was going to the chiropodist’s, to get my insteps sorted out.

  The counsellor was a woman with long, straight black hair, parted in the middle. She wore long skirts with matching long cardigans and pendants on chains that hung low down on her chest. We sat opposite each other on plastic chairs. She had a clipboard and paper on her lap, as if she was expecting to make a lot of notes.

  ‘Why do you feel the need to harm yourself?’ she asked, and I’d try to make up reasons.

  It struck me as absurd that I was supposed to tell a total stranger what was going on in my mind.

  The bath water is almost cold now and goosebumps are creeping out on my chest. I sit up and pull out the plug. The skin on my hands is swollen and wrinkled. I have been in here far too long.

  Why did I do it?

  To see who would care, that’s why.

  SEVEN

  Arianne helps me in Sainsbury’s, but it wasn’t always like that.

  Now she is three she likes to be grown up; she brings her own little pink plastic handbag and likes to help me by putting things into the trolley. She looks very sweet with her white-blonde curls and her pretty dress, and with her baby hands picking up apples one by one to put them in the bag. Old ladies stop and admire her. Arianne likes to be admired, now that she is three.

  A year ago, she couldn’t have cared less.

  It used to be that the minute we pulled up in the car park the whingeing would start, and by the time we got to the trolley bay the foot-stamping would be under way. As soon as we got inside the shop, all hell would be unleashed. She wanted to sit in the trolley; she wanted to walk; she wanted to sit in the trolley again. She wanted to carry the bread, but then she’d throw it on the floor, scream. I’d pick it up, give it back to her, down it would go again. I wouldn’t keep giving her back something just to have her throw it down again if I was at home or anywhere else, but in a supermarket you do anything to try to stem the screaming. You’re powerless in a supermarket, and children know this, even at two. You open packets of biscuits as bribery, putting the rest of the packet carefully on top of your shopping so that people can see you’re going to pay, you’re not a thief. I never thought I’d end up doing that, but I did.

  Once she wanted a banana, and I gave her one, keeping the skin to show the woman on the checkout. I expected the woman to charge me a nominal amount, whatever the average price of a banana might be, but I had to suffer the humiliation of the supervisor being called, and then I had two disapproving faces looking me over as bananas were weighed and a price worked out, while the woman in the queue behind me tutted and Arianne screamed. I expect all three of those women were mothers themselves, but it’s amazing how quickly you forget what it’s like.

  I pushed Arianne back out to the car while she screamed and screamed, legs rigid, face on the verge of blue, and I unloaded her and the shopping from the trolley. Then I sat in the car and cried, with my hands over my face. She shut up then, satisfied at last.

  The irony was that I only went to the supermarket for something to do. No one ever talks about that, do they – about how desperate you are for something to do when you’re stuck at home with a small child all day, day in, day out? No one ever talks about the boredom, the loneliness. My goodness me, no. What with the rounds of coffee mornings and baby-gym mornings and music-time mornings . . . how can it be that on the one morning of the week there’s nothing on, you end up so desperate that you’d rather go to the supermarket and have your child scream there than be at home?

  I didn’t always shop in Sainsbury’s. I used to go to Tesco, before Arianne was born. Thomas was good, so I thought. He didn’t scream the whole time. He’d sit quite content in his trolley chair, no bother at all, while I got on with the shopping. Sometimes I got strange looks from people, but I put that down to some bizarre sort of jealousy, or curiosity even; why wasn’t this child howling when all the others were? But one day, as I was weighing out grapes, a woman whom I had seen in there often, herself the mother of girls, glared at me with a face profuse with outrage. She glared at me, then pointedly she glared at Thomas in the trolley behind me. When I turned round to look at him sitting in his trolley seat, he’d managed to wriggle his shorts and his pants right down and was pulling away on his newly nappy-free willy, perfectly happy.

  I didn’t go to Tesco again.

  Now, of course, I get what I can delivered, but there are still always all those things you forget, or run out of unexpectedly. There are still those dark, pervading moments when domesticity sucks you up because you’ve run out of something, dishwasher tablets, peppercorns – something you didn’t even think of when you put your order in. And it eats you up, the need for that run-out-of thing, as if the security of your whole little empire depends on it. So you think I know, let’s make a trip of it, as if you’re some numb-headed halfwit, lulled by the call of the fluorescent-lit aisles, the cloying, pumped-out smell of baked bread. And so you end up there again, back in the supermarket, pushing your trolley.

  Today, as Arianne and I unload our things onto the conveyor belt at the checkout I can hear some child screaming. In fact, I’ve been hearing it for quite some time as we’ve been moving around the aisles. There aren’t many people shopping on a Monday morning and sound really travels in these places. The screaming is getting closer now and the woman behind the till and I exchange a look. Her expression tells me that here comes yet another howling brat giving her a headache, and what wouldn’t she do to shut it up! I cannot imagine what my face says to her.

