This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  She follows me out to the hall. She’s too close. I’m afraid she’s going to grab hold of me again and my skin prickles in the effort to get away.

  ‘Tuesday,’ she says again, as if I hadn’t got the message. ‘That’s the best day for the doctors.’

  ‘Mrs Partridge, I really don’t know what I’m doing on Tuesday.’

  ‘But if you have the time?’ she insists. ‘You’ll come if you have the time?’

  And just to get myself out of there I say, ‘Look, I’ll have to check my diary.’

  FOUR

  I practically fall out the front door in my haste to escape, and immediately I am hit by the brightness of the day after the gloom inside that house, and I have to squint against the sun. Mrs Partridge feels it too and cowers back into the hall, then peers round the half-closed door as I get into my car. I wish she’d go right inside and shut the door. I’d like to just sit there for a moment to clear my head before driving off, and I need to phone Penny, to confirm the time for lunch. But I can’t do that with Mrs Partridge standing there watching, so I stick the key straight into the ignition. She’s still there as I pull away; I catch a glimpse of her in the mirror, waving. I should have waved back, I suppose.

  She didn’t want to let me go.

  I feel sorry for her now. She didn’t want me to go, but I couldn’t get out of there quickly enough.

  I stink of Mrs Partridge’s cigarette smoke. I can smell it on my hair, my clothes – horrible. I open the windows, all four of them, to try to blast the smell away, and the wind whips at my hair, fresh and spring-scented, blowing Mrs Partridge away.

  Some bizarre curiosity sends me on a detour through Barton Village on my way back to Ashton. Barton Village is a 1970s conurbation on the north side of Forbury, about a mile and a half out down the long road that winds past the reservoir, the blackberry fields where the gypsies used to turn up every year, and the pig farm. The road always seemed like a divide, keeping the two places apart, and I’m surprised to see that it’s like that still, that the blackberry field is still there, and that more houses haven’t sprung up, closing the gap.

  I haven’t been down here for years and years. It’s not just new houses. There’s an old pub too, and a couple of sweet little cottages, the pretty bit before the rest begins. At juniors, I was friends for a while with a girl who lived over here, Kim. Whenever I came to her house I wondered how she remembered which one was hers. They all looked the same, still new back then, and neat, built in tidy rows. You love that sort of thing when you’re young, that sameness. We played on the square of grass outside Kim’s house with the other children on her block, and their mums could see us from their little front kitchens.

  Kim seemed special to the rest of us in Forbury, because she had to come to school by car and be picked up again afterwards. Her mum was always there at twenty-past three, right outside the school gates in her little white Mini. Everyone else walked, but you couldn’t walk all the way to Barton Village, and the bus into Forbury only came once an hour. In fact, if you didn’t have a car you were stuffed. I picture Heddy living out here with a young baby, isolated. I picture her struggling with a pushchair and the shopping, getting on and off buses, red-faced and sweating.

  There’s a small parade of shops built under some flats, right on the corner of Kim’s block, with a lay-by out the front. I pull in here quickly to phone Penny, and watch as one or two or maybe three people wander in and out of the newsagent’s. I remember running round there with Kim to buy sweets, and a loaf of bread for her mum from the baker’s next door. The baker’s is gone now, boarded up, like a shut eye between the betting shop and the newsagent’s. As I sit there, an oldish, fattish man comes out of the betting shop wearing a badly fitting brown suit and his slippers. Clearly it’s been a good morning; he grins up at the sky and shoves a roll of money into his trouser pocket before shuffling into the newsagent’s. As he goes in, a young girl comes out, pushing an angry child in a buggy. The man forgets to hold the door for her, and as he goes past her it starts to swing closed, bumping the girl from behind. She pushes it back open with her shoulder as she wrestles the buggy out, muttering furiously. Once outside, she uses her teeth to tear open a bag of sweets for the child and drops them into his anxious, clutching hands. Then she sticks a cigarette in her mouth and strikes up a match to light it, cupping her hands against the wind. She takes a long drag in, flicks the match into the gutter and leans forward, resting her weight on the handle of the pushchair for a second as she blows the smoke out of her mouth sideways, thereby avoiding her child’s head. Then she’s up on her feet again, clack, clack, clacking down the road in her black high heels, one hand pushing the buggy, the other holding the cigarette. She’s dressed optimistically in a halter-neck top and a tight, short skirt that strains as she walks. She cannot be more than seventeen.

