A Perfect Life (11 page)

Walking home, Angel crosses the road before Nick to look over into the canal at the water beneath the lacy grace of a summer-green weeping willow on the bank just south of the bridge. Nick is behind her, fiddling with his phone; he pauses beneath a street lamp sending a text, not glancing in Angel's direction.

‘Hey there, dude, what the fuck are you doing?' A teenager, not looking where he is going, walks into Nick, and recoils exclaiming. Angel is walking ahead now, and several of them surround her, passing her, jostling, hitching up their jeans to maximise their loafing gait. Nick catches up; he leans towards her and his breath is on her neck.

‘Do you find this lot intimidating?' he whispers. He has tucked his phone into his inside pocket and he pats it now, reminding Angel of someone middle-aged. With a feeling of something solid crumbling for ever, she realises he is old, and he is scared.

She smiles at him. ‘No, they're just trying to be cool. They're just like Jem, I'm not afraid of them,' she whispers back. Nick is reassured and saunters away from her a little to read a billsticker on the bridge. The boys are still around them; Angel is conscious suddenly that one is talking deliberately loudly.

‘Hey, yeah – there's that white guy we saw the other night. I guess this must be his woman.'

Curiously, Angel glances behind her. A tall youth with a black and yellow baseball cap turned sideways on his cropped hair is looking directly at her. There are no other white people on the street. Angel's heart pounces in her throat: they are talking about her. And Nick.

The boy looks hard at her and goes on talking to his friend.

‘Yeah, that white guy. He's the one we saw kissing that redhead the other night.'

‘Yeah, man, he had his hands all over her.'

‘And this is his woman, lookin' at us right now.' They grin a challenge at Angel. She can hardly breathe. Nick is just within her vision, walking beyond the two boys, his expression closed, his eyes on the ground in front of him. Angel realises he is not listening. Nick crosses the road towards the house, fumbling in his jeans pocket for keys; the boys slow down for a second, pivoting on their rubber-soled trainers to watch as Angel crosses too. One of them wolf whistles. Nick looks back, flashing a proprietorial grin that Angel wants to slice off his face with a blade. The boys carry on walking, still talking, their voices a singsong ballad.

‘I saw that guy right outside that house the other night. He was kissing that redhead so hard.'

Nick unlocks the door.

‘Come on, Angel, let's have a cup of tea in the garden.'

Angel sees Nick's face, tired, exposed and preoccupied in the streetlight.

‘You didn't hear what they were saying, did you?'

‘What, those boys? No, but I imagine it was about drugs.'

‘No, it was about you.'

‘Me?' The whites of Nick's eyes shine green with the reflection of the digital clock on the cooker then vanish as Angel turns on the overhead light in the kitchen.

‘Yes, they said they saw you kissing a redhead in the street the other night.' Angel's voice, strong and pure
inside her, comes out small, dull and level. She is shocked to find that she cares, and cares a lot. It isn't so much that he might be kissing redheads, it is more that he has lied, and that he lied in the restaurant, maybe not in actual words, but Angel knew he wanted to sleep with the waitress, and it feels like betrayal. All the more because she has betrayed Nick in her fantasies. She knows what it means. And everything that seemed dreary yet safe in the grind of their marriage suddenly seems at risk. Angel has a sense of stepping off the edge of her life when she says, ‘I don't want you to lie to me.'

Nick slams his fist on the table.

‘For fuck's sake, Angel, they are a bunch of troublemaking crackheads. Of course they didn't see me kissing a redhead, but it's a very clever way of making trouble for a middle-class white guy.'

‘I don't believe you.'

‘Oh, fantastic! So you believe a load of fucked-up teenagers you have never met, who would rape you as soon as look at you. You believe them and not me. How can you live with me and not trust me to that degree?'

‘I don't know if I can live with you any more.' This is said so softly Angel realises Nick cannot even hear it, but it doesn't matter. She has said it now.

