This Perfect World (9 page)

And everyone else will have a much better outfit. At least
he didn’t say that, though I expect it’ll be true. Everyone else
has a much better mummy who went to John Lewis before
the grey fake-fur ran out, and who loves nothing more than
to sit and sew perfect outfits for her perfect little darling to
wear to school for just one day, after she’s knocked up a
batch of perfect cakes and produced a perfect meal for her
perfect husband. I remember watching the film
The Stepford
Wives
once, years ago, when I was about twelve. In the film
all the women become robotized, all perfect, all the same.
Good grief, I thought, that’ll never happen to me.

Good grief indeed.

To sort out the leg problem Thomas and I agree in the
end that I could sew felt onto his trousers, to make them
match the body. I’ve still got this to do, and the tail. I snap
off the cotton with my teeth. I hate sewing. I loathe it.

‘Yes!’ James shouts from the other end of the room and
I glance up just as he punches the air. ‘Chelsea are through!’

He’s sitting cross-legged in front of the television, checking
the football results. Fluff from the white fake-fur has spread
itself across the floor and little clumps have stuck themselves
to the back of his T-shirt. I should have sewn on the furry
patch last, after I’d done the arms. I’ll be clearing up white
fluff for evermore.

The phone starts ringing. I am re-threading the needle to
start on the legs and James is idly flicking through the teletext.
No one moves to answer the phone.

I look at James as I hold up the needle. My neck is stiff
from leaning over and I flex it from side to side. The phone
rings and rings. Looking at him, I wonder if he even hears it.

‘James,’ I say. ‘James, I’m in the middle of sewing. Could
you get it?’

He makes a noise that is half huff and half grunt and
reluctantly gets to his feet. His socks are covered in white
fluff. Still staring at the TV, still holding the remote control
in one hand, he picks the phone up from the windowsill with
the other and puts it to his ear.

‘Hello,’ he barks into the handset, then comes over and
hands it to me. ‘It’s for you,’ he says.

It’s
her.

Mrs Partridge’s voice rattles down the line and I hold
the phone close to my ear. For some reason I don’t want
James to hear. He’s curious, I know; he looks at me as
he goes out into the kitchen. He’s looking at me still as he
comes back again with a bag of pistachio nuts and a bowl.
He stands in the middle of the room with the bowl at his
feet and half-reads the teletext and half-listens to me as he
splits open nuts with his teeth and spits the shells down
into the bowl.

She’s checking I’m still coming on Tuesday. She’s upset;
her voice is higher, louder than usual, and I press the phone
against my ear to try to muffle it.

‘Of course I’m still coming,’ I say, because that is the
easiest – the only – thing to say right now. But then she tells
me Heddy’s had a bad turn; she needs me to come and see
her, she says. She didn’t like to bother me so soon, and at
the weekend too, but she hasn’t been able to think about
anything else.

‘I see,’ I say into the phone. I look at James and he raises
his eyebrows at me as he drops another nut shell into the
bowl.

‘I’ve been worried sick, all weekend, worried sick,’ she tells
me, and I wish James would go away. ‘I went to see her on
Friday. I always do, you know, every day. Just in the holidays
it’s difficult, you know, with Nathan at home . . . but I
always go when I can, always . . .’

I hear her sniffing, then she’s gone for a second. James is
losing interest now; he’s flicked the TV back onto normal
and is switching through the channels. When Mrs Partridge
comes back on the phone, her voice is shaking, shockingly
so.

‘On Friday the buses were running late,’ she says, ‘I missed
the connection in Fayle. I didn’t get to the hospital until gone
twelve. She must have thought I wasn’t coming. She’d split
open a yoghurt pot and cut herself with the plastic, all over
her chest and her neck. I heard her screaming out when I
got there.
Nathan
, she was calling,
Nathan
. Over and over.
Heartbreaking, it was, heartbreaking.’ She breaks off again
and I hang onto the phone, frozen. ‘They put her to sleep.
She didn’t know I was there, and then I had to get back
again for Nathan, before she woke up. And I couldn’t go
back at the weekend, because I had Nathan to look after. I
phoned them, but they tell me nothing on the phone. She’s
fine, they tell me, but she isn’t. She isn’t fine.’

James has stopped spitting out nut shells now. He switches
the TV to standby, then drops the remote control down
beside the overflowing bowl and goes out into the hall to
get his BlackBerry. For a second I relax a little, but then he’s
back with it, walking around the room as he checks his emails.