  I wonder where Heddy lived. Naturally I picture her in a house like Kim’s, with chipboard partitions for walls and open-slatted stairs going up from the living room. Those stairs would be hell for someone with a small child, a constant danger. Kim was small and thin, and her family were smallish and thin too – I remember them as modern and bright and stripy-clothed, like the families on frozen-food adverts; they seemed to fit their house, back then, when everything was new. Now, with my adult eyes, I can see a different scenario. I see Heddy, fat like in that photo at Mrs Partridge’s, clad in the oversized clothes of post-pregnancy, too big for that house, too alone. I see her sitting on her sofa and staring at her reflection in the glass of the patio doors. I see the squareness of the room, of the windows, of the patio outside, boxing her in.

  I hear the baby cry, I hear Heddy cry, and for a moment I shut my eyes.

  Penny and I meet at Chico’s in the High Street. Tasha joins us, last minute; she bumped into Penny earlier in John Lewis. You always bump into someone in John Lewis, it’s guaranteed. We kiss the air beside each other’s cheeks and I breathe in the heady scent of expensive perfumes and easy lives.

  Tasha has a dilemma because she’s just bought a house that needs renovating and can’t decide whether to have wooden floors throughout, or just downstairs.

  ‘What do you think, Laura?’ she asks, pushing her blonde hair back from her face and staring at me with serious grey-blue eyes. She’s had streaks put in her hair, red under the blonde, beautifully done at André’s in the village, where we all go. The hand that pushes back the hair is newly manicured too, and thin; we are all thin, all exactly so.

  We sit picking at our panini and discuss this, and other issues, such as Roman blinds versus curtains and whether a built-in fridge with ice dispenser would be better than one of those huge free-standing American things. We lean close as we talk and we talk fast, sometimes all of us at the same time. We talk about Tasha’s house with the same level of enthusiasm as we talk about our children and the school, and our husbands too, sometimes, when we’ve had a glass of wine or two. And this talk is like a web that we spin around ourselves. I know this, and yet I sit there, I talk, I spin.

  Penny has a funny story about Belinda. She looks behind her to check who else is in Chico’s, then leans forward. We do the same, tight.

  ‘Well,’ she says in a stage whisper, and we’re hanging on, Tasha and I, grinning already in expectation, ‘you know that house they bought in Walpole Road? You know what a dump it was and how they were living in it when it was being done up?’

  ‘Urgh! I could never do that!’ I say.

  ‘Me neither,’ Tasha agrees, tossing her hair back over her shoulder to show her new streaks to full advantage, and we shudder in unison.

  ‘Well, apparently it was really raining hard one day – you know, a total downpour – and Belinda was in the toilet when the weight of the rain caused the roof to cave in.’ She pauses a moment, for dramatic effect. ‘Right on top of her!’

  Tasha and I slap our hands over our mouths, horrified.

  ‘She got hit on the head by a plank of wood,’ Penny says, and Tasha and
I are collapsing into giggles behind our hands. ‘Knocked unconscious. The builders had to get her out.’ She pauses again, checks around the room once more, then shields her mouth with her hand, and says, ‘Knickers still round her knees!’

  We’re beside ourselves now, Tasha and I, mortified on Belinda’s behalf. Tasha dips her head to hide the laughter, letting her hair fall forward over her face. Then she tosses it back again, apparently oblivious to how it swings so perfectly into place.

  Penny manages to keep her face straight. ‘It wasn’t funny, you know,’ she says, and tucks her own sleek, neat hair behind her ears in a perfect parody of Belinda, and we laugh even more. Penny’s laughing too now and people are looking. We hope none of them knows Belinda, but for the moment we don’t care.

  ‘How did you hear that?’ Tasha asks.

  ‘Stephen told me. Belinda’s husband Mike told him. He was at some old boys’ do last week and Mike was there, propping up the bar apparently. You know what he’s like after a few beers.’

