A Perfect Life Page 3

  ‘Why do you care, Angel?’ Nick glances at her then crouches to pierce holes through the sausages with the barbecue fork, before chucking them in a string into the old black pan Ruby brought out. Angel feels as though she is built from ice with a single living vein of aggravation coursing through her. The only way to prevent herself from freezing over completely is to keep on needling Nick.

  ‘I don’t. But I would have thought you would care. I would have thought you would have liked to play.’ Her voice is rising and tightening, her jaw is tense. She hasn’t noticed that she has folded her arms tight across her chest.

  Foss is between them now, holding up a ball. Nick takes the ball and tosses it from one hand to the other. ‘I’ll delay the trip. I can miss the conference, it’s no big deal, and I’ll just go to the Trade Fair.’

  Glancing uneasily at Angel, Foss says, ‘Daddy always wants to play,’ and the wheedling in his voice is another flail to Angel’s conscience.

  Jem

  It’s my school holidays at last and I have been home for two days. Mum is weird. She’s not normal and she made Ruby cry today. She’s got this new habit of talking mad psycho stuff. So this morning – well, I suppose it was after lunchtime really, but just now, when Ruby wants to make bread and it is really hot and I have just got up and am getting my breakfast, she comes into the kitchen talking on the phone as per usual, and she stands and glares. It’s the beginning of the holidays for all of us. She has given up work because she says it’s too stressful with all of us to look after, but I think she would rather have given us up and kept on going into the office. She should chill out, but she is fired up and anxious. I don’t like it. She isn’t concentrating on what she is saying to whoever it is on the phone, because her eyes are darting about in a really stressy way at me and Ruby and all the flour and cereal and spilt stuff that just comes if you leave a seven year old to do their own thing. It’s Mum’s job to look after Ruby, in fact, it’s Mum’s job to look after all of us, and if she’s on the phone or in her office then she can’t expect us to do everything her way. And just because she’s decided not to go to work any more doesn’t mean we all have to be perfect hologram people.

  ‘Listen, Janet, you’ll have to wait for Nick to get back. Or call him in New York later. The children are all making bread and there’s a kind of In the Night Kitchen insanity in my house and I must focus on that now. Let’s talk later on. Actually, you should call Jake. He’ll have a good take on it, and he’s responsible with me out of the picture and Nick away. Look, I must go, we’re about to be engulfed by dough!’

  God. I so know this one. Mum is so good at making it sound as though whatever we are doing here is wonderful and creative and she is enabling it. Other people are always saying, ‘Angel, you give your children a perfect life.’

  Well, if this is perfect I may as well shoot myself and save Mum and Dad a whole load of money and grief. And by the way, if this is perfect, please never show me flawed. Mum presses the off button on the phone, slams it on the dresser and stomps over to the kitchen sink.

  ‘Can’t any of you even pick up a teaspoon?’ she demands, standing like a wooden martyr at the sink. ‘I do feel, Jem, that you could take responsibility for yourself now and get yourself up and dressed before lunch. How can you have a sense of fulfilment if you’re asleep all day?’

  ‘I don’t want a sense of fulfilment, I just want some sodding breakfast,’ I snarl back at her. Mum raises one eyebrow – a really irritating thing she can do which I have tried to copy.

  ‘It’s lunchtime,’ she says, trying to be withering and not succeeding.

  ‘Mummy, when you do that you get wrinkles on one side of your face,’ says Ruby, pulling Mum towards her with a floury hand, commanding her attention. ‘Mummy, help me make this plait. I need you to do it and put sprinkles on it.’ Ruby is kneeling on a corner of the kitchen table. Actually, she looks as if she is rising out of a big flap of greaseproof paper, a bit like the Venus de Milo in that seashell which we have just been doing in art. The reason that it springs to my mind is that Ruby is wearing a bikini decorated with felt cut-out conch shells and she’s got ice cream on her nose and a streak of green in her hair where Coral sprayed it with a can of coloured dry ice. She looks quite neglected, but also very like my art project. I need a photograph of her. I think there’s a camera in the dog bed – most things seem to end up in the dog bed. Except the dog – she is behind me eating an egg that has rolled off the table and smashed on the floor.

