A Perfect Life Page 10

  Angel nods. ‘Oh yes. That sounds lovely. I can’t wait to see it.’

  ‘How’s Nick?’ Jenny’s tone is the same, but Angel feels as if she is about to step off a cliff.

  ‘Oh Jenny,’ she says.

  ‘Oh Angel,’ says Jenny quietly.

  Angel looks at her friend; kindness glows around her almost visibly. Angel blows her nose. ‘Well, you know how it is. There were probably a thousand signs before, but it is not until you choose to recognise them, or are ready to, that they reveal themselves to you.’ Angel’s heartbeat seems to come from her throat. Jenny says nothing.

  ‘I haven’t told anyone this, Jenny,’ she says, ‘but I have begun to realise that even though Nick and I have been married for eighteen years, I don’t know him. I don’t think I ever knew him. And I don’t love him.’

  There. It is out in the real world. The truth Angel had known without wanting to know, and which had been corroding within her, is out. She wants to be sick, but instead she takes one of Jenny’s cigarettes and continues.

  ‘It was the carelessness that was so hurtful.’ Angel lights the cigarette and inhales deeply. ‘I was unpacking Nick’s bag last week – I should have learned by now to let him do it himself, but Jem wanted the bag for his art trip. Anyway –’

  ‘Oh, I think I know what’s coming.’ Jenny’s face, open and unjudgemental, is so loving, Angel begins to cry.

  ‘I don’t know why I looked in the zipped-up inside pocket, but I did and I found a box of condoms – actually, it was an empty box which used to have condoms in it. Sixty. They were called Durex Featherlite Easy Glide and there weren’t any left in the box. And we don’t ever have sex with condoms – in fact, we very rarely have sex at all, but when we do, the contraception is my business and I’ve got a coil.’

  Angel stubs out the cigarette and lights another one. ‘I know there could have been a reasonable explanation, but the thing that I found intolerable was that he didn’t care enough to make sure I didn’t find this. He did it in my car as well.’

  Angel reaches over to the plate in front of Jenny and breaks a corner off the remaining half-croissant, feverishly hovering, finding things to put in her mouth, wanting to fill the gap within her.

  ‘What do you mean, he did it in your car? He had sex with someone?’

  Angel laughs. ‘No, he was using my car for a few days and then he went away. I was clearing out the rubbish – once again, I guess it’s my fault because I am so stupidly tidy and anal. Anyway, I was picking up crap and I found three condoms.’

  ‘Used?’ Jenny’s pale eyes flicker, but no disgust crosses her face. Angel laughs again, wondering how many versions of this conversation are going on all over the world right now.

  ‘No, not used. In their foil packets. I think they must have fallen out of his washbag; he’s always got a few in there along with all the other rubbish. He always has had.’

  ‘But why does he have condoms in his washbag?’

  ‘Do you know, I have never asked him. I have no idea. The thing I want to know is why the hell do I keep clearing up after him? Or anyone. It doesn’t do me any good. I would be better off spending the time reading or learning to knit.’

  Jenny laughs. ‘Do you mean to say that with all that domestic accomplishment you can’t knit? I don’t believe you. You can cook, you can grow stuff in your garden, you can make your home a place everyone wants to be, even your own teenage children like being there, and you’re telling me you never learned knit one purl one. What was your mother thinking of?’

  ‘Appearances,’ replies Angel promptly. And as if a machine is working inside her head she feels a shift and she has a sense of an egg breaking in her head, its contents flowing slowly through her consciousness. ‘Oh God. That’s what I’ve inherited from her, I think. Look at what I’m good at – folding and tidying and giving everything a right place.’

  ‘It’s not a bad thing to be good at.’ Jenny stretches across and puts her hand over Angel’s. Her hand is cool and steady. Suddenly Angel senses that she is missing something, and it is something in life she would really love and respond to.

  ‘What, Jen? What are you thinking?’ Angel’s throat is tight with tears and her voice comes out small.

  ‘Just wondering why you feel you need to try so hard.’

