Perfect Lives

by Polly Samson

  Laura stopped playing and Celia sprang across to bolt the balcony door before it banged again. Laura smiled broadly when she spotted him. She was pretty and her eyes were doll-blue but tonight her big gappy-toothed smile made him think of a pumpkin lamp.

  ‘I stopped having the dream as soon as I got this piano,’ Anna had told him. Her jumper had stretched and slipped some more and he could see as far as the line the inside of her arm made against her body. Her shoulder gleamed; Richard wanted quite badly to feel the warmth of her skin beneath his fingers and while he stood, not touching, he found that her dream swam into his head as though it were of his own making. The piano falling away through the sea and he was back at the Wigmore Hall, Leszek in the audience with his arm casually draped over Aurelia Lieberman beside him, and his dad, his face pinched and so close that he could see the whites of his eyes and that wet mollusc of his mouth. Richard’s hands shaking so badly, and the piano sinking out of his reach, getting smaller and smaller, and with it drowning his dreams.

  ‘I’m very sorry.’ He’d never felt meaner, telling poor Anna her piano wasn’t worth tuning. He was stepping away from it and wishing he could stop himself from staring at her shoulder. He was appalled to see that he had made her cry, made her offer him a rug, for goodness’ sake. She wiped across her eyes quickly with her forearm.

  ‘My poor old Joanna,’ she said, attempting to be chirpy. ‘The thing is, I wouldn’t want to replace it with any other piano.’

  ‘I could help you find something much better.’ He had already offered and he offered again more insistently; the thought of driving the Mini with the windows open and her folded into the seat next to him pleased him more than he would ever have thought possible.

  He always prided himself on being a very quiet piano tuner, but that night the Bösendorfer took a beating. The notes seemed to resonate through his bones. It was partly to save his own ears that he usually managed to keep the big thumps down to a minimum, really just the one on each key to equalise the strings, but as the wind whipped the rain against the glass, he found himself pounding the keys. His ears were ringing, he was almost punch-drunk by the time he had finished with it. Then, when it was done, his fingers picked up the Chopin and for a moment all was forgiven and he was almost lost, but she came back to find him on the waves of the Barcarolle.

  ‘I don’t want another piano. This is the piano. It’s the one in my dream.’ She had followed him down the path in her bare feet.

  ‘It’s the same piano. I shipped it here. I had to wait until my aunt died to get it back. She would never let me have it, even though no one played it, and I’m ashamed to say that getting it was the only thing I thought of when she died.’ Her eyes were glittering at the memory, but at least she wasn’t crying.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He said it again as he shut the front gate.

  He had a cold glass of flinty wine in his hand; he’d remained seated at the Idlewilds’ piano stool after delightful Celia had suggested he stay and play rather than call a taxi straight away. Graham Idlewild had lit a fire. Celia, who had changed for dinner, perched beside him and their son Ed, a magnificent six feet tall already, sat back to back on the love seat with Laura, her bare legs blushing prettily beneath the shortened dress.

  ‘Chopin’s Barcarolle in F Sharp.’ He pushed his sleeves to his elbows and flexed his fingers. When he gets it right he can make himself weep.

  The Bösendorfer glistened; his fingers hovered above its velvety keys. He lifted his wrists but instead of the Bösendorfer all he could see was Anna’s forlorn piano with its nicotined joke of a keyboard. Anna’s unpierced earlobe, tender as a new broad bean. Her shoulder. He could hear the stones being flung on to the beach outside. He looked up in panic at the perfection that was the Idlewilds: Graham in his shirtsleeves, wine glass in hand; Celia, so expensively beige; Ed in his school uniform, preternaturally the same age as his father; pretty, plump Laura still smiling at him like a pumpkin. But all he could see was Anna, and the beauty of the rug that she made from rags. The Bösendorfer was sinking fast, as though through the colours of her rug, a setting sun, a stormy sea, and his hands began to shake.

  THE MAN ACROSS THE RIVER

  ‘Fear grips me from behind, with a knife to my throat. Fear wears a dark cloak. He mourns the loss of his wife. He’s on drugs …’

  My mother laughs a little cruelly as she reads from the stapled sugar-paper book. It’s a childhood dirge, yes, one of mine that she’s just found in an old biscuit tin.

