This Perfect World (6 page)

‘Show us your boobs,’ they’d chant, and she started standing
with her shoulders sloping forwards, trying to hide them.

We had our own swimming pool at junior school, with
changing rooms right by it: one block divided into two by
a partition wall, girls on the left, boys on the right. The
silly person who’d designed the changing rooms had put
full-sized windows in, all along the front, so you could see
straight in. So naturally the boys used to sneak out from
their side of the building and dash across to ours to get a
look at us when we were changing. We’d catch sight of
their little faces peeping over the window frame and hysteria
would break out; a mass of squealing and giggling and
hiding behind towels.

Heddy didn’t laugh, though. Heddy didn’t squeal. Heddy
was the only one of us with anything to hide, but she just
carried on getting changed in the corner, her back to the
window, struggling under her towel while the boys gawped.
Her embarrassment was genuine, and we got a kick out of
that, too.

We got a kick out of watching the boys looking at her in
her big pants, and seeing her go red.

One day, somebody hid her clothes. Her skirt and her shirt
and her big smelly knickers. We watched her hunting for
them, groping about on the bench among everyone else’s stuff
while the other girls pushed her away.

‘What you doing, Heddy Partridge?’

‘Get off my things, Heddy Partridge.’

‘You perv, Heddy Partridge, get off.’

She moved around the room, her face red and tearful
and stupid. She was shaking, with the cold or with fear, and
clutching that tatty towel around her body with one hand
while her stringy wet hair dripped down her shoulders.
Somebody started grabbing at her towel. Somebody else
produced her clothes and started throwing them around –
her shirt and her skirt – while Heddy lunged about trying
to catch them, at the same time trying and failing miserably
to keep her nakedness covered. And we shrieked with
laughter. Shrieked and shrieked until the boys came creeping
out from next door to see what was going on.

Nobody wanted to touch her knickers, though. They were
thrown and landed on the floor with a flop, and everyone
screamed and jumped away. And then they were kicked, and
kicked again, back and forth across the wet floor, amid more
screams, until the teacher eventually came and sent the boys
packing, and then we all shut up, good as gold.

‘For heaven’s sake, what is going on?’ Mrs Rogers demanded.
And she looked at Heddy, who was standing there,
quivering behind her towel. ‘Heddy Partridge, why have you
not even started getting dressed yet? Do you think you’ve
got all day?’ But she didn’t wait for an answer. She marched
off next door to sort the boys out.

And when she’d gone, someone quickly opened the door
again and kicked out Heddy’s soggy pants. They landed on
the grass on the other side of the path, and that’s where they
stayed, for days and days, for everyone to see.

On Friday Arianne and I accompany Thomas into school,
each of us carrying a tray of cakes that I iced but didn’t
make for the cake sale, each tray wrapped in a plastic bag
because the unusually hot weather’s broken now and it’s
turned colder and greyer and there’s drizzle spitting in the
wind, threatening real rain later, just when we don’t need it.
We like our cake sales outside, in the sunshine. We like to
see the children rushing out at three-fifteen, grabbing their
mummies and their mummies’ money and crowding round
the cake stall, eager eyes and eager hands, loading up. It feels
timeless, like at a country fair, like we are doing what women
are meant to be doing; dealing with children, with cakes,
with pennies.

In the sunshine, it seems idyllic. In the sunshine, our lives
seem idyllic and we like that, we like that very much.

At three-fifteen I am back again with Arianne, doing my
bit for the class. The wind is getting up and throwing the
rain into our faces in fitful bursts and smudging the icing on
the cakes. There are four of us doing the selling. Juliet has
an umbrella that she’s tilting forward into the wind, trying
to shelter the cakes – and us as much as she can – without
poking the little ones in the eye with the spokes. Arianne is
up close behind me, hanging around my legs and whingeing,
‘Can we go? Can we go?’, but we’ve another ten minutes of
this at least. The children are still coming out, their mothers
battling with umbrellas and lunch boxes and purses.