  ‘Mummeeeee. Help me!!!!!’ bellows Ruby, more like Goebbels than the Venus de Milo, but that’s another whole project for History and I am not going there today.

  ‘Just a minute, darling, let me finish talking to Jem, he needs – Oh look, Jem, where did you find my camera? I’m sure you could take a better picture of Ruby if she wiped her face and we got all that mess off the table, and what about some flowers – oh look, there’s that jug of hollyhocks over there –’

  Racing about, Mum starts trying to ruin everything by poncing it up, but I’ve got the picture already so it doesn’t matter.

  ‘Mum, what are we doing today?’ I interrupt her because I don’t want to hear her half-baked rubbish about what she thinks I need, what she thinks I should photograph and how cute she can make it. I am so bored of life with my family I could lie down and go into a trance and never stand up again.

  The phone rings again, and Mum shrieks, ‘God, I can’t stand it!’ and starts scrabbling around on the dresser because she can’t remember where she put the handset down. She’s got no bra on and her boobs are drooping like pancakes and more or less showing at the sides of her strappy dress. The phone is in the dog basket. There is so much stuff in there it’s like an office and there is actually no room for Vespa. That’s my excuse for why she sleeps in my bed. I fish the phone out and hand it to Mum, clicking the on switch. She is so lucky to have me instead of a total crack-head teenage son. I wonder if she realises. A clue that she does is that Mum smiles at me – the fastest smile I have ever seen. It’s gone almost before I register it existed. It’s not much, but it will do for now. It’ll have to.

  ‘Hello? – Yes, this is Angel – oh, Jake. Yes. No, not at all. Of course I can talk, I’ve been thinking about you and wondering how you are getting on.’ Suddenly everything is different about Mum. Her shoulders drop about three inches, she lounges over to the sofa in the corner of the kitchen and she sits down, flopping back, not sitting perched with her hand clamped tight on the phone as she usually does. Now she is swinging her legs. She runs her fingers through her hair and giggles into the phone. You would not think it was the same harridan of one second ago.

  ‘Yes, well, the figures suggest that we can pull it off, but what do you think?’

  ‘Mum, can we go to the beach? I need to dig a hole to do a poo.’ My mini-brother Foss comes in with his bucket and spade, shouting because he always does and Mum says he needs an operation – grommets. I think permanent headphones for all the rest of us would do the job fine. He looks even more neglected than Ruby. He is chewing a piece of gum I remember him having yesterday when he went to bed, he has a snail of snot running from his nose, and he is only wearing a T-shirt. He stands in front of Mum and starts hitting her on the knee with his spade. He is more or less totally charm free. That’s what I like about him. Mum makes a horrible face and shoos him away with one hand. I heard her telling her friend Jenny last summer that she never meant to have him. I can remember every word and she was pretty emphatic. ‘The thing is,’ she said, ‘because Nick and I more or less never have sex, I completely forgot about contraception, so I was astonished when I found I was pregnant, and by the time I realised it was actually true, it was far too late to do anything.’ Mum never talks loudly, but her voice carries when she is sitting in the kitchen with a friend and I am on the computer in the playroom and all the doors between are open. I don’t actually know what acid dropping on stomach tissue feels like for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it
is a similar feeling to hearing your mother talking about having sex, and worst of all with your father. Anyway, I felt sick for a while and then I forgot about it, though I do feel sorry for Foss every now and again. It isn’t great that he wasn’t wanted, but he’s here and everyone loves him in their own way. I wonder if they wanted me, come to think of it? They already had Coral; they might have wanted another girl, or an only child. I’ll ask them sometime.

  ‘Mum, come on, let’s go and dig a loo,’ Foss bellows. I can’t stop laughing because Mum is glaring and waving her arms as if she is being attacked by a wasp, but from her voice on the phone you would think she was in a totally peaceful empty room.

  ‘I’m so glad you’re enjoying the work, and thanks for getting in touch, it’s really thoughtful . . . I do feel a bit spare without my job at the moment, but family life is pretty fulfilling.’

  There is a shriek from Ruby. ‘Mummmmmeeeeeee,’ she yells on a crescendo of frustration, ‘you’ve got to help me, I need to put this in the oven now. Come ON!’

