A Perfect Life

by Raffaella Barker

  He does. ‘How old is your little sister?’

  ‘Err, dunno . . . maybe seven or something,’ I mutter and feign sleep, but he is not going to be shaken off.

  ‘Where’s the other one?’

  ‘The other what?’

  ‘You know, the other small kid – you’ve got two, haven’t you?’

  ‘Well, I haven’t – Mum and Dad have got two as well as me and Coral. I dunno where he is. I think Coral took him somewhere with her friends – I was only supposed to be in charge of Ruby.’ I tell him all this in an energy-saving monotone and I hope it is enough to shut him up. I don’t dislike him, it’s just that I want to chill out now I am finally horizontal on the beach with no small children dangling off me, and I can’t chill if I have to talk to some bloke I don’t know.

  ‘It looks like fun being part of a big family,’ he says, and I realise that there is nothing I can do to shut him up, unless I actually get up and move further away. I am flat out, with warm sand shored up around me. I suddenly remember this book Mum used to read about five children and some little creature with eyes on stalks. ‘Can you remember that psycho little thing that lived in sand in a gravel pit in some old children’s book?’ I even prop myself up on one arm to squint over at Jake. He puts his sunglasses on his forehead and squints back, looking confused.

  ‘The first book I ever read was the Highway Code when I took my driving test.’ He laughs. It doesn’t sound to me much like there was a follow-up, so I don’t ask what the second was.

  Anyway, I have remembered by myself now. ‘I think the swivel-eyed creature was called It. I dunno why I just thought of it.’ I pull my hat over my face more and try to burrow down a bit because I can hear Mum and Ruby on their way back and on to a smooth bit of the emotional ride.

  ‘Here we are,’ Mum puffs, staggering up to us with Ruby clinging with all arms and legs around the middle of Mum, which seems very small. ‘I think you could walk now, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Or fly or dance or do anything like holding hands with you,’ agrees Ruby, schizophrenically altered from ten minutes ago.

  Jake leans up on his hand and mutters to me, ‘Blimey, is this normal?’

  ‘Yeah – don’t you know anyone this age?’

  ‘I suppose I don’t – but I like them, they’re crazy.’

  ‘Stir her up and watch her spin,’ I say, and Jake and I snigger for no reason. Mum, kneeling by the castle, looks over at us; her hands are on her hips and her sunglasses are on her head and she is doing her sixties impression which would be quite good if it wasn’t so dated. She nearly speaks then changes her mind. I wish Dad was here to play a game of beach cricket. I don’t really want to ask Jake – it would please Mum too much.

  Nick

  The hotel has walls like suede or fudge but they are not soft. Nick’s back is against the wall – literally more than metaphorically. He is lounging in the lobby waiting for Carrie to come out of the Ladies’ lavatory. She could have used the one in his room, but she didn’t even glance through the door at it – quite unusual for a girl.

  Is it unusual for a girl to come and have sex in the afternoon with someone she has just met? Maybe not in America, which just shows how excellently his instincts were functioning when he conceived the plan of buying the apartment. Nick has never experienced this version of adultery before. It seems a lot more practical and sensible than dating, and it’s exciting, too. Three hours in his hotel room with shadows from the tops of trees outside moving on Carrie’s back when she lay on her elbows on the bed, looking at him, not talking, but playing with her hair and propping her feet one on top of the other. She had a bikini mark slicing high across her arse and a tiny scar like a hidden pocket zipped shut on her hip bone and her skin was golden, soft and taut, everything skin should be. She smelled of fruit and daisies, not exotic and sultry, but clean and preppy. And what she could do with her mouth, her tongue, her lips, her hands. Mmmmm. This is what Nick is in New York for, affirmation that he is alive and successful. He may not have cracked the deal with the US elastic manufacturers, but he can fuck and ejaculate as well as the next man.

  Probably better, he thinks, remembering Carrie’s second orgasm, when he had her up against the hard-backed yet soft-surfaced suede wall. Oh yes. That was what it was all about. And she was so yielding, so open. Mmm, lust is a great feeling. With a flourish he turns his phone on and it beeps with a message. He listens to it, turning towards the window as Carrie comes out of the Ladies and stands next to him, fresh lip-gloss shining on her smile. He blinks at her and steps away a little, instinctively wanting his own space now he is focusing on the rest of the world again.

