Perfect

by Rachel Joyce

  Sometimes he darts a look out of his window and he sees life continue without him. It is like waving goodbye to something that has already gone. The residents of Cranham Village appear with their Christmas gifts. There are children with new snow boots and new bicycles. There are husbands with battery-operated leaf vacuums. One of the foreign students has received a sledge and, despite the absence of snow, they walk up to the ramps in their hats and Puffa jackets. The man with the dangerous dog has a new sign outside his house that warns intruders he has CCTV cameras. Jim wonders if the dog is dead and then it occurs to him that he never saw a dog, dangerous or otherwise, and maybe the old sign was only a trick, and not the truth at all. The old man is back at his window. He seems to be wearing a baseball cap.

  So this is being ordinary. This is getting by. And it is small really but Jim can’t do it.

  The interior of the van is striped with duct tape. There is only one roll left. He doesn’t know what he will do when it is finished. And then it occurs to him, like a slow dawning, that he will not last any longer than the duct tape. He has not eaten, he has not slept. He is finishing everything, himself included.

  Jim lies on the bed. Above his head the pop-up roof is a criss-cross of tape. His head reels, his blood thumps, his fingers sting. He thinks of the doctors at Besley Hill, the people who tried to help. He thinks of Mr Meade, of Paula and Eileen. He thinks of his mother, his father. Where did this begin? With two seconds? A bridge over the pond? Or was it there from the very beginning? When his parents decided their son’s future should be golden?

  His body shakes, the van shakes, his heart shakes, the windows shake, all with the waste of it. Jim, Jim, it shouts. But he is nothing. He is hello hello. He is strips of duct tape.

  ‘Jim! Jim!’

  He is falling into sleep, into light, into nothing. The doors, the windows, the walls of the van thump, thump, like a heartbeat. And then just as he is nothing, the pop-up roof bursts from its hinges. He feels the slap of cold air. There is sky, there is a face, and maybe it should be a woman, but it isn’t, it is frightened, very frightened, and then comes an arm, a hand.

  ‘Jim, Jim. Come on, mate. We’re here.’

  5

  Strange in the Head

  BYRON’S FATHER EMPLOYED a middle-aged woman to look after the children. Her name was Mrs Sussex. She wore tweed skirts and thick tights and had two moles with hairs like spiders. She told the children her husband was an army man.

  ‘Does that mean he is dead like my mummy?’ said Lucy.

  Mrs Sussex said it meant he was posted abroad.

  When Seymour arrived for weekends, she told him to get a taxi from the station if he didn’t want to drive. She made casseroles and pies for the fridge and left heating instructions, before going to her sister’s. Sometimes Byron wondered if she might invite him and Lucy too, but she didn’t. His father spent weekends in his study because he had so much work to catch up on. Sometimes he fell over when he went upstairs. He tried to make conversation but the words smelt sour. And although Seymour never said it as such, all this seemed to be Diana’s fault.

  What bewildered Byron most about the death of his mother was that, in the weeks which followed, his father died too. But his was a different kind of death from Diana’s. It was a living death, not a buried one, and it shocked Byron in a different way from his mother’s removal because he had to keep witnessing it. He discovered that the man he had assumed his father to be, the man who stood remote and upright beside his mother, urging her to get in the left-hand lane now, Diana, and dress in old-fashioned pencil skirts, was no longer the same person once she had slipped away. After her death, Seymour seemed to lose his balance. Some days he said nothing. Some days he raged. He flew through the house, shouting, as if his anger alone was enough to make his wife come back.

  He didn’t know what to do with the children, Byron overheard him saying another time. He only had to look at them and he saw Diana.

  It’s only natural, people said.

  But it wasn’t.

  Meanwhile life went on as if his mother’s loss had not touched it in any way. The children returned to school. They dressed in their uniforms. They carried their satchels. In the playground the mothers crowded round Mrs Sussex. They invited her for coffee. They asked how the family was coping. She was reserved. Once she said that she was surprised at the state of Cranham House. It was a cold place, not a happy environment for young children. The women shared a glance that seemed to imply they had had a lucky escape.

