Perfect (5 page)

Outside the sky was as open as a blue dish, the air was thick and
scented with heat. Lupins stood tall like coloured pokers and the roses and peonies were in bloom. Everything in the garden had a place; nothing hurt the eye. The pink beds seeped into white ones and then into blue, the smaller shapes became bigger ones. Already the fruit trees bore small green buds like marbles, where only weeks ago there had been a scrambling of white blossom. Byron smelt the sweetness of the air and it was so substantial it was like walking into the hall and hearing his mother’s gramophone music before he found her. The smells, the flowers, the house – these things were surely bigger than what she had done that morning. Besides, even though his mother had committed a crime, it was not her fault. The accident had happened because of the two extra seconds. He dreaded what his father would say if he knew. It was lucky nothing had happened to the Jaguar.

‘Lamb cutlets for tea,’ said his mother. She served them with frilled white paper crowns and gravy.

He couldn’t eat. He could only carve his meat into small pieces and blend it with his potato. When his mother asked why he wasn’t hungry, he told her he had an ache and she rushed to fetch the thermometer. ‘What about your Sunquick?’ she said. ‘Don’t you want that either?’

He wondered what had happened to the little girl, whether her parents had found her, or neighbours. How badly she was hurt.

‘I will have Byron’s Sunquick,’ said Lucy.

Byron had always liked the way his mother referred to an item by its brand name. It implied a specificity he found reassuring. It was like the small reminders she left for herself on the telephone pad (‘
Polish Lucy’s Clarks’ shoes. Buy Turtle Wax polish
’); a label suggested there was one correct name for each thing and no room for mistakes. Now, as he watched her tidying the kitchen and singing under her breath, the irony of it brought a lump to this throat. He must do everything in his power to keep her safe.

While his mother ran water for the washing-up, Byron went outside to
speak to Lucy. He found her hunkered on the stone slabs of the terrace in front of a bed of jewel-coloured wallflowers. She was arranging four garden snails in order of shell size and also speed. He asked in a casual way how she was and she said she was very well, except that he was kneeling on her snails’ finishing line. Byron shifted to another spot.

‘Are you all right about this morning?’ He cleared his throat. ‘About the thing that happened?’

‘
What
happened?’ said Lucy. She still had a smear of Angel Delight around her mouth.

‘When we went – to you know where.’ Byron winked expansively. Lucy lifted her hands to her face.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘I didn’t like that.’

‘Did you—? Did you see anything?’

Lucy realigned one of her snails with the starting line because it seemed to be racing backwards. ‘I wasn’t looking. I was like this, Byron.’ Smothering her eyes with her hands, she demonstrated how frightened she had been.

The situation required all Byron’s skill. He twisted his fringe, the way James did when he was thinking something through. It might upset their father, he explained slowly, if he found out they had gone down Digby Road. It was important not to say it when he came for his weekend visit. It was important to act as if they had never been there.

‘Supposing I forget?’ Suddenly Lucy’s mouth wobbled and he was afraid she might cry. ‘Supposing I forget we wasn’t there?’ She often got her words confused. It was worse when she was upset or tired.

Overwhelmed, Byron stooped to embrace her. She smelt of sugar and pink and he understood in that moment that they had become different, that she was still a child while he knew something bigger. The realization gave him a bubbling in his stomach that was like Christmas morning, only without the presents. He glanced towards his mother in the kitchen,
drying plates by the window and caught in the crimson glow of aureole light. He was aware he had reached a landmark in his life, a defining moment, and even though he had not been expecting a landmark or a defining moment it was part of becoming a man, just as passing his scholarship exam would be part of that. He must rise to both.

‘Everything will be all right. I promise you.’ He nodded the way his father did when he was stating a fact, as if he was so correct even his own head had to agree. ‘You just need to put this morning out of your mind.’ Byron leaned to plant a kiss on her cheek. This was not manly but it was what his mother would do.

Lucy pulled back, her nose wrinkled. He was afraid she would cry so he reached for his handkerchief. ‘You have stinky breath, Byron,’ she said. She skipped back into the house, her pigtails thumping her shoulder blades, her knees tucked high, and crunching at least two of her snails beneath her shiny school shoes.

That night Byron watched both the six o’clock news and
Nationwide
. There was more fighting in Ireland but no mention of the accident and no mention of the two extra seconds. He felt clammy and sick.

What would James do? It was hard to imagine Andrea Lowe making a mistake. If the situations were reversed, James would be logical. He would draw a diagram to explain things. Despite the fact the children were not allowed, Byron carefully unclicked the door to his father’s study.

Beyond the window, the garden was bathed in warm light, the spires of red-hot poker glowing in the evening sun, but the room was still and cool. The wooden desk and chair were polished like museum furniture. Even the tin of fudge sweets and decanter of whisky were things you must not touch. It was the same with his father. If Byron ever tried to hug him, and sometimes he wished he could, the embrace ran away at the last minute and became a handshake.

Perching on the very edge of his father’s chair, so as to cause the least offence, Byron took a sheet of thick white paper and his father’s pen. He drew a careful map, plotting the progress of the Jaguar along Digby Road with arrows. He marked the washing lines and the flowery tree. Then, with a change in the direction of the arrows, he showed how the car had swung to the left and rammed to a halt against the kerb. He drew a circle where they had left the little girl. She was just to the side of the car, where only he could see.

Byron folded the map into his pocket and replaced the pen, dusting the chair with his shirt so that his father would not know he had trespassed. He was about to leave when an idea for a further experiment occurred to him.

Kneeling on the rug, he lowered his upper body to the floor. He practised lying exactly as the little girl had done beneath her bicycle, on his side, with his knees tucked towards his chin and his arms curled round. If she had been all right the little girl would have got up. She would have made a noise. Lucy made an awful noise if you so much as scratched her by mistake. Supposing the police were searching for his mother even now?

‘What are you doing in here?’

Startled, he turned to the door. Diana hovered at the threshold, as if she didn’t dare tread any further. He had no idea how long she’d been there.

Byron flipped himself over and over, up and down the rug, to suggest he was a perfectly ordinary boy, albeit on the large side, who was playing a game. He went so fast that it burnt the bare flesh of his arms and legs, and made his head spin. His mother laughed and the ice cubes in her drink tinkled like shards of glass. Because she seemed happy he rolypoly’d some more. Then he knelt up and said, ‘I think we should go to school by bus tomorrow.’

His mother was swooping to the left and right for a few moments because he had slightly overdone it with the rolling.

‘The bus?’ she said, landing upright again. ‘Whatever for?’

‘Or maybe a taxi. Like we used to do before you could drive.’

‘But there’s no need. Not since your father taught me.’

‘I just thought the change would be nice.’

‘We have the Jaguar, love.’ She didn’t even flinch. ‘He bought it so that I could take you to school.’

‘Exactly. The car is so new, we shouldn’t use it. Besides, he says women can’t drive.’

At this she openly laughed. ‘Well, that’s clearly not true. Although your father is a very clever man, of course. Much more clever than me. I’ve never read a book from start to finish.’

‘You read magazines. You read cookery books.’

‘Yes but they have pictures. Clever books only have words.’

In the silence that followed she studied her injured hand, twisting it palm up, palm down. There was nothing but the stream of light from the window, swirling with silver dust mites, and the insistent ticking of the mantelpiece clock.

‘We had a little swerve this morning,’ she said quietly. ‘That’s all.’ Then, glancing at her bracelet watch, she gave a gasp. ‘Goodness, it’s time for your bath.’ She snapped into being a mother again, like an umbrella shooting into the right shape, and smiled. ‘If you like, you can have crazy foam. Are you sure you didn’t touch anything of your father’s?’

That was the most she said about the accident.

