Perfect (2 page)

When Byron pictured the inside of his mother’s head, he imagined a series of tiny inlaid drawers with jewelled handles so delicate his fingers would struggle to get a grip. The other mothers were not like her. They wore crochet tank tops and layered skirts and some of them even had the new wedge shoes. Byron’s father preferred his wife to dress more formally. With her slim skirts and pointy heels, her matching handbag and her notebook, Diana made other women look both oversized and under-prepared. Andrea Lowe, who was James’s mother, towered over her like a dark-haired giant. Diana’s notebook contained articles she had snipped and glued from the pages of
Good Housekeeping
and
Family Circle
. She wrote down birthdays she had to remember, important dates for the school term, as well as recipes, needlecraft instructions, planting ideas, hair styling tips, and words she had not heard before. Her notebook bulged with suggestions for
improvement: ‘
22 new hairdos to make you even prettier this summer
.’ ‘
Tissue paper gifts for every occasion
.’ ‘
Cooking with offal
.’ ‘
i before e except after c
.’

‘Elle est la plus belle mère,’ James sometimes said. And when he did he blushed and fell silent, as if in contemplation of something sacred.

Byron dressed in his grey flannel shorts and summer vest. He had to tug to fasten the buttons on his shirt and this one was almost new. Securing his knee-length socks with homemade garters, he headed downstairs. The wood-panelled walls shone dark as conkers.

‘I’m not talking to anyone but you, darling,’ sang his mother’s voice.

She stood at the opposite end of the hallway at her telephone table, already dressed. Beside her, Lucy waited for her plaits to be tied with ribbon. The air was thick with Vim and Pledge polish and it was a reassuring smell in the way that fresh air was reassuring. As Byron passed, his mother kissed her fingertips and pressed them to his forehead. She was only a fraction taller.

‘It’s just me and the children,’ she said into the mouthpiece. The windows behind her were opaque white. In the kitchen Byron sat at the breakfast bar and unfolded a clean napkin. His mother was talking to his father. He rang at the same time every morning and every morning she told him she was listening. ‘Oh, today I’ll do the usual. The house, the weeding. Tidying after the weekend. It’s supposed to get hot.’

Released from their mother’s hands, Lucy skipped to the kitchen and hoicked herself up on to her stool. She tipped the box of Sugar Stars over her Peter Rabbit bowl. ‘Steady,’ said Byron as she reached for the blue jug. He watched the splashy flow of milk in the rough vicinity of her cereal. ‘You might spill it, Lucy,’ he said, although he was being polite. She already had.

‘I know what I’m doing, Byron. I don’t need help.’ Every word of Lucy’s sounded like a neat little attack on the air. She replaced the jug on the
table. It was vast in her hands. Then she slotted a wall of cereal packets around her bowl. He could see only the flaxen crest of her head.

From the hall came their mother’s voice. ‘Yes, Seymour. She’s all polished.’ Byron assumed they were discussing the new Jaguar.

‘Please could I have the Sugar Stars, Lucy?’

‘You are not supposed to have Sugar Stars. You must have your fruit salad and your healthy Alpen.’

‘I’d like to read the packet. I’d like to look at the picture of Sooty.’

‘I am reading the packets.’

‘You don’t need all of them at once,’ he said gently. ‘And anyway you can’t read, Luce.’

‘Everything’s as it should be,’ sang his mother’s voice from the hallway. She gave a fluttery laugh.

Byron felt a notch of something hot in his stomach. He tried to remove a cereal box, just one, before Lucy could stop him but her hand flew up as he was sliding it away. The milk jug shot sideways, there was a resounding smash, and the new floor was suddenly a wash of white milk and blue pins of china. The children stared, aghast. It was almost time to clean their teeth.

Diana was in the room within moments. ‘No one move!’ she called. She held up her hands as if she were halting traffic. ‘You could get hurt!’ Byron sat so still his neck felt stiff. As she made her way to the cleaning cupboard, balancing on tiptoes, with her arms stretched out and her fingers pointed, the floor swished and snapped beneath her feet.