I stick more cakes out. Most of them are like mine: shop-bought
fairy cakes with a bit of home-dyed icing squirted
over them, and maybe a sweet stuck on top to make it look
as if you’d made them yourself. You don’t want your kids
eating these. But you don’t want your kids eating some of
the real home-made ones either, when you don’t know whose
home they were made in. Thomas bought one once that had
a long, long hair cooked inside it; it got caught between his
two front teeth when he took a bite and I had to pull it free.
I shudder to think of it. I shudder as the children arrive,
swarming, fingers that have been busy poking at noses and
bottoms now poking at the cakes, picking them up and putting
them back again, looking for the ones with the most icing
on top. I have the ones I’ve already picked out for my children
put by in a bag behind the table; helper’s perks. When
Thomas comes bounding over, I hand him the bag and take
a note from my purse and drop it into the kitty tin. Instantly
Arianne lets go of my leg and turns her complaining to him
now; it’s all
Let me choose first
and
I wanted that one!

Friday night children are the worst, always the worst. And
tonight is James’s football night, so he’ll be in earlier than
usual and he’ll stir the children up just as I’ve got them
wound down for bed. He’ll stir them up, then he’ll go out
again, leaving me to deal with the fallout.

‘James playing football tonight?’ Juliet asks me after the
rush has gone, as if reading my mind. She smiles sweetly at
me from under that umbrella – it’s a
boys will be boys
smile.
We shove what’s left of the cakes into one tin, and Juliet
pops one into her mouth and sticks a couple more into a
bag. ‘I’ll take these for Andy,’ she says, referring to her
husband as though he was a seven-year-old. ‘He never has
time to eat much before football. You know what it’s like.
He dashes in, he dashes out. I have a sandwich ready for
when he gets in from work, but I practically have to hold
him down to make him eat it before he goes rushing off to
his football.’

My husband plays football with my friends’ husbands, every
third Friday. And he catches the train with them every morning,
and back again every evening. Oh, not the same ones, not
every time. It does vary a bit. Some may go in ten minutes
earlier some days, come home ten minutes later.

James will come home and say,
I saw so-and-so on the
train today, and so-and-so
. And he’ll tell me some little piece
of gossip that he’s heard: somebody’s house sale’s fallen
through; somebody else is getting their loft converted so that
the nanny can move in. Invariably I know this already. I talk
to the women. He talks to the men, later.

I picture them all standing there on the platform at Ashton
station. I picture them like cardboard cut-outs, like those
wooden figures you used to get at fairs, years ago, the ones
with no faces that you had to stand behind and stick your
own face in the gap, either to be oh-so-amusingly photographed
or to be pelted with wet sponges. I picture them
like this, those husbands. I imagine a certain number of
basic cut-outs in place permanently, with only the faces
coming, going, changing day to day. The conversation doesn’t
change; the conversation flows from one day into the next
with barely a break in continuity. Each person comes, pops
their head over the wooden collar and says their little bit. I
imagine it flowing like a well-rehearsed play, an ongoing act,
choreographed to perfection.

Sometimes, when I am feeling sour, I wonder what would
happen if you stopped every one of these men five minutes
after they left Ashton station in the evening, rewound them
and sent them all back to the wrong home. I picture them
scurrying along the streets, reprogrammed.

And sometimes, when I am feeling really, really sour, I
think that they probably wouldn’t even notice, and nor would
their wives.

I pick clothes up off the floor where they have been dropped
in random lines – socks, pants, shorts – and stuff them into
the washing basket. At least Arianne has put her things
in the basket, but no amount of nagging will get Thomas to
do the same.

‘Put your clothes in the wash,’ I say every evening, and
every evening I end up picking them off the floor. Sometimes
I shout at him, sometimes I can’t be bothered. Thomas thinks
it’s a game and he’s right, it is. It’s that little game called
Let’s See What We Can Get the Woman to Do for Us. He’s
practising for when he’s older; he’ll need to be good at that
game when he has a wife of his own.