I really quite like it when Mum and Dad are both away. It doesn't happen so much now Mum isn't working, but she's gone to London and I don't know when she'll be back. I wish she had said, as we have to tidy up before she gets here or she stresses out. Maybe she did. I'll ask Coral later. Right now I am just enjoying the laid-back atmosphere of no parents. For example, there is no point in opening the curtains in the TV room like Gosha wants me to. Even though her English is not great, I know that's what she wants because she kind of mimes it at me, then she sits down, looking like a puppet whose puppeteer has just got bored and chucked the strings down – so she is sitting with her hands flopped out beside her and her head kind of wobbling with disgruntlement, looking at me and then at the curtains. I carry on watching Extreme Sports – today it is whitewater rafting and some of them are wearing gorilla suits, I'm not sure why. Coral comes in, and I can't quite believe it but she starts on at me too.

‘Jem, you are such a slob. Get off your fat arse and pick up your shoes and open the curtains. It stinks in here.' Honestly, you'd think she was Mum or something.

‘Piss off, Coral. You can't tell me what to do. You are not in charge.'

‘Well, you don't seem to be doing what Gosha asks you, do you?'

She waves ostentatiously to include the whole room in the things I am not doing. Gosha just stands there, blocking the TV, holding a duster and a bottle of spray cleaner.

‘You are a major pain in the backside, Coral.' It is definitely one of those situations where it is much easier to look as though I am doing what Coral wants.

I take the spray stuff from Gosha and squirt the TV screen. Coral kicks the bottle out of my hand.

‘What the fuck are you doing?' I hiss. She is nuts. Her eyes are all popping and swivelling around and she is biting her lip so hard I reckon she will draw blood. Gosha backs towards the door and slips out, closing it behind her, leaving me with the psycho.

‘You know that is just so annoying, don't you?' Coral pounces on my duster and tears it in half. I watch her and I just can't help it, I start laughing. She is making such an idiot of herself. She hasn't noticed me laughing because she is stamping on the ripped-apart duster. I reach for her wrist. My hand fits around it so easily it is like holding Ruby's wrist, and she suddenly notices I am laughing. There is a moment when I am almost scared. She is like a
snake. She kind of rears back on her spine, and her hair runs like scales down her back and her eyelids go down like hoods, and when she lifts them again her eyes are black and they gleam for a flashing moment with anger so deep I could never get to it. Her face is a jarring collision of angles. I find I am running out of laughter, and then, just as I remember happening in every argument we ever had when we were little, at the moment I think, Actually, this isn't a joke, it's not at all funny, and I am trying to stop myself, Coral starts laughing too.

‘God, you're a bloody bastard, Jem,' she says. ‘Look, I want to clear up this dump so Gosha doesn't grass me up. I'm going to have some people back this evening for a party after the pub. Gosha will be in bed and I don't think she'll hear them, but you never know. At least if I've tidied up I've got more chance of her doing what I ask. You can ask some of your friends, if you like.'

The trouble is, my friends can't drive yet. And none of them lives near enough to bicycle to my house. It makes me feel such a retard that we all have to ask our mums to drive us still, and then they pick us up from someone's house and get in a real psyche if we're drunk. It's a lose-lose situation and it just isn't worth trying to get anyone over.

I tell Coral, ‘No, I'll be all right, thanks,' and then just to please her, I pick up three sweet wrappers, a yoghurt pot and an egg cup full of dog-ends and take them through to the kitchen. She is slamming plates in the dishwasher. It is a miracle they don't break.

‘When are Mum and Dad back?' I don't care what the answer is, I just want to distract Coral. It works. She shuts the dishwasher and leans against it to light a fag. She offers me one and I take it. It is weird to be smoking in the kitchen.

‘Too soon. Well, Mum is. I don't know what Nick's doing. He's never here at the moment.'

‘Yeah. It's crap. It's better when they're both away. Mum notices too much on her own.' I flick ash into the sink and zap the radio into life with the remote control. Coral turns on the tap and puts her cigarette out under it.

‘Mum is a real pain in the neck on her own,' she says.

Foss has left some snail shells on the kitchen table, and some twigs. I remember there is a wren's nest in the greenhouse I want to show him, and I go out to find him. I know he will be in the dank green corner by the water butt, and sure enough I find him there.