  Without James, and without his mother, Byron felt marked apart. He waited several weeks, hoping for a letter from James with the address of his new school, but nothing came. Once he even tried to telephone his home, but hearing Andrea’s voice he hung up straight away. At school he spent whole lessons staring at his exercise books and failing to write. He preferred to spend playtime alone. He overheard one of the masters describe his circumstances as difficult. Little should be expected.

  When Byron found a dead sparrow at the foot of an ash tree in the garden, he picked it up because at last there was more death and it seemed a sign that Diana was not alone in it. Really what he wanted was not one dead bird, but hundreds. He wanted them dropping from the air like stones. He asked his father at the weekend if they might bury the bird, but his father shouted at him not to play with dead things. He was strange in the head, he said.

  Byron did not mention to his father that Lucy had buried her Sindy dolls.

  It clearly was not true that Byron had worried too much. His mother had been wrong about so many things. Sometimes he pictured her in her coffin and found the idea of her being surrounded by darkness almost impossible to bear. He tried to think of his mother when she was alive, the light in her eyes, her voice, her way of draping a cardigan over her shoulders, and then he missed her even more. He told himself to concentrate on his mother’s spirit and not to focus on the thought of her body locked beneath the earth. Often his head got the better of him, though, and he woke in the night, bathed in hot sweat, unable to push away the image of her trying to get back to him; of her beating at the locked coffin lid with her fingers, and screaming at him to help.

  He did not tell anyone, just as he could not bear to confide that he had begun the string of events that led to her death.

  The Jaguar remained in the garage until a pick-up truck came to take it away. It was replaced with a small Ford. October passed. Leaves that his mother had once looked at loosened from the trees and twisted through the air, gathering in a slippery carpet at his feet. The nights grew longer and brought days of rain. Crows fronted the storm and were scattered by it. In one night alone, the rain was so heavy the pond began to refill and Seymour had to have it drained again. Hedgerows were bare and black and dripping, but for the ghostly weaving of old man’s beard.

  In November the winds moved in and the clouds scudded over the moor until at last they joined forces and lay so thick the sky was a slate roof over the land. The mists returned and they hung over the house all day. When a winter storm felled an ash, the tree lay butchered in pieces across the garden. No one came to clear it. With December came flurries of snow and hail. The Winston House boys spent every day preparing for their scholarship exam. Some had private tutors. The substance of the moor changed from purple to orange to brown.

  Time would heal, Mrs Sussex said. Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub. He didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she had never been there.

  One afternoon, Byron was talking to Mrs Sussex about evaporation when she dropped the knife and cut her finger. ‘Ouch, Byron,’ she said.

  There was no connection between Byron and her injury. She was not blaming him. She merely fetched a plaster and continued to peel potatoes but he began to have thoughts. Thoughts he didn’t want and couldn’t stop. They even came when he was asleep. He thought of his mother screaming from her coffin. He thought of Mrs Susse
x rinsing her finger under a tap, and the way the water turned red. He became convinced it would be Lucy next, and that, just as the accident had been his fault, and also Mrs Sussex’s cut, Lucy’s injury would be his fault too.

  To start with, he hid his fears. He found simple ways of leaving the room when Lucy entered, or perhaps if he couldn’t leave, if it was dinner, for instance, he would gently hum to distract himself from thinking. He took to placing a ladder outside her bedroom window at night so that if anything happened, she would have a safe escape. Only one morning he forgot to move it in time, and Lucy woke, saw the ladder at her window, ran into the hall screaming and slipped. She needed three stitches just above her left eye. He was right. He caused injury, even when he didn’t want to.