  The unfortunate owner of the screaming child appears from the frozen-foods aisle. Frantically she scans the tills for the shortest queue, and decides on mine. She’s a young mother, with greasy hair tied back from her face and tired, numb eyes. She pushes the trolley one-handed, shoving her thin body against it for extra leverage, as she tries to still her child with the other hand. He’s pinching at her arm, then he’s throwing himself backwards as far as he can within the confines of the wire seat, twisting round, head flung back, and screaming.

  The woman parks her trolley up behind me and mutters, ‘Bloody pack it in, won’t you, Connor?’ Then she steps back from the trolley and stands, face turned away from her child and staring at the floor, eyes fixed on the tiles. If I was her, I’d be in tears by now. Everyone is looking at her. You can feel the disapproval rippling along from checkout to checkout. The woman serving me lets her breath out on a long, slow sigh as she passes my stuff across the scanner.

  The child really is going for it. The pitch is unrelenting. Arianne stops helping me and stares at him. He’s thrashing around in his seat, wrestling against the straps that are holding him in, trying to grab the sweets now, piled up in a dumper bin right next to him at the end of the checkout. In a burst of frustrated fury, his mother shoves the trolley, getting him away from those sweets; then she’s back, arms folded, staring at the floor. Arianne jumps slightly and holds on to my skirt. I don’t want to seem to be staring, so I try to keep my eyes down, as I pile up the
last of my things onto the conveyor belt. As I look down and up, down and up, I can’t help noticing the contents of her trolley: it’s a sharp contrast to mine. There’s not much in it, and no fresh stuff at all. Bread and tins from the economy range, a couple of pizzas, three jumbo bottles of Coke – buy two, get one free – some frozen chips and a multi-bag of crisps.

  I have a sudden memory of something Liz said to me once, after some report had come out about the health divide between the well-off and the poor, and about how much of it came down to the food we eat. Liz has quite strong opinions on things; it makes the rest of us a little uncomfortable at times. ‘It all comes down to education,’ she said, and nobody liked to disagree. ‘A packet of crisps costs the same amount of money as an apple. You need to be educated to choose the apple.’

  Or an organic apple, in my case.

  The last of my things are on the conveyor belt now, and the woman behind the till picks up item after item, scans each thing and packs it into a bag. Organic strawberries, organic mangoes, free-range chicken breasts, wild rice and Italian bread. She is positively flinching at the noise that child behind me is making, and her mouth is puckered, in badly suppressed disapproval. Handling my expensive goods seems to add weight to her umbrage, as if she assumes that just because I can afford high-quality foods, I will join in her silent condemnation of the poor woman behind me who can’t.

  ‘Thank you, madam,’ she says to me with a strained, supercilious smile when I key in my PIN. Then she turns po-faced to the next load of haphazardly piled-up goods coming her way and shoves the stuff through quickly, as if too much contact might make her hands dirty. She is like those estate agents who act as if every big house on their books is theirs.

  I push my trolley out to my car, disturbed. It’s only food. We all need it. We all shove it in our shopping trolleys, shove it in our mouths. Our need for food should make us equal, that and the mind-numbing trek around the supermarket. You’d think we’d all be the same behind our trolleys, we women, we wives, we mothers. You certainly feel like every other woman, when you struggle with the wonky wheels and the monotony. What we stick in our trolleys shouldn’t paint a picture of our lives, it shouldn’t divide us.

  But it does.

  We’re soul-bared in the supermarket. Soul-bared, purse open.

  Everything is disturbing me today.

  I can’t even enjoy Tumbletots any more, since the other week on the evening news when there was some feature on early childhood development, and they showed a clip of some Tumble centre, just like the one Arianne and I go to. The clip showed the wind-down session, after the main tumbling time, when the women and the children join together in a circle to sing songs – songs that have movements to go with them. You know, ‘The wheels on the bus’ and that sort of thing. I’m sure there isn’t a mother alive who hasn’t ‘Row, row, rowed the boat’ down the godforsaken stream at some time or another, and perhaps we do feel a little bit self-conscious, silly even, at first. But it’s just what you do, what we all do. We’re all in it together, women and children in the bizarre, self-imposed world of women and children.

  But the other night, when they showed that clip on the news, James was eating a peanut-butter sandwich and he nearly choked on it.

  ‘Look!’ he exclaimed, spluttering peanut butter everywhere, and pointing at the television where a group of women and toddlers were clapping together as they smiled and sang. ‘Look!’ He turned from the television to me and back to the television again, almost bouncing up and down on the sofa in his disbelief, as if it was the funniest thing he’d seen for a long time.

  ‘That’s what it’s like, James,’ I said. ‘That’s what we do.’

  And he laughed even more, as if I’d said it just to amuse him. There is so much of amusement here, in the little world.

  I take refuge from my thoughts at Tasha’s house.