  ‘They were always so full of terror.’ She chuckles, turning the page with an air of confusion, and I try to raise my eyebrows at Simon in a See what I have to put up with? sort of a way without her noticing.

  She has taken to wearing kaftans of Demis Roussos proportions of late and her hair hangs down her back in a single long grey plait: a bell-pull that secretly I long to tug. I silently thank Simon for ignoring Tim, his twin brother, when he advised him to take a long hard look at the mother before considering the daughter as a wife.

  She reaches into the Peek Freans tin and unfolds another effort, clears her throat, ready to mock. It’s about a dead jackdaw.

  ‘What do you think of Mummy’s poem?’ she asks when the jackdaw is duly buried, possibly still alive, in the cruel black earth of my childhood imagination, but Angus and Ivan are more interested in picking the combination lock on her sweets and treasures box than listening to any poem.

  ‘Do you know Mummy won a prize?’

  ‘I had my name in the newspaper,’ I tell the boys, who look at me blankly.

  ‘It was for the poem that you wrote about cruise missiles,’ my mother remembers. Simon snorts loudly into his mug of tea and she gives him that teacher’s look of hers, only these days it rarely works as a corrective, it’s just funny.

  ‘Do you think the boys want to watch Cee-bee-bees?’ she asks, clapping her hands together, and I almost grind my teeth as the boys jump down, crying: ‘Cee-bee-bees! Cee-bee-bees!’

  ‘It’s really quite educational.’ She leads them off, plait swinging, and as usual I wonder if she’s playing an elaborate game.

  ‘It’s ridiculous,’ I moan to Simon. ‘I was never allowed to watch television.’ Now she seems to revel in turning my children into couch potatoes. She even bought a DVD of an American television show purporting to be child-friendly science that, when they all watched it, turned out to be nothing but overgrown boys demonstrating massive ejaculations using the explosive properties of Mentos and Diet Coke. Bombs and sweets and America, all at the flick of a switch. What fun. And she buys them sweeties, or even candy, to cram into their mouths while they watch this stuff, though she draws the line at Haribo, which she tells them are made from boiled-down bones and will give them cancer. Then she has to explain to them about cancer.

  ‘What sort of child writes poems about cruise missiles?’ Simon asks, picking it out of the tin and holding it up. There’s an illustration of a wire fence with a rabbit hanging from it, done in felt-tips, and I’m surprised to see how my writing used to slope backwards as though my letters were all trying to jam on the brakes.

  Simon goes to her pantry for a loaf of bread so that we can all have toast. White sliced bread, I notice.

  ‘Funnily enough,’ I say, ‘I can remember writing it.’

  It had been fine and dusty that day, the ground hard beneath my flip-flops, the grass just beginning to get scorched, bright sun I could feel against my skin. I was pleased with my tan, I liked the tickle of the grass on my bare brown arms and legs and I had a small white dog at my heels, a rather bouncy and optimistic terrier that my mother had taken pity on.

  Up at the cottage she was busy plotting the next revolution with her friend Suzanne. Their uniform was pretty standard dangly earrings and CND T-shirts, their brigade the militant wing of Primary School Teachers for Peace, against Coca-Cola, fur coats, fighting, whatever.

  Suzanne had been my class teacher, as well as being my mother’s first lieutenant and partner in
placards, and was still in the habit of demanding that I write poetry. In those days I couldn’t ask her to pass the salt without her thinking I should write about passing salt, though it was usually current affairs that my self-appointed muse felt should inspire me: starving Africans, homelessness, the sort of things that eleven-year-old girls are keen not to think about too much.

  ‘You should write a poem about the cruise missiles,’ she said to me that sunny afternoon. ‘It would be interesting to have a child’s-eye view of the danger.’

  She and my mother had already scared me witless with stories of nuclear attack: it was all coming to Britain, they said, while gloomily sipping their rosehip tea. ‘Bloody Americans again.’