‘God, that’s awful,’ I say, and for the moment I mean it.

And then I regret it.

James looks up from his BlackBerry and I avoid his eye
as Mrs Partridge says: Could I come tomorrow? Could I,
instead of Tuesday? Could I come tomorrow, come to St
Anne’s with her, because it’s no good her going on her own,
she can’t make head or tail of what they’re doing to poor
Heddy.

‘No,’ I snap down the phone, and even James looks startled;
poor Mrs Partridge is silenced. ‘No,’ I say again, softer
this time. ‘I can’t – not tomorrow. I’m sorry, but I’m busy
tomorrow, all day.’ And I am. I’ve a full day lined up: I’m
shopping first thing, then Arianne’s got Tumbletots at eleven,
and we’re going back to Tasha’s for lunch after that. Tasha’s
got some wood-floor brochures that she wants to show me.
And Thomas has swimming lessons after school.

I don’t tell Mrs Partridge all this. I don’t see why I should.
I listen to the silence now in my ear, and I try telling myself
that I don’t need to feel guilty, or to make excuses. I do have
a life, and I didn’t ask for the Partridges to come barging
into it.

‘It’ll have to wait till Tuesday,’ I tell her, and I’m too
annoyed to feel any pity for her as she sniffs and sighs and
mumbles her disappointed ‘Yes, dear, thank you then, dear.’

‘Shit,’ I mutter as I switch off the phone and drop it onto
the floor beside me.

‘Well?’ James says, and throws himself down onto the
sofa, still looking at his BlackBerry. He’ll be checking the
football results again now; he always does this, as if they
might differ from the results on the TV.

‘Well, what?’ I pick up my sewing and ram the needle into
Baloo’s tail.

‘Well, who was that?’

‘Family friend,’ I say, sticking that needle in and pulling
it out again; in, out, in, out. Family pain-in-the-neck, more
like.

‘Going to tell me what’s going on, then?’ he murmurs and
I look up at him. He’s not even paying attention, not really.
I can see his eyes flickering as they read that tiny screen, his
face intent, absorbed. I am a byline, a little extra on the
outside, as usual.

I am not in the mood to be entertaining. I am not in the
mood to talk to half a person. The annoyance I feel towards
Mrs Partridge, and myself, transfers itself onto James now.
‘Girl I was at school with is stuck in a mental hospital,
and her mum wants me to help get her out,’ I mutter and
James laughs; it catches in his throat and comes out on a
snort.

‘Never thought of you as the altruistic type,’ he says.

I stare at him. ‘Why not? I helped that cat that got hit by
a motorbike, remember? It was me who called the vet. And
I do loads for the school.’

‘Yes, I know, but that’s animals and children. What I meant
is I can’t see you helping some nutter.’

His words make me flinch. The easy way in which he says
them makes me flinch. They’re throwaway words, that’s all.
I look at him sitting there with the foot of one leg propped
up on the knee of the other, and one arm resting across the
back of the sofa, bent at the elbow, hand thrust into his
brown ruffled hair while the other hand plays away at that
computer propped upon his thigh – his latest toy. I look at
him and I wonder: when did we become so lost under the
weight of our lives?

‘I didn’t say she was a nutter.’ Something in my voice
makes him glance up.

‘You said she was stuck in a mental hospital,’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say, and I have the strangest feeling of something
hollowing out inside me. ‘But things happen, sometimes, to
people.’

James is looking at me now, properly. ‘I didn’t mean to
upset you,’ he says. ‘I’m just surprised you’re getting involved,
that’s all.’

‘I’m not getting involved,’ I say, and turn back to my
sewing, subject closed. I can feel James watching me, as if
he’s going to say something else, but I keep my head down,
concentrating on my work. After a moment he gets up from
the sofa and goes out to the kitchen. In the silence of the
house I hear the click as he opens himself a beer.

I sit there on the living-room floor with felt and thread
and fluff all around me and I am busy, busy, but my head
is full of all the things that Heddy Partridge and her mother
know about me, and James doesn’t.

And I’m thinking about Heddy trying to cut herself up
with the edge of a yoghurt pot. A yoghurt pot! A yoghurt
pot would be plastic and flexible; you’d end up having to
hack at yourself to get anything bigger than a scratch.

You’d never get a good cut with a yoghurt pot. And I
should know.

