This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

I see Penny look at Tasha, and Tasha look at Liz.

  ‘Where’s the hospital?’ Liz asks.

  ‘St Anne’s. Other side of Hounslow,’ I say, over the lump in my throat.

  ‘Why would you want to get her out?’ Penny asks. ‘I mean, I’m sure she wouldn’t be in there in the first place unless there was a very good reason, Laura.’

  I can’t answer this. Again, I see them all exchanging glances.

  ‘She might be dangerous,’ Tasha suggests, and Penny nods, vigorously, in agreement.

  They’re waiting for me to tell them more, but I can’t. I should never have mentioned it at all. I should have stuck to clothes and houses and children and the general bitching with which we normally amuse each other. My throat is burning, the skin under my hair prickling up with heat.

  Tasha shivers slightly, and pulls her cardigan a little closer around her. The silence drags on.

  And then Penny suddenly sees someone she just has to wave hello to across the other side of the room, and Tasha remembers it’s at least five minutes since she checked her phone for messages. Liz picks up her cup, stares into it for a long moment and eventually notices that it’s empty, again.

  ‘More coffee, anyone?’ she asks stoically, breaking the silence.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ Tasha says, ‘good idea’, and the relief is palpable.

  ‘Me, too,’ Penny says and, turning towards Tasha, and away from me, she says, ‘I’ve been dying to ask: how is your floor coming along?’

  And swiftly they are back on floors, and wall coverings, the debatable progress of the children’s book-day costumes and the new summer collection already appearing in Flavia’s in the village, as if I had never done anything so gauche as to throw a nutter into the conversation.

  It’s a while before I can join in. It’s a while longer before any of them can meet my eye again.

  TEN

  Mrs Partridge catches me in the next time she phones.

  We are just in from school, with Thomas tearful and angry inside the sad remains of his Baloo outfit. I’d be just the tiniest bit angry myself if I didn’t feel so sorry for him. He’s torn his school trousers trying to rip the felt off them, and the white furry patch on his tummy is covered in dirt from rolling around on the ground, fighting. The tail is gone altogether, thrown around the playground apparently, until it got stuck up a tree.

  ‘There’s been some silliness,’ Mrs Hills said when I went to pick him up. She kept him back with her as the rest of the class dispersed, always a bad sign. She kept Milo Littlewood back too, at her other side, which was doubly worrying as we were supposed to be going back to the Littlewoods’ for tea.

  ‘Oops,’ Fiona Littlewood whispered into my ear as we waited, as required, until all the other delightful little Jungle Book characters had been claimed.

  Oops, indeed. Thomas was sporting a scowl that would sink battleships on his tear-stained little face. Milo, who was clad in a Baloo costume worthy of a stage production, was sporting two large red scratches on his.

  The silliness turned out to be fighting and name-calling and all manner of inappropriate behaviour, rounded off most effectively by Thomas digging his nails into Milo’s milky-white cheeks. Naturally, Mrs Hills hoped never to see such behaviour again, and certainly not during book week.

  I felt like a six-year-old myself, and thoroughly told off. This I covered with a profusion of apologies on Thomas’s behalf in a voice slightly lower than my normal tone. And Fiona Littlewood graciously accepted my apologies with vocal and smug generosity. Although she did go on to say that perhaps the tea arrangements might be postponed as the children seemed a little tired after their rather exciting day. She smiled as she said it – a smile at once superior and understanding – and for just a second I wondered how she would look with a couple of scratches to match Milo’s on her beautifully maintained face.

  And so we came home, Thomas, Arianne and I, with Thomas and me feeling, I imagine, equally deflated and Arianne piping up every two minutes, ‘Has he been naughty, Mummy? Has Thomas been naughty again?’

  ‘They kept calling me a rat,’ Thomas cries when we are home, and he is clinging on to my legs and pressing his face into my tummy, just above the belt of my jeans. ‘They said I looked like a rat, not Baloo.’

  He lets his tears bubble up, and I hold him. He cries, and I cry too. Soon Arianne is holding on to both of us, and joining in. Thomas is crying over the humiliation of his bodge-job Baloo outfit. Arianne is crying over Thomas. And I am crying over a million things that I couldn’t even begin to explain, not even to myself. And so we launch ourselves off onto a family crying jag. And this is how we are when Mrs Partridge phones, and catches me in.