  Suzanne and my mother were considering going to Greenham Common for the holidays. ‘We have to do our bit to stop them storing their missiles here,’ they said. ‘Sitting ducks we’ll be. We have to go for the sake of our children’, and they looked at me cramming my mouth with peanut butter from a spoon and nodded.

  I had seen Greenham Common on the news: the high fences and the righteous feral women, in the mud, arms linked, singing protest songs and shouting: ‘Whose side are you on?’ at the dead-eyed troops.

  ‘I don’t think I could live with myself another moment if I didn’t do my bit to keep the missiles out.’ My mother was emphatic and I didn’t think I could live for another moment full stop if I had to stay and listen to another word. I slipped from my chair and headed for the door.

  ‘It might be fun to live in a bender, take the kids,’ Suzanne was saying and I thought how much more fun it would be if they all dropped dead. Suzanne’s own children were much younger than me. One of each, with permanently encrusted nostrils. They looked like trolls with their fuzzy hair and the girl, whose name was Coriander, had a habit of following me around.

  I knew from a home-educated girl with a lisp at Woodcraft Folk that a bender was an unglamorous tent made out of bent-over saplings and tarpaulin. She had already been to Greenham Common and the news from the front wasn’t good: lavatories that were holes in the ground, ‘everyone stinks like wet dogs’. I wondered why I couldn’t just spend the summer on a beach somewhere with my dad.

  I rolled up my vest in the way that my mother hated me to do and trudged along for a bit on the dirt track past the hazel woods, whipping the heads from weeds and long grass with a swishy branch I’d pulled from a sapling. The white terrier was doing its best to lighten me up, springing back and forth, bringing me the black corpse of a tennis ball that it’d found in the long grass.

  Cruise was such a wind-in-the-hair carefree word, I thought, whipping the dry grass, sending little darts of grass-seed flying. Cruise. I choose. To amuse. There were rusty-brown butterflies at every footfall and birds singing, an endless sky that matched the faded denim of my cutoffs. I threw the ball and the dog jumped for it. I swung my arms, enjoying their length and slenderness and the near-burn of the sun on my shoulders.

  Heading towards the river I decided that cruise missiles were probably bad in the way that sweets were bad for the teeth, and television, particularly American television, was bad for the soul.

  I knew these fields well from walking with my mother. The farmer would be topping the grass for hay soon so I should try not to make tracks and opted for the well-trodden path along the riverbank. Until all this stuff about Greenham Common had arisen the long summer had stretched before me as blissfully as empty golden sands. I was dying for school to end. There were girls in the third form with spiteful nails. In the loos there were girls who waited for you to thump you, to write your name on the wall, to surround you and bruise you or nuke you with their words. Sign here if you hate so and so.

  Cruise. The last thing I needed was another thing to be afraid of. The terrier ran for the ball and startled a duck who shot from the reeds, desperately calling to her ducklings who fell in two by two behind her, leaving chevrons in their wake.

  Cruise, cruising by. The river was at its widest, practically a pool and smooth as glass. In the winter it flooded completely and the footpath was submerged in knee-deep water meadow, it even had a current running through it then. In the spring the drowned grass was flattened and feathered, littered with plastic bottles. But in the summer the grass was tall and unswayed with buttercups, and lily pads bloomed on the black river that ran through it, easing itself along the sloping bank from which some people swam, though not me because I never liked the ooze of mud between my toes.

  I stopped for a moment on the bank and watched the river slip by, its glossy surface shirred by the breeze and stippled with small circles from darting insects. A pair of damselflies were disco dancers, dressed in blue sequins. The water lily buds looked fit to burst their corsets in the heat.

  The bank on the opposite side of the river was in shadow and heavily wooded so I didn’t see him at first. A couple of times as I wandered along the sunny side I thought I saw a flash of white in the woods and I later realised that this must have been the white of his T-shirt.

  I could only look once. First, I saw his dogs snuffling around and then the man emerged between the trees. The dogs were large, not a breed I recognised, with muscular hind limbs and hacksawed tails. The man was powerfully built too, his white T-shirt looked stretched across his chest and he was holding a stick. His hair stuck up from his head, an army sort of style, so blond it was almost yellow. He didn’t look like the sort of person that you normally encountered on a footpath and I was immediately glad that we had a river between us. It was the stick in his hand that spooked me most: it wasn’t long and thin like a walking stick, nor was it the sort of rough stick that you might throw for a dog. His stick was squat and thick at the end like a baseball bat and he was holding it in front of his chest like he meant business.