  Tasha lives in a vast extended 1930s house built on a corner plot at the end of Chestnut Drive. Her husband works for an American bank. Tasha likes the idea of interior design and did a little course on it recently, not at the local college, but up in town somewhere – it cost a fortune, apparently – while Carole looked after Phoebe for her. When she was halfway through the course Tasha decided that she liked the planning more than the actual doing, that her forte was more in steering other people to carry out her ideas than doing it herself, and now she has a whole house to play with.

  Wood samples are laid out along the huge, open expanse of the living-room floor, for me to look at.

  ‘What do you think?’ Tasha asks me, and both her voice and the heels of her shoes echo slightly against the wood flooring. The existing floor is parquet, dark little oblongs, all packed in, just like we had on the hall floor at junior school. Suddenly I picture us sitting on it – not Tasha, of course, but me and all those other girls and boys of thirty years ago, squashed up in rows, legs crossed and pink, fingers picking at the dried-on sticky bits and bogies, and at the unrecognizable remains of school dinners that gave the school hall its awful, unforgettable smell.

  Tasha paces up and down, looking at the options, then she stops up beside me, one arm folded across her middle, hand supporting the elbow of the other arm that is bent, that hand up by her face, one finger extended and tapping against her chin. She is willowy elegant, Tasha. Always clad in black and grey, with just a flash of pink or red to lift things, and her nails always newly done, to match.

  I switch my glance from the S-like curve of her figure standing next to me to the mirror opposite us, hanging above the great open fireplace. It’s an enormous mirror; from this little distance it reflects us both, right down to the start of our thighs in our matching dark jeans. Looking in this mirror, I am struck by how alike we are. Oh, she is a good inch or so taller than me and I’m sure I don’t have her incredible grace, and her hair is cut a little shorter and choppy now with those red streaks underneath the blonde, but still there are things, so many things. I realize that my stance is the same as hers, one hip lifting, one hand raised to the face in contemplation. I see our pale, serious faces with our pale, serious eyes and I think how similar we look, even though Tasha’s changed her hair. She used to wear her hair like mine, like Penny’s: highlighted blonde and falling straight to the shoulders. In fact, if you put Tasha and Penny and me in a row, you could pass us off as sisters. Liz too, though she fights against the grain a little by going about in her gym clothes half the time and letting her fair hair go wavy.

  I stare at our reflections and I am unnerved. I wonder why it is that all my life I have chosen friends that look like me.

  Tasha glances up, catching my eye in the mirror, oblivious to the way my mind is working. ‘What do you think?’ she says, frowning slightly. ‘I’m torn between the natural and the honeyed oak. And should we take it upstairs? Rupert says not; he thinks carpet for upstairs, but I don’t know.’ She stares at me, serious, and I can be serious too.

  I can lose myself in this.

  We carry on considering Tasha’s floor over lunch, which we eat at the dining table; through the double doors we can still see the samples on the living-room floor. Arianne and Phoebe chatter away at one end of the table while Tasha and I talk floors at the other. We won’t make our minds up today. This is part of the pleasure – wallowing in choice.

  It’s like floating away on nothingness, and I want to float away.

  Shortly after five on Monday my mum phones, from Devon. She asks after James, briefly, and the children of course, then she tells me about the trellis my dad is going to build over the patio, and about the vines they’re planning to grow on it. You can get quite decent grapes down there, apparently, if the summer’s kind. They have a very active garden society down there, in the village, she says; she’s put my father up as treasurer. She’d do it herself, but she’s busy with the church-renovation project fund-raiser and the Keep Our Village Green campaign. I listen as she talks breezily on, and wickedly I feel a little sorry for Lower Eddington. I picture the
place: sleepy, time-warped and barely on the map. And I picture my mum and my dad descending upon it, with all the good that they no doubt will do.

  I do not tell my mother about Heddy. I do not tell her, but I feel guilty just the same.

  EIGHT

  I cannot think what to wear.

  I am up early as usual, and straight in the shower the minute James comes out. We get ready for our days around each other. He is standing in front of the mirror, looking at himself as he puts the cufflinks into his shirt and combs back his hair. I watch him; I can see both the back of his head and his reflection, an all-round view if you like, of James Hamley the lawyer, as he lawyers himself up. He tilts his head, from side to side and then down slightly at the front, peering up at himself, dark-blue eyes sharp under that dark, sharp brow. It used to amuse me, watching him practise like this. He runs through all his expressions: we have the considering look, the I understand what you’re saying, but . . . look, the Please, have utter faith in me look, even the This really hurts me to have to do this look. We have it all. His whole self is exercised across his face as he primes up for the day.

  It used to amuse me. I used to find this routine endearing until I realized he uses the same expressions on me.

  James rounds off his routine with a smile – at himself, at his clients, I can’t tell. It is a confident smile, a winning smile, worked to perfection. He is a winner, my husband. He knows it, I know it. The whole world must know it by now, surely.