This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  And I say, ‘Thank goodness for that.’

  *

  I wake up early and put on yesterday’s clothes. My parents are in the kitchen and they greet me a little stiltedly. Surprises don’t fit well in a carefully planned existence, and what a surprise I am, turning up unannounced like this. Allowing them no time for preparation, no opportunity for performance, for cushions to be plumped and cakes to be baked, for the choreography of outstretched arms and cries of delight.

  I’ll get all that when I come back next time, with the children. But this time, I just get the bones.

  ‘Well, I’ll leave you to it,’ my dad says more or less straight away as if I want to be left to it, and off he goes, into the garden. And so I am left with my mum again, and that oh-so-tangible air of disapproval. I remember just before I got married, a month or so beforehand, when the whole ordeal of flowers and napkins and place-settings just got too much, and it felt as if the most important thing about my wedding was whether we were going for violet or blue. And I remember saying as much to my mother, during yet another overstressed conversation.

  ‘Of course it’s important,’ she snapped back. Followed with, ‘Don’t you dare go changing your mind now, or I will never forgive you.’

  And I wondered if she was talking about the colour scheme, or the wedding itself.

  ‘And how are you feeling this morning?’ she asks me now, a little coolly.

  And I say, ‘Fine. Thank you’, because I realize there isn’t much point in saying anything else. To my mother, this is all about a silly argument with James. ‘I’ll be heading back in a while.’ She nods in approval, and I see her visibly relax. ‘But I’ll just go and have a quick chat with Dad first.’

  *

  I find him poking about down the end of the garden, as far away from any possible histrionics as he can get. He starts telling me about his plans to grow vegetables, and then we just stand there, side by side, staring out across the fields to the sea, picture-book blue in the distance. I think he can sense that there’s something I want to say; there’s something between us, some charge. My heart is beating slow and hard. I think of Heddy saying Your dad loved you whatever you did. I think of that time in the car when we had to give Heddy a lift to the Forbury High disco; I think of him hitting me again and again and again.

  And I blurt out, ‘Heddy Partridge was in hospital because she kept cutting up her arms.’ I wonder if he already knows this – if he does, he doesn’t let on. His face is controlled, impassive. ‘I went to see her . . . lots of times. I saw her scars, just like mine.’ My voice is stark and clumsy in the soft, honeyed air.

  My dad lays down his garden trowel and slowly wipes his hands on the front of his thighs. I can hear the steady rise and fall of his breathing.

  I carry on before I lose my nerve. ‘And before they moved she said something about her dad dying . . . and about you, about that day, when you took me in there, when I—’ I stop. I just cannot bring myself to say it.

  The silence is blistering.

  And then he says, ‘Is that what this is all about? Bring back bad memories, did it?’

  I shake my head. ‘No. It’s not just that. Dad, I was so cruel to her when we were kids.’ I see his face cloud with disappointment, just like it always did, shutting me out. But I won’t stop now. I can’t. ‘But you forced us together, all the time. I couldn’t understand why.’ My voice is getting shrill; I can’t help it. ‘I felt like you shoved me at her constantly, and constantly I let you down.’

  ‘Was it really so hard for you to understand the concept of being nice to someone less fortunate than yourself?’ he starts in that weary voice that he has used on me so often – so often – but I’m not having it. Not this time.

  ‘But why did I have to be so nice to her? Why did I even have to know her? Why couldn’t we just have been the strangers that we wanted to be?’

  ‘Laura? What’s going on?’ I can hear my mother, coming striding across the lawn. ‘Laura!’ she calls, her voice sharp with suspicion.

  ‘Heddy’s father worked for me a long time ago. I felt a degree of responsibility towards them,’ my dad says quickly and turns away from me, as if that is an end to it.

  ‘Do you know how judged I felt by you all the time? And it seemed to me that she was the cause. I was caught in a vicious circle. The more disappointed you were with me, the more I hated her; and the more I hated her, the more disappointed you got.’

  ‘Laura! I don’t think we want to be talking about this now!’ my mum barks, joining us now, her face flushed from her march down the garden.

