This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  I saw her first and nudged Jane, and we ducked down, peering through the gap between the gravestones so that we could see Heddy, but Heddy couldn’t see us. She was tiptoeing along at quite a speed, looking nervously from side to side. Every few steps she stopped and looked behind her, before scampering on again. It didn’t take her long to spot the statue with my red jumper dangling off it. And from my hiding place I saw her looking relieved for a second, before confusion and anxiety set in. She crept all the way around that statue twice, as if expecting Christopher to jump out from the other side and say Boo! Then she stood turning circles on the spot, looking all around her, clutching and unclutching her hands, and then she went back around the statue the other way. Jane and I were almost bursting with the effort of not laughing. Heddy was making this strange, low murmuring sound, like a hum gone wrong.

  ‘I can smell her fear,’ I whispered to Jane.

  And Jane whispered back, ‘That’s not her fear, it’s her bum.’

  Heddy heard us, or heard something; heard us snorting back the giggles most likely, and glanced our way, but couldn’t see us.

  ‘Oh. Oh,’ she kept saying, and she started flapping her hands at her sides.

  ‘She’s trying to fly,’ I whispered and Jane screeched and fell backwards, giving us away.

  Heddy watched us as we struggled to stand up, clutching at each other, half-collapsing again with laughter. She had a look on her face of absolute jaw-dropped horror.

  ‘What’s the matter, Heddy?’ I said. ‘Have you seen a ghost?’

  ‘There are lots of ghosts out here,’ Jane said. ‘Lots and lots.’

  ‘Yes, look!’ I gasped and pointed. ‘There’s one right there. And there, look!’

  Heddy turned to look, and so did Jane. Just then a bird or a squirrel caused a rustling in the bushes right beside us, and all three of us jumped. Jane screamed, and Heddy began to make a low groaning noise in her throat.

  ‘Where’s Christopher?’ she asked, as if she actually thought he might be there.

  ‘I don’t know, Heddy,’ I said, all quiet and mysterious. ‘Is he here somewhere? Is he?’ I put my finger to my chin in concentration and looked slowly around, peering through the trees and gravestones, and Heddy peered with me. Then I took a sharp breath and pointed to my red jumper, hanging off the statue. ‘His jumper is here,’ I whispered. ‘And so he must be, too. But where can he be? What do you think, Heddy? Where can Christopher be?’

  Heddy shook her head, and kept on looking around with her frightened, pleading eyes. She was clutching her skirt at the sides with both hands, bunching it up, pulling it shorter across her thighs.

  ‘Do you think – do you think something could have happened to him? Something awful?’

  ‘Let’s go now!’ Jane said. ‘You’re scaring me, too!’

  I was scaring myself, but I couldn’t stop.

  ‘Do you, Heddy? Do you think something really terrible has happened to Christopher?’

  Heddy screwed her skirt up even tighter; her thighs were practically wobbling with fear. And still she was making that groaning sound. I began to creep from side to side in front of her, slowly moving in on her.

  ‘What if he’s been murdered? What if he came to meet you and, while he was waiting, he was murdered? That would be your fault then, Heddy, wouldn’t it? It would be your fault if he was murdered because of you.’

  She was snivelling now. Snot was running out of her nose; she curled her tongue up over her top lip to meet it. She filled me with revulsion: her fat thighs, her snotty nose, her stupidity in thinking someone like Christopher would ever be interested in her. And every time I moved, she moved. It was like my birthday party all over again, but Heddy was well and truly trapped this time. She could run off into the depths of the scary graveyard, but she couldn’t run past me.

  ‘Do you think that’s what’s happened, Heddy? Do you think he’s been murdered?’ I shivered as I said it, and at the same time a bird came batting its way noisily from the leaves of a tree above us.

  ‘Come on, I’m going,’ Jane said and started heading for the exit, but I was too wired up now, driven on by all the anger, all the resentment I had ever felt towards Heddy Partridge.