‘That was your fault, Byron,’ said Lucy.

Diana rushed back with the mop and bucket, and the dustpan and brush. She twisted the mop in soapy water and dragged it through the pool of liquid. With a glance at her watch, she swept the broken pieces into a dry patch and scooped them into the dustpan. The last splinters she scraped up with her fingers and shook out over the bin. ‘All done,’ she said
brightly. It was then that she noticed her left palm. It was cut with crimson, like spilling stripes.

‘Now you’ve got blood,’ said Lucy, who was both appalled and delighted by physical injury.

‘It’s nothing,’ insisted their mother but it was slithering down her wrist and, despite her bib apron, had made several spots on the hem of her skirt. ‘Nobody move!’ she called again, turning on her heels and rushing out.

‘We’ll be late,’ said Lucy.

‘We’re never late,’ said Byron. It was a rule of their father’s. An Englishman should always be punctual.

When Diana reappeared she had changed into a mint-green dress and matching lambswool cardigan. She had wound her hand with a bandage so that it looked like a small paw and applied her strawberry-red lipstick.

‘Why are you still sitting there?’ she cried.

‘You told us not to move,’ said Lucy.

Clip, clip, echoed her heels across the hallway as the children raced after her. Their blazers and school hats hung from hooks above their school shoes. Diana scooped their satchels and PE bags into her arms.

‘Come along,’ she called.

‘But we haven’t cleaned our teeth.’

Their mother failed to answer. Swinging open the front door, she ran into the shroud of mist. Byron and Lucy had to rush outside to find her.

There she stood, a slight silhouette against the garage door. She studied her watch, her left wrist clamped between the thumb and fingers of her right hand, as if time were a small cell and she was examining it through a microscope.

‘It’s going to be all right,’ she said. ‘If we hurry, we can make up time.’

Cranham House was a Georgian building of pale stone that shone bone-white in full summer sun and pink as flesh on a winter morning. There was
no village. There was only the house and the garden and then the moor. The building sat with its back resolutely set against the mass of wind, sky and earth that loomed behind, and made Byron think of a home that wished it had been built elsewhere, in acres of flat English parkland, for instance, or on the gentle banks of a stream. The advantage of the setting, his father said, was that it was private. This was what James called an understatement. You had to drive at least three miles to find a neighbour. Between the gardens and the first slopes of the moor, there was a meadow with a large pond, and then a belt of ash trees. A year ago the water had been fenced in and the children were forbidden to play there.

The gravel drive popped beneath the wheels of the Jaguar. The mist was like a hood over Byron’s eyes. It stole the colour and edges from even the closest things. The top lawn, the herbaceous borders and rose pagodas, the fruit trees, the beech hedging, the vegetable plot, the cutting beds and picket gate, they were all gone. The car turned left and carved its path towards the upper peaks. No one spoke. His mother sat straining forward over the wheel.

Up on the moor, conditions were even worse. It covered over ten miles in each direction, although that morning there was no dividing line between hills and sky. The car headlamps bored shallow holes into the blanket of white. Occasionally a watery group of cattle or a protruding branch took shape and Byron’s heart gave a bounce as his mother swerved to overtake. Once Byron had told James the trees were so scary on the moor they could be ghosts and James had frowned. That was like poetry, James had said, but it was not real, just as a talking detective dog was not real on the television. They passed the iron gates to Besley Hill where the mad people lived. As the wheels of the Jaguar rumbled over the cattle grid, Byron breathed a sigh of relief. Then, approaching the town, they turned a corner and braked hard.

‘Oh no,’ he said, sitting tall. ‘What’s happened now?’

‘I don’t know. A traffic jam.’ It was the last thing they needed.

His mother lifted her fingers to her teeth and ripped off a shred of her nail.

‘Is it because of the mist?’

Again, ‘I don’t know.’ She pulled at the handbrake.

