This Perfect World

by Suzanne Bugler

  ‘But why does she do these things if it means she is taken away from her son? Why make herself even more unhappy?’

  ‘Hormones,’ Mrs Partridge says and I try not to notice as she tips her ash onto the floor. ‘First she lost the baby. Then it took such a while for Nathan to come along. We thought that would make things better, but there was the post-natal depression, see, and the bereavement still, from the first baby. And the money worries.’ She sounds like she’s making a list. It could be a shopping list. One hundred and one things to buy so that you, too, can be like Heddy Partridge. ‘Then her husband left her, just when she needed him most. That came especially hard to Heddy, after losing her father so young. And she was never happy about her weight.’ She stops. She’s run out of reasons.

  ‘But surely she’s just making it worse for herself,’ I persist.

  ‘Yes, dear,’ Mrs Partridge says. ‘She is. But she can’t help herself. She doesn’t know what else to do.’ She looks around her and finds the unused ashtray in front of the gear stick and grinds out her cigarette. ‘It’s all just too many things for one person.’

  And that’s the truth of it. Too many things. One of which was me.

  NINE

  The minute I get home I close the front door behind me and take my shoes and all my clothes off in the hall, and leave them there. Then I run naked up to my shower and stand under it before the water is even running warm. I don’t stop to take my make-up off first, and I can feel my mascara running into my eyes, stinging them. I clamp them shut; I want the water all over my face, all over every inch of me. I feel I need to be washed, and washed again, before I can even begin with the soap. I start on my head first, groping for the shampoo bottle without opening my eyes and tipping far too much out. I scrub and scrub until my scalp feels scratched raw. Then I move on to my body, working my way down bit by methodical bit so that nothing gets missed. I even soap my face, which I never, ever normally do, and my skin tightens in objection. Then under my chin, in my ears, across my shoulders and down.

  And as I wash I am mentally retracing my steps, going over in my head everything that I have touched with my hands before I got in the shower. The handle to the bathroom door. The inside of the front door where I closed it behind me, the outside where I pushed it open. My keys. The car door handle; both car door handles. The steering wheel. The gear stick. I will have to go over them all with Dettox, and then I will throw away the cloth. I try to think where Mrs Partridge’s hands have been and I remember her searching for the ashtray; the whole dashboard will have to be sterilized.

  The thought comes into my head to get out my steam cleaner and clean the car seats. But I haven’t the time before I have to pick up Arianne from Carole’s, and I wonder if that might perhaps be going just a little bit far. The thought stays there, though, and I know I’ll end up spraying the seats with Dettox, just in case.

  Even though my hands have been washed, as they’ve washed the rest of me, I now wash them again, paying attention to every groove and line between fingers and around knuckles. Hospital germs and bugs get everywhere; I can almost picture them, burrowing into my skin. I do not have a nail brush inside the shower, so I press my nails into the soap and dig hard, feeling it clog up underneath them, right down, where the germs might hide.

  The bathroom is thick with steam when I turn off the shower. I rub myself dry, then wipe a clear patch on the mirror and see the awful mess the soap has made of my make-up. By the time I’ve cleaned my face properly and got dressed, I’m really running late. There isn’t time to redo my make-up or dry my hair.

  I hesitate over the clothes in the hall. For just a second I wonder if I should take them to the dry-cleaner’s, in case I need them again.

  I take the optimistic route, and chuck them all in the bin.

  I make it to Carole’s on time by the skin of my teeth.

  Penny is just coming out of the gateway with Sam perched on her hip when I get out of my car. In one glance she’s taken in my wet hair, my bare face, my change of clothes. As unobtrusively as possible I try to peel my shirt away from my back where it is sticking to my skin, damp from the Dettoxed car seat.

  ‘Got time for a quick coffee?’ she asks casually, lowering Sam to his feet.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say and, borrowing from James, I pull an I’d love to stop and chat if only I had the time face. ‘I’ve got a splitting headache.’