  The annoying thing is, if Thomas hadn’t scratched Milo’s cheeks, if Milo hadn’t been wearing such a sick-makingly perfect Baloo outfit and if there hadn’t been such a tortuous annual event as book week in the first place, we’d have gone back to the Littlewoods’ as planned and I’d have been out and have missed her call, and believe me, I’d have had my mobile switched off.

  I loosen myself from my children’s arms to pick up the phone and have to listen to her thanking me again for my time given up and my most appreciated concern. I feel like God is having a laugh at my expense. Then she gives me a full unwanted update on Heddy’s progress, or rather the lack of it, since my bountiful visit to St Anne’s. Right now I couldn’t care less.

  She falls short of asking me outright what I’m going to do, but the question is there, hanging in the long pause, when she finally shuts up.

  I feel a deep tiredness, which I think you might call resignation, sinking into my bones.

  ‘I have given it some thought,’ I say, which is true enough. ‘We need to get her out, back with Nathan. That’s the main thing.’ The children loosen themselves from my legs and stare up at me, intrigued.

  Mrs Partridge remains quiet on the other end of the phone, waiting for me to tell her something she doesn’t already know.

  ‘It seems to me that Heddy’s caught in a cycle. We need to break that cycle.’ I am talking complete rubbish. I can tell by her silence that Mrs Partridge thinks this too. Even the children have forgotten their tears and are starting to giggle now. I’d laugh too, if the joke wasn’t on me.

  I tell her I’ll help. I tell her I’ll do whatever I can. I say it just to get her off the phone, but it’s true. I have no choice. It seems to me that on one of his particularly boring days above the earth God decided to make the Partridges my problem, and so I am stuck with them unless I can sort them out and get rid of them for good.

  The first thing I do is write a letter to the local paper. Not just my local paper, here in Ashton, but all the local papers around here that get printed out of the same office. So we have a pretty large area covered. I am surprised at how easy it is to write your own little feature and get it into print. In fact there’s no writing involved at all, I just phone the central office number and speak to the nice guy on the phone and he writes it all down for me.

  ‘Mental illness is still a social taboo,’ I tell him, ‘and the trouble is that people like these become lost in the system. They don’t have the confidence to stand up for themselves, or, frankly, the brains. Their social status marks them out as victims; it is incredibly unfair.’

  I feel quite pleased with myself. I am a pioneer for the working classes. I find myself quite liking this role and the easy sleep it brings, until I see my article in print, one week later.

  I have been completely misquoted. Every ‘they’ I said has become ‘we’. I read the article with drop-dead horror. ‘“Mental illness is still a social taboo and people like us get lost in the system,” says Ashton mum Laura Hamley. “Just because we don’t have the confidence or the brains to stand up for ourselves, we’re marked out as victims. It isn’t fair.”’

  Embarrassment settles over me like a heavy blanket. The local paper is posted through every door, in every street, in Ashton.

  James thinks it’s hila
rious. He half-kills himself laughing when he reads it. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he says, ‘what will the ladies of Ashton do, now they know they’ve got a nutter in their midst?’

  Nobody says anything. That makes it worse.

  I feel like all of Ashton is looking at me, and I wish someone would say something, make a joke about it at least. I wish I could make a joke about it. I would, if they’d give me the chance.

  I get kind looks in the playground, if I get any looks at all. Mostly people are suddenly very busy, dashing here, dashing there. I find myself painfully invisible. No one is pushing for coffee, or lunch, or tea, later, with the children. Even Penny, Tasha and Liz are suddenly unavailable when I call, but I’d bet my bottom dollar they’re not unavailable to each other.

  It is a strangely quiet week. Whatever we three do, we do alone. Tennis lessons, swimming lessons, after-school recorder practice. All the things we normally rush to and from are suddenly so much less of a rush when there is no tea to be fitted in before or after; no tea, and no chat. It seems to me that for days I speak to no one but my children, and my husband – and he, obviously, doesn’t count.

  ‘Oh, Laura,’ James laughs, oblivious of his place at the very bottom of the list of those I would like to chat to, ‘how are the ladies of Ashton going to get over that one?’