  ‘Daddy, it’s Ruby and Foss. Please can you ring us? We want to know when you will be back and how do you make the car work when Mummy left the lights on? Also Jem isn’t letting us watch the big TV and Mummy says we have to sort it out ourselves. Love you.’

  It is only by taking a deep breath and shutting his eyes that Nick can keep from crying out in pain and rage. His head contracts as darts of guilt pierce him. He would like to double up and fold over but all his instincts and his whole life of male conditioning make him stand up taller, inflate his chest and take the blows. He only knows how to walk on, walk away, keep going and never let it show, never let it hurt. Never stop and hold pain because it could kill him. It’s just too big. A waitress from the hotel bar walks out of the Ladies door Carrie has just come through. She is blonde, tired but raunchy looking. Her bracelets rattle as she goes. Nick closes his eyes and inhales the air she moves through. There is a smell of musk and cigarettes and a metallic whiff of pharmaceuticals that sets his pulse racing through time. It fishes him out of his guilt and brings him back to here and now in a New York hotel lobby with his fingers smelling of sex. It’s time to get out and go to work, but there’s Carrie. What will she want to do now? Where is Carrie, anyway? He had forgotten her as he dealt with the message, and now she seems to have vanished. He looks around. In the same moment Carrie coughs a small, ironic cough from behind him and fishes into her bag for her phone. Glancing up sideways at him she smiles, and having got his attention, touches his arm and tiptoes to kiss him.

  ‘I gotta go now, it was nice spending time with you,’ she says, and turns and walks out of the door, her phone clasped to one ear.

  No exchange of numbers, no ‘Will you call me?’ Just out of the door and into a cab. Nick looks after her and for a bittersweet moment regrets that he will never know her better. The yellow cab pulls away from the building and with one, smooth, easy movement Carrie is gone from his life. It’s so simple it should be patented. Nick sighs and presses the recall button on his phone; five hours and several thousand miles away the telephone rings in his house.

  Angel

  A homecoming is always fraught; glancing at her watch, Angel has yet another burst of creative energy. She has been busy since early this morning, rewriting a mental list and adding to it constantly in a fevered and successful mission to have no free time to think. The truth is actually unthinkable anyway; today Nick is on his way back from New York and Angel doesn’t want him to come home. Pulling the heads from three amber-scented roses she sprinkles the petals over the table outside. Nick will be here in half an hour; his plane should have landed at breakfast time and he will be on the train. Coral and Mel have laid the table. The only way Angel can get any teenagers to do anything is to make sure there is one with no relationship to her in their midst. The presence of the outsider always shames the other progeny into most chores.

  Angel straightens one or two place settings, and begins to gather up the glasses, polishing them on her skirt, not even conscious that she is doing it. Conditioned for years now by her own pointlessly high standards, she notices cloudy dishwasher residue on the glasses and automatically begins to clean them. The shade of the pear tree and its low-embracing branches creates a domed chamber filled with dappled green light. The cloth on the table is a cool green backdrop for the mainly murky glasses
, the cutlery and the soft peachiness of rose petals. Eighteen place settings stretch away. Angel cleans three glasses and stops as tears begin to drip off her nose. She digs her hands into her apron pocket and her fingers claw the seam, tearing at the fabric, scratching until the tip of her finger burns with friction and her nail goes through. Then she presses into the flesh of her leg, sniffing and blinking, trying to focus on the irritation of physical pain but preoccupied with organising. Why has she decided to ask so many people to lunch on the day of Nick’s return from a week away in New York?