  Penny’s eyes are almost popping with curiosity. She’s about to speak and I’m racking my head for quick excuses, but then she is distracted and I am temporarily saved, by Belinda, who is just coming out of Carole’s front door.

  ‘Laura!’ Belinda calls, rushing up the pathway towards us, Molly following at her heels. ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

  ‘Lucky you,’ Penny mutters quietly, under her breath.

  I can feel Penny’s gaze slipping away from me and wandering down to Belinda’s rather wide feet, which are clad in a pair of navy-blue loafers. Between these unfortunate shoes and the too-short trousers are what look suspiciously like popsocks, in a worrying shade of beige. Out of the corner of my eye I notice Penny stick out one of her own mock-crocodile-skin boots, pivot it on its pin-thin heel and make the comparison.

  ‘You haven’t got any make-up on,’ Belinda accuses me, gawping at my face with undisguised horror.

  ‘I know,’ I say. ‘I’m running late.’

  Belinda proceeds to make me even later. ‘I want to talk to you about French classes for Arianne,’ she says, of all things. ‘There may be a space coming available soon in Molly’s class. I could put a word in for you, if you like.’

  I stare at her hamster face staring at mine. French classes are the last thing on my mind right now.

  ‘And I wondered what you thought about the girls doing flute lessons together,’ she carries on. ‘They’re starting them at St James’s Hall in September. I’ve put Molly’s name down already.’

  ‘I’ll leave you to it,’ Penny says to me, taking Sam by the hand and somewhat reluctantly letting me go.

  And so I am off the hook for now, but a juicy story gets all the juicier for the waiting. I am well aware of this. My naked face on its own would be enough to bring empires down, around here.

  My mother phones again that evening, when the children are eating their tea. Twice in one week is not like her at all. I hear her voice and I wonder if there is some mother–daughter telepathy thing going on along the psychic airwaves. I hear what she has to say, and I know it.

  ‘Laura,’ she says, without preamble. ‘There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you, but I keep forgetting. Just a day or two before we moved I bumped into old Mrs Partridge in the High Street. You remember the Partridges, don’t you, darling, from Fairview Lane?’ She doesn’t pause long enough for me to reply, which is probably just as well, but carries on, ‘Well, it seems poor Heddy’s had some kind of a breakdown and has had to go into hospital. Mrs Partridge had been having a terrible time. I did feel sorry for her.’ Hesitation is slipping into her voice now, slowing her down a little. ‘I gave her your phone numbers, just in case things got too bad. You don’t mind, do you, darling?’

  ‘No,’ I say, keeping my voice as level as I can. ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Only I did feel so sorry for her. For both of them. They’ve had a very hard life, the Partridges.’

  I can hear the pity in my mother’s voice, but also something else, much more disturbing. And it’s something directed at me, I can feel it.

  ‘It’s probably something and nothing,’ she says, brightly now. ‘I’m sure she won’t need to call you.’ The pity is jollied away on a light little laugh, but the something else is still there. I can hear it. And then she says, ‘But if she does call you, you will try to help her, won’t you, darling? You will do what you can?’

  And I think I know what the something else is. It’s doubt. My own mother thinks me incapable of being nice.

  I tell James later, but he’s not that interested. He’s ha
d a hard day at work and he finds the description of Belinda’s footwear and her bumptious enthusiasm for all things French or musical much more entertaining.

  ‘God, she is one pushy mother,’ he laughs, twirling spaghetti carbonara around his fork and swigging back his wine.

  But when I tell him about my trip to St Anne’s I see his face shut down a little. He is quiet as I speak; he shovels pasta into his mouth with his head tilted slightly to one side as if I have his full attention, but I know he is not really listening. He’s thinking about work. I know this because of the politely fascinated expression on his face. I see this expression a lot. Sometimes it tempts me into telling him something totally wild, such as that a family of badgers has taken up residence in the study and used his Chelsea programmes for bedding, just to catch him out. But not tonight.

  Tonight I tell him there is this poor old woman who travels four hours a day on buses just to spend one hour with her mentally ill daughter. I tell him that the daughter, a woman of my age, is someone I was at school with, though I don’t tell him what a bitch I was to her the whole time I knew her.