‘I think the sun is up there somewhere,’ he said brightly. ‘It will burn this off soon.’

There were cars blocking the road as far as they could see; all the way into the veil of cloud. To their left the dull silhouette of a burnt-out vehicle marked the entrance to the Digby Road Estate. They never went that way. Byron saw his mother glance over.

‘We’re going to be late,’ wailed Lucy.

Snapping down the handbrake, Diana pushed the car into first gear with a crunch, yanked at the wheel and accelerated towards the left. They were heading straight for Digby Road. She didn’t even mirror, signal, manoeuvre.

At first the children were too stunned to speak. They passed the burnt-out car. The glass at the windows was smashed and the wheels, doors and engine were gone so that it was like a charred skeleton and Byron hummed gently because he didn’t want to think about that.

‘Father says we must never go this way,’ said Lucy. She smothered her face with her hands.

‘It’s a short cut through council housing,’ said their mother. ‘I’ve been this way before.’ She eased her foot down on the accelerator.

There was no time to consider what she had said; that, despite their father’s rule, she had been this way before. Digby Road was worse than Byron had imagined. It wasn’t even tarmacked in places. The mist was glued to the rows of houses so that they reached ahead, dull and indistinct, and then appeared to disintegrate. Pieces of rubbish choked the gutters; rubble, bags, blankets, boxes, it was hard to tell what it was. Occasionally
washing lines appeared, strung with sheets and clothes that held no colour.

‘I’m not looking,’ said Lucy, sliding down her seat to hide.

Byron tried to find something that wouldn’t cause alarm. Something that he might recognize and feel good about in Digby Road. He worried too much; his mother had told him many times. And then suddenly there it was. One beautiful thing: a tree that glowed through the fog. It presented wide arching branches that appeared festooned with bubblegum-pink flowers, although the fruit blossom at Cranham House was long since over. Byron felt a surge of relief as if he had witnessed a small miracle, or an act of kindness, at the moment he least believed in the existence of either. Beneath the tree came a moving silhouette. It was small; the size of a child. It was spinning towards the road and had wheels. It was a girl on a red bicycle.

‘What time is it?’ said Lucy. ‘Are we late?’

Byron glanced at his watch and then he froze. The second hand was moving backwards. His voice sliced at his throat and he realized it was a scream.

‘Mummy, it’s happening. Stop.’ He grabbed her shoulder. He pulled hard.

He couldn’t make sense of what came next. It was so fast. While he tried to poke his watch, or more specifically the adjusted second hand, in front of his mother’s face, he was also aware of the miracle tree and the little girl bicycling into the road. They were all part of the same thing. All of them shooting out of nowhere, out of the dense mist, out of time. The Jaguar swerved and his hands smacked into the mahogany dashboard to brace himself. As the car slammed to a halt there was a sound like a metallic whisper, and then there was silence.

In the beats that followed, that were smaller than seconds, smaller even than flickers, where Byron sought with his eyes for the child at the roadside and did not find her, he knew something terrible had happened and
that life would never be the same. He knew it before he even had the words.

Above the moor shone a dazzling circle of white light. Byron had been right about the sun. It would burn through any moment.

J
IM LIVES IN
a campervan, on the edge of the new housing estate. Every dawn he walks across the moor and every night he walks back. He has a job at the refurbished supermarket café. There is wifi access and a facility to charge mobile phones although Jim has no use for either. When he started six months ago, he worked in the hot beverages section but after serving cappuccinos with a raspberry twirl topping and a flake he was relegated to tables. If he messes this job up, there’s nothing. There isn’t even Besley Hill.

The black sky is combed with trails of cloud like silver hair and the air is so cold it pares his skin. Beneath his feet the ground has frozen hard and his boots crash over the brittle stumps of grass. Already he can make out the neon glow that is Cranham Village, while far behind car headlamps make their way across the moor and they are a necklace of tiny moving lights, red and silver, stringing the dark.