  There is nothing Angel cannot fold or iron. She could give seminars on the perfect ratio of clothing to shoes to books in the perfectly packed suitcase. Her clothes drawers are the same, and her wardrobe. To leave things untidy makes Angel feel mad and out of control. It is impossible, at times of unhappiness, it becomes a compulsion overriding everything, including exhaustion.

  There was a row with Nick just after Foss was born. Angel had left the baby crying, while in a trance she folded sixty-four muslin squares and a stack of cot sheets in the airing cupboard.

  ‘You have no love in your heart,’ Nick had yelled at her, carrying tiny Foss on one arm. ‘Didn’t you hear him?’

  ‘No.’ Angel had a twitch of exhaustion at the corner of her eye, and panic rising in her chest. She looked at the blotched face of her small son and waited to feel something. But nothing came. Nick was right, she was incapable of love. The panic became clear, cold fear.

  ‘Well, how the fuck could you not hear him? The sound of a baby crying is meant to pierce a mother’s heart – it’s a primal instinct.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t hear him, and you did, so what’s the problem? It doesn’t always have to be me, you know. Today you had the primal instinct and I was too goddam tired.’ Angel was only aware of her shouted responses on the lowest level. She was barely ticking over in terms of living, and just now a slumped survival was the best she could hope for. The gloom that engulfed her after Foss was born had never happened with any of the others; its force had taken her by surprise – she did not know how to come to terms with it. She was afraid that coming to terms with it meant coming to terms with not loving the baby. Better to keep everything tidy and hope it would pass.

  ‘Well, what the hell are you doing in the airing cupboard, then? Leave the sodding laundry. There are people here in this life, you know. Your kids need YOU, not a tidy cupboard. And let me tell you something, Angel, no one ever died wishing they’d folded more sheets.’

  Nick’s raging hardly penetrated Angel’s fog, but the thought of a life of uninterrupted sheet folding, and the vision of the baby propped on Nick’s forearm, calm now, looking around like a parrot while Nick gesticulated and swore at her, made her laugh. But by then it was too late for laughter to turn a quarrel into love. Nick passed her the baby and stalked out to the garden where he vented his frustration on the molehills. Angel stopped folding sheets and went and lay on her bed with Foss. She didn’t know what to do, so she did nothing, but she did it with her baby right next to her.

  Ruby, Foss and the silent Gosha, bubblegum a vast pink distortion swelling from the side of her mouth, are suddenly at the café table, standing too close. ‘Mummy, Foss wants to buy more buckets and spades and we’ve got about ten at home and I told him so and he hit me with a balloon sword and the display fell down and I got stuck with my foot in the basketball net and quite a few people laughed.’ Ruby blinks and pouts, steaming with indignation at the injustice of life. Angel rubs her daughter’s bare arm, and the skin is thin beneath her touch; smooth, cool and fragile like porcelain.

  ‘Mummy, I’ve still got seventy-five so can I buy an ice cream? Is it enough to buy Foss one too? He lost the change when I asked him to hold it when my foot was stuck. I think I had fourteen then. It’s so annoying.’ Ruby is revving up.

  Hastily, Angel waves to get the attention of a waiter.

  Jenny smiles. ‘Hello, all of you. How nice, can I kiss any of you?’ Jenny reaches out and swings Foss on to her knee where his solid summer-brown boyishness engulfs her, so only her eyes are visible to Angel, peering through the gold frizz of Foss’s curls.

  ‘Let’s all have some ice cream and not worry about a bit of lost ch
ange,’ says Angel, summoning her brightest head girl voice, a useful feature she only discovered many years after leaving school. Gosha pops her bubblegum and the pink crumpled remains fall on the floor, flaccid and small at Angel’s feet. Jenny and Angel look at one another and their grinning splits into laughter.