  ‘She’s trapped inside herself, drugged up and shut away,’ I say, and I wonder where all this compassion is coming from.

  ‘Right,’ James says, curling spaghetti round his fork.

  ‘I mean, it’s a downward spiral.’ I can hear myself talking in clichés. ‘It could happen to anyone. You get depressed, you go to the doctor, you get put on pills. But pills don’t sort out the problem and you end up needing more pills, and before you know it you’re caught up in the system and can’t get out.’ For a second I wonder what on earth I’m talking about, and I shut up before James asks me the same thing.

  He doesn’t, though. He carries on eating, twisting up his spaghetti and cutting off any unruly tails with the side of his spoon.

  ‘It’s terrible that this should happen to people,’ I finish lamely.

  ‘It’s a tough old world,’ James says, which is a safe thing to say, when he clearly hasn’t been listening to a word I’ve said.

  I can’t get over the cuts all up her arms.

  The more I think about it, the creepier it is.

  I lie awake in the darkness with my eyes wide open and there are a million questions firing in my head. I listen to James snoring away beside me and I wonder why it is that Heddy watched us at school all those years ago, cutting ourselves. Did she just want to be like us – pretty, popular, blonde, included, all the things Heddy Partridge could never be? Or was she trying to pick up tips on technique from the master cutters so that she’d be better able to copy us one day, when her own time came? I stare into the dark and I see Jane, Cathy, Amanda and me huddled together in the playground, close, each of us in turn rolling up our sleeves and baring the soft, latticed skin of our inner arms, and I see Heddy, always there, hovering close by, trying to catch a look.

  When we cut our arms it was a very private thing, or so I thought. Something between just the four of us, binding our friendship. But all performers need an audience, don’t they, and now I wonder: did we need Heddy? Did we need her just so that we could tell her to get lost, just to make our need for secrecy more intense?

  Did I need her, just to make myself look and feel better?

  I turn on my side and close my eyes, but the thoughts won’t go away.

  I remember my English tutor at college telling the class that if you hate someone, it is because you can see in them that something you dislike about yourself. What nonsense, I thought.

  Heddy Partridge and I are aeons apart in our lives and in our heads, surely?

  Surely?

  She is like a shadow that just won’t go away.

  What was she thinking when she watched us, all those years ago? And what was she thinking when she stood looking down at me as I lay on her mother’s sofa with my wrist so half-heartedly slit? I squeeze my eyes tight shut, but I can still see her blank, emotionless eyes, giving nothing away.

  And when she so publicly cut up her own arms, what was she thinking then? Not of me, surely. Not even for a second. That would be just too creepy for words.

  I press together the inside of my arms, inner wrist against inner wrist. I remember how it felt to peel back the woolly sleeve of my cardigan, the anticipation, the thrill. I remember it so well I can almost feel it. The prickle and the tingle of the blade scraping away at my skin, the pop as it burst through. The adrenaline, shooting out and making my heart race while I kept my body oh so still. And the pain, the secret, glorious pain, beating in time with my heart.

  I remember all this, though I want to forget.

  I will help Mrs Partridge. I will do whatever I can to help get Heddy out of St Anne’s. I have to, otherwise they will be on my back like clawed beetles forever, dragging me down.

  Sure enough, there is a message on the answerphone the next day, when I get back from town with my new shoes. It’s the third message after the one from Tasha confirming coffee on Thursday and Liz’s Hello, how are you? Didn’t see you at yoga.

  ‘Mrs Partridge calling,’ she announces in a semi-shout, as if answerphones were the newest of the new and just too baffling for words, rather than simple taping mechanisms that have been around for years and years. ‘Violet Partridge calling. For Laura Cresswell. Phoning to say thank you, dear, for all your kind help. Will try again later.’

  Please don’t, I think, as I wipe off the message. Please don’t try again later.

  But she does, of course. This time, thankfully, I am busy bathing the children, and again I don’t answer. So she calls me on my mobile. I hear the distant ring of it from my handbag, down in the hall.

