This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  Finally he pats a little cologne onto his cheeks and turns to me. I am standing, still in my underwear, with the doors of my wardrobe flung open, but I’m not even looking at what’s inside. I’m looking at him.

  ‘Not going to yoga?’ he asks as he shrugs himself into his suit jacket. He gives me his cheerfully curious smile, the one that says he’d love to hear my reply, if only he had the time to hang around and listen.

  ‘Not today,’ I reply, and I wonder if I would have told him more, but he kisses me on the cheek and is gone, out of the house, before his children are even awake.

  I cannot think what to wear because I have never been to visit someone in a mental hospital before. Hospitals of the ordinary kind are bad enough. You feel the dirt jumping onto you, the germs, the promise of death. Especially on the floor. The floor is always the worst.

  The year before last my father was in hospital for a week after a knee operation. I visited him twice. I wore the same clothes each time, kept them in a sealed bag between visits, then sent them to the dry-cleaner’s when he came out. I wore the same pair of shoes too, and then I threw them away.

  I do not want to waste a pair of shoes on Heddy Partridge.

  In the end I decide on a pair of last year’s trousers and a top I don’t often wear because the colour isn’t exactly right on me. I know I’ll never wear them again. And I’ll wear the suede mules that I bought last week in town, and tomorrow I’ll go and buy myself another pair to replace them.

  Mrs Partridge is standing on her doorstep, waiting for me to arrive.

  I am late, for the obvious reason that I do not want to be here at all. I chatted to Penny in the playground, long after the children had gone in. Chatted while Arianne pulled at my clothes, saying, ‘Mummy, Mummy, come on.’

  Chatted until Penny said, ‘What are you doing today?’ She skimmed her eyes over my clothes, curious.

  ‘Oh, boring stuff,’ I said, grabbing Arianne by the hand. ‘Dentist. That sort of thing. Must dash.’

  On my way out of Carole’s I bumped into Tasha.

  ‘Fancy a coffee after yoga?’ she called, unloading Phoebe from the back of her car. Then in seconds – milliseconds – she’d clocked me head to toe and said, ‘Oh. Not going to yoga?’

  Curiosity is a big, big thing around here. Lives are built and ruined on it. The slightest little thing out of the ordinary will not go unnoticed. Today it will be my life under scrutiny; I do not fool myself otherwise. It will not be Tasha and me having coffee, it’ll be Tasha and Penny and Liz instead, and I’ll be the subject of discussion for today. And for many days to come if I’m not careful, if I don’t nip this thing in the bud, so to speak. They’re probably on their phones already, speculating.

  And so it is that I am late arriving at Mrs Partridge’s. Late according to her plan, that is. As far as I’m concerned, she’s lucky I’m here at all.

  She’s looking out for me, twittering and fussing on her doorstep like an agitated penguin. It’s a warm day, but she’s buttoned into a thick, quilted jacket that makes her head look tiny poking out the top, and her legs even thinner. She watches me as I park up the car, and I think, as she is clearly ready to go, she will close the door behind her and come and get straight in the car, but she doesn’t. She darts back into the house, swallowed up by the darkness, and I wait where I am. I am not going to be hurried. I am not going to be blustered into some false sense of urgency. It is essential that I remain detached, for both of us.

  I think I might check my phone for messages, perhaps make a call, just to make my point, but before I do Mrs Partridge reappears, anxiously gesturing for me to come inside. I don’t like being beckoned like a child, and I get out of the car slowly, irritated.

  Once again I am walking up that pathway, and into that house.

  She disappears inside the house once I’m halfway up the path, and so I have to follow. I feel as though I’ve been tricked.

  She’s got a bunch of papers in her hand, seemingly pulled from the big plastic shopping bag at her feet.

  ‘This is the man,’ she says, without even a pre-emptive hello, thank you for coming. ‘This one here.’ She waves a letter at me, pointing at the signature. ‘Dr R. D. Millar. He’s the one you need to talk to.’

  Do I, indeed? And what, exactly, do I want to talk to him about?

  ‘You don’t want to bother with the rest,’ she goes on, and I hear in her voice the weird mixture of inherent suspicion and isolation that some people – old people, especially – seem to have when faced with anyone in authority. ‘Dr Millar, he’s in charge of Heddy.’

  She prods her bony finger against the papers as they flop in her hand. She’s not looking at me. She’s staring at the writing, as if everything that matters is there in the black-and-white print. She seems to have shrunk since Thursday, and she’s looking very, very tired. ‘Dr Millar,’ she says again, to herself, not me. ‘Dr Millar.’

  She stuffs the letters back into her bag, wedging them down the side of all the other things that she’s squeezed in; you’d think we were going for a week, not just an hour or so. I watch as she checks the contents of that bag. There’s a rolled-up towel in there, sticking out the top, a washbag and sandwiches wrapped in tin foil.

  ‘Only ham, dear,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what you’d like.’

  I haven’t the heart to tell her I’m planning to be back long before lunch.

  Then she’s patting her pockets, feeling for her keys, fussing, looking around for anything she might have forgotten. Finally she takes a deep breath and lets it out on a sigh, and I see her brace her tiny shoulders inside her coat. Suddenly I find myself feeling very sorry her. Heddy is her daughter, after all.

  On the way to the hospital Mrs Partridge talks non-stop. She tells me how normally she takes the bus, two buses in fact. The one that comes only once an hour and goes up through Barton Village and all the way to the airport eventually if you stay on it. She gets off before then, by the junction on the Great West Road, and catches another bus, the 911, that takes her right through Hounslow. The whole journey takes her about two hours, she says, and she does this every day, when Nathan is at school. Two hours there, two hours back, one hour with Heddy. It’s not so bad. The 911 stops almost right outside St Anne’s, and she normally makes herself up a sandwich to eat on the way home. And she gets a good hour with Heddy, if the buses run to time. Long enough to brush her hair and give her a bit of a wash.

  Dread uncurls itself inside me. I hope to God I don’t have to have anything to do with washing Heddy Partridge.

  We drive through Barton Village and I glance sideways at Mrs Partridge, keeping one eye on her, one eye on the road. I am dead curious to know which road Heddy lived in, and I expect Mrs Partridge suddenly to turn her gaze, to look sideways in a poignant way, marking out the spot, but she doesn’t. She carries on staring ahead, and she carries on with the endless stream of nervous chat.

  ‘I did go, yesterday,’ she says, and by the tone of her voice I can’t tell if she’s criticizing me for not coming with her, or reassuring me that she went on her own. ‘They’d put dressings on her neck, you know, where she’d hurt herself. And they’d given her something.’ She pauses, for just a second, and sighs, and when she speaks again I can hear the helplessness in her voice. ‘She wasn’t in any pain,’ she says, but I can tell that isn’t the point. Pain is there, whether you try to numb it out or not.

  ‘It’s Nathan she wants,’ Mrs Partridge says to me. ‘She’s pining for him. But what can I do?’ She waits, as if she expects me to have the answer. I cannot think what to say so I say nothing, and concentrate on the driving. ‘Straight across up here and then left, at those lights,’ she directs as we come into Fayle, and I realize that we are following the bus route, and that we’ve probably added twenty minutes or so to our trip in the process. Sure enough, she says to me, ‘You go on up here, dear. That’s where I normally change buses.’

  ‘What about Nathan’s father?’ I ask. ‘Wher
e’s he?’

  ‘Oh, we haven’t seen him for a long time,’ she replies, breezily, far too breezily. ‘He sends the odd card, you know, at Christmas. And a bit of money, when he can. But we haven’t seen him. Not for a long time. They moved in with me, Heddy and Nathan,’ she explains, ‘when they had to sell that house. John, Heddy’s husband, he made other arrangements, and we haven’t seen him since. Poor Heddy, she was in a very bad way. It was a terrible time, a terrible time.’

  Suddenly she leans forward and turns on me, anxious. Her seatbelt catches and yanks her back. ‘It wasn’t me that put her in hospital,’ she says, and I can feel her staring at me. I keep my eyes fixed on the road. ‘I’d never do that. We were managing all right. Heddy had her problems, but we were managing. I did my best.’ Her voice is small and shrill and insistent. ‘She was out. Gone on the bus to Fayle, when Nathan was at school. Next thing I know there’s a policeman knocking on my door telling me they’d picked Heddy up outside the shopping centre. They’d had to call the ambulance. It was a terrible to-do. She’d smashed a bottle on the ground and cut right down her arms with the glass.’

  The skin across my shoulders prickles, cold.

  ‘It was help she wanted, poor Heddy. Breaks my heart to think that I couldn’t help her, my poor girl. They took her into hospital and then they moved her to St Anne’s. Nothing I could do.’

  Mrs Partridge leans forward now and rummages in her bag. She comes out with tissues, one of those handy packs. Out of the corner of my eye I can see her hands shaking as she pulls out a tissue and blows her nose. I cannot think of anything to say.

  ‘It wasn’t the first time, see,’ she says in a thin voice. ‘They’d taken her in before. Nothing so bad as that last time, but . . . Thing is, you can’t go doing things like that in public. People don’t like it, do they?’ There’s a tight, bitter tone to her voice now. ‘Of course they don’t. It’s not what they want to see when they do their shopping. My poor Heddy. It was a cry for help, that’s all. It’s always a cry for help, isn’t it, dear?’

  Mrs Partridge’s words are weaving a strange and cloying magic inside my car. I feel misplaced, as if I’m caught up in somebody else’s nightmare, trapped in one of those journeys that go on and on, going nowhere.

  Is it always a cry for help? Is it?

  Heddy Partridge and I, were we crying about the same thing? Did we feel the same things as we hacked ourselves up with our House of Hammer, kitchen-sink torture tools?

  I try to take myself back, to remember what I was feeling that long-buried and newly dug-up day.

  I remember the challenge. I remember pushing the blade down into my wrist, seeing the skin peeling back as it split, and watching the slow rise of blood.

  I remember the voice in my head, saying What if, what if?

  Thick people don’t have feelings.

  I have a sudden flash of my nine-year-old self, hands on hips, imparting that little gem of wisdom to my friends. Thick people don’t have feelings. You can tell them to get lost and call them names and make them the brunt of your jokes – they may not like it much, but that doesn’t matter because they don’t have feelings, not proper feelings. They don’t have the brains, so how can they feel? How can they know how to hurt?

  Heddy always reminded me of a cow, a big, slow cow, fit for nothing more than chopping up and eating. Even more so in her Brownie uniform. Then she was a big, slow, brown cow.

  On saints’ days we were allowed to wear our Brownie uniforms to school. We liked that; it showed everyone else we were special. There were only about three of us in my class that went to Brownies, three of us and Heddy. Now a Brownie uniform is not the most fetching of outfits, but if you were thin and dainty with nimble arms and legs you could wear the dress pulled in at the middle with a belt and look quite sweet. Heddy’s uniform was a hand-me-down, too short, too tight, too straight-up-and-down and with no belt round her big middle.

  We rounded on her at playtime.

  ‘What are you wearing your uniform for?’ I demanded, outraged.

  ‘It’s St George’s Day,’ Heddy mumbled, staring at the ground.

  ‘Well, St George doesn’t care about you.’ I looked her up and down. ‘You’re a disgrace.’

  ‘And we don’t want you trying to copy us,’ Claire said. ‘Or following us around.’

  Heddy carried on staring at the ground, her white face going slightly pink.

  ‘You shouldn’t even be in the Brownies,’ I told her. ‘You’re far too fat.’

  ‘And stupid,’ Jane said.

  ‘You’re a fat, stupid cow.’ I made my eyes big and pulled a long cow face. ‘Moo,’ I said.

  ‘Moo,’ said Jane and Claire.

  Now I think of Heddy, wanting herself to be dead.

  Again, I remember her watching us at school, when we were older, when we cut ourselves for kicks. I remember her spying on our private world of self-inflicted pain. I think of the criss-crosses under my sleeves, and the constant threat of what if?

  I see her face, her dark, still eyes looking down on me as I lay bleeding and trying to die on her mother’s brown Dralon sofa on that otherwise very dreary Sunday afternoon. Was that a cry for help? What did I have to cry about except the constant emptiness, gnawing away inside?

  Didn’t I hear it all the time, how lucky I was, how fortunate I was, how grateful I ought to be? I think of my mum, at every opportunity, telling everyone how good Laura was at dance, at English, at maths, at everything . . . Bragging, if you like, painting her perfect picture of her perfect family. And I went along with it. I thought it had to be so.