The week continued and everything went on as before. No one came to arrest his mother. The sun rose, climbed in a wide arc, and set over the other side of the moor. Clouds passed. Sometimes they poked bony fingers across the flanks of the hills and sometimes they grew and darkened like a stain. At night came the moon, a pale copy of the sun, spilling over the hills in shades of silvery blue. His mother left the bedroom windows open for air. The geese cried out from the pond. Foxes yelped through the dark.

Diana continued to do the small things she had always done. She woke to her half-past-six alarm. She swallowed her pill with water and examined her wristwatch in order not to be late. She dressed in her old-fashioned skirts, the way his father liked, and prepared Byron’s healthy breakfasts. By Wednesday the bandage had disappeared from her hand and there was no longer anything to link her to the morning in Digby Road. Even James seemed to forget about the two seconds.

Only Byron kept remembering. Time had been changed. His mother had hit a child. Byron had seen and she had not. Like a splinter in his heel, the truth was always there, and even though he tried to avoid it by being careful, sometimes he forgot to be careful and there it was. He tried to do other things, playing with his soldiers or practising a magic trick to show James, but the images kept bobbing back, small details, as if they belonged to him now. The little girl’s striped school dress, her black plaits like liquorice, her socks at her ankles, the spinning wheels of her red bicycle. You could not do a thing without consequences. It was like Mr Roper giving you lines for being an ignoramus, or Byron throwing a stone over the fence at the pond to watch the rings of water as they opened like flowers. Nothing happened by itself. And even though it was not his mother’s fault, even though no one knew about the accident, there must be repercussions. He listened to the clocks all over the house, ticking and tocking and chiming their passage through time.

One day – if not now, then in the future – someone would have to pay.

J
IM SPRAYS A
table beside the window. Once. Twice. He wipes. Once. Twice. He has his own bottle of anti-bacterial multi-purpose spray and also his own blue cloth.

The early December sky is thick with snow that does not fall. Maybe there will be a white Christmas. It would be something to have snow for his first time in the van. Customers dart across the car park, carrying recyclable bags and small children, their bodies pinched against the cold as if the air is made of pepper. Some of them have Christmas-themed scarves and hats and one little girl is wearing a set of antlers that keeps slipping sideways. Beyond all this, the upper peaks of Cranham Moor jut towards the sky. The greens, yellows, pinks and purples that were brackens, heather, wild orchids and grasses have been burnt by the cold to brown. In the distance he can make out Besley Hill and the construction vehicles that circle it. Rumours are, it will be an estate of fifteen five-star luxury homes. Since the building of Cranham Village, there have been new
developments all over the moor. They emerge from the earth like fragments of exposed bone.

‘Haven’t you got a job to do?’ says Mr Meade, appearing from behind. He is a small, neatly moustached man who keeps his own set of parking cones in case of emergency.

‘I’m s-s—’

But Mr Meade interrupts. Everyone does. They don’t want to see a man stuttering so hard over words they look painful. ‘And by the way, Jim, your hat is skew-whiff.’

Jim’s hat is skew-whiff because it is too small. It is also not technically a hat, at least not a serious one. It is orange, like his staff T-shirt, his staff apron and also his staff socks, and it is made of meshed plastic in the approximate shape of a trilby. The only person who does not wear the hat is Mr Meade because he is the manager. After all, you wouldn’t expect royalty to wave flags or hang up bunting; it is up to everyone else to look patriotic on their behalf.

Jim straightens his hat and Mr Meade goes to serve a female customer. The new cook is late again.

It is not as if the café is busy. Despite the recent refurbishment, there are only two men with coffees and they sit so still they could be frozen solid. The most alive thing here is the fibre-optic Christmas tree, positioned at the top of the stairs to greet shoppers as they arrive from the supermarket below, and blinking a festive passage from green to red to blue. Jim squirts and he wipes. Twice. Once. It is acceptable to do it like this at work. It is like using a magic plaster until he returns to the van and can perform the rituals properly, the full twenty-one times.