  Angel

  Waking up hurts. Struggling back to consciousness Angel moves from a warm deep dream in which she was driving a camper van across a river with Foss and Ruby in the back eating sausages. In the dream Angel’s camper van was purple and had a skull as the knob on the gear stick and it was blessed with surround sound and a stereo system. Her dream mind swelled then overflowed and tears rolled down her dream face as the Led Zeppelin track ‘Babe, I’m gonna leave you’ flooded into the vehicle. Outside, water flooded around the camper van as it floated into midstream like Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

  Angel, followed by her biddable and non-whingeing dream children, opened the door and dived out into the smooth silky green of the river. Coming up for air, she found the camper van had floated to a mooring among some hazy sapling trees. She swam to it and tied it to a hitching post. A family who looked as though they had stepped from another seventies rock album, maybe by Fleetwood Mac, stretched out their hands to pull her in. Foss and Ruby ran out on to the bank, shook themselves dry, and disappeared into a teepee with some tall children whose brown skin and slanted cheekbones and tangled mops of hair reminded Angel of Mowgli in the Disney film of The Jungle Book. A fire crackled in a clearing and the people who had helped her out of the water returned to it now. A man threw a log into its peachy pink heart. The heat wrapped around Angel, and she turned to smile at the adults who gestured to her to sit down among them.

  The music got louder, changed tempo, becoming strident and invasive: ‘It’s getting hot in here, so take off all your clothes.’

  The shreds of the dream seep away and Angel shifts, groaning and burying her face in her pillow, trying to reach back into her subconscious and find more of the intoxicating golden feeling. There is nothing left; it is as if the dream was liquid in a vessel, and it had tipped on its side and every drop had spilled out. ‘If you take your clothes off I will kiss you all over.’

  Ruby is perched on the side of Angel’s bed with headphones on, her eyes closed as she sings along to something on her Walkman. It is unspeakable.

  ‘Oh go away.’ Angel pulls the sheets over her head but it is too late, she is raw and awake, reality throbbing between her eyes. Reality is looking like a bad film this morning. Angel wishes she didn’t have a part in it. Or if she has to have a part, she could be a maid cleaning in the background or someone driving a car past the action. Feeling ludicrous, she flings back the sheets, gets out of bed, and thinks better of it. Not yet. She lies down again. Ruby continues to sing. ‘Yoooouuu can take your clothes off,’ she warbles.

  Last night Angel asked Nick for a divorce. He didn’t even put up the pretence of a fight. He stood up from the kitchen table, and walked around the room, his eyes fixed on the floor as he navigated the chairs and the strewn water pistol and squirting camera left by Foss before he went to bed. Reaching the sink, where Angel stood, both hands behind her gripping the edge of the worktop, he stopped and ran his hands through his hair.

  ‘If that’s what you want,’ he said, looking through her, not at her. Angel shuddered and nodded; her head felt as though it was full of marbles rolling across her brain, pulling her down into something black. Nick picked up a postcard his mother had sent the children that morning.

  ‘It isn’t what I want. I mean, it is what I want. Oh! It’s just that there is no other way now.’ Angel rubbed her palms across her face.

  Nick turned the postcard towards the light and scrutinised the postmark. ‘She’s in Greece now,’ he said, his voice incredulous. ‘I wonder if she’s gone to another retreat?’

  Angel crossed her arms and gazed coldly at her husband. ‘How can you?’ she muttered, jaw clenched, fists forming involuntarily.

  He smiled at her, a big flashing grin that didn’t reach his eyes and he replied, ‘How can I not, when it has such an effect?’

  After that the conversation disintegrated. Anger flared in Angel’s ribcage and flooded up, crashing through the marbles in her head, driving splinters through her nerves so she thought her whole body might burst through her skin. She slammed three plates into the sink with such force that she broke a glass, cutting herself on its jagged rim. Sucking her finger, she searched through the drawers of the dresser for a plaster, dripping scarlet drops of rage across a pile of photographs of Jem playing cricket.

  ‘Shit! This is crazy. How come you don’t have anything to say?’ On the dresser Angel found a wide piece of blue ribbon; it was the nearest approximation to a plaster available and blood was seeping down the back of her hand and slipping along her wrist.

  ‘Why don’t you want to defend yourself or change my mind?’ She caught the end of the ribbon between her teeth and began winding its length around her finger.

  ‘What am I supposed to say? What do you need from me, Angel? For whatever reasons, I make you angry. I have disappointed you, and that’s how it is.’ Nick swatted a fly with a rolled-up newspaper, then sat down on the sofa and began reading Jem’s music magazine. Angel reached the other end of the ribbon and tucked it under itself, pulling with her teeth to make a knot.

  She looked at him sideways. ‘You could bloody well help put something on my finger for a start.’

  Nick’s glance up at her was so swiftly retrieved that Angel wasn’t sure it had happened. He spoke through gritted teeth, holding the magazine close to his face and angling it in exaggerated interest. ‘Why can’t you ever do anything normal? Use a bloody plaster like other people.’

  Angel ignored him. ‘I don’t know what I want you to say, but you are not supposed to say nothing and do nothing. I feel like I’ve got to have both sides of the argument. I feel as though I am the only one who exists here. You aren’t really here. I don’t think you care any more.’

  Nick looked up, an arrested expression holding him for a moment. ‘Isn’t that funny. I don’t feel YOU care any more,’ he said slowly.

  Stalemate. Angel wondered if every marriage reached this point, and what made some turn the corner together and others walk off in separate directions. Angel always thought the fact that she and Nick had made something lovely together, a home and a family, was glue enough for a lifetime. That feeling of solidarity was real, but as individuals each of them needed more and the other one didn’t notice. It was ironic that they were both so busy making life perfect that they didn’t notice their hearts had failed.

  And there was a lot of momentum between them for a while; Angel and Nick had toasted one another and made love on the kitchen table on the fourth anniversary of his sobriety. The memory of laughing with him that night was vivid. Angel had one hand over his mouth so the children didn’t hear and come downstairs, she was lying back among a chaos of toys, a half-read newspaper and some sprinkled flour with the person she knew best in the world holding her, kissing her, fucking her. It didn’t get much better than that, Angel had thought at the time. Someone told her, when she and Nick got married, that if they put one bead in a jar every time they had sex before they got married and took one out every time they had it afterwards, they would never empty the jar. Angel could not believe it at the time, and Nick laughed when she told him. But now she thought that in that imaginary jar lay the secret glue of marriage.

  The throbbing between Angel’s eyes becomes a hammering as Foss joins Ruby on the bed and they begin to bounce and chant together, ‘Take off all your clothes it’s getting hot in here.’ Pinned into the bed by the weight of both of them on the duvet, Angel thrashes to the side trying to get out but their solid mass forces her down.

  ‘Ha! Look at Mum, she’s our captive.’ Ruby elbows Foss, pulling at his pyjamas to steady herself on the bed.

  ‘Where’s Daddy, anyway?’ Ruby blows a bubble with some gum she has be
en hiding on the roof of her mouth.

  Angel groans. Foss squats down and sits on the lump in the bed that is his mother. He is astonishingly heavy. Angel imagines his bones and flesh carved from alabaster, like a Michelangelo sculpture. Foss pats her bottom with his stone-weight hand.

  ‘I don’t know where he is, but he should be in bed too, next to Mummy like proper people.’ Nick is not even in the house. He is in the Travel Lodge on the roundabout by the main road ten miles away. That is where he said he was going when he left last night. Angel wants to kick herself now; it is so obvious that he should have slept in the spare room, but it never crossed either of their minds last night.

  ‘Oh, get OFF you two,’ Angel screams, claustrophobia catching in her throat as she shoves the children away. Ruby falls on top of Foss and both of them scream then begin to cry, more in shock that Angel is angry than because they are hurt.

  ‘I just wish you could treat me with even the smallest degree of respect. Do you know what the word even means? I doubt it, I very much doubt it.’

  Angel storms around her room, yanking open drawers and riffling manically through them. Ruby recovers and begins giggling as her mother attempts to put on a pair of knickers while marching towards the window to pull back the curtains and wobbles for a moment on one leg.

  ‘She can’t be properly angry till she’s dressed,’ Ruby whispers to Foss. ‘Whoever heard of a naked tantrum? Not me.’

  ‘No,’ agrees Foss, ‘but I do know about naked sunbathing because they do it along the beach from where we go. It’s called naturing – Jem showed me but there was only one lady there when we went and she was throwing a stick for her dog.’

  He slides off the bed and heads to the door. Looking back to stare at his mother he adds, ‘She had bigger boobs than Mum and they sagged more – Jem said they looked like raw eggs in tights.’ Angel, still only wearing underwear, glares at the children, then collapses herself, giggling on the bed.