  ‘What were you going to do with him anyway, Heddy? Were you going to snog him? Were you planning on meeting Christopher Chapman and snogging him?’ I tipped my head back and laughed; the sound of it crackled out, witch-like in the heavy air. ‘Did you really think that Christopher would actually want to snog you, Heddy Partridge?’

  Heddy was panicking now, looking round for an escape, but there was none. She moved to the left, I moved to the left. She moved to the right, I moved to the right. Then suddenly she turned and just ran, going I don’t know where. And straight away she tripped over an old tree root or something, and fell so hard that when her top half hit the ground, her lower half bounced up again, like in a cartoon, and her skirt flew right up, showing off her big white knickers. And I was laughing so much I was going to wet myself if I wasn’t careful.

  ‘Come on!’ Jane called from the gate and I called back that I was coming, but not before I saw that the wrist Heddy had landed on was broken, the bone sticking right out, the hand discolouring already.

  She tried to pick herself up from the ground, but got no further than her knees. She wasn’t even crying, just breathing in short, hard gasps. And then she retched, and threw up all down herself.

  And I turned and ran after Jane, and I left Heddy there.

  Heddy wasn’t in school for the last days of term. Out of sight was out of mind as far as Jane and Claire were concerned; they seemed to forget about the whole thing instantly. They didn’t know about Heddy’s wrist, of course. No one did. No one would be interested in why Heddy was off school. No one would even notice.

  But I expected there to be some kind of comeback.

  It wasn’t my fault that Heddy had broken her wrist. It wasn’t my fault that she ran and tripped. It wasn’t my fault that she wanted to go sneaking into the graveyard to meet a boy after school. She should have known better.

  None of it was my fault. I went over and over this reasoning in my head and absolved myself from blame.

  And then one evening over dinner my mum said, ‘I saw Mrs Partridge in the chemist’s this afternoon – she was in there getting something for poor Heddy. She told me something shocking. Heddy’s been in an accident. Apparently she was chased by some older boys on her way home from school and she tripped over. She’s got a broken wrist and a huge gash on her forehead, according to Mrs Partridge. Isn’t that awful?’ And then she said to me, ‘Do you know anything about this, Laura? Did they say anything at school?’

  The gash on the head was news to me. I shook my head, unable to speak.

  ‘That’s terrible,’ my dad said. ‘Did they call the police?’

  ‘I asked her that, but she said not. They ought to have done, but you know . . .’ My mum shrugged a shoulder, raised an eyebrow, saying so much about the Partridges with so few words.

  ‘I’ll go and see them,’ my dad said, and I waited in fear to be found out.

  And I waited and waited.

  Either Heddy lied to her mum because she’d be in trouble for being in the graveyard in the first place, or because she was scared of what I’d do to her if she told the truth. Either way, my dad came back with the same story.

  We’d all quit Guides by then and now she stopped going to ballet too – after all, she’d look pretty stupid prancing around with her arm in plaster. And we moved up to secondary school, and that was it: Heddy Partridge was finally out of my life.

  And it seemed that I’d got away with it.

  And yet, and yet.

  I picture myself lying prone and bleeding on her mother’s worn old sofa, offering myself up like some badly bodged sacrifice. And I think how she always seemed to be there in the distance, watching as I chiselled out the shape of this not-so-perfect life of mine, and I think of what she saw.

  Sh
e saw what I really was. She saw what I had done to her all those years, and what that had done to me.

  I can’t face going straight home, so I drive round and round, catching myself in the endless loop of the one-way system, then I veer off following the signs to the multi-storey car park, and park up, and find my way down to the shopping precinct. And there I wander from shop to shop in search of anonymity; I blend myself in with everyone else, just like any other woman, on any Saturday. But it brings no respite. I cannot lose myself because my self comes with me; we are anchored, chained together, inseparable. Myself and my ghosts. All that I did, all that I am.

  So I go back to my car, and again I just drive, slotting myself into the stream of crawling traffic, and I end up taking the route back that I took with Mrs Partridge that first day, following the bus route back to Forbury, through concrete street after concrete street. We are near the airport out here, and today the planes are frequent and low, roaring in and out of my consciousness. The air is sour with kerosene, and I close my window and switch on the air filter, closing myself into my bubble.

