Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  ‘I never even got to touch the radio in our car and the steering wheel was most definitely out of bounds,’ she said, the first time she sat clutching my car’s wheel. ‘I’m sure I could drive … I have definitely got a licence and I can remember taking a red Mini Moke right up the middle of Portobello Market …’

  I was in awe of her then. I was nervous when she developed my films and printed my pictures, worrying that my composition was not good or the exposures ill-judged; she made prints for the best of them. There was glamour to her, she was festooned with it: all those bracelets she wore, the layers of fine fabrics, the charms and old meaningful rings that hung from her neck, clustered together on a long gold chain, the hints of a rackety life once lived up and down the Kings Road.

  I called for her on Tuesdays and Thursdays at two-thirty in the afternoon so we had a clear hour to mow down pedestrians before I had to collect my pair of leaky buckets from their school. The mornings would have suited me just as well but she told me she was still finding it hard to raise herself; what with the great weight of her soul pressing on her chest as soon as she opened her eyes, so heavy, she said, it felt like it had been ripped from her in the night and plonked there, filled with rubble.

  She often spoke of her soul until I imagined it louring down on her in her silk-swagged chamber, heavy and bowed with grief. A long candle burning and through the bay windows a view all the way to the horizon, only a road and the promenade between the former marital bed and the ocean. That black soul engulfing the clouds of silver-threaded tresses on her pillow, and seeping over the tragedy of her throat, so swan-like in Mike’s celebrated pictures of once upon a time; her eyes smudged by yesterday’s kohl. How could he leave her so sad? In the autumn, when he knew how she dreaded the winter each year. After a lifetime.

  Talk at home was all tractors, Lego and Cheestrings, three sevens are twenty-one and the thrilling adventures of Biff and Chip, only the occasional grunt or sigh from Simon. My cat had more to say than my husband these days and now that the more unpredictable brick-throwing phase was over, a couple of episodes a week of Morganna’s drama was, I came to realise, just what the doctor ordered.

  Though Morganna claimed her soul was in torment she never failed to cheer me up.

  Sometimes I could feel my poor Peugeot quake. A variety of stimuli could set Morganna off: an alabaster statuette spied through his window, flaunting its nakedness atop his new desk: ‘Do you suppose it reminds him of her?’ CDs. A book spotted lying on the back seat of his car, a thick one with an irritating title: ‘The man on the cover looked to be in fear of his life,’ she said, rattling my keys at the ignition irritably.

  ‘What’s he doing reading self-help books?’

  I had more or less given up trying to dissuade Morganna from making these detours up Mike’s road. Her innocent request for driving practice had very soon taken on a Thelma & Louise-style urgency all of its own. Our route usually took us by his flat and there were forays past his studio down by the lighthouse too, where occasionally she parked with a vantage point to his assistant carrying lighting rigs in and out. Shamefully, we often took off along the seafront to pass the rehearsal hall where Elizabeth sometimes went to play her oboe. The one time we saw her walking along the street, oh, it was a carefree, ponytail-swinging sort of a walk, Morganna squealed like a schoolgirl with a crush and ducked down into her own lap, despite the fact that she was the one who was actually driving, and I had to grab the wheel or we would have crashed.

  Sometimes, Morganna told me, she couldn’t sleep at night and in the darkness she tiptoed, quite undetected, through the perfumed gardens of Elizabeth’s Facebook. Elizabeth seemed to have accepted Morganna’s alter ego as a friend. I said it just proved how few friends she had in the real world.

  Bang outside Mike’s flat and into a space either directly behind or directly in front of his car always seemed to Morganna to be the perfect place to practise parking. The curtains were drawn at the front, they had been since the last time he’d allowed her over the threshold and, much to Elizabeth’s displeasure and Morganna’s later mortification, she and Mike had ended up wrestling on the floor like bad children.

  Once parked, Morganna was able to nip out and search for those little sharp nuggets of information that she so craved, peering through the windows of his black Audi. I watched her with her hands against the glass of the car that had once been her chariot and cringed as I imagined Elizabeth or Mike seeing her there.