  The thoughts that followed were about boys at school, as well as Mrs Sussex, and the mothers. Even people that he didn’t know; people he saw from the window of the bus as he sat behind Mrs Sussex and Lucy. He saw he was a danger to each and every one of them. What if he had already hurt someone and he didn’t realize? Because he had thought the awful thing, about hurting a person, it must be that he had done it. That he was the sort of person who could – because otherwise, why would he be having those thoughts? Sometimes he did little things to himself to show people he was not well, maybe bruising his arm, or pinching his nose until it bled, but no one appeared concerned. Ashamed, he pulled his shirt towards his knuckles. He needed something different to keep the thoughts away.

  When the truth emerged in the playground about Lucy’s stitches, Deirdre Watkins telephoned Andrea Lowe. She suggested to Mrs Sussex a marvellous chap Andrea knew in town. When Mrs Sussex said that all the boy needed was a good cuddle, Deirdre Watkins rang Seymour. Two days later, Mrs Sussex resigned.

  Byron remembered very little about his visit to the psychiatrist. This was not because he was drugged or mistreated in any way. Far from it. In order not to be frightened, he hummed, first gently to himself and then, because the psychiatrist had raised his voice, he had to sing somewhat louder. The psychiatrist asked Byron to lie down. He asked if he had unnatural thoughts.

  ‘I cause accidents,’ said Byron. ‘I am unnatural.’

  The psychiatrist said he would be writing to Byron’s parents. At this, Byron went so silent and still, the psychiatrist called an end to the session.

  Two days later Byron’s father told him he was to be measured for a new suit.

  ‘Why do I need a new suit?’ he said. His father staggered from the room. This time it was Deirdre Watkins who accompanied Byron to the department store. He was measured for new shirts, pullovers, two ties, socks and shoes, both indoor and out. He was a big boy, said Deirdre to the assistant. She also asked for a trunk, full sports kit and pyjamas. This time Byron didn’t question why.

  At the cash till, the assistant wrote out a bill. He shook Byron by the hand and wished him luck at his new school. ‘Boarding is marvellous, once you get the hang of the place,’ he said.

  He was sent to a school in the north. He had the impression no one knew what to do with him and he did not fight that. If anything, he agreed. He made no friends because he was afraid of hurting them. He lingered on the edge of things. Sometimes people jumped because they had no idea he was in the room. He got ridiculed for being quiet, for being strange. He got beaten up. One night he woke to find himself being carried outside on a sea of hands and laughter but he simply lay very still and did not fight them. It amazed him sometimes how little he felt. He no longer even knew why he was unhappy. He only knew that he was. Sometimes he remembered his mother, or James, or even the summer of 1972, but thinking of that time was like waking out of a sleep with shards of dreams that made no sense. It was better to think of nothing. School holidays were spent at Cranham House with Lucy and a succession of nannies. His father visited rarely. Lucy began to choose to stay with friends. Back at school he failed exams. His reports were poor. No one seemed to mind either way, if he was clever or stupid.

  Four years later, he ran away from boarding school. He took several night trains and a bus and returned to Cranham Moor. He went back to the house but it was locked up, of course; there was no way in. So he took himself to the police station and handed himself in. They were at a loss. He hadn’t done anything although he kept insisting that he might. He caused accidents, he said. He cried. He begged them to let him stay. He was clearly so distressed, they couldn’t send him back to school. They rang the boy’s father and asked him to fetch his son. Seymour never arrived. It was Andrea Lowe who came instead.

  When Byron heard about his father’s suicide, several months had passed. Things were very different by this time and he had no space left in which to feel. As a precautionary measure, he was given sedatives before and after the news. There was talk of a shotgun and a terrible tragedy as well as most sincere condolences but by now he had heard words like these so many times, they were sounds that meant nothing. When he was asked if he would like to attend the funeral, he said he wouldn’t. He remembered to ask if his sister knew, but he was told she was at boarding school. Didn’t he remember that? No, he said, he didn’t. He didn’t remember very much. Then he saw a fly, a dead one, black and upside down, on the windowsill and he began to shake.

  It was all right, they told him. Everything would be all right. They asked Byron if he could be still? If he could not cry and remove his slippers? And he promised he could do those things. Then the needle pierced his arm and when he came round they were talking about biscuits.