  And I see my life, opened out and crawling with beetles, eating me up and pulling me down.

  *

  James and I have sex scheduled in on Wednesday nights. Obviously if he’s away on business or working late, then we can’t do it and then there’s the nightmare of rejiggling diaries to see if we can fit it in on a Tuesday or a Thursday instead, but more often than not one of us is either out or busy. And there’s always the Saturday slot to fall back on.

  Tonight James is at home, we are on the bed and he has been working on my left nipple for quite some time now.

  I started off with good intentions, but I just can’t concentrate. I just can’t relax. I mean, how can I, with Heddy Partridge and her mother permanently stuck in my head? It’s like they’re here, in the room with us.

  I sigh, and James seems to take this as a sign that he’s getting somewhere at last. His fingers speed up the twiddling, and he starts rubbing himself against me, and kissing my neck.

  ‘I’ve got to help them,’ I say, and James grunts into my neck. ‘I’ve got to.’

  James grunts again, lets go of my left nipple and moves his hand across to start on my right.

  I stare at the ceiling. ‘But how? What can I do?’

  James’s fingers stop twiddling, and start drumming on my breast instead, a sign of impatience, I think. ‘No one can be held against their will unless they’re a danger to themselves or to others,’ he mutters into my hair.

  I turn my head and we are nose to nose. ‘You make it sound like she’s in prison!’

  ‘No,’ he says, finally giving up on my breasts altogether and taking his hand away, ‘you make it sound like that.’ He props himself up on one elbow and looks down on me. ‘You know, I think I preferred you when you were selfish,’ he says.

  He means it as a half-joke, but it isn’t even half-funny. Tears rush into my eyes, and sex is definitely off the menu. ‘I am still selfish!’ I cry as James stares at me, startled. ‘Believe me, I am.’

  I arrive at Chico’s at twelve-thirty on Thursday to meet Tasha and, surprise, surprise, Penny and Liz are there too. I see them through the glass before I open the door, heads together around the table, chatting very animatedly. The chat stops, of course, when I walk in, and they grin up at me, hungry as wolves.

  Coffee is ordered for me, and more coffees for them. The
y’ve clearly been here for quite some time, though they quite ridiculously try to pretend they’ve just arrived and that it was a coincidence, them all bumping into each other like this.

  I sip my coffee and wait, and they wait too, all eyes upon me, blatantly voracious.

  ‘Well, go on then,’ Liz says at last. ‘You know we’re all dying to know what you’ve been up to.’

  ‘Yes, and it better be something good for you to keep us in suspense like this!’ Penny quips, and I notice she sounds just the tiniest bit miffed.

  ‘Teenage lover, at least,’ Tasha drawls, manicured fingers stirring her spoon around her coffee cup with artificial ease.

  ‘Well, actually,’ I say, looking at each of them in turn, ‘I’ve been to see a girl I knew from school, who’s stuck in a mental hospital. I was wondering if any of you’d know how I could help get her out.’

  All three of them stare back at me, mouths open, eyes wide.

  ‘Oh, my God, what did she do?’ gasps Penny. ‘I mean, what kind of mental?’

  ‘Do you mean mad-mental or is it just some kind of breakdown?’ Tasha asks, and when she says mad she shakes her head a little, and crosses her eyes, cartoon-like, lest I should doubt her definition of the word. ‘Who is the girl? Do we know her?’

  ‘No of course not. And she’s not a girl now; she’s a woman. She’s a mother.’

  ‘Oh, my God,’ says Penny again. ‘Now that is awful. You shouldn’t go having children if you’re, you know—’

  ‘What? Mental?’ I ask and my voice is tight and dry. ‘Well, maybe she wasn’t then.’ And square up before my eyes rises that image of Heddy Partridge trapped in her box-house in Barton Village, beaten down by her life, new baby in her arms. Suddenly, mortifyingly, I’m going to cry, and I have to dig the nails of one hand into the other to fight back the tears.