This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  I feel so disoriented. I tell myself it’s just a reaction, to all that has happened. I tell myself this, but my self is not convinced.

  I just can’t get it out of my head, what Heddy said about her dad, and about my dad. I can’t stop thinking about that day, when my dad did as Heddy said and carried me into her house in his arms and laid me on her sofa. And how she stood there looking at me, and how she was feeling what I now know she was feeling.

  And what of my dad, who loved me whatever I did? When I lay on that sofa with my eyes squeezed shut and heard him tell Mrs Partridge and Heddy and Ian that I was okay, I thought he sounded disappointed.

  Disappointed with me, yet again.

  And what about me? The only feeling I could register in myself at the time was embarrassment, that I hadn’t put on a better performance and made the cut a bit deeper.

  Suddenly I remember my first concert at Forbury High, and I remember how nervous I was because I’d got a big part dancing, not just in a group, but on my own too for some of it. My mum helped with the catering because that’s what my mum always did; while I was dancing she was organizing cakes onto plates and overseeing the cup quota. She missed the performance entirely, though she took the complements happily enough in the interval. Oh yes, Laura’s very good at her dancing, very good, she agreed, pouring out the teas.

  My dad, though, he was there in the audience, right near the front. I saw him sitting there, and gazing off into the space beside the stage with a frown on his face for the whole time I danced. And so he missed it all, too.

  Though you wouldn’t know it to hear him afterwards. ‘Excellent show,’ he agreed with my mother, with the other parents, with anyone else who was listening. ‘Laura did very well.’

  That’s Laura for you, folks – all-singing, all-dancing, always putting on a good show. And there are my parents, doing the same.

  When I took my little wrist-slitting show to the Partridges’ front room I got my dad’s attention then all right. But what good did it do?

  I’ve a hollow inside me, an ache, like an old, old hurt. Like there’s a cry inside me, cut off, mid-shout. Hurting myself could never make up for what I did to Heddy Partridge. Each wicked thing that I did sits upon the track of my life like so many twisted knots. They can never be undone.

  When James comes home the children are still up, their faces and their pyjamas all sticky with honey and mud. They run in from the garden to greet him, leaving yet more dirty footprints on the living-room floor, and start clamouring for his attention. They haven’t spoken to him for days, as all week he’s been in too late to see them, and they’ve lots to tell him, about playing at Nathan’s house and all the cakes that they ate and the mattress that was as good as a trampoline. James stands there, braced against the onslaught, trying to keep their grubby hands off his suit. And every now and again he looks at me over the top of their heads with a slightly raised eyebrow and a pained expression, especially when he realizes that the mattress was outside the house, and when he hears about the camp I’ve let them make in our garden with our own crisp and pristine bedding.

  ‘Well, I think it’s time you put your duvets back on your beds now, don’t you?’ he says.

  ‘There’s a snail on Thomas’s pillow,’ says Arianne.

  And, ‘Mummy said we could sleep out there,’ says Thomas.

  James looks at me again, in disbelief.

  ‘Well, I didn’t say that they couldn’t,’ I say. I am curled up on the end of the sofa. I try to raise myself up from my lethargy, and find that I can’t.

  James carries on looking at me, and his eyes narrow. ‘Would our new cushions happen to be out there too?’ he asks.

  I don’t bother to answer. The children are starting to whine now, deflated by James’s lack of enthusiasm. ‘Right,’ he snaps, ‘I think it’s time for bed.’ And with Thomas and Arianne hanging off his sleeves, he marches out to the back garden and marches in again, dragging duvets and pillows and wailing children; and out again, and in again, until all are deposited where they should be, dirt and all. And then he comes back down the stairs, leaving the children crying in their rooms.

  Still I cannot stir myself.

  James stands before me, with his hands on his hips. He looks hot, and he looks angry, and there is a large yellowish splodge on the front of his lapel. ‘Are you doing this just to wind me up?’ he asks.