  I don’t know why I am doing this. This is no pleasant trip down memory lane. I drive through the council estate that leads into Barton Village. Living in Ashton, you could almost forget that places like this exist, and yet this is the world just forty-five minutes away. This is life. These are the people I was at school with, and it could be me, too, but for chance and determination.

  At least there’s the odd field out here, and the hills alongside the reservoir. Forbury seems almost rural, the houses small, the cars even smaller. I drive past the turning of Fairview Lane and turn down the road where we used to live, my mum and dad and me. I drive past our old house; there’s a huge builder’s skip in the driveway and a half-built extension on the side. All those years I lived here and now it belongs to someone else – it isn’t even familiar. My family are scrubbed out, just as we are from the shop in the High Street where my father and my grandfather sold carpets for so many years. I drive up past here and I would never, ever recognize the place. The pizza delivery bikes parked up outside, the skinny, spotty boys clustered around smoking their cigarettes, talking on their phones. It is so strange, how things can be one thing for so long, and then so suddenly and so quickly they are entirely gone.

  Yet the damage lives on and on.

  Finally, I drive round past our old junior school, and from there to the little lane going up to the graveyard. Outside the school there are crossing places now, traffic lights and speed bumps, all new. The road bends and narrows into the old part of the village, to where the church is, and opposite that the lane down to the graveyard. I haven’t been down here for years, not years and years. My mother wanted me to get married in this church. She thought it appropriate. ‘This is where you grew up, after all,’ she insisted.

  Exactly, I thought. And I picked a registry office as far away from here as possible.

  The road is too narrow really for me to stop, but I pull up opposite the lane to the graveyard for just a moment anyway, and park half up on the pavement, with my hazard lights flashing. There’s a sign up at the entrance to the alley now, telling you where it leads to, the opening hours of the graveyard, and that no dogs may crap on this land. But other than that it is as creepy as it ever was, going nowhere other than to death.

  I sit in the false safety of my car and I just look. Wild horses wouldn’t drag me down there, now.

  It’s late when I get home, and James is in a sulk and the children are whingeing, all because I wasn’t there to get tea.

  I stand in the doorway of the kitchen and watch James as he slams cupboard doors open and closed, as if hunting for clues, and I feel strangely detached and misplaced. James huffs and he puffs, and he pulls out a packet of spaghetti, and a tin of baked beans, and bangs them down on the counter. Yum, yum, I think, but I resist the urge to take over. Instead I turn to Arianne, who has come grizzling into the kitchen to wrap herself round my legs.

  ‘Thomas is being horrible,’ she wines.

  ‘Thomas, don’t be horrible,’ I say automatically.

  Thomas comes into the kitchen too, shoving past me. ‘I don’t want baked beans,’ he says.

  ‘Well, you’re getting baked beans,’ snaps James. ‘As there doesn’t appear to be anything else.’

  I almost laugh, but Arianne starts to cry, and so does Thomas. I say, ‘They are your children too, you know, James.’

  ‘I don’t need you to tell me that,’ James replies, clattering all the cutlery in the drawer as he searches for the can opener, which he doesn’t need because there’s a ring pull on the tin.

  ‘There’s a ring pull on the tin,’ I say, and James turns and glares at me.

  ‘Thank you, Laura,’ he says. ‘I think you’ve made your little point.’

  ‘I wasn’t aware that I was making a point.’

  A thin stain of red rises under the ridges of James’s cheekbones. ‘You could have phoned,’ he says.

  And childishly I say, ‘You could have phoned me.’

  James stands there with the tin of baked beans in his hand, and he is staring at me as if he really doesn’t know me at all. Which, I realize, he doesn’t. And he never really will, not if we stay together for another forty years.

  When you are born blonde and clever and pretty like me, you have it all. You are Mary at Christmas, year in, year out. Then you’re the May Queen in summer. Because you’re good at sports as well, you always come at least second in all your chosen races at sports day, and when you start secondary school there’s no question that you’ll be captain in netball. You’ve got to be good and popular to be captain. And so you have the power of picking the team. And you pick the team like you pick your friends: from the prettiest down. The same way you pick your boyfriends when you’re older, the same way that I picked James.

