A Perfect Life (15 page)

So Nick leaned towards this beautiful freckled magnet, his eyes running over her like he wanted his hands to, his elbows on his knees. He was utterly sincere when he said, ‘You are incredible. I want to buy you a drink and pay you a lot of attention.' It didn't always work, but he'd had two vodkas already on the train, some subtle opiates at home before he left, and nothing to eat since God knows when. This girl looked good enough to eat and the adrenalin required to be so up front was a fix like any drug. And what the hell; to be turned down was nothing like as bad as not having any drugs. The look he got back from Angel smouldered for a moment then ignited in a smile that was surely all about sex.

‘OK,' she said. And at that point neither of them was able to see that the chemistry between them was as toxic as the chemicals coursing through Nick's veins.

Had things been different, perhaps their affair would have run its short course. But Angel was pregnant. She would have left him otherwise, at some point over that summer. She was not in love with him, she was still in love with Ranim; she did not pretend otherwise, though she did not say so either. Nick felt that on some level he had known this. But he wanted her. And everything he was doing at that point of his life was bad for him, so what would have made him pick a girlfriend who was good for him? Angel looked so perfect, she looked like the answer. She was unfinished business. In fact, she was unfinishable business, but Nick wanted to try. When Coral was born, they
became a family. Angel tried to find Ranim, but every letter was returned. Nick remained constant. Angel gave up. Nick believed he had won her. Everyone else thought he had rescued her. And at some level he thought it too.

Sometimes I just feel so real. It is a weird feeling and it makes me realise how not real most of my life is, and how I hang around without really living or seeing or hearing except though a filter of my headphones and my mobile phone. But something about today got to me when I woke up. Maybe it was the fact that the sun had warmed the patch on the pillow right next to my head but the rays had not hit me in the face, so when I moved my head I was suddenly in this warm patch, clean-smelling like the airing cupboard. I was already smiling when I became aware I was awake. Then the cornflakes were super crunchy and the milk tasted just right, and I was standing by the fridge eating the third bowlful and I must have been making a noise because Coral came in and said, ‘Are you on drugs, man? – that's just cereal, you know.' And I nodded with my mouth full, thinking, Yeah, she's right, but it's delicious.

I would have definitely eaten the whole packet if Ruby hadn't come in prancing and singing some boy band noise pollution.

‘Hey, Roