Perfect (29 page)

It is Eileen’s idea that they head for the moor. Sensing his anxiety, she suggests they should get some space. She’s always found it easier to talk in the dark. She drives at a steady forty miles an hour and he sits with his hands tight in his lap in the passenger seat. The seat belt cuts into his neck. He can hardly breathe.

They travel in the opposite direction from town, past the new drive-in food chains and the construction site where there will soon be a retail park. The floodlit billboards promise 1,430 free parking spaces, twenty eateries, major high street brands and three levels of hassle-free shopping. Eileen says there won’t be any moor left soon, but Jim makes no reply. He remembers standing at the barriers of a demolition site once. He watched the
bulldozers, the cranes, the diggers; a whole army to punch down a few bricks and walls. He couldn’t believe how quick they were to fall.

Once they reach the cattle grid, the land takes over and darkness spills either side of the car. House lights pepper the flanks of the hills and ahead of them there is nothing but night. When Eileen parks and asks if he would prefer to sit and talk, he says he’d like to get out. It’s just over a week since he was last on the moor. He has missed it in the way he imagines other people miss family.

‘We can do whatever you want,’ says Eileen.

Apart from the buffeting wind, the lack of sound up here is breath-taking. For a while neither of them speaks. They just push slowly against the wind. It charges at their bodies and whistles through the long grasses with the rage of the sea. There are many stars sprinkled like embers over the sky but he can’t find the moon. On the western ridge of the hills, the horizon is rimmed with orange light. It is street lamps, but you might think it was a fire, somewhere very far away. It is sometimes bewildering; to look at a thing and know it could mean something else, if only you changed your perspective. The truth is inaccurate, he remembers suddenly. And then he shakes his head in order not to think that any more.

‘Cold?’ says Eileen.

‘A bit.’

‘Do you need my arm?’

‘I’m OK.’

‘Foot OK?’

‘Yes, Eileen.’

‘Are you sure you should be doing this?’

He takes short steps in order to be safe. He is so churned up he can barely swallow. He has to do small blowings of air, like the nurses showed him. He has to empty his mind and visualize the numbers 2 and 1. Briefly he wishes for the seeping away that came from the anaesthetist’s needle
before the treatment, though it is years since they stopped doing that at Besley Hill.

It seems Jim is not the only one with odd breathing. Eileen’s too is coarse and fast, as if she is dragging it from her lungs. When at last she asks what the emergency phone call was about, he can only shake his head.

A night bird flies on the wind and it is so fast, so dark, it looks tossed, as if the moor is playing with it, as if the bird is not flying at all.

‘If you don’t want to talk, that’s all right, Jim. I’ll talk. Try stopping me. I could do with some of your silence.’ She laughs and then she says, ‘Why didn’t you answer my calls? I rang the supermarket. I left messages. Didn’t you get them?’

Again he shakes his head. She looks agitated. ‘Did I do this to you?’ She stops. She points at his foot. She does not flinch.

He tries to say accident but he can’t get near the word.

‘Shit,’ she says.

‘Please don’t be upset.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me? You could sue if you want. People sue all over the place. Children sue their own fucking parents. Not that I have much to give unless you would like my car and a buggered TV?’

He is not sure if she is being serious. He is trying to hold on to the things he wants to tell her. The more she says, the more difficult it is to remember.

‘You could at least have reported me to the police. Why didn’t you do any of that stuff?’

She watches him, waiting for the answer, and all the time she watches, he opens and shuts his mouth and makes small relaxing noises that are so wired with tension, they actually hurt.

‘You don’t have to tell me right now,’ says Eileen. ‘We can talk about something else.’

The wind blows so hard the trees swing their branches like skirts. He
tells her their names. Eileen pulls her collar to her ears and sometimes he has to shout. ‘This is an ash. The bark is silver. The buds are black. You can always tell an ash because the tips point upwards. Sometimes the old seedheads hang and they are like threads.’ He pulls down a branch, he shows her the pointing buds, the seedheads. He barely stammers at all.

When he glances at Eileen her smile is wide, but above the corners of her mouth spread two blushes like strawberries. She laughs as if he has handed her a present. ‘Well I never knew that about trees.’ After that, she says nothing. She simply steals glances at him that seem to make her redder and redder. It is only when they are back at the car, she says, ‘There’s nothing wrong with you, Jim. How come they kept you so long at Besley Hill?’

He begins trembling so hard he could almost fall. It is the question he most wants to answer. It carries everything he wants her to know. He sees himself as a young man, shouting at the constable, hitting at walls. He sees himself in clothes that were not his. The view from barred windows. The view of the moor. The sky.

‘I made a mistake.’

‘We all make mistakes.’

He keeps going. ‘There were two of us. Many years ago. There was me and a friend. Something happened. Something terrible. It was my fault. It was all my fault.’ He can manage no more.

Once it is clear he has finished and there is nothing else he can say, she hoists her bosom beneath her arms and gives a long sigh. ‘I’m sorry. About you and your friend. Do you see him now?’

‘No.’

‘Did he visit you at Besley Hill?’

‘No.’

It is so hard to say these things, these fragments of truth, he has to stop. He can’t tell any more what is sky and what is land. He remembers how
he longed for letters, how he waited and waited, certain one would come. Occasionally patients got a Christmas card, maybe something for a birthday; for Jim there was nothing. Noticing his distress, Eileen reaches for his sleeve. She laughs and it is a gentle one, as if she is trying to show him the way to join her. ‘Take it easy. You’ll be back in hospital if we’re not careful. And that’ll be my fault as well.’

It’s no use. His head swims. He doesn’t know if he is thinking about what she has said or Besley Hill or something else, something long ago. He says, ‘It was an accident. I forgive you. We must forgive.’

At least that is what he wants to say. The words glue to his mouth. They are only sounds that do not amount to proper language.

‘OK, Jim. It’s OK, darlin’. Let’s get you back.’

He hopes, he prays, she has understood.

‘I
UNDERSTAND THE
situation, Byron. But we must not panic. We must think in a logical way,’ said James in a breathless voice down the telephone. He had telephoned as soon as he read Byron’s letter. ‘We must list the facts and work out what to do.’

The facts were simple. Jeanie had not walked for five days; not since Lucy’s birthday trip to the beach. According to Beverley, she could not put any weight on her leg. At first Walt had tried to encourage her with sweets; Jeanie had cried. They had taken her to the hospital. Walt had begged the doctors to help. Beverley had shouted at the nursing staff. None of these things made any difference. There was no obvious sign of a wound and yet the child appeared to be lame. If Jeanie tried to stand, she either hit the ground or screamed. Now she refused point blank to move. She had a bandage wound all the way from her ankle to her upper thigh. She was refusing some days even to lift her hands and feed herself.

If Diana’s initial response was one of stupefaction, her second was one
of frantic activity. On Monday morning she had bundled the children into the car. Parking outside the house, she had run into the garden with a bag of magazines and comics she had bought on the way. For the first time, it was Diana who looked the slighter and smaller of the two women. She had bitten her nails and paced while Beverley watched her with her arms folded. His mother suggested a man whose name she had in her notebook but when Beverley heard he was a psychologist she hit the roof. ‘Do we think we’re making this up?’ she yelled. ‘Do you think we’re nutters just because we live on Digby Road? What we need is proper
help
!’

Beverley had said it would be easier for her to move Jeanie around if she had wheels; her hands were a problem. Diana had rushed home and fetched Lucy’s old pushchair. Again the children had watched from the car as their mother showed how to clip the pushchair in place, all the while promising to drive Beverley wherever she needed. Beverley shrugged. People were very helpful when they saw you were dealing with a child’s injury. They helped you get on the bus and let you go first in queues at the shops. Her manner remained guarded.