  ‘Why would I do that?’ I reply, but he just huffs and rolls his eyes in exasperation.

  ‘I don’t suppose there’s any supper?’ he says and, when I look at him blankly, ‘You know I have just come in from a long day at work.’

  ‘I thought we could get a takeaway,’ I say, a little lamely.

  James is looking at me intently, critically, as if trying to suss me out, and I curl my legs up a little closer. Then he says, ‘You know, I’ve some interesting news of my own.’

  ‘Oh, really?’

  ‘Yes, really.’ He takes his hands off his hips and folds his arms now, in front of him, barrier up. ‘Guess who I bumped into on the train tonight?’

  I look up at him. I wait.

  ‘Rupert Searle.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘Yes, and guess what he said to me? He said: are we going to their party tomorrow night, as we’ve not yet replied?’

  ‘Oh,’ I say again.

  He tilts his head to one side and laughs this bemused what’s-going-on-here? laugh, which isn’t really a laugh at all. ‘Laura, do you realize how embarrassed I felt? I didn’t even know they were having a party.’

  ‘No,’ I say. ‘I’d forgotten about that.’

  He laughs again, in disbelief. ‘Since when did you ever forget about a party?’

  ‘Yes, well, I don’t want to go.’ The TV guide is on the floor next to the sofa; I bend and pick it up. Anything to avoid looking at James. Upstairs both of the children are still crying; one of us will have to go up in a minute.

  ‘Why don’t you want to go?’ James asks, standing there with his arms crossed, and I shrug.

  ‘I’m just not in the mood to go spending an evening with those people.’

  ‘Those people are our friends,’ he says, and I snort; I can’t help myself.

  ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

  James reaches down and snatches the TV guide right out of my hand. When I look up, he starts nodding his head, slowly, as if realization has finally dawned. ‘This is about that thing over the asylum seekers,’ he says.

  ‘Well, look how they reacted! I mean honestly, James, some people around here don’t care about anything except the price of their houses!’

  ‘Laura,’ James says, ‘do you not think people have a right to be pissed off when you start spreading around rumours like that? Do you not think you’d be pissed off, if one of your friends did that to you? And if Tasha and Rupert have the good grace to invite us to their party after all that, do you not think we ought to have the good grace to accept?’

  ‘Look, I just don’t want to go.’

  ‘Well, maybe I do. I want us to go, and I want us to be nice to these people.’ Then, ‘Oh, for God’s sake! Now what?’

  Arianne has come out of her room and down the stairs, and is now standing in the doorway, howling.

  ‘It’s okay, Arianne,’ I say to her, getting up at last from the sofa. Because people like us, we don’t fight in front of the children. That’s what we like to think. We simmer and we snipe and we circle each other in resentful isolation, but we don’t fight. Oh no.

  And so I can’t stop myself from saying, ‘You know, James, the children were perfectly happy until you came home,’ before I take Arianne back upstairs and comfort her, as I have comforted her so often. And then I settle both the children, as I have settled them both so often.

  When I come back downstairs James has gone out. He comes back a while later with a takeaway in a polystyrene box that he sits and eats in front of the TV, jabbing angrily at noodles with a plastic fork. He doesn’t speak to me again a
ll evening, until later, when he sees me struggling to change our duvet cover, which is covered in dirt and grass stains from the garden.

  ‘Not such a good idea after all, was it?’ he says then, ambiguously, and takes himself off to the spare room, leaving me to sleep alone.

  And thus I am punished.

  Still, I do go with James to the party. Damage limitation, James calls it, but for me it is just a swansong.

  We walk there, in strained silence, through the pleasant, leafy streets. And all the while James is just fractionally ahead of me, so that I have to walk too fast in my heels to keep up. It doesn’t bode well. When we arrive there are already loads of cars parked up outside. Only Tasha could get away with having a party in July; people will have booked their holidays around this. Just as we get to the door, James turns to me and says, ‘Please, just don’t do anything else to embarrass me.’

  But before I can reply – and believe me, reply I would – the door is opened and in we go.