  ‘Awaken the Giant Within! What’s that supposed to mean? When did he ever read books like that?’ she huffed, as we pulled away in a series of ostrich jerks.

  ‘Mirrors, mirrors!’ I yelled.

  ‘Silly little girl must be telling him what to read! Self-help!’ Her bracelets jangled as she thumped the steering wheel for emphasis: ‘He never had any trouble helping himself!’ Ignoring the hooting from the car behind.

  ‘What do you suppose I did to his giant anyway to put it to sleep?’ She scraped the gears as she changed into third. ‘Sorry,’ she said to me, and to the man who’d overtaken, shaking his head. ‘And he’s listening to The Ting Tings! What’s he doing listening to The Ting Tings?’

  A regular prompt to her misery was parked in the drive beside her house. It was her only vehicle: a purple camper van of such pastel perfection that I’d have begged, stolen or borrowed it in a heartbeat.

  ‘I can’t afford driving lessons,’ she said, and grinned foolishly. ‘I call her Lucille.’ She was shining the chrome cone of a wing mirror with the end of her sleeve. ‘Silly to give her a name, isn’t it?’

  Lucille deserved a name. She was vintage with the soft contours of patisserie, icing the exact colour of Parma Violets with cream fenders and wheel arches and cream leather upholstery. I couldn’t imagine that Morganna’s driving would ever be up to taking the driver’s seat but couldn’t help but envy her the dream.

  ‘Years restoring it, Mike turned quite nutty doing it,’ she said the first time she showed me inside. ‘You wouldn’t believe how many specialists she’s been to, how many beauty treatments she’s had: re-chromers, re-upholsterers, re-veneerers, his attention to detail down to the last screw; the full facelift, you name it.’

  Lucille had been Mike’s present to Morganna. Inside there was a leopard-skin rug for the bed, enamel plates in pastel colours and gold stars painted on the dark purple ceiling.

  ‘Our plan was to drive Route 66,’ she said, pulling out a drawer and showing me the slim cutlery stacked side by side and the clever salt and pepper pots shaped like two little figures hugging one another.

  There wasn’t money available to buy a car; she could hardly pay the electricity bill now Mike had gone. And all the professionals were turning to digital. She’d once had an unpleasant experience with a mini-cab driver so was understandably a little phobic. Life would be a hassle if she didn’t drive something and I couldn’t see that she would ever part with Lucille.

  At least she didn’t have to worry about the house. Her sedate grandmother, a duchess or something similar, had bypassed the half-baked Maoists in favour of the only grandchild and Morganna inherited number 7 Marine Parade, in all its decayed elegance and glory, the day she turned eighteen.

  She’d remained there ever since, wildly for a while and then settled: Mike, the children, pets, a piano. Now she rattled about its various rooms with nothing but the increasingly decrepit pets for company and Mike seemed happy to live in a basement. I had been outside this dull basement too many times. It was like watching a drug addict as she tried to wean herself off passing his – his and Elizabeth’s – door, was pleased if she ever managed not to go there; her hands with ideas all of their own gripped the wheel, turning her right instead of staying straight, however hard she tried to will them not to.

  ‘Focus on what you’re doing before you kill someone!’ I yelled as we skidded to a halt, and the gentleman who was halfway over the zebra crossing thumped my bonnet.

  ‘You are the one who is actual
ly driving the car,’ I told her for the umpteenth time.

  She explained that whenever we were driving close to his flat she was swept up by a salty great wave of nostalgia and longing, as though the steering wheel was his penis; it was the exact girth and smoothness apparently, that and the particular texture of the grey vinyl that Peugeot had used in my 305.

  I planned to buy one of those furry things to cover it as soon as I could.