Later, when I’ve given up on the sewing, I run myself a bath.
I lock the door, which I don’t normally, and wait in the steam
as the bath fills up, then slide myself in.

I wish I could wash out my head. I wish I could wash
Heddy out of my head, and Mrs Partridge and all the horrible
stuff that comes with them. The past is the past – gone. When
my parents moved away to Devon, I thought my ties with
Forbury were finally cut, forever.

What was it Jane and I used to say to each other when
we caught the bus and the train together to get to the tech
in Redbridge, when everyone else just stayed on in the sixth
form or quit school altogether? That’s it: you can take the
girl out of Forbury, but can you take Forbury out of the girl?

Can you indeed?

Heddy didn’t go to college. Heddy left school at sixteen
and got a job in the baker’s down the High Street. I remember
my mum telling me she saw her in there sometimes, serving
behind the counter. And I remember thinking
I bet she ends
up eating all the cakes
. I saw her once, one morning when
Jane and I were on the bus to the station to catch the train.
She was walking along the main road to the High Street,
bundled up in a short, thick coat that didn’t quite cover her
orange uniform. She’d got her apron on too, ready for work,
and flat, black, old lady’s shoes. Comfy shoes, just right for
standing up in all day, serving cakes. She walked like she
was in a hurry, head down, leaning forward slightly. Mustn’t
be late for work, I suppose.

I looked at her trundling along as Jane and I rode by on
the bus. And I just felt so glad that she wouldn’t be there in
my life any more, watching me.

Because that is what she was always doing, watching me.
At ballet, at Brownies, right through school – even secondary
school, where we were in different streams, she’d be there at
break, somewhere in the near distance, big eyes getting a
look at my life.

She came into the toilets once when Jane and I were
talking by the sinks. It was a private conversation. We
were talking about our boyfriends. Actually we were talking
about sex.

‘Have you really done it?’ Jane said, and right then Heddy
walked in, big ears flapping. I sighed, Jane sighed, I folded
my arms and we waited for Heddy to hurry up and go back
out again.

‘Honestly, some people have no consideration, butting in
on a private conversation,’ I said, and we stood there listening
to Heddy trying to pee quietly. It seemed ages before we
heard the scrunch of hard toilet paper and the resistant crank
of the chain.

‘She just wants to hear your answer,’ Jane said.

So I bigged it up. I said, ‘Oh yes, Paul’s amazing. He goes
on for hours. And hours. He can’t get enough of me.’ And
so on. I said it just to shock Heddy. To see her red face when
she came shuffling back out of that cubicle.

And she always seemed to be near the bins at lunchtime
when I threw my sandwiches away. One bite we allowed
ourselves, Jane and me, then into the bin with the rest. You’d
think it was a crime from the expression on Heddy’s face, if
you ever made the mistake of looking at her. But you couldn’t
be as thin as we were and eat lunch – any fool knew that.

She was always watching us. I expect she wished she could
be like us, but what chance did she have?

She watched us at break, when we pushed up our sleeves, to
look at the cuts on our arms.

I close my eyes and her face is there inside my head. I open
them again and she is still there, big eyes seeing too much.

We all used to cut ourselves in my group – Jane, Amanda,
Cathy and me. It’s just what we did; it was a phase, if you
like. We started doing it in the fourth year; just little cuts,
to our arms. We had quite an arsenal of weapons between
us, stored in our pencil cases: razor blades, scalpels, drawing
pins, and I had a big old metal compass with a long, sharp
point.

We’d sit in maths or geography or biology, or whenever
we were bored, and push back the sleeves of our cardies just
a little way and dig away at the skin there, to pass the time.
Small cuts, mostly; it becomes hypnotic, scratch, scratch,
scratching away. You go into a sort of trance and the pain
is a very fine thing, a very controlled thing, when drawn
from you stage by tiny stage, each gentle movement of the
blade or pin, or whatever, pushing just that little bit more
into the soft, pink skin. It’s a challenge, too, managing that
pain – you know, resting that arm on your lap, hidden by
the desk, cutting away and keeping your face totally blank.
You cannot show the pain, ever; secrecy is a big part of it.
We’d test ourselves, push ourselves. You cut, the pain rises,
you keep your face calm, serene – to achieve this you have
to stop breathing for a minute, then as the pain ebbs you
can take in just shallow, small breaths, and then you cut
again.