  But I carry on. ‘I was so cruel to her. The things I did—’ My voice cracks now. ‘That time Heddy broke her wrist. It was my fault. I persuaded her to come to the graveyard after school to meet some boy, and she got frightened and she ran and fell over. It was my fault, and I just left her there.’

  There, I have said it. My words fall like rocks in the morning air. My parents stare at me in shock, and the flush on my mother’s face drains clear away.

  She recovers first, though. And she starts off on an outrage. ‘Well, you must tell them. You must apologize to Heddy and to her mother straight away. I don’t care how long ago this happened—’

  ‘I did,’ I say. ‘But Mrs Partridge knew already. She always knew.’

  Suddenly my dad sits down, right there on the grass, and puts his head in his hands. ‘My God,’ he mutters, ‘what have we done?’

  ‘We’ve done nothing,’ my mum snaps, ‘except do our best for that family. Laura, you bring shame on us.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t know that? Don’t you think I’ve hated myself for the things that I’ve done? I hated Heddy, but I hated myself too. Surely you could see that?’ My voice catches and I’m breathing too fast. I feel like I am five years old again, excluded from understanding. My mother glares at me, her thin mouth working silently, dragging up the words with which to condemn me again.

  But my dad speaks before her. ‘Heddy lost her father,’ he says, ‘and I felt responsible.’

  I see him sitting down there, looking so old suddenly, and so pale.

  ‘But why would you feel responsible for that?’ I ask.

  And my mum says, ‘David!’ warningly, and to me, ‘Laura!’ – like who is she trying to stop? She looks from one to the other of us, arms folded across her chest, fingers digging into her skin.

  Slowly my dad stands up. His hands hang by his sides, helpless, dragging his shoulders down in a slope. ‘Mr Partridge worked for the firm,’ he says and his voice is strained and tired. ‘As a carpet fitter. He’d worked there for years, long before I took over. When his Heddy was born same year as you . . . well, he was so proud. He brought photos of her into the shop, showed them to everyone.’ He sighs, then comes back to the point. ‘We got a big job in, at an office block in Fayle,’ he says, ‘replacing all the flooring.’

  ‘It was still your father’s business then, David,’ my mum butts in quickly. ‘Don’t you forget that.’

  ‘Yes, but I was in charge of the office.’ My dad’s face is grey and pinched. ‘It was me that gave the instructions. It was my decision. Go on in, I said, rip it all up.’ He gestures with his hand, swiping at the air. Rip it all up.

  I wait for him to continue. Suddenly, I am afraid to breathe.

  ‘And there was asbestos,’ he says simply. ‘In the old floor.’

  I gasp. I can’t help myself.

  ‘But didn’t you check?’ I say. ‘Before he started?’ You always check for asbestos, always. Even I know that, carpet-shop owner’s daughter that I am. It’s the procedure. You check. You assume, until you know otherwise.

  ‘I took a chance,’ he says shiftily. ‘We were in a hurry.’

  Now maybe I am being really slow here, but I don’t quite follow this. ‘But you must have known . . .’

  My dad hunches his shoulders. He avoids my eye. ‘We needed to get the job done quickly. The business was struggling. There were bills to be pai
d.’

  ‘You mean you covered it up?’ I stare at him in disbelief.

  ‘Your father did what he had to do,’ my mother says curtly. ‘For the sake of the business.’

  ‘So you didn’t tell them, the Partridges? They didn’t know about it?’

  ‘Of course not,’ my mum says. ‘What good could possibly come of that? Your father would have lost the business!’

  I can’t believe she says this. I think of Mr Partridge, confined to his chair, and coughing himself slowly to death. ‘So you watched him die?’ I say, and my father flinches. ‘You sacrificed Mr Partridge for the sake of a few pounds, and then you watched him die?’ My mouth is filled with saliva and I think I’m going to be sick. I swallow and swallow, but my stomach is knotting into cramp.

  ‘Laura!’ snaps my mum, and then she looks round, sharply, as if realizing she has spoken too loudly. She drops her voice to an angry whisper. ‘What would you have us do, then? Ruin both of our families? And the man smoked forty cigarettes a day, don’t forget. For all we know, it might have been them that killed him!’