We like to joke that we are the ones with the brains, we
women, and you only have to look at school-performance
results to see that. Yet when I pick other people’s dirty
clothes up off the floor, I wonder about it. I wonder about
it when I scrape the scraps off other people’s plates into
the bin, and when I wipe up the wee stains from around
the loo. I wonder about it a lot. I wonder what happens to
our brains when we get married, when we become mothers.
I mean, look at me: would you believe that I organized
events for a PR company in my previous life? ‘We manage
our families now,’ Liz once said to me – she who used to
manage an entire department for a major bank. But I don’t
feel like any kind of a manager right now. I feel a whole lot
more like a fool.

I listen to my family laughing as I clear up their mess.
They’re tucked up in Arianne’s bed, all three of them, with
Daddy the Clown in the middle telling a quick funny story.
Quick, because he’ll be going back out in five minutes. He’s
got one eye on his watch already; can’t be late for football.
I know this and so do the children – there’s a hysterical edge
to their laughter now. I hear them getting wilder as I unplug
the bath, hang up the towels. They’re competing for his attention,
getting louder, out of control, and I’m sure that James
is loving it, this little burst of worship. But the children aren’t
loving it, not really. James thinks that they are, but he can’t
hear the tears creeping into their laughter. James can’t hear
how desperate they are to hang on to him, to entertain him,
to make him want to stay with them a little longer.

But then James doesn’t hear Thomas’s plaintive little voice
every night, calling down the stairs, ‘When’s Daddy coming
home?’

And James doesn’t have to listen to Thomas singing to
himself, counting to himself, pop-popping his finger against
the inside of his cheek to try to keep himself awake, hoping
with all his little heart that he might see his daddy before
he falls asleep.

I don’t know which is worse: normal nights when James
comes in too late to see the children, but at least the children get their sleep, at least they’re tucked up and calm and
there have been no tears; or this, this heart-breaking performance
every third Friday when he comes home early, winds
them up full of excitement and then leaves them again.

Daddy the Clown is pulling away now; it’s time to go. I
hear the tone of his voice change instantly, so precise, so
businesslike now. Playtime over. I hear Arianne’s voice rising
on a wail, I hear Thomas shouting, ‘Dad, Dad, one more
time . . .’

But Daddy grabs his kitbag and is gone out the door,
kissing me quickly on the cheek on his way past, smiling,
oblivious to the chaos he leaves behind.

As soon as James closes the front door behind him it starts.
Their little hearts are overloaded with disappointment and
they turn on each other now. Arianne kicks Thomas to get
him out of her bed. Thomas pinches Arianne. Arianne starts
screaming, yelling, ‘Mummy! Mummy!’ Thomas calls Arianne
a crybaby, Arianne calls Thomas Fatty Belly, Thomas calls
Arianne Poopy Pants, and on and on it goes.

I walk into Arianne’s room, bracing myself.

She is sitting on her bed, face red and squashed up with
misery. ‘Mummy!’ she howls even louder now she sees me.
‘Thomas called me Poopy Pants!’

‘Poopy Pants! Poopy Pants!’ Thomas taunts, jumping
around the room, sticking out his bottom and blowing raspberries
over his shoulder.

‘Fatty Belly!’ Arianne rises up like a cat, spitting out the
words, and dribble spurts onto her chin.

‘Ha-ha!’ Thomas jeers, pointing. ‘Dribble Chops! Dribble
Chops!’

*

Some books tell you that the way to deal with this is to reason
with them, to let them show their anger and to help them
understand it, even though you’re not allowed to feel any yourself.
Some books say separate them, others say don’t intervene.

I find the only way I can deal with it is to deaden myself
inside.

Stop it, I say to Thomas; stop it, I say to Arianne. I put
them in their separate beds in their separate rooms and close
the doors, and I wish we didn’t have to go through this every
third Friday.

Once, my mother phoned, right in the middle of it all.
And it was particularly bad that night; it must have been,
for me to say anything. Both kids screaming away and me
just about ready to join in.

‘Whatever’s going on?’ my mum asked before I’d even said
hello.

‘It’s James’s football night,’ I said, expecting her – stupidly
– to understand. Expecting a little bit of sympathy maybe, a
little bit of
Oh dear, I’m sure they’ll settle soon.

What I got was this disbelieving pause. And then she
laughed, that short, shrill, committee-member laugh. ‘Surely
you can control your own children, Laura,’ she said.