‘Sssh, Jem. This is toad school,' he whispers, pointing to where Ruby is crouched with a small stick pointing at three inattentive-looking toads. I must say, Ruby looks as though she might have crawled out from under a stone herself; her legs are pale green in the shade, and when she turns to look at me the bags under her eyes are almost bruises.

‘Hey, sis, you need an early night,' I say. This is definitely my day for getting it wrong with sisters.

She hurls a scornful glance in my direction and hisses, ‘Just be quiet. This is charm school and anyone who is rude becomes a toad and any toad who
misbehaves becomes a Prince, but did you know that the way toads misbehave is by being polite and charming?'

The pressure becomes too much for one toad and it flings itself into a patch of hogweed. Foss dives in to retrieve it, oblivious to the nettles among the foliage he is groping in. Foss never feels a thing. I always think it's because he's the youngest and he has evolved into this part-subterranean being because his life experience is that it just isn't worth making a fuss. I feel like that most of the time myself, actually, but the girls never do.

My job when Mum is away is to feed the sheep. It's a miracle they are still alive, as I only remember about once every couple of days. Actually, it isn't that bad; I usually feed them when I go to the shop and that's almost every day because the only excitement around here is heading down to the village for a bit of commerce. Mum doesn't like the shop selling us fags, but it's tough luck. There are not many good things about being sixteen but buying cigarettes is one of them. The only reason I can afford the fags is that Mum and Dad have gone mad with dishing out cash at the moment. It usually means something is wrong, and if the wrong is proportional to the amount of money, then we are in for a major car crash in our lives. Mum has given me about forty quid in the last week or so and Dad has given me seventy. He actually gave me a fifty-pound note the other night on the way back from the stinking Gildoffs'.

He said, ‘Here, Jem, this is some summer pocket money.' Coral went mental, huffing in the car next to me, but she was glaring at Mum, not Dad, when she said, ‘Well, Mum. How about it? What happened to your promise that I will always get the same treatment as the others?'

My fifty-pound note was too big to fit in my wallet. I rolled it up and tried to imagine what sniffing cocaine through it might feel like, but I could only imagine it to be like sniffing sherbet by mistake which makes you cry, or inhaling cigarette smoke up your nose, which also makes you cry, so I didn't feel very authentic. I tried folding it in a concertina instead. Mum was having a go at Coral, leaning her elbow on the seat, twisted to more or less face us in the back of the car, her face looking pretty evil and not unlike the swivelling child in
The Exorcist
. Anyway, she had her teeth gritted when she said, ‘Don't try and get clever with me, young lady. Emotional blackmail is not on. Do you understand me?'

And she flounced herself round and put on her dark glasses in the front, even though it was late at night and dark outside. And blow me, then Dad got another fifty out and passed it to Coral.

‘I had one for you all along,' he said.

But Coral pushed his hand away and said, ‘I don't need paying off, Nick,' which was so rude I was gobsmacked. And stupid, I mean, if she didn't want it, I would have had it.

Mum and Coral have more rows than I have with anyone, but they also really like one another. Just as well.

* * *

Mum gets back from London far too early in the morning. Around twelve. I hear her because I seem to have slept in the playroom on the sofa, so her voice, shouting from the kitchen, ‘Hi, everyone, I'm back,' is much closer than I want it to be. Luckily Coral is in there, so I don't have to get up, but they don't bother keeping quiet.

‘Hi, Mum, did you have a good time?'

‘Well, some of it. Boring at the bank, good at the hairdresser and I did some shopping. Look, I bought these.'

There is a lot of rustling while Mum gets stuff out of a shopping bag. Coral chirps and gasps, the way girls do over clothes, then she starts laughing.

‘Mum, you've got a lot of stuff.'

Mum laughs too. ‘Some of it is definitely coming your way. I mean, how can I have thought I would look OK in this? It's like a horse's hay net.'

‘No. It's great, it's a halter-neck. Look!'

‘Yes, I had a feeling that would be better on you. I wish you had been with me.'

‘Didn't Nick come?'

Mum laughs again. ‘No, he went to Birmingham yesterday.'

‘So why didn't you go too?'

‘To Birmingham? No thanks. I'm on sabbatical exactly so I don't have to go to Birmingham. Now tell me, what's been happening here? Should I be suspicious that it's so tidy?'