  And yet, and yet.

  I think of my dad, always so distant, and always so slightly disappointed. And I think of my childish self, so very far from perfect, and of the terrible things that I did.

  Mrs Partridge falls silent as we pull off the road and into the concrete grounds of St Anne’s, looking for the car park, which turns out to be not a car park at all really, but just lots of parking spaces squashed in here, there and everywhere in the network of roads and small empty spaces that weave their way around the hospital site. St Anne’s is an old, grey sprawling building built way back in the Victorian age, and it’s long overdue for demolition. There are letters about it sometimes, in the local paper, which I read occasionally when I’m really bored. Save St Anne’s, someone pleads, but no one takes any notice; why should they?

  Eventually we find a spot tucked away at the back of the hospital, between the bottom steps of a black iron fire escape and the kitchen bins. I open my door to go and buy a ticket from the machine. Mrs Partridge is horrified and flaps and blusters, digging her purse out from her carrier bag and hunting for change, which I do not take. It’s a big purse, with lots of compartments, some zipped, some clipping together.

  ‘Never thought you’d have to pay,’ she says, flustered with outrage. ‘To visit a hospital? It’s disgusting.’ She’s still flapping when I come back with the ticket. ‘Shouldn’t have to pay to come to a hospital,’ she mutters, fussing with her bag now, and her coat, as she gets out of the car. She looks worryingly frail as she bangs the door shut, and anxiety is pulling at the muscles in her face. ‘How do people manage?’ she says. ‘Shocking, it is, shocking.’

  ‘Really, Mrs Partridge, it’s okay,’ I say, to try to calm her, but she’s still muttering as we try to find our way to the Arthur Mitley Wing, where Heddy is.

  Mrs Partridge knows her way from the main entrance, of course, which is where she normally comes in from, off the bus, so first we have to find our way round there, which takes a while in itself. The place is a maze of covered walkways that seem to go on forever. God knows how you find your way back out again. One corridor leads on to another and then another, through plastic, swing-shut doors. The sound of our shoes clack-clacking on the concrete floor echoes off the walls, and the deeper in we go, the hotter it gets and the more I can smell the horrible hospital smell of disinfectant and boiled cabbage, masking the sweeter, sickly sme
ll of human decay. It’s like an invisible gas, choking out the air.

  Walking along those endless corridors, it suddenly occurs to me: how will Heddy feel about seeing me?

  I’ve never given a thought to how she must feel towards me. I think of all those times I was mean to her and of all the cruel things that I said. She never said anything back, ever. I never gave a thought to how she might feel about me. And now here I am, turning up in her life again, just like she’s turned up in mine.

  Heddy Partridge must hate me, surely. Way more than I ever hated her.

  Mrs Partridge sticks her finger on the buzzer outside the Arthur Mitley Wing and presses hard. Through the blue of the window I can see a nurse sitting at a desk writing up notes. Slowly she rises to her feet to tap in the code to let us in. It reminds me of the maternity ward where Arianne was born – there was keypad security there, too, but just to keep the dodgy people out. Not to keep them in.

  ‘I’ve brought a visitor with me today, dear,’ Mrs Partridge says, to explain my presence. ‘And we’d like to see Dr Millar, if we may.’

  The nurse looks from Mrs Partridge to me and back to Mrs Partridge again. She’s about my age, with mousy blonde hair scraped back from her world-weary face. ‘I’m not sure if Dr Millar’s available,’ she says.

  ‘No, dear,’ Mrs Partridge says and I’m surprised by her assertiveness. ‘He wasn’t available yesterday, but he will be today. That’s what the nurse here yesterday told me.’

  The nurse keeps her face carefully blank. ‘Dr Millar’s a very busy man,’ she says. ‘He has a lot of patients.’ She fiddles with her pen, flicking it between her fingers. ‘But I’ll see if I can find him for you. It’s Mrs Partridge, isn’t it?’

  ‘Yes, dear. Thank you, dear,’ Mrs Partridge says, and then, to my total embarrassment, she adds, ‘And this is Mrs Hamley, whose husband is in the legal profession.’