‘James playing football tonight?’ Juliet asks me after the rush has gone, as if reading my mind. She smiles sweetly at me from under that umbrella – it’s a boys will be boys smile. We shove what’s left of the cakes into one tin, and Juliet pops one into her mouth and sticks a couple more into a bag. ‘I’ll take these for Andy,’ she says, referring to her husband as though he was a seven-year-old. ‘He never has time to eat much before football. You know what it’s like. He dashes in, he dashes out. I have a sandwich ready for when he gets in from work, but I practically have to hold him down to make him eat it before he goes rushing off to his football.’
My husband plays football with my friends’ husbands, every third Friday. And he catches the train with them every morning, and back again every evening. Oh, not the same ones, not every time. It does vary a bit. Some may go in ten minutes earlier some days, come home ten minutes later.
James will come home and say, I saw so-and-so on the train today, and so-and-so. And he’ll tell me some little piece of gossip that he’s heard: somebody’s house sale’s fallen through; somebody else is getting their loft converted so that the nanny can move in. Invariably I know this already. I talk to the women. He talks to the men, later.
I picture them all standing there on the platform at Ashton station. I picture them like cardboard cut-outs, like those wooden figures you used to get at fairs, years ago, the ones with no faces that you had to stand behind and stick your own face in the gap, either to be oh-so-amusingly photographed or to be pelted with wet sponges. I picture them like this, those husbands. I imagine a certain number of basic cut-outs in place permanently, with only the faces coming, going, changing day to day. The conversation doesn’t change; the conversation flows from one day into the next with barely a break in continuity. Each person comes, pops their head over the wooden collar and says their little bit. I imagine it flowing like a well-rehearsed play, an ongoing act, choreographed to perfection.
Sometimes, when I am feeling sour, I wonder what would happen if you stopped every one of these men five minutes after they left Ashton station in the evening, rewound them and sent them all back to the wrong home. I picture them scurrying along the streets, reprogrammed.
And sometimes, when I am feeling really, really sour, I think that they probably wouldn’t even notice, and nor would their wives.
I pick clothes up off the floor where they have been dropped in random lines – socks, pants, shorts – and stuff them into the washing basket. At least Arianne has put her things in the basket, but no amount of nagging will get Thomas to do the same.
‘Put your clothes in the wash,’ I say every evening, and every evening I end up picking them off the floor. Sometimes I shout at him, sometimes I can’t be bothered. Thomas thinks it’s a game and he’s right, it is. It’s that little game called Let’s See What We Can Get the Woman to Do for Us. He’s practising for when he’s older; he’ll need to be good at that game when he has a wife of his own.
We like to joke that we are the ones with the brains, we women, and you only have to look at school-performance results to see that. Yet when I pick other people’s dirty clothes up off the floor, I wonder about it. I wonder about it when I scrape the scraps off other people’s plates into the bin, and when I wipe up the wee stains from around the loo. I wonder about it a lot. I wonder what happens to our brains when we get married, when we become mothers. I mean, look at me: would you believe that I organized events for a PR company in my previous life? ‘We manage our families now,’ Liz once said to me – she who used to manage an entire department for a major bank. But I don’t feel like any kind of a manager right now. I feel a whole lot more like a fool.
I listen to my family laughing as I clear up their mess. They’re tucked up in Arianne’s bed, all three of them, with Daddy the Clown in the middle telling a quick funny story. Quick, because he’ll be going back out in five minutes. He’s got one eye on his watch already; can’t be late for football. I know this and so do the children – there’s a hysterical edge to their laughter now. I hear them getting wilder as I unplug the bath, hang up the towels. They’re competing for his attention, getting louder, out of control, and I’m sure that James is loving it, this little burst of worship. But the children aren’t loving it, not really. James thinks that they are, but he can’t hear the tears creeping into their laughter. James can’t hear how desperate they are to hang on to him, to entertain him, to make him want to stay with them a little longer.