  I found myself walking a bit faster and calling to the little terrier, though I wasn’t quite sure which way to head. Jumping beans had started in my stomach. I kept walking faster still and wondered if I was crazy to have this reaction to a man out walking his dogs. The spit in my mouth turned to paste as I tried to work out how far I was from the bridge that separated his side of the river from mine. I rounded the bend and the bleached carcass of the lightning oak came into view. The oak, I knew, wasn’t far beyond the bridge; if I could see the bleached oak then the iron bridge that crossed the river was maybe five minutes away at a fast pace. I’d frightened myself enough by then to turn heel and started heading back in the direction I’d come, trying not to run at first. When I did run I felt foolish, almost cursing myself, my disbelieving legs disobeying me all the way.

  They seemed to have taken on a life of their own: it was as though at each step my ankles and knees had become spongy, cartilage rather than bone. I tripped on a rut, my ankle twisted, and it was as I clambered back up on to my knees that I knew for sure that the man had indeed turned around and was keeping up because I could see his dogs reflected in the river.

  I pounded along, not even aware of the pain in my ankle; I saw the dogs running, heard the crack of branches from across the water. Though we had left the lightning oak bridge far behind I knew there was another bridge, a stone one, just ahead. I was going to have to veer off the path and cut across the fields to get back to the cottage quickly; it would only be trespassing a little bit. It seems mad now that my degree of trespass should even have entered my mind. I might have done better to think about the barbed wire fences and hedges I would have to fight my way through. As I started to run up the field I heard a splash and turned to look back at the river. The two dogs were crouched over the bank, barking. The man’s head appeared, breaking the surface like a seal; the sunlight hit the rivulets running off his shoulders as his arms parted the river around him in a muscular vee. He was shouting to me but I couldn’t hear what as my heart hammered in my ears. It just sounded like, ‘Oi oi oi.’

  Fear gripped me. I ripped my thigh on the barbed wire of the first fence. I raced on, barely aware of the blood running down the inside of my leg and havi
ng to rid myself of my flip-flops which were getting tangled between the toes with grass, as if trying to run wasn’t hard enough anyway. I fell over twice, expecting to see the man looming over me as I scrambled to my feet. I could hear his dogs bark and as I hurtled past the hazel copse I almost imagined I could see the shadow of his club, their breath at my heels.

  I didn’t go back to the river all summer long. It was restful to be in the company of the women and the girls at the camp, gathering firewood on the Common, singing songs, becoming gently smoked by the fire. I became skilled at fence rattling and chanting: ‘Take the toys from the boys!’ I wore tie-dye and rainbow braids in my hair. I enjoyed the singing but grew to hate the underwater sounds of the ululating at the fence.

  We ate loads of apples and cheese instead of meals and I pretended not to mind when someone shouted ‘Lesbians!’ out of the car window while my mother and I were walking up the hot tarmac to find a standpipe.

  When we packed up our stuff at the end of the summer I tied my floppy stuffed rabbit to the perimeter fence. The part of the fence where we camped was festooned with other people’s toys and bras and babies’ booties and bits and pieces that were supposed to remind everyone of peace. Suzanne’s children tied their teddy bears to it. My mother handed me a shoelace and I fixed the small silky-eared rabbit to a higher part of the fence where it immediately hung its head like any other tatty thing. It seemed a pity then because I had slept with my nose pressed to its silky ears for every night I could remember.

  I never told my mother about the man across the river because I couldn’t be sure about what I had seen. It only happened a couple of weeks before we left for Greenham Common and my shame had grown by the day. I was first to switch on the local news every night and I scoured the county gazette. After a while I doubted myself more and more and the face of a drowning man started to surface in my dreams and I would wake with the sheets wound around my legs like weeds. When we moved later that year, though I had loved the cottage and my bedroom in the eaves, I was relieved that I would never have to go anywhere near the river again.