Diana had spent the entire evening poring over medical books from the library. The following morning Beverley had telephoned with the news that the doctors had given Jeanie a buckled caliper.

Presented with all these facts, James replied in one sentence. ‘The situation is very serious.’

‘I know that,’ whispered Byron. He could hear his mother pacing upstairs, she couldn’t seem to keep still, and he had not asked her permission to use the telephone.

James gave an anguished sigh. ‘I just wish there was a way I could examine the new evidence for myself.’

For the rest of the week Jeanie sat on a blanket beneath the shade of the fruit trees at Cranham House. She had Lucy’s colouring books and her
dolls and Byron could hardly look. Every time he needed to pass he took a longer route. Lucy had tied a handkerchief around her knee. She wanted her pushchair back, she said. She needed it. She even cried.

‘The thing is this, Diana,’ said Beverley from the terrace. ‘You ran into my daughter and then you drove off. You didn’t own up to what you had done for a whole month. And now my daughter is lame, you see. This is what we are dealing with.’ It was the first time Beverley had threatened Diana, and even so, it wasn’t said as such. She spoke softly, almost with embarrassment, fiddling with the buttons on her blouse, so that if anything it sounded like an apology. ‘We may have to get the police involved. Lawyers. You know.’

‘Lawyers?’ His mother’s voice was high-pitched.

‘I don’t mean this in a horrible way. You’re my best friend. I just mean I have to think. I have to be practical.’

‘Of course you do,’ his mother said bravely.

‘You’re my best friend but Jeanie is my daughter. You would do the same. You’re a mother. You would put your kids before me.’

‘Do we really need to involve the police? And lawyers?’

‘I’m thinking of Seymour. When you tell him, he’ll probably want to do things in the proper way.’

His mother hesitated, suggesting she didn’t know whether or not to voice the thoughts in her head. ‘I really don’t think we need to tell Seymour,’ she said.

In one last slavish effort to avoid the truth, Diana seemed briefly to become more perfect. She appeared slimmer, neater, faster. She polished the kitchen floor every time the children crossed it, if only for a glass of Sunquick. But to be so perfect requires constant vigilance and the effort was beginning to take its toll. Frequently she listened as if she were not hearing; or as if what she was hearing was something different from everybody else. She started making lists. They appeared everywhere, not
only in her notebook. Torn pages appeared on the kitchen worktops. In the bathroom. Beneath her bedside lamp. And not run-of-the-mill lists, containing food to be bought or phone calls to be made, but fundamental ones. Among reminders like ‘
White washing
’ and ‘
New blue button for Lucy’s cardigan
’ there would also be ‘
Make lunch
’ and ‘
Clean teeth
’.

No matter what, every day when she was getting it right, when she was making the children their healthy breakfasts and washing their clothes, it seemed there was also the moment in the car when she had got it wrong. It was as if right from the beginning she had hit a child, and not stopped the car. And whatever she did to make amends, it would never be enough because Beverley had now started her own motion. The two women were spinning in separate places.

‘I don’t understand,’ his mother said one time. She stared at the floor as if she were searching for physical clues to help her. ‘She had a cut on her knee. They said the first time we went to Digby Road that it was small. Nothing, they said. How can she not walk? How can that have happened?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Byron. ‘Maybe it is in her head.’

‘But it isn’t in her head!’ Diana was almost shouting. Her eyes were more light than colour. ‘She can’t walk. The doctors do test after test and no one can help her. I wish it was in her head. But she is lame, Byron. I don’t understand what to do next!’

Sometimes he brought in little gifts from the meadow, a feather, a stone, something that might once have made his mother smile. He left them in places where she would come across them as a surprise. And sometimes the little gifts, when he checked, had vanished; sometimes he found them afterwards stowed, say, in her coat pocket. He felt he was bringing her luck without either of them having to say it.