But then James doesn’t hear Thomas’s plaintive little voice every night, calling down the stairs, ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’
And James doesn’t have to listen to Thomas singing to himself, counting to himself, pop-popping his finger against the inside of his cheek to try to keep himself awake, hoping with all his little heart that he might see his daddy before he falls asleep.
I don’t know which is worse: normal nights when James comes in too late to see the children, but at least the children get their sleep, at least they’re tucked up and calm and there have been no tears; or this, this heart-breaking performance every third Friday when he comes home early, winds them up full of excitement and then leaves them again.
Daddy the Clown is pulling away now; it’s time to go. I hear the tone of his voice change instantly, so precise, so businesslike now. Playtime over. I hear Arianne’s voice rising on a wail, I hear Thomas shouting, ‘Dad, Dad, one more time . . .’
But Daddy grabs his kitbag and is gone out the door, kissing me quickly on the cheek on his way past, smiling, oblivious to the chaos he leaves behind.
As soon as James closes the front door behind him it starts. Their little hearts are overloaded with disappointment and they turn on each other now. Arianne kicks Thomas to get him out of her bed. Thomas pinches Arianne. Arianne starts screaming, yelling, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Thomas calls Arianne a crybaby, Arianne calls Thomas Fatty Belly, Thomas calls Arianne Poopy Pants, and on and on it goes.
I walk into Arianne’s room, bracing myself.
She is sitting on her bed, face red and squashed up with misery. ‘Mummy!’ she howls even louder now she sees me. ‘Thomas called me Poopy Pants!’
‘Poopy Pants! Poopy Pants!’ Thomas taunts, jumping around the room, sticking out his bottom and blowing raspberries over his shoulder.
‘Fatty Belly!’ Arianne rises up like a cat, spitting out the words, and dribble spurts onto her chin.
‘Ha-ha!’ Thomas jeers, pointing. ‘Dribble Chops! Dribble Chops!’
*
Some books tell you that the way to deal with this is to reason with them, to let them show their anger and to help them understand it, even though you’re not allowed to feel any yourself. Some books say separate them, others say don’t intervene.
I find the only way I can deal with it is to deaden myself inside.
Stop it, I say to Thomas; stop it, I say to Arianne. I put them in their separate beds in their separate rooms and close the doors, and I wish we didn’t have to go through this every third Friday.
Once, my mother phoned, right in the middle of it all. And it was particularly bad that night; it must have been, for me to say anything. Both kids screaming away and me just about ready to join in.
‘Whatever’s going on?’ my mum asked before I’d even said hello.
‘It’s James’s football night,’ I said, expecting her – stupidly – to understand. Expecting a little bit of sympathy maybe, a little bit of Oh dear, I’m sure they’ll settle soon.
What I got was this disbelieving pause. And then she laughed, that short, shrill, committee-member laugh. ‘Surely you can control your own children, Laura,’ she said.
Funny that I should think of that now.
Downstairs in the kitchen I pour myself a large glass of wine. I can still hear the children grizzling away, but it’s becoming intermittent now. Five times I’ve been called back upstairs, bringing drinks, finding teddies. Five times I’ve gone up, and each time I’ve said I’m not coming up
again.
I sit at the table and sip my wine, and wait as the silence gradually eases down.
All day I have had the strangest sensation of going the wrong way fast, like running backwards through a crowd. And all day I’ve felt that at any moment I might bump into Heddy Partridge. I keep getting the neck-prickling feeling that she’s just behind me, that if I turn around she’ll be there, moon-faced and rabbit-eyed, watching me.
This is so irrational. Heddy Partridge makes me irrational. I know she isn’t going to come wandering out of St Anne’s looking for me. I mean, just imagine it, big mad Heddy roaming the streets of Ashton in her hospital gown!
It’s the girl she was that’s haunting me. Not the woman that she is now, whatever that may be.
I have this image stuck in my head, of Heddy on her ninth birthday. Heddy coming down the stairs in her house, ridiculous as ever in her ballet clothes, stupid face open and hopeful as a baby’s.