  Tasha makes the first move, to break my exile.

  After Tumbletots on Monday, when we have each sat and clapped and separately applauded the musical, balancing and all-round marvellous performing skills of our children, Tasha turns to me with a generous smile and says, ‘Hi, Laura. How are you? Haven’t spoken to you all week – I’ve been so busy.’

  ‘Me too,’ I reply, as required, although we all know that Coventry isn’t the busiest of places when you’re sent to it.

  ‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I’m having drinks at my house on Thursday night, for the girls. Rupert’s away, on business. You will come, won’t you? I’ve got something exciting to tell.’

  ‘I’ll have to check my diary,’ I say, which is what we always say. ‘But that should be fine. I’d love to come.’

  My smile is at least as big as Tasha’s, so wide it’s almost cracked out into my ears.

  Oh, what it is to be relegated to second-rate invitee rather than first-rate planner in this powerful, powder-puff world of ours.

  I arrive latish, so no one feels compelled to talk to me before the action gets under way. Tasha is holding court already, tippy-toeing about so that her heels don’t dent her new, soft oak floor. Everyone else is doing the same; I walk in and see this and it occurs to me just how de rigueur it is, this funny indoor walk, and how I’d laugh and point it out to them all if I wasn’t in enough disgrace already.

  I myself am wearing flats tonight.

  ‘Laura!’ Tasha trip-trips over to me and kisses the air on each side of my face. ‘So glad you could come.’

  And so I am greeted all round, and so I greet back. Everyone is here tonight. Tasha’s star is clearly in the rising, whereas mine has plummeted to earth. No one mentions my dreadful faux pas with the local paper.

  Now we’re all on our second glass of champagne, and we’re all starting to get just the tiniest bit ditzy. Tasha herself is rosy-cheeked and starry-eyed, but not from the champagne. She has pointedly kept one hand placed over her glass all evening.

  ‘Girls,’ she announces now, after trilling one nail against her glass to get our attention. ‘I know you’re all dying to know . . .’ She lets her words trail off as she coyly smiles around the room, and then she extends her free hand, waggles her manicured fingers and slowly pats her incredibly flat stomach.

  The room erupts into squeals.

  ‘Oh Tasha, you’re not!’

  ‘Tasha, how could you keep it from me?’

  ‘Oh Tasha, you dark horse – I knew it, from the moment you went off coffee!’

  ‘And gin!’

  And so we crowd around and we gush and push and shove in our efforts to be favourite friend. My new position in the back row makes the viewing of this social zoo all the more entertaining.

  After enough of a fuss has been made of Tasha, and a little more champagne has been drunk, we start on the obligatory tales of pregnancy and childbirth. We all have a stack of such tales, to be brought out on occasions like these. It’s the one thing we all have in common, I suppose – that and our love of shoes.

  Fiona Littlewood starts it off, telling us all how she spits them out, like shelling peas. Personally I don’t actually think this is something to be proud of, especially as she goes on to give them all such ridiculous names. Minka, she called the last one, for God’s sake. I suppose that’s what comes of having too much energy left over after pushing, and not enough decorum. The harder the push, the plainer the name, that’s for sure.

  I mean, look at Penny.

  ‘It took me days to have Joe, and I mean days,’ she states and though we have all heard this story several times before, we are all ready to hear it again, curling up our toes and our noses in anticipation. ‘Forceps, suction, cut from here to here,’ and she holds up her hands in what I sincerely hope is an exaggerated estimate of the distance down below. ‘It was years before I could have sex again, and I mean years. And then look what happened. I got Sam. Same thing all over again.’ She shudders, and we all shudder too, glorying in the delight that at least there is one couple out there having sex less often than ourselves.

  ‘Well, I went through all that and still ended up having a Caesarean,’ Juliet squeaks, pulling a poor-me face and crossing her eyes.

  ‘How awful,’ we all say, sympathy itself, ‘imagine it, all that pain for nothing.’

  ‘And in the days before tummy tucks!’ someone laughs, and we all laugh too, though terribly politely of course. I mean, no one would actually suggest that Juliet could have done with a tummy tuck.