  I roll my eyes. ‘James can’t stand him. Thinks he’s a total dickhead.’

  Then we are back onto serious things again: weighing up the cost of decorators and discussing what Fiona Littlewood has had done to her dining room. And just then my phone rings. I fish it out from my bag, see it’s a number I don’t recognize and stupidly I answer it. It’s her. Mrs Partridge.

  ‘Laura?’ she’s saying. ‘That you, Laura? Can you hear me?’

  I can hear her and so will everyone else. I lean away from the table as far as I unobtrusively can and switch the phone to my other ear. ‘What is it?’ I hiss.

  ‘It’s Violet Partridge here.’ Her voice is loud, too loud.

  ‘Yes, yes, I know.’

  I see Tasha glance at me, then at Penny, and raise an eyebrow.

  ‘I wondered if you’d had time to consult your diary yet, dear. About Tuesday.’

  ‘What?’ I don’t believe this. It’s less than two hours since I left her house. Penny and Tasha have stopped talking now, and are both sitting there, watching me.

  ‘About Tuesday,’ she says again. ‘Will you be free on Tuesday?’

  Out of the corner of my eye I see Tasha mouth the word Tuesday.

  ‘Yes, yes, that’s fine,’ I say, just to get her off the phone.

  ‘You will?’ I hear the surprise, the relief in her voice.

  ‘Yes,’ I say. ‘Fine. I’ll see you then.’ And I hang up. ‘Dentist,’ I say to Tasha and Penny, who are both staring at me, expectantly. ‘Change of appointment.’ And I don’t care right then if they believe me or not. ‘Fiona Littlewood’s wallpaper,’ I say now, to stop them looking at me like that. ‘Where did you say it was from?’

  And so I steer us back into the smooth, benign conversation of our own safe, parallel world. And I do not mention Mrs Partridge, or the fact that this morning while Penny and Tasha were shopping in John Lewis I was trapped on that old sunken sofa in Mrs Partridge’s cramped, dark front room. I do not mention this because I want to talk about the things in our world, our perfect world. I want to forget Heddy Partridge and everything to do with her. I want to forget her as I had forgotten her for the last however many years. She has no place in my life now; she never did. So I laugh about Belinda and I talk about decorators and kitchen plans, but still I can’t help wondering what it was like for Penny and Tasha and Fiona Littlewood and all the other Ashton women when they were younger, before they were Ashton women. I wonder what it was like for them when they were at school. Were things always so smooth and easy? Do any of them know a Heddy or someone like her? Do any of them have a skeleton rattling around in their cupboard?

  Do they?

  Oh, I’m sure they must do, but no one will ever know. We meet, we chat, we think that we are the dearest of friends, but we all keep our cupboard doors firmly shut.

  FIVE

  She got breasts before the rest of us. That’s the second thing I think of when I think of Heddy Partridge. After the ballet incident.

  She got breasts too soon, before it was fashionable to have them. And we could all see them, two fat bumps inside her white school shirt, no matter how hard she tried to hide them.

  ‘Heddy’s got boobs,’ we used to say, and the boys would run their hands up her back, to see if she was wearing a bra. Then they’d twang the strap and Heddy would pull away, embarrassed to the point of tears.

  ‘Show us your boobs,’ they’d chant, and she started standing with her shoulders sloping forwards, trying to hide them.

  We had our own swimming pool at junior school, with changing rooms right by it: one block divided into two by a partition wall, girls on the left, boys on the right. The silly person who’d designed the changing rooms had put full-sized windows in, all along the front, so you could see straight in. So naturally the boys used to sneak out from their side of the building and dash across to ours to get a look at us when we were changing. We’d catch sight of their little faces peeping over the window frame and hysteria would break out; a mass of squealing and giggling and hiding behind towels.

  Heddy didn’t laugh, though. Heddy didn’t squeal. Heddy was the only one of us with anything to hide, but she just carried on getting changed in the corner, her back to the window, struggling under her towel while the boys gawped. Her embarrassment was genuine, and we got a kick out of that, too.