I didn’t know it was her birthday. It was a Saturday, and there we were, picking her up for ballet yet again. My dad always let me sit in the front for the short distance from my house to the Partridges’, but then I’d have to go in the back when Heddy got in the car, and sit next to her, because my dad said I had to be nice. So because of her I had to move away from my dad. The only time I ever got to be near him, to have him to myself, to feel like I was special maybe for a few minutes – and Heddy Partridge cut it short.
‘Go on, then,’ my dad said, and I got out of the car even more reluctantly than usual to knock on the Partridges’ door, because that particular Saturday it was raining, hard.
The rain dotted grey spots on my pink ballet tights as I ran up the pathway, holding my coat up over my head. Halfway up the path there was a huge puddle. I jumped wide to cross it, misjudged, and clomped down onto the wet concrete, splashing puddle water across the tops of my feet and inside my school shoes.
‘Stupid Heddy Partridge,’ I cursed. ‘Stupid, fat, stupid Heddy Partridge.’
You’d think she’d be ready when we came for her. You’d think a honk of the horn would do it and out she’d come, but oh no, up that pathway I’d have to go, come rain or shine. Up that pathway and into that house.
I rang the doorbell and listened to that awful chime.
‘Come in, come in,’ Mrs Partridge said, opening the door and ushering me through the plastic strips to stand dripping on the doormat. She pulled the door shut behind me, leaning over me, close, with her arm outstretched to do so. She smelled of the hard work of being Mrs Partridge, of cooking and sweat and cigarette smoke. I shrank into myself, appalled by her nearness.
‘Heddy!’ she called as the door clicked shut behind me, shutting out the sound of the rain. Her mouth was close to my face, her voice loud in my ear. I could smell her breath, a smell of cats and fish and dampened-out bonfires. I pressed my tongue against the top of my mouth and tried not to breathe, for far too long, and felt my heart thump.
‘Heddy!’ she called again, away from me now, shouting up the narrow stairs that rose steep and dark from the hallway into the darker beyond. I let out my breath and quickly took in another, through my mouth. ‘Heddy!’ Mrs Partridge yelled again and her voice caught on a gurgle and a cough. The cough rattled like water over stones, and as if in response Mr Partridge started coughing too, from behind the half-closed living-room door where he sat slowly, audibly dying. I wished I was safely back out in the car, next to my dad, who hardly ever coughed at all.
Mrs Partridge turned back round to me, a conspiratorial look on her face and said, ‘It’s Heddy’s birthday today.’
I could smell her breath again. She grinned at me, triumphantly, waiting. ‘Oh,’ I said.
Then Heddy came down the stairs, at last, fat pink legs visible first, like butcher’s sausages in her ballet tights, followed by the rest of her. Most of us wore pink leotards now. Mine was the exact same colour as my tights, with a thin belt around the waist, sewn on at the sides. Heddy’s leotard was black and plain and cut low on the thighs with thick elastic bunching against her flesh, like old-fashioned knickers. She stopped at the bottom of the stairs and looked at me, all bright-eyed and expectant.
They were both looking at me, and waiting.
‘Happy birthday,’ I muttered, then I stood there impatiently as Heddy shoved her feet into her school shoes and took her anorak down from the coat rack. I’d got my hand on the door latch and, as soon as I possibly could, I pulled open that door and ran back down that pathway in the rain to the car, and my dad. I wanted to get in the front, right up beside him, but I didn’t, because I had to be nice to Heddy.
I knew Heddy was following along behind me, but when I opened the door to the back seats and clambered in, I saw that Mrs Partridge had followed us too, come out in the rain holding a broken yellow umbrella over her head. She bent down to the front passenger window and tapped, and my dad started when he saw her, as if he’d had a fright, which would have made me laugh if I wasn’t so angry. He leaned across the passenger seat to wind down the window, grabbing at the handle with a clumsy hand. And then he put on this stupid, gushy voice.
‘Hello, Mrs Partridge, how are you?’ he asked with way too much enthusiasm. I cringed on his behalf.