  And meanwhile Tasha sits there, centre stage, touching those beautifully painted fingernails to her mouth, her forehead, her stomach in a parody of anticipated dread. ‘Bang go my Joseph trousers,’ she moans now and again. ‘And as for my new Prada skirt – why on earth did I buy it? What have I done? I’m ruined.’

  I have my own little repertoire of ever-so-amusing stories from the arena of childbirth and I’m wondering which little ditty I should share tonight.

  There’s the one about my first day at the NCT group where the group leader handed around picture cards to the eight of us in her group. On these cards were pictures of women, in various types of attire. Well, I say various, but mostly they were of a type, what you might call the comfy type – dare I say it, the mumsy type – make-up-less, hairstyle-less, clad in joggie bottoms and sweatshirts and their husbands’ big denim shirts. Clothes I would not be seen dead in. All of the women in the pictures were like this except for two, who between them were wearing lipstick, decent highlights, cute jackets and heels.

  ‘Now pick out the images that most represent you,’ our leader said to us, as if we were imbeciles. I thought she was checking to see if our brains had all gone with the arrival of our bumps.

  Naturally I picked out the two women wearing the lipstick, the decent highlights, the cute jackets and the heels; after all, that’s how I dressed for work every day. And even though I wasn’t going straight back to work – my job in PR meant erratic hours and too much travel – I assumed I’d still carry on dressing the way I liked.

  But, ‘Oh no,’ our leader admonished, shaking her head, and the other women all shook their heads too, like oversized puppets. ‘You can’t go around looking like that when you have a new baby to look after. You won’t have time to put on make-up, or worry about your hair. You’ll be lucky if you manage even to get dressed in the morning.’ All around there was a general murmur of agreement, and relief. Obviously no one else had been so stupid as to think they’d carry on being themselves, after they’d had their babies. ‘And smart jackets,’ she added, with a good deal of contempt in her voice, she herself most definitely being someone who
did not go in for such frivolities, ‘don’t look so smart with sick all down the lapel. This is what you’ll be wearing,’ she finished, jabbing her finger at a picture of a washed-out woman in a sweatshirt so hideous it might as well have been covered in sick, ‘when you’re a mum.’

  The girls always love to hear that one. They think it’s hilarious, they love to imagine my horror. Of course when I tell that story I paint myself as the rebel, the one that got away, the one who did sit up in bed and ask for her lipstick and a mirror, the minute her stitches had been sewn.

  I never tell them how isolating it was to be told, in effect, that you might as well just give up on yourself once you became a mother. That just wouldn’t be funny.

  Or there’s the one about the time I took Thomas along to the clinic to be weighed, when he was just a few weeks old. I went along to the clinic a lot when Thomas was tiny, just for something to do, and to have the nurses tell me my little boy was fine, though I didn’t see how he could be fine when he cried all the time. Thomas hated being weighed. He hated having all his clothes taken off and being placed on the scales, much like a bunch of bananas in the greengrocer’s. He’d scream as soon as the cold metal touched his skin. One time, as he lay on the scales, screaming, his little willy popped up and sent out an arc of pee, right across the room. It hit one of the nurses, square on the chin. She screamed in surprise, making Thomas scream all the more and wriggle about, thus sending the arc across the other side of the room and squirting another nurse, also in the face. He was like a high-powered garden sprinkler, spraying around the room. Soon everyone was screaming and trying to dodge his fire.

  But today I decide to tell them about the cabbage-leaf woman.

  ‘Oh no, not the cabbage-leaf woman!’ squeals Penny, who’s heard this story before.

  Oh yes. The cabbage-leaf woman turned up as guest speaker at one of our antenatal classes, come to talk to us about breast-feeding. She was a very curious-looking woman, somewhat round in shape and squeezed into an all-in-one green jumpsuit, the sort of thing I vaguely remembered being fashionable way back in the 1980s. And she’d obviously had it since the 1980s – it was fraying a little around the ankle hems, just above the straps of her red Jesus sandals. She had very pale skin and wore no make-up except for two matching bolts of electric-blue eye-shadow applied midway between her eyes and her overplucked brows. Her hair was a shocking frizz of yellow curls cut to just below her ears, in such a style that it seemed to be the same length all over, as wide as it was deep as it was long.