  Brittle smiles greet me as we walk the length of the hall to the kitchen. Warmer smiles greet James. It’s all James, hi, good to see you, followed by Laura, and how are you?

  Again and again and again.

  I have the weird feeling of not belonging to my life any more. Surprisingly, I don’t really care. I feel strangely free, like a ghost walking through, just watching. James cares, though, I can tell. Not out of any loyalty to me, you understand, but as a reflection upon himself. There is a marked difference. I see it clearly.

  Poor James. He couldn’t come on his own, but he doesn’t want me there, not really.

  And then we are set upon by Tasha. She too greets James first, draping her delicate arms around him, kissing him fondly on the cheek.

  ‘So glad you could make it,’ she gushes, and to me, stoically, ‘I hope that tonight we can all be friends.’

  I know why she says this. Just beyond her, at the far side of the kitchen, I can see Fiona Littlewood poking things on sticks into a giant watermelon. She glances my way and catches me looking, and turns away again, and in no time at all is huddled up with a group of what we always referred to as the mums from school, all of them with their backs to me.

  ‘Drinks are in the garden,’ Tasha says. ‘Do help yourselves.’

  And so we wander through. Outside, they’ve a table laden with champagne glasses and some sort of fountain-thing going on, and a couple of girls I recognize as ex-babysitters loading up trays to circulate with.

  ‘Let me get you a drink,’ James says a little tersely, and leaves me standing on the patio, from where I can look out at the good and the great, and the not-so-good and the not-so-great, scattered across the perfectly striped lawn. There are fairy lights strung from the trees, and plenty of patio heaters, pumping out their fumes. Not that they are needed; it’s a fine, warm night. Everywhere people are gathered in little groups, chatting in that fast, urgent way that people chatter at parties – you know, making out that everything they have to say is just so funny and so amazing. Oh no, nothing can ever be dull, or just plain ordinary, or serious in any way. The laughter trills out, carrying for miles.

  ‘Here,’ James says, returning briefly to hand me a glass. And then I watch him as he so casually wanders over to a group of the men of this town: Rupert, Peter Littlewood and the like, and so smoothly moves in on them, slapping backs, telling jokes. And I see how they respond, just as he wants them to. Clearly he is not to be blamed for the failings of his wife.

  The thing is, it is unthinkable for James to be anything other than popular. It was unthinkable for me, too, until recently.

  ‘Hello, Laura.’ It’s Liz.

  ‘Hi,’ I say, and I slap on my party smile.

  ‘I’m glad you came,’ she says. ‘Haven’t seen you for ages.’

  ‘Well, you know . . . I’ve been kind of busy.’

  ‘So I heard,’ she says, and she sips her drink. She’s had quite a lot to drink; I can tell this because she sways, just ever so slightly, like a flower in her pink strappy dress. ‘They’ll get over it, you know.’

  ‘What?’

  She points with her glass to the far side of the garden by the arbour, where Tasha is holding court now among a crowd of followers. She’s showing off her dress, in which she looks gorgeous, even though she’s five months pregnant. ‘Them,’ Liz says, and she leans a little closer to me and whispers conspiratorially, ‘you showed them up for what they are and they didn’t like it. I think it’s hilarious.’

  And then off she totters again, back across the lawn to the others.

  I don’t want to stay. I am not a part of this any more.

  To interrupt James and tell him I’m leaving would be to induce a scene, of one type or another. So I just go. Quietly, I slip back through the house, and out of the front door. And the sense of freedom I feel as I start walking down that street, on my own, in the soft balmy air, is heaven. It’s still not completely dark and I can see the shapes of the clouds in the sky above the trees, purple on purple. There are just big houses in this street, set back from the road behind hedges. No one is about. Not a single car passes me by. It would seem that the whole world is at Tasha’s house and I am completely alone. My heels hit the ground too noisily, and the sound hammers back with an echo, so I take my shoes off, and I feel the pavement gritty under my feet. Now there is silence. Now I can truly disappear.