  Mum climbs backwards off the sofa, speaking in staccato snatches into the phone. ‘That is so perceptive of you. Well, Nick is often away and –’ she breaks off and I wish she was on a photo phone so Jake could see her scowl, wipe Foss’s nose with a tea towel and lift him out of her path.

  ‘Yes. You’re right, I try to –’ She lifts Ruby off the table and pushes her towards the sink, miming hand washing. Mum grabs the dough plait. A bit of it flops off in her hand. Ruby turns on her – more like Medusa now than the Venus de Milo, and whacks her with a wooden spoon. Mum grabs the wooden spoon and chucks it in the dog basket before turning her face to the wall, literally, and carrying on her conversation looking into the corner of the room.

  She giggles at something Jake has said and fluffs up her hair again.

  Ruby has not finished with her. ‘Mummy, you’ve ruined it. I am glad you are in the corner. You ruin everything of mine. I was going to sell it at the fête and now it’s too small and I will have to make another one or else it will have to be thirty-five instead of seventy pounds. Or pence. I haven’t even decided which yet.’

  I pat Ruby on the head. ‘Good maths, Roobs.’ I smile at her but she is working up for a big scene, and won’t be distracted.

  ‘It’s half,’ she snarls at me. A familiar tension is building like clouds before a storm in the kitchen. And in fact, weirdly, I glance out of the window and the sky is mental – grey and purple, too, and a couple of birds are frantically trying to fly to a tree for shelter but they don’t seem to be making headway. Anyway, it’s probably a mistake as the tree could get struck by lightning. Ruby starts to howl and on the phone this guy Jake is obviously still yakking on.

  ‘Oh, I would love to do that. What a nice thought,’ Mum burbles.

  I wave at her, Mum scowls at me, and tucks the phone under her chin. Standing on one leg she puts her hands together as if she is ready for prayers. She always does yoga when she’s stressed. Her concentration is ragged, though, thanks to the mayhem in the kitchen, and she wobbles and drops the phone and it falls in Vespa’s water bowl.

  ‘Shit,’ says Mum, bending over to fish it out, but Jake has gone. ‘Oh well,’ she says, and putting her hands on her hips, she tries to get organised in a cheerful Boy Scout way that doesn’t suit her. ‘OK, everyone, what would you like to do now? It’s your holidays and you can choose.’

  ‘Good,’ sobs Ruby. ‘I choose you. I want you to talk to me, me, ME. You have hurt my feelings.’ She yanks at Mum’s skirt, making her wobble and topple on to a chair.

  Mum looks sad and young. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you, Ruby,’ she says quietly. It seems to me there is a good chance she will start crying, but luckily she pulls herself together and winks at me.

  ‘Put the kettle on, gorgeous,’ she says to me. She isn’t making me feel safe or happy to be home. She is not acting like a mum. I feel like she is talking to a parrot, and I am not getting that cosy family feeling there sometimes is in our kitchen. Or used to be. I don’t blink but I stare and stare at her. She must be deranged. Her mood swings are worse than Foss and he’s four. She is forty, for Christ’s sake. Maybe she’s getting the old lady thing where they don’t get the curse any more and their bones go brittle. Apparently it drives them mad – well, that’s what Coral says. Thunder whacks through the sky and a hiss of rain starts instantly like a sprinkler being turned on. Mum is wiping the table and putting cups for tea on it, and trying to chat to the little ones.

  ‘We could play Hide and Seek?’

  ‘Nope,’ says Foss.

  ‘Or Snakes and Ladders?’

  ‘It’s lost,’ snaps Ruby.

  ‘Mum, this is crap,’ I say, and I didn’t mean it to be as forceful as it sounds in the room. Mum’s face crumples; she pulls it together and tries to smile. If she didn’t make everything so difficult I would feel sorry for her right now.

  ‘Oh,’ she says quietly, rocking Ruby in her arms. Foss climbs behind her and his arms are locked around Mum’s neck under her hair. She has a way of looking very primitive when she is surrounded by my little brother and sister. She kind of huddles with them, and she wears a lot of ethnic jewelry and big, buckled belts which intensify the cavewoman thing.

  ‘You get in too many stress situations and you shout a lot. If I didn’t know you, I wonder if I would like you?’ I feel mean because, cavewoman or not, she suddenly looks like I have thrown a bucket of snot over her. She has almost no wrinkles and a small face with a lot of big hair. She is quite pretty for a mum as old as forty, I think; I can only go by what my friends tell me, and they say she’s quite cool.