  We got a kick out of watching the boys looking at her in her big pants, and seeing her go red.

  One day, somebody hid her clothes. Her skirt and her shirt and her big smelly knickers. We watched her hunting for them, groping about on the bench among everyone else’s stuff while the other girls pushed her away.

  ‘What you doing, Heddy Partridge?’

  ‘Get off my things, Heddy Partridge.’

  ‘You perv, Heddy Partridge, get off.’

  She moved around the room, her face red and tearful and stupid. She was shaking, with the cold or with fear, and clutching that tatty towel around her body with one hand while her stringy wet hair dripped down her shoulders. Somebody started grabbing at her towel. Somebody else produced her clothes and started throwing them around – her shirt and her skirt – while Heddy lunged about trying to catch them, at the same time trying and failing miserably to keep her nakedness covered. And we shrieked with laughter. Shrieked and shrieked until the boys came creeping out from next door to see what was going on.

  Nobody wanted to touch her knickers, though. They were thrown and landed on the floor with a flop, and everyone screamed and jumped away. And then they were kicked, and kicked again, back and forth across the wet floor, amid more screams, until the teacher eventually came and sent the boys packing, and then we all shut up, good as gold.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, what is going on?’ Mrs Rogers demanded. And she looked at Heddy, who was standing there, quivering behind her towel. ‘Heddy Partridge, why have you not even started getting dressed yet? Do you think you’ve got all day?’ But she didn’t wait for an answer. She marched off next door to sort the boys out.

  And when she’d gone, someone quickly opened the door again and kicked out Heddy’s soggy pants. They landed on the grass on the other side of the path, and that’s where they stayed, for days and days, for everyone to see.

  On Friday Arianne and I accompany Thomas into school, each of us carrying a tray of cakes that I iced but didn’t make for the cake sale, each tray wrapped in a plastic bag because the unusually hot weather’s broken now and it’s turned colder and greyer and there’s drizzle spitting in the wind, threatening real rain later, just when we don’t need it. We like our cake sales outside, in the sunshine. We like to see the children rushing out at three-fifteen, grabbing their mummies and their mummies’ money and crowding round the cake stall, eager eyes and eager hands, loading up. It feels timeless, like at a country fair, like we are doing what women are meant to be doing; dealing with children, with cakes, with pennies.

  In the sunshine, it seems idyllic. In the sunshine, our lives seem idyllic and we like
that, we like that very much.

  At three-fifteen I am back again with Arianne, doing my bit for the class. The wind is getting up and throwing the rain into our faces in fitful bursts and smudging the icing on the cakes. There are four of us doing the selling. Juliet has an umbrella that she’s tilting forward into the wind, trying to shelter the cakes – and us as much as she can – without poking the little ones in the eye with the spokes. Arianne is up close behind me, hanging around my legs and whingeing, ‘Can we go? Can we go?’, but we’ve another ten minutes of this at least. The children are still coming out, their mothers battling with umbrellas and lunch boxes and purses.

  I stick more cakes out. Most of them are like mine: shop-bought fairy cakes with a bit of home-dyed icing squirted over them, and maybe a sweet stuck on top to make it look as if you’d made them yourself. You don’t want your kids eating these. But you don’t want your kids eating some of the real home-made ones either, when you don’t know whose home they were made in. Thomas bought one once that had a long, long hair cooked inside it; it got caught between his two front teeth when he took a bite and I had to pull it free. I shudder to think of it. I shudder as the children arrive, swarming, fingers that have been busy poking at noses and bottoms now poking at the cakes, picking them up and putting them back again, looking for the ones with the most icing on top. I have the ones I’ve already picked out for my children put by in a bag behind the table; helper’s perks. When Thomas comes bounding over, I hand him the bag and take a note from my purse and drop it into the kitty tin. Instantly Arianne lets go of my leg and turns her complaining to him now; it’s all Let me choose first and I wanted that one!

  Friday night children are the worst, always the worst. And tonight is James’s football night, so he’ll be in earlier than usual and he’ll stir the children up just as I’ve got them wound down for bed. He’ll stir them up, then he’ll go out again, leaving me to deal with the fallout.