  I am too stunned to reply. I turn to my father for some kind of explanation and he looks back at me reproachfully with hurt, hangdog eyes, as if somehow he is the victim in this.

  ‘I tried to make it up to them over the years,’ he says and his voice is short with indignation. ‘I did what I could for them. Helped them out when I could. And all I asked of you, young lady, was that you be kind to their daughter.’

  And thus he absolves himself. He speaks to me in that accusatory tone, shifting, twisting the blame. He asked me to be nice and I wasn’t. I let him down.

  My mother – so visibly, quietly angry with me – says, ‘And now there is absolutely nothing more to be said.’ And then she links her arm through my father’s and starts steering him back towards the house.

  And so they pull away from me, as ever they did. As always, a united front. I see my mother, glancing round anxiously now lest anybody might have overheard. I see my father, small and fallible and weak.

  My parents, such pillars of the community.

  And I think of Mr Partridge, grey-faced and wasting on his slow slide to death; I think of that bed in their house with its stained and sunken mattress and Mrs Partridge sitting on it, clutching at its history with her thin and desperate hands.

  I stand there in the bright sunshine as my parents walk away from me and I am filled with a lifetime’s anger and guilt.

  But who am I to judge? We’re all culpable.

  I sit down on the grass and have to spit, several times, to clear my mouth. I am breathing too fast and too hard and my heart is pounding. I try to calm myself. I draw up my knees and link my hands around them so that I am hugged into a ball. The sunshine is warm upon my back and there is silence now, except for the birds in the trees and in the distance the faint hum of a lawnmower. I breathe deeply and smell the grass, the flowers, the soft morning air, and I feel that I will choke.

  On the day of Mr Partridge’s funeral I came home from school to find my parents in the kitchen. I remember the weirdness of bounding in to see my dad sitting at the table in his black suit and tie, with his shoulders all hunched over and his head resting in his hands. My mum was there too, standing by the sink. She’d been saying something, but she shut up as soon as she saw me, and so I walked into this sudden, strange silence.

  I stood there, and I wanted to say something, but I couldn’t think what to say. The first thing I came out with was, ‘Mrs Cookson kept us all in at break because some of the boys were mucking around, but I wasn’t, so it wasn’t fair.’ And still there was this silence, with me in the middle of it. My dad didn’t even look up. So I started saying it again. ‘Mrs Cookson kept us in and it wasn’t fair . . .’

  It was nerves making me talk. Nerves making me say whatever came into my head. Anyone could have seen that. I was too freaked out by the sight of my dad sitting there with his face in his hands. But behind me my mum snapped, ‘Laura!’ to shut me up, and my eyes smarted with tears.

  ‘Dad . . .’ I wailed and he looked up then, at last. And he looked terrible, all pale-faced and his eyes were bloodshot with dark smudges underneath them, like bruises. I didn’t want to see my dad looking like that. I didn’t want to see him looking at me like that. ‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘It was only Mr Partridge . . .’

  And what I meant was that Mr Partridge was just someone we knew a bit. He wasn’t family. He wasn’t even a friend. I couldn’t understand why my dad would be so sad.

  But my dad closed his eyes, as if he couldn’t bear to look at me any more, and my mum snapped ‘Laura!’ again, followed by, ‘Go upstairs! Now!’

  ‘Don’t worry!’ I shouted back, stung by the unfairness. ‘I’m going!’ And off I flounced, slamming the door behind me.

  But in the hall I stopped, and I listened. And I heard my mother saying to my dad, ‘For heaven’s sake, David, you had no choice.’

  To which my dad replied, ‘Oh, but I did, Rita. I did have a choice.’ Followed by the even scarier, ‘What kind of a man am I?’

  What kind of a man indeed?

  I press my face into my knees, and so I sit, and I cry like a child.

  Here it begins, and here it ends.

  Nothing will ever justify what I did to Heddy. Nothing will excuse the taunts and the jeers and the goading. But I see my father, always turning away from me, haunted by a greater guilt. I see shame and secrecy, poisoning its way down the line.

  And hurt engenders hurt.