  She knows the answer: it is simple, it is quicker to form than the question. She lives with the answer all the time – it never changes; she cannot bear to be alone with him. It is as if she has run out of petrol. She feels empty and worn out. And frustrated. Actually, she cannot see how she or Nick could have done more, and yet, today, the reality of daily domestic life with her husband is unbearable. It was not always like this. Other parties, other family occasions were different, and Angel is reminded of one, Coral’s birthday when she was twelve or thirteen. She leans on the wall looking over into the water meadows beyond. Nick built a huge bonfire, planning to roast a whole sheep on it. But the heat was so extreme that to get near it he had to wear protective clothing, and a passer by, seeing him stamping out sparks with a spade, called the Fire Brigade. This was the best thing that could have happened. The firemen helped Nick get the sheep roasted and a lot of the children thought it was meant to happen. Angel sighs. The gulf between where they were then and now is best filled by castles in the air and peopled with guests. In the ever-moving merry-go-round of family life with friends there is no time to be still, and no time to examine how far removed the reality of their life together is, from the picture they present to the world.

  A saucepan clattering from within the kitchen window reminds her that there is food to be got out of the oven, an opulent pudding to decorate and wine to open. Angel stalks back to the kitchen yelling for the children to come and help her.

  ‘Come on. Granny will be here soon, and everyone else, and Daddy will be back in a moment and I need some help if we are ever going to get lunch on the table.’

  Foss and Ruby are already in the kitchen stirring a bowl of lime-green liquid, both standing on the table and as usual wearing more or less no clothes. Why can no one else dress the children? Angel wonders with a stab of irritation, peering into their cauldron.

  ‘Christ, what’s that?’

  Foss drops his spoon, Ruby raises her eyebrows and huffs, offended.

  ‘It’s jelly and we’re going to put flowers in it and turn it upside down in the mould.’

  ‘That’s lovely,’ Angel says guiltily, turning to crouch by the oven. She pulls the chickens on the roasting tin out and backs towards the table. The door from the hall swings open, Angel’s hand slips through a hole in the tea towel and her skin sticks to the hot metal of the tray. ‘Oh buggering bastard!’ she screams.

  Ruby glares at her, hugging Nick, who appears through the swinging door at this moment. ‘Daddeeeeee!!!!’ she coos, frowning at Angel and hissing, ‘Mummy. Don’t call Daddy that. You should be pleased to see him. I am.’

  Fierce defiance radiates from Ruby, stinging Angel like a small slap. Chastened and caught out, Angel wonders if leaving work is the catalyst for her to behave like a five year old, or if the osmosis has happened through exposure to the children. Nick moves round to hug Foss, and with both Foss and Ruby in his arms, clinging like small monkeys, he reaches across to kiss Angel’s cheek. All she can see are the whites of his eyes. His mouth on her cheek is cold and her heart flares for a moment then contracts with a hiss as though it is hot metal and has been immersed in cold water.

  ‘Hi, Nick, how was your trip?’

  ‘Mummy, why do you never talk to Daddy in your nice voice?’ Oh God, they miss nothing. Angel spins lettuce savagely, pulling the string of the salad spinner so hard that the lid flies off and the lettuce twirls across the room.

  ‘Bollocks,’ says Angel. Ruby giggles, ‘Stressy’, and bats a bit back to her. Angel gathers up the salad and plonks it in a huge bowl. She would like to put the bowl on her head, to have some space between herself and the children, to redress the balance a bit. Maybe Nick being home will help. Ruby has her small palms flat across Nick’s face, pressing his skin, wrinkling his cheeks and fluffing his hair. With jet lag and coffee-stained teeth, Nick looks rough. Angel cannot find any part of herself that is pleased to see him, and an anaesthetic of cold fear begins to seep through her. Nick, in front of the kitchen window with Foss and Ruby loving him, is not what she wants any more. It has never occurred to her not to want it, or to even think about it before. Until now, this was life.

  Nick puts the children down and opens the fridge door, a reflex reaction he makes every time he comes into the kitchen. Angel cannot speak or look at him as a flame of irrational rage leaps through her.

  Nick drinks a can of Coke in greedy gulps, flips his sunglasses down on to his nose and says, ‘So, what’s the big lunch in aid of, or is it to welcome me home?’ Angel hears the defensive clip in her voice and despises herself as she rises to his challenge.

  ‘My mother hasn’t seen the children for weeks and Nat Rosstein was in Cambridge for some accounting meetings so I thought I’d ask a few people to lunch. I invited Peter and Jeannie Gildoff. Oh, and Jake Driver.’