  ‘That’s what you think,’ I always tell them, even though of course I am secretly pleased. ‘She keeps another personality at home – it’s the one with a haggard old face, bad breath and the nastiest temper outside the Mafia.’ My favourite film is The Godfather. And it’s true – Mum does have a split personality. I try to concentrate on the part of Mum I like, and I relent a bit.

  ‘Oh, I probably would like you,’ I offer, ‘but I doubt I would ever meet you if we weren’t mother and son.’ I get myself out of the room before she or one of the mini-brethren begins to cry. What a stupid conversation to have begun with my mum. I sound like one of Coral’s stoned friends.

  Angel

  Angel’s alarm clock prods her awake, and her sweat is another skin in the hot night, sheet tangled around her legs. Three o’clock in the morning. She must have miss-set the alarm. Turning over, Nick’s back faces her, she turns again on to her front. Her nightdress and the sheet catch her, and she sits up, wide awake now, mind racing out of the room and away. A comforting yeasty smell, warm in the air, brings her back and she remembers why she is awake now. She has to turn on the breadmaker. Ruby needs bread hedgehogs to take to Brownie Camp tomorrow – today, in fact. It is not even term-time any more, but there are still non-stop child events, opportunities to fail in optimum mothering skills, scattered through the holidays. It was the obvious answer last night to bring the breadmaker into her bedroom. It would work if she turned it on in the night, and the hedgehogs would be ready at breakfast time.

  Angel presses the switch and the machine begins to churn. She lies down again on her side, her back and Nick’s curved away from one another, a channel of cold linen between them. He does not stir, but his breath rasps on the verge of snoring. She feels resentful. He can sleep. He can hop on a plane to New York and call it business, but Angel knows it will be fun. She would like to be going and it is shaming after only one week away from work, to acknowledge this. The company could really benefit from some good strong orders in the US and Angel knows Nick will be very good at generating them; while she is not working and not managing to do the hedgehogs on time.

  Angel wriggles to get comfortable in the bed, insomniac fear beating like a muffled drum in her head. What if the sabbatical does not make her life work better? So far it isn’t showing any signs of improving anything. Angel has set a lot of store by i
t, unable to look past it at anything else. A mother needs to take stock of life sometimes, and to do that she must be able to give things up. But what will be next? How much of what is important to her must she lose to find herself?

  The rattling of the breadmaker and Nick’s snoring are joined by the first birdsong of the morning as dawn breathes grey light into the room. Angel is chilly now, and wide awake, her resentment increasing with every noise Nick utters in sleep. At least he is going away, so she can have some peace at bedtime. Angel is glad not to have a witness to this thought.

  She gets up, unplugs the breadmaker, and takes it out and down to the kitchen. The table is already laid for breakfast. Another day. Angel puts the kettle on and sits down at the table. Ruby will be pleased about the hedgehogs. She stands up and opens a cupboard, taking out a tin lunch box and putting it on the floor in front of the door. Now she will remember the hedgehogs when she and Ruby leave in a rush. Nick’s jacket is on the back of a chair. On the table in front of it lies his passport, the ticket tucked into it, and next to it his car keys. Familiar parts of her husband. There used to always be a packet of cigarettes with his most closely guarded items, but Nick gave up smoking a year after going into Alcoholics Anonymous. Then there were worry beads and nicotine chewing gum for a while, but all that has gone now. Remembering how he struggled, and how she appreciated him for doing it because her father never had, Angel shivers, remorse creeping like cold water through her. She wishes she wasn’t glad he was going to be away.

  The kitchen chair digs into her spine. Angel moves with her cup of tea over to the sofa and lies down, kicking aside a large cuddly bear, a pair of headphones and a ball of red wool with knitting needles trailing a scarf small enough to spiral round a worm. A pink glow is creeping round the corner in the yard and filtering through the kitchen window. The timer pings on the breadmaker, and as she decants the dough, Angel thinks how often she has seen the dawn in. Kneading hedgehogs, sewing on name tapes, sitting up with an ill child, breastfeeding a new baby, so many nights with Nick asleep or away. So much time inhabited alone.