  They are in the kitchen. My father is sitting at the table looking woefully defensive. His hands are clasped on the table in front of him, like in a prayer. My mother is standing to the left of him, midway to putting the kettle on for tea. They were talking, and now they stop, and so I walk in to a hostile, loaded silence.

  I am reminded of the day of that funeral. And of the secrets kept from me, the damage done. And now that those secrets are out, we are stripped bare, all of us. We are parasites, feeding off the weak.

  ‘People like the Partridges don’t matter,’ I say. ‘They can be manipulated, disposed of at will.’

  ‘Laura, you are being ridiculous,’ my mother says, and she turns away from me, the colour rising in her face. She holds the kettle under the tap, which she then flicks on hard so that it blasts noisily, water against metal.

  ‘But people like us, we mustn’t lose face.’

  My mother plugs in the kettle and takes two mugs from the cupboard and slams them down on the counter. Two, not three.

  My father grips his hands and ignores me. I look at him, and I see so much deceit that I can’t think what is real and what isn’t, in anything he has ever said to me. I think of that day when he carried me bleeding into the Partridges’ house, and laid me down upon their sofa. I think of Heddy wishing that she had a father like mine, and of him saying to Mrs Partridge How are you? How are you managing?

  I swallow, but the lump in my throat is a solid, hard mass.

  ‘How can you bear it?’ I say. ‘Knowing what you did.’

  He doesn’t answer. I didn’t expect him to. He closes his eyes, the better to shut me out. But what does he see there inside his head? What peace does he find?

  Over by the counter my mother has gone very, very still.

  ‘You used me,’ I say. My father’s eyelids flicker, but he keeps them shut. ‘You expected me to somehow make up for what you had done.’

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ my father whispers.

  And my mother says, ‘Laura, please.’

  ‘But how could anyone make up for what you had done? I made it worse. I hated Heddy Partridge and I hated myself, too. And the reason that I hated Heddy and hated myself was because of the guilt that you dumped on me.’ I speak fast. My throat is burning. ‘Your guilt.’

  I leave them in the kitchen. For half an hour I sit on the single bed in their little spare room, too numb to do anything. There is no going back from this. There’s a line throu
gh my history, striking it out.

  The house is silent. I gather up my things.

  ‘I’m going now.’

  They are in the kitchen still, both of them sitting at the table now, the empty mugs in front of them. My mother gets up when I walk in, and starts fussing; she takes the mugs to the sink, then picks up a tea towel and starts folding it in her hands.

  ‘You don’t want to leave James any longer,’ she says, to which I say nothing. She shakes out that tea towel, and folds it again. ‘And I expect you’ll want to avoid the traffic.’ She’s relieved to see me go. They both are. It’s hardly surprising.

  I look at my father. His face is tensed and closed.

  ‘We ought to tell them,’ I say. ‘The Partridges. We ought to tell them what happened. They have a right to know.’

  For seconds no one speaks. No one moves. Then my mother puts the tea towel down and slowly wipes her hands on the front of her skirt. It’s a similar gesture to the one Mrs Partridge was always making; I can’t help but notice.

  She says, ‘For heaven’s sake, Laura, what good would it do now?’

  My father looks up now, and I see the anguish in his eyes. ‘You do not know,’ he says, ‘how desperate I was. I was going to lose the business. If I lost the business, we’d lose the house.’ He stretches his hands out in front of him as he speaks and clutches at the air and lets it go again, repeatedly, clutching, clutching, letting go. ‘You do not know,’ he says, ‘because you were a child. Wanting your ballet lessons, and your parties, and your pretty clothes.’ These last words he spits out, and I stare at him, stunned. I think of my childhood with its best of everything, and all of it spun from deceit. ‘I had a family to feed,’ he says. ‘Bills to pay. I was desperate.’

  ‘But what about Mr Partridge?’ I say. ‘He had a family too.’

  ‘Do you not think I know that? Do you not think I regret what I did, every single day of my life?’ He pushes his hands into his hair now, and stays like that, with his head bowed, elbows resting on the table. And I stand there and I look at him, and feel my heart stripped raw.