  Emma from across the road is babysitting. She jumps up from the TV when I walk in, surprised to see me back so early, but I pay her for the night anyway and send her on her way. And I wonder what I am going to do now.

  I look in on my children, and see them sleeping the sweet sleep of oblivion. I straighten their covers and close their doors again, and creep about my house in the half-dark as if I don’t belong here. I feel I should wait up for James and give him some sort of explanation. I think of texting him, but remember he doesn’t have his phone; we took mine tonight, for the babysitter. So I pour myself a glass of wine and sit in the living room, in the silence and semi-darkness.

  I feel so detached from my life. On the wall beside the mantelpiece is a photo taken of us all last year: a studio shot in which we are tumbling together against a background of white, bare-footed and laughing. You know the sort of thing; you’ll have seen similar photos of similar families in similar houses to ours. It shows us in our uniform, our disguise. See how good-looking we all are, with our perfect teeth and our shiny hair. It’s a PR shot. It shows us as we want to be seen, not as we really are.

  And I remember all those photos clustered around in Mrs Partridge’s front room, of her children and her grandchildren, the people she loves and who love her. The snapshots and school photos of gap-toothed, bed-haired kids, of Heddy in her wedding dress. No air-blown perfection there, no need for artifice. Just the real thing. So lovingly Mrs Partridge packed them all away into old cardboard boxes, carefully wrapping each one in newspaper. I think of their lives. Always, for evermore, I will think of their lives and feel the hole that has opened up in mine.

  I wait for James and I wait. I feel so strangely calm, weightless, as if I have already let go. But he comes in late, very late, and by then I have given up and gone to bed. I hear his key in the door; I hear him banging doors. He will be drunk, then, as well as angry. I hear him go into the kitchen and pour first one glass of water, then another. I lie in our bed, completely still, hidden in the dark, and listen.

  After a while he comes upstairs, but he doesn’t come into our room. He goes straight into the spare room. And this is where he will always sleep from now on, for the remainder of our marriage.

  It is a hot night and against my skin the sheets feel cool. I lie so still I could almost be floating. I close my eyes and I picture my life as a box, held together with string; undo the string and one by one the sides fall open, and inside there is just me.

  I feel the layers of myself, peeling away.

  TWENTY-THREE

  I am up early in the morning, long before James. I find some c
ereal for the children and put the washing on. Strangely, I feel the urge to be a good wife now that I feel I will not be one for much longer. I load up the dishwasher and clean out the fridge, which is more or less empty apart from some suspect milk and a bag of old apples. I am sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, and writing a list for Sainsbury’s, when James comes down.

  He comes into the kitchen and he stands there in his bathrobe and says, ‘Why did you do it?’ in this quiet, pained voice. He is looking tired and a little haggard; he runs his hand back through his sleep-messed hair, tilting his head to the side. Does he mean to be patronizing? Sometimes I find it hard to tell. ‘Will you please just explain to me why you find it necessary to humiliate me like that?’ He pulls out a chair and sits himself down opposite me, and then waits, as if he actually expects me to answer.

  ‘I don’t find it necessary. I don’t mean to humiliate you.’

  ‘Then what else is it, Laura? Why else would you come to a party with me, and then just leave without even telling me?’ His voice is rising now. The children are in the living room watching TV – they’ll hear. ‘I didn’t even know you’d gone,’ he says. ‘Till near the end and I’m looking for you and I can’t find you, and I say to Tasha, “Have you seen Laura?” And she says, “Oh, James, didn’t you know? She left ages ago. I do hope nothing’s wrong.”’

  ‘You didn’t miss me then.’

  ‘Do you know how stupid I felt? Do you know how ashamed? Everyone else knows my wife’s just walked out, without even saying goodbye to anyone, and I don’t.’

  So I didn’t escape unseen, then. I picture them all, gossiping. How they must have loved it.

  ‘If I’d told you I wanted to leave, you’d have tried to stop me.’