  6

  The Meeting

  JIM HAS TO keep looking at his trainers. He can’t work out if his feet have grown or stayed the same. They feel different inside shoes. He has to wriggle his toes and lift his heels and admire the way they stand, side by side, like a pair of old friends. He is glad they have each other again. It is strange not to walk with a limp, but evenly; to be like everyone else. Maybe he is not so irregular after all. Maybe you have to take things away sometimes to see how right they were before.

  He knows he owes his rescue to Paula and Darren. Concerned about his absence from work, they took the bus to Cranham Village. They knocked at the door and windows of the van. At first they thought he must be on holiday. It was only when they were walking away, she admitted afterwards, that other thoughts occurred to them. ‘We thought you were dead and stuff.’ It was Darren who had clambered on to the roof of the van and yanked open the pop-up roof. They wanted to take him straight to A&E, but he shivered so hard they made tea instead. With difficulty they removed the tape from the windows, doors and cupboards. They fetched blankets and food. They emptied the chemical toilet. They told him he was safe.

  It is late afternoon on New Year’s Eve. He cannot believe he so nearly gave up. It was in him, to surrender. And yet now that he is on the other side of that, now he is back at work and wearing his orange hat, his orange apron and socks, he sees how wrong it would have been. He almost gave up but something else happened and he kept going.

  Rain clings like beads to the darkened windows of the supermarket café. Soon it will be time to close. Mr Meade and his staff begin to wrap clingfilm over pastries. The few customers finish their drinks and put on their coats and prepare to drive home.

  Paula has spent the afternoon discussing her fancy dress outfit for the party Darren is taking her to at the Sports and Social Club. He in turn has spent a long time in the lavatories doing something with his hair to make it look as if he hasn’t done anything. At five thirty, Mr Meade will change into the black suit hired from Moss Bros by Mrs Meade, and meet his wife downstairs. They will attend a dinner dance, followed by fireworks at midnight. Moira, it turns out, has a date with one of the youth band and will accompany them on the minibus to a New Year’s gig. The café will close and everyone will have somewhere to go, except Jim, who will make his way back to the van and perform the rituals.

  ‘You should come with us,’ says Paula. She clears the empty plates and cans of Coke from a table. Jim takes out his spray and his cloth
in order to wipe. ‘It would be good for you. You might meet someone.’

  Jim thanks her but says he won’t. Since she found him in the van, he has to keep reassuring Paula he is happy. Even when he is frightened or sad, and occasionally he is both those things, he has to push his face into a wide smile and give her a thumbs-up.

  ‘By the way, she rang again,’ says Paula.

  Jim tells Paula he doesn’t want Eileen’s message. But she has rung three times, Paula insists.

  ‘I thought you said—?’ The sentence stabs at the air. ‘I thought you said – you said – she was t-t-t—?’

  ‘She is trouble,’ interrupts Paula. Since there is now one customer left in the café, she puts down her tray. She tugs a blue wig out of her pocket and yanks it over her hair. She looks like a mermaid. ‘But she’s good trouble. And here’s the thing, she likes you.’

  ‘It’s no – it’s no g-good.’ Jim is so confused by what Paula is telling him, and in turn by what he feels, that he finds himself squirting the table of the single remaining customer. The man sits very still. He has not yet finished his coffee.

  ‘Suit yourself,’ says Paula. ‘I’m going to get changed.’ She walks away.

  ‘Excuse me, do you have the time?’

  The question is part of the café. Jim barely hears. It is part of the youth band finishing their limited New Year medley downstairs, part of the flashing fibre-optic tree. It is part of other people going about their lives, but Jim does not consider it as pertinent to him, and so he continues to wipe. The man clears his throat. The question comes again, only this time it is a little louder, a little more placed in the air. ‘Pardon me for asking. Do you have the time?’

  Glancing down, Jim realizes with horror that the stranger is staring straight up at him. The café seems to snap to a standstill, as if someone has turned down the light and the volume. He points at his wrist to show he does not have it, the time. There is not even a mark on his skin for a strap.