Perfect (9 page)

‘I l-l-like your sandwich,’ says Jim.

Eileen frowns. She looks at the sandwich and then she looks back at him.

Jim’s mouth is like sandpaper. Maybe the sandwich was not a good starting point. ‘I like the way you have set out the crisps,’ he says. ‘On the side.’

‘Oh,’ she says.

‘And the – and the – lettuce. I like the way you have cut the tomato like a s-s-star.’

Eileen nods as if she has not considered that before. ‘I’ll make you one, if you like.’

Jim replies that he would like that very much and watches her deliver the sandwich. She says something to the customer that makes him roar with laughter. Jim wonders what it might be. As she strides back to the kitchen, her orange hat jumps about in her hair and she lifts her hand to bat it in the way other people might swat a fly. He feels something inside, like a tiny light switch going on. He doesn’t want to think about the day nobody came to meet him any more.

Despite the fact he was cured again when he was twenty-one, and released again, Jim was back at Besley Hill within six months. In that time he had tried to get it right. He had tried to be like everyone else. He enrolled at night school to catch up on his education. He tried to make conversation with his landlady and the other men who rented bedsits. But he found it hard to concentrate. Since the second set of electric shock treatment, he seemed to forget things. Not just the facts he had learned that day, but the most basic things, like repeating his name, for instance, or the street where he was living. He failed to sign on one day because he couldn’t remember where to get off the bus. He tried to take a job on the rubbish trucks but the other men laughed when he kept arranging the bins in order of size. They called him queer when he said he had no girlfriend. They never hurt him, though, and by the time he lost the job, he felt he had begun to belong. Sometimes he watched the dustbin men from his bedsit window,
carrying the bins on their backs, and he wondered if they were his team or a different one. In working with them, he had begun to understand a little more about what it was to be strong, and part of a group. It was like looking inside another person’s window and seeing life from a different perspective.

There was a downside. For months afterwards he could still smell the rubbish bins in his clothes. He took to visiting the laundrette every day. The woman behind the counter lit one cigarette after the other; she held the smouldering stub of one to the fresh tip of the next. After a while he couldn’t tell if it was the smoke in his clothes or the bins, but whatever it was, he had to keep going back to wash them because they were never fully clean. And eventually she said, ‘You’re funny in the head, you are.’ So he couldn’t go back there either.

It was wearing dirty laundry that upset him the most. Some days he couldn’t even get dressed. From here came thoughts he didn’t want. And when he tried to do other things to get rid of the thoughts, like saying no to them or going for a walk, the tenants began to notice and steer clear of him. Then, opening his door one day, he happened to call hello to the Baby Belling. It wasn’t even meaningful. It was simply to be kind because it occurred to him the miniature oven looked lonely. But he noticed something happened afterwards, or rather that nothing happened, not once all day. He had no bad thoughts. A little while later his landlady got wind of his spells at Besley Hill and the room was no longer available.

After several nights on the streets, Jim handed himself in to the police. He was a danger to other people, he said. And even though he knew he would never willingly hurt anyone, he began to shout and kick things, as if he might. They drove him straight to Besley Hill. They even put the sirens on, although by that point he wasn’t shouting or kicking. He was only sitting very still.

It wasn’t clinical depression as such that took him back the third time.
It wasn’t schizophrenia or multiple personality disorder or psychosis or any of the other names people gave it. It was more like habit. It was easier to be his troubled self, he found, than to be the reformed one. And even though he had begun doing the rituals now, his return to Besley Hill was like putting on old clothes and finding people recognized him. It felt safe.

Someone is making a noise from the café kitchen, a woman. Someone else is trying to calm her, and this is a man. The door flies open and Eileen bursts through it with her flaming red hair wide on her head. There is no hint of her orange hat and she has her coat flung over her shoulder, like a thing she has killed. The door crashes back on itself and produces a yelp. When Mr Meade emerges seconds later he has his hand to his nose.

‘Mrs Hill!’ he shouts between his fingers. ‘Eileen!’ He darts after her as she marches past tables. Customers are beginning to put down their hot beverages.

‘It’s me or the fucking hat,’ says Eileen, over her shoulder.

Mr Meade shakes his head while still cupping it, as if he is afraid vigorous movement may cause his nose to fall off. Shoppers queuing for their Festive Snack Deal (one hot drink with free mince pie; flapjacks / muffins not included) stare with open mouths.

Eileen stops so suddenly that Mr Meade collides with a trolley of Christmas groceries. ‘Look at us,’ she says, addressing not only him but the whole room, the shoppers, the staff with their orange hats, even the plastic tables and chairs. ‘Look at our lives.’

No one moves. No one answers. There is a moment of stillness as if everything has been stopped, or turned off, as if everything and everyone has mislaid what should come next. Only the Christmas tree appears to remember and continues its happy transformation from green to red to blue. Then Eileen’s face creases with disbelief and she makes that wild honking noise that is in fact a laugh. But once again, it is as if she is not
laughing at them, but with them. As if she is looking down over the scene, herself included, and suddenly seeing the outrageous joke.

Eileen turns, revealing two white-grey legs where her skirt has pitched itself into the gusset of her underwear. ‘Oh fuck it,’ she snorts, as she gropes for the handrail and throws out her foot for the first of the customer-only stairs.

Without Eileen, there is a fresh silence. Something unspecific has occurred and no one is prepared to move until they understand the full extent of the damage. Someone murmurs and when nothing happens, nothing splits open or crashes down, someone else laughs. Gradually, softly, voices thread into the density of silence until the café is once more itself again.

‘That woman is fired,’ says Mr Meade, although it could be argued Eileen has already fired herself. ‘Back to work, team.’ Then: ‘Jim? Hat?’

Jim straightens it. It is probably best he will not see Eileen again; she carries such chaos in her wake. And yet her parting words resound in his head, as does her generous laugh. He can’t help wondering what sort of sandwich she would have brought him. Whether she would have served it with crisps and lettuce and a star-shaped tomato. He remembers a time long ago when there were cut sandwiches on a lawn, when there was hot tea. He has to hold his head so that while he shakes, he will not lose his orange hat.

The first flakes of snow begin to fall, silent and twisting, like feathers through the air, but he does not look.

T
HE SUN WAS
up and already the dawn sky was pasted with copper-tipped clouds. Gold light trickled over the moor like honey. Six days, twenty-one hours and forty-five minutes had passed since the accident. At last Byron had a plan.

He made his way purposefully through the garden and towards the meadow. His mother and sister were still sleeping. Equipped with essential tools and a packet of Garibaldis in case the work was difficult, he clicked the picket gate shut. Heavy dew had fallen overnight and fat drops clung to the wild grass like pendants. His slippers, pyjamas and the hem of his towelling dressing gown were soaked within minutes. When he stopped briefly to glance back at the house he could see the dark path his feet had made, and sunlight growing like flames at the bedroom windows. Both his mother and Lucy were asleep. Far away, a farm dog barked across the hills.

James Lowe once said that a dog was not necessarily a dog. It was only
a name, in the same way that hat was just a name, or chest freezer. Maybe, he had said, a dog was really a hat.

‘But how could a dog be a hat?’ Byron had asked. He was getting a picture in his mind of his father’s deerstalker on a lead and it was confusing.

‘I am only saying hat and dog are words that someone has chosen. And if they are only words someone has chosen, it stands to reason they may have got the wrong ones. Also, maybe not all dogs are dogs. Maybe they are different. Just because we have given them all one name, doesn’t mean all dogs are actually dogs.’

‘But they are still not hats,’ said Byron. ‘And they are not chest freezers either.’

‘You have to think bigger than what you know,’ James had said.

Using the magnifying glass from his chemistry set, as well as a torch and his mother’s silver tweezers, Byron began his search. He found a yellow striped stone, a tiny spider with a big blue ball of eggs, wild thyme and two white feathers, but not the important thing he needed. Maybe he was looking in the wrong place. Resting a foot on the lowest rung of the fencing round the pond, he hauled himself over. It was strange to be on the forbidden side of the fence after all this time. It was like being in his father’s study, where the air grew sharp edges. The geese hissed and stuck their necks forward but they didn’t run at him. Losing interest, they swaggered towards the water’s edge.

The remains of the bridge still crossed the pond. It stretched, like a shiny black spine, from the bank to the small island in the middle. He could see too where the fragile structure left the island and then disappeared halfway before reaching the furthest side. Kneeling in the grass, he tried to resume his search with his torch and magnifying glass, but it was no good, he couldn’t concentrate. His head kept walking off and remembering things.

The bridge had been all James’s idea. Byron was really only manual labour. James had thought about it for weeks. He had drawn up plans. At school he had talked about it constantly. On the day of construction, the boys had sat side by side on the bank, the two of them viewing the expanse of water through their splayed fingers in order to get a professional perspective. It was Byron who had lifted stones to the pond and dragged the larger of the branches from the ash trees at the end of the meadow.

‘Very good, very good,’ James had murmured, without actually getting up.

Byron had piled the stones one on top of the other in the shallows, using them as supports for the thicker branches. After several hours an irregular structure had spanned the skin of water. ‘Do you want to test it?’ Byron had asked.

James had consulted his diagram. ‘I think we need to look at the load bearing.’ Byron had insisted it was only a pond. He had stepped out.

He remembered how his heart had swung like the structure beneath his feet. The wood was dark and oily; his toes could gain no purchase. With each step he was waiting to fall and the more he expected failure, the more inevitable it seemed. He remembered too how James had mouthed numbers and insisted it wasn’t because he was worried, it was because he was calculating.

The memory of that day was so clear it was like watching two ghost children beside the water. Then something else began to happen.

The more Byron gazed at the water, the more he found not only the bridge but also the sky’s reflection, as if beneath the surface lay a second, more refracted world that was also pasted with copper clouds and flickering sunshine. If a boy did not go to Winston House he might be forgiven for believing there were two skies that morning, one above his head and another below the water. And supposing, after all, the scientists were wrong? They had clearly made a mess of time. Supposing there were really
two skies? Until the accident, Byron had assumed everything was the thing it appeared to be. Now, staring at the pond, and the sky within its shining circumference, it occurred to him that people knew things only because they had been told they were true. James was right. It didn’t seem a very good basis for believing.

This was so much to think about Byron thought he might eat a Garibaldi. A slight wind rustled the water and sent tiny jewels of light darting all over the grass. It was already quarter past six. He shook the crumbs from his dressing gown and returned to his task. The magnifying glass and the torch made no significant difference; the sun was sailing higher by the minute. They just made him feel more like a boy who found things. There would be no need for either if James was at his side.

‘Goodness, you’re soaked,’ said his mother when the alarm went off and her eyes flicked open. She reached for her pill and her water. ‘You haven’t been down by the pond?’

‘I think it’s going to be another hot day,’ he said. ‘Do I have to go to school?’

Diana pulled him close and wound her arms round him. He couldn’t wait to show her what he had found.

She said: ‘Your education is very important. If you don’t have a proper beginning, you end up like me.’