  I can picture him now: the first time I met him in the student-union bar, with all his friends fawning around him. Good-looking, popular, clever. It was like looking in a mirror. It was like seeing who I am: the top of the box, no need to dig any deeper.

  SEVENTEEN

  On Monday, the stripes are back on Milo Littlewood’s face.

  Arianne and I walk into the playground at half-past three just as the children are spilling out of the double doors, and see that Mrs Hills is holding Thomas back. I mean literally, holding him back. It is taking both her arms and a lot of effort to restrain him. He is furious.

  ‘No, I won’t say I’m sorry! I’m not sorry!’ he shouts for everyone to hear as he struggles against her, and my heart sinks. I grip Arianne’s hand and walk steadily towards them, trying to appear calm.

  Fiona Littlewood – who always arrives early for pick-up – is standing to the left of the doors, clutching Milo dramatically to her side. Milo is sobbing loudly with his mouth wide open, his cheeks all pink and freshly scratched. Fiona glares at me as I approach, her face tightened up with anger, and my heart starts to thump. As soon as I’m near enough she takes two steps towards me and says, ‘Really, Laura, this is too much,’ in a voice that whips out sharp across the playground. And then she flounces off, still with the wounded Milo clamped to her side.

  Thomas starts crying too, now that he’s seen me, and the sight of his desperate little face makes my own eyes smart. ‘What’s the matter with Thomas?’ Arianne pipes up beside me, and I hush her, quickly, with a tug of the hand. Mrs Hills loosens her hold on Thomas and straightens herself up. She is hot, and flushed, and clearly not amused.

  ‘Mrs Hamley, I am sorry to have to tell you that there has been another incident,’ she says, and again I have to listen to her complaining about my son’s unacceptable behaviour with regard to name-calling and cheek-scratching and Milo Precious Littlewood.

  I do what I have to do. I look shocked. I say, ‘Thomas, what on earth is this about?’ in the most appalled voice I can manage, so that Mrs Hills, and anyone else listening, knows that we certainly don’t approve of violence in the Hamley househo
ld.

  ‘It’s your fault,’ Thomas cries and lunges at me, pushing me in the stomach.

  ‘Thomas, for heaven’s sake!’ I grab hold of him and he falls against me then, and clings on.

  ‘He said you’re a twisted fuck-head,’ he cries into my skirt. ‘And he kept saying it. He said his dad said it, so it must be true.’

  I’m looking at Mrs Hills over the top of Milo’s head as he says it, and I see the colour drain out of her face. We stare at each other, stunned to hear these words come out of my son’s mouth. I stare at her the longer, stunned that they came out of Peter Littlewood’s mouth. Part of me wants to laugh at the very idea of Peter Littlewood calling someone a twisted fuck-head, but I can’t laugh because that someone is me. I stare at Mrs Hills and I’m blinking and blinking my eyes, but I can’t think what to say.

  She speaks first. ‘Would you like to sit down, Mrs Hamley?’ she says in a gentler voice than I’ve ever heard her use before, and I guess I must have gone even whiter than she did. I shake my head. I just want to get out of there.

  ‘I think we’d better go home,’ I manage to say, to which she agrees, and nods her head a little too keenly. I feel her watching as we make our way out of the playground, we three, with me in the middle trying to hold on to my dignity.

  I haven’t been called a name like that ever before in my whole life. Not ever.

  I’m still reeling, hours later. I’ll be reeling for days. When we get home we sit on the sofa together, Thomas, Arianne and I, watching Scooby-Doo. I give them fish fingers and ice cream for tea, and see Thomas looking at me wondering why he’s getting such treats when he was expecting a telling-off. But I can’t find it in me to tell him off. I mean, who am I to criticize his behaviour when it stems from me? The best I can do is say, ‘There is no excuse for violence, Thomas.’