‘Oh, good, good. Not so bad,’ Mrs Partridge said back, and probably she was cringing too because there was this awkward pause then, as if neither of them knew what to say. And I sat there, thinking Oh, just get on with it, while Heddy stuffed herself onto the back seat beside me.
And then,‘It’s Heddy’s birthday,’ Mrs Partridge announced, as Heddy bumped her big self up against me.
Oh, woopy-dee. Bring out the trumpets and put an ad in the paper. I wriggled across the seat to the far side and pressed myself right up against the door to get as far away from Heddy as I could. She smelled of wet dog.
‘Happy birthday, Heddy,’ my dad said, straining his neck to look round at Heddy in the back.
‘Thank you,’ Heddy muttered, and blushed, and looked down at her fat legs, flattened fatter against the seat of the car.
I thought Mrs Partridge would go away now that she’d made her grand announcement, but she carried on standing there with the rain running down off her crumpled umbrella and into the open window. Then, to my horror, she said, ‘Would Laura like to come round later, this afternoon, for some cake?’
No, Laura would not, I wanted to reply, but my dad answered for me, gushing, ‘I’m sure Laura would love to. That’s very kind of you, Mrs Partridge.’
I sat the whole way to ballet staring out the window away from Heddy, and fuming. And when we were at ballet she seemed to think this unwanted invitation – and the extremely unwanted, unfair acceptance – somehow gave her the right to hang around me more than ever. When I hung up my coat with the others she was there, hanging hers on the next peg. I took off my shoes and left them under my coat and ran over to the bench on the far side of the hall where some of the other girls were sitting, to lace up my ballet pumps. I squeezed myself in between the other girls, deliberately, so there was no room for Heddy, thinking she’d get the message. But still she followed me across the hall, and stood there, totally ignored by everyone, until Madame clapped her hands for us to get started. Then Heddy tried to stand next to me when we did our circle exercises, so I had to dash across the hall at the last minute and butt in on the other side of the circle, just to get away from her. And then I was stuck with her stupid face opposite me, all hurt and bemused.
She was like a dog following me around all the time; she made me want to kick her. It wasn’t my fault that she was too thick to know when to get lost. And it wasn’t my fault that the only time I ever got to have my dad to myself – that is, when he was giving me a lift somewhere – she had to come along and spoil it.
She wanted me to tell the others it was her birthday. I didn’t, of course.
I ignored her all the way home in the car too, staring out the window and not speaking to Heddy or my dad, so she was the one who had to answer h
im when he asked How did it go, did you have a nice time? And then I hated her even more for muscling in and talking to my dad when she shouldn’t even have been in our car at all.
When we dropped her off, my dad said, ‘Have a very happy birthday, Heddy. Laura will be along later.’
Before Heddy had even closed the car door behind her, and knowing full well she could hear me, I said, ‘Dad, I don’t want to go round there.’
And my dad turned around and snapped at me, ‘How dare you be so rude! It’s jolly kind of them to invite you.’ And so I got another lecture all the way home, about how I mustn’t be so selfish, about how I must make more of an effort, about how I must be nice to poor bloody Heddy Partridge. The injustice of it all was like a finger jabbing at my head, like Heddy Partridge was put on this earth just to make my parents forever disappointed with me.
If my dad liked Heddy Partridge so much, why didn’t he go to her party? In fact, why didn’t he have her for a daughter full stop, instead of me?
After lunch my mum gave me some money and made me walk to the shops around the corner to buy Heddy a present, even though it was still raining. I bought her a box of cheap bath cubes, like you’d give to your granny, from the chemist, and the worst card I could find, a hideous cheap thing with a bunch of old flowers on the front. It was my dad I was angry with, but Heddy bore the brunt of it. I spent the rest of the money on sweets, which I ate, though they stuck in my throat.
My mum made me get changed, too, into something nice.
‘It’s not a party,’ I kept saying to her. ‘It’s just cake.’ And mouldy cake probably, at that.
I sip my wine. Memory is a leech, sucking me back.
This Perfect World Page 5