  Nick groans, ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Angel, I’ve just got off a plane. I don’t want to do all this. Nat Rosstein. I mean I like him, but I do not want to track the accounts today, or even think about the business.’

  He stalks to the fridge and takes another can of Coke.

  ‘Anyway, it’s a fucking charade,’ he adds. Tears spring in Angel’s eyes; she turns the tap on at the sink and blinks them away, distracted by her new capacity to cry and not wanting Nick to see.

  ‘I don’t know why you have to be so negative about everything,’ she mutters, not really wanting him to hear and start a row, but unable to keep the bitterness within her. She slams salad, spoons and a salt cellar on to a tray and marches out into the garden. Nick gazes after her, then takes himself into the playroom, shuts the door and flips through the TV channels to Extreme Sports. Surfing in Australia. Excellent. He stretches himself on the sofa and turns the volume up.

  The breeze catches the corner of the tablecloth and shivers through it, moving the leaves of the catkin tree, rattling them like sequins on an Indian shawl. Goose pimples rise on Angel’s arms as she kneels behind the courgettes in the vegetable patch, picking a bowl of strawberries from Foss’s tiny edible garden. Foss is meant to be doing this with her, as he was meant to plant the sunflower seeds and pumpkins and the row of radishes, but he cannot be persuaded to leave his snail emporium, well established and flourishing in the stone sink in the yard. She stops picking them mid-bowl and goes back to try again with Foss.

  ‘Come on, darling. You and Mummy can do it by ourselves – we can pick the strawberries with no one else,’ Angel urges him. It is absurd that he spends all his life in the same dank spot, though, she reminds herself cheeringly, he did come out to make jelly this morning. Now, though, he is back with his bucket, some stones and his signature snotty nose. She wipes it on her apron and he roars, ‘Get off, Mum – that’s my nose you’re picking. Leave it alone.’

  ‘I am not picking it,’ retorts Angel, trying to hold his hand and lead him through the gate in the wall to the vegetable patch. Foss shakes her off and crouches to pull a slug off the bottom of his bucket.

  ‘Come on, let’s go and pick strawberries.’

  ‘No.’

  Angel takes a deep breath and counts to five. Children are so insane. Half their lives they are moaning and crying that she doesn’t see them enough, that she isn’t there to pick them up from school or watch them on the climbing frame, and the other half of the time they are refusing to interact and want to keep her at bay.

  ‘Look, we’re running out of time and we need strawberries for Granny to
have for lunch,’ she wheedles, looking at her watch and calculating that she needs ten minutes to change and pick another bunch of bloody sweet peas. Why do they die so fast? She must try and find some endurance flowers; in fact why not just go for plastic ones and forget the sodding garden?

  ‘Well, you get them then, I don’t want to.’

  Jem, bouncing a basketball, pauses with a grin. ‘Mum, you can’t make people do what you want just because you’ve suddenly got time. He’s been working on that slug centre for days now and he thinks picking strawberries is for girls. I bet Ruby will help you.’

  Angel looks anxious for a moment then bursts out laughing.

  ‘OK. You win. I think you’re right. How did you get so sane, anyway?’

  Jem grins again. ‘I learn from your mistakes,’ he says, and chucks the ball in through what appears to be an open upstairs window. A sound of smashing glass follows.

  ‘Oh fuck,’ says Jem.

  Angel’s eyes follow his gaze.

  ‘I can’t stand it,’ she sighs, not sounding as though she minds at all. And in fact she doesn’t. She has no will for anger and it is such a relief not to care.

  Nick

  Dawn Mayden had been a very good advertisement for mothers-in-law when Nick met her. Just the way she poured a drink, oily gin beneath slow bubbles of tonic as she added an inch of it to the warm glass until it brimmed over and slopped on her fingers grasping it, her nails painted powder-puff pink, a little chipped but charmingly so. The unspoken, almost unconscious recognition of another drinker was, for Nick, like a Masonic handshake. Or like he imagined one to be. Lionel was overpowering, confident, a king among men, his chest a puffed-up pillow in front of the rest of him, his chin imperious, his nose an angle to look down. He was already ill with the first stages of emphysema when Nick met him, but it did not show then in anything save the gusts of command that were his conversation.