  She admitted that it was self-harm, obsessive-compulsive, a way of staying connected, addictive. She went online every evening and analysed the transactions in his bank and credit card accounts because she still had the passwords. He was taking holidays in Santorini and the Spanish mountains. He had spent two hundred and fifty-six pounds at Dinny Hall the jeweller. She imagined him and Elizabeth on the mountain bikes they’d taken to riding everywhere – though she’d always found it difficult to get him to even go for a walk – freewheeling between the banks of flowers that lined the pass, light as the wind. She practised small discourtesies: ripping up his final parking fine reminders and his Photography Magazine subscription renewal notices that still came to her house.

  It was her second summer without Mike and still she was at it: spending precious sunshine looking at the many flattering photographs that Elizabeth had posted of herself on her own website. Elizabeth irritatingly listed her many achievements: prizes at the Royal Music College, recitals, a couple of pop projects that seemed to involve her wearing a negligee to play.

  Morganna’s torture of choice featured Elizabeth with her long curtains of hair hanging each side of her face, slightly over-exposed so her skin was the very essence of ivory soap and her large, extravagantly – ‘falsely!’ – lashed eyes straight to camera, the rings of his flash showing in her pupils. It was a studied, brilliantly chiaroscuro portrait that Mike had taken the first time he’d set his eyes on her. A commission for a colour supplement line-up of young musicians. Her lips were around a long Japanese instrument called a shakuhachi. ‘Japanese slang for blow job!’ she was quoted as saying in the piece when it was published, thus guaranteeing herself the largest photograph of the bunch.

  ‘Overblown view of her own talent,’ Morganna said. ‘Her and her perfect little embouchure.’

  Mike left Morganna on a late September evening, just before Lola, their last child, departed for university, ensuring that Lola was the one who had ultimately to leave Morganna completely alone in her big empty house at Marine Parade. Elizabeth was the love of his life, he said. What else could he do? He had to take his chance for happiness.

  At first he said he’d do nothing to hurt Morganna but that changed along with the weather. Adrenalin and loneliness were not a pretty cocktail and he couldn’t fail to notice how thin she was becoming, how drawn her face looked in the grey winter afternoons. Every night as he gazed into the face of an angel on the pillow beside him in the cosy basement, he persuaded himself that Morganna was a demon who had brought this all upon herself. Employing the sort of tactics that one country’s government will use to justify bombing another, he publicised her shortcomings. To their friends he said she once threw a fork at him and it stuck in his chin.

  ‘Yes,’ said Morganna. ‘We even managed to laugh at the time. It was an accident. He makes it sound like I stabbed him.’

  To Lola he confessed that he couldn’t remember ever having been happy in the marriage and Lola, so proud of her own resistance, stupidly told Morganna on the phone what he’d said and how in response she had stuck to her resolve regarding Elizabeth. She was away from it all at university: ‘I said that I didn’t want her turning up with him here,’ she said, good for her, but Morganna had been left stumbling about in the bombsite of this thing she’d just been told, half blind, and all the bits of shrapnel from the earlier explosions still working their way out. Lola delivering a fresh wound, and a deep one. ‘Never happy. What, really, never?’

  The aftershocks every bit as bad: one day deleting his voice on their answerphone and the next regretting it so bitterly that she’d asked him, pathetically, if he would do her a new one, she thought it would be better if a burglar called. ‘Any man’s voice would do,’ he said, putting down the phone.

  The problem was that it was still ‘his’ voice whenever she got him to pick up the phone. The voice that always said to her ‘I love you’ in the casual way that other people said ‘Good morning’. The timbre and tone as familiar as her own, so it was hard to adjust to the idea that this voice no longer wished to speak to her, no longer wished to wish her well.

  One evening our route took us past the cemetery at the Old Deer Park and she told me about a funeral she had attended there the previous weekend; a photographer she had known some years before. They played Vivaldi on a tape at the grave. The last of the leaves falling with the pizzicato of the strings. ‘I watched the widow weeping and envied her the certainty,’ she said.

  She thought constantly of the intimate things they had done together: Mike’s hand on her stomach as a baby kicked; the raw tenderness of the first time they made love as each baby was a month or so old; tiny Lola cupped in his hands, a real little survivor, they all said so at the hospital, her bottom in his palm no bigger than an egg; the way, in the times when things were bad, he scratched her back in small circles until she fell asleep.

  Now he was scratching Elizabeth’s back and she was to get herself to sleep, though sometimes she didn’t know how. His voice, when he finally picked up, on the telephone; she’d never find peace again: That’s right! I’ve never been happy! Bang! Bang! The past as broken as a jigsaw that could no longer be assembled, too many of the pieces were bent or battered or missing: Were we happy or weren’t we? It was a question she asked herself in various ways and one I couldn’t answer.

  I only met him once. He came round to pick up Lola to take her back to university. Lola was still getting her stuff and Morganna and I were shiny with thin sticks of rustic bread and a dish of fat olives that had been marinated in lemon and garlic. It was a delicious combination, the bread soaking up some of the olive oil. Morganna had a sensuous attitude to food, there was a best place to find everything delicious or sinful and always a treat with jasmine tea to drink before I set off for the boys: there were very sweet oranges cut into quarters with madeleines baked by a handsome Frenchman that she had run into that morning, wet almonds and butter tuiles that melted on the tongue.

  When Mike arrived Morganna didn’t invite him in, though she’d fussed about her hair a fair bit before he was due, coiling it and pinning it up here and there with the little silk flowers that she wore. I could see him on the doorstep while he waited for Lola to be ready, jigging a bit on the spot and throwing his balled-up scarf from hand to hand as though he was an athlete warming up, a bit of a player, a deluded fool with improbably matte brown hair. He looked like the sort of man who might sing at the London Palladium, though his trainers didn’t quite go with the rest of it, the suit and striped silk tie. They were glaringly techno: thick soles and bi-coloured laces.

  Sometimes I took Angus and Ivan round to Morganna’s after school so that they could have a plonk on her piano. There was always chocolate cake and that bright green parrot of hers was easily encouraged to swear.

  As the summer wore on the house was filling up with people: now when I was there I rarely had Morganna to myself, someone was always popping in or on the way out and she’d started to take in lodgers from the art school. Everyone wanted the rooms, she said; the house was right on the beach, so she got to pick.

  But it wasn’t until September when she came back from Scotland that everything really changed. The impending winter no longer cast such a frightening shadow. Her face was smooth in a way that it hadn’t been in all the time I’d known her, as though it had been swept by a tide, and her eyes calm and completely clean of their usual clog of make-up. She was smiling, biting her lip just enough. Saying: ‘I’ve set a date, Route 66.’ She patted the driver’s door of the camper van as though it were the shou
lder of her horse – ‘There’s two months for us to knock me into shape’ – and ran a finger along the chrome door handle. Then she hugged me as though we were already saying goodbye and a lump came to my throat.

  I’d been at Marine Parade the night the call to Scotland came. My boys were happy enough thumping hornpipes on the piano and Simon was never at home in time to miss us anyway. She was doing her usual: sneaking around his bank account, sniffing at Elizabeth’s Facebook, even Googling Elizabeth’s friends: there was never anything much I could say to stop her. She tore her addict’s eyes away from her computer, blazing.

  ‘She’s on holiday in the Highlands. Look, she’s boasting about it here. Another holiday. I bet he’s taken her to Kinlochie. I bet he’s paying. Poor Lola, he won’t even stump up for her health insurance premium now that she’s eighteen and has dropped off his.’

  Lola had been at Marine Parade earlier, still pallid and wheezy from a bronchitis. Morganna explained that it was because she had been so premature that she was prone to so many respiratory illnesses. Lola was beautiful in all the ways that made people tut about fashion models: tangles of hair appearing too vigorous for the light stem of her body, the stringy roots of her legs, slightly knock-kneed and junkie-pale.

  ‘All her existing medical problems are still covered if he renews the policy. It doesn’t make sense to let it lapse.’ I had rarely seen Morganna so agitated, pulling at the rings and things around her neck until I thought the chain would break; I was glad that we weren’t in a car with her at the wheel.

  ‘He doesn’t seem to understand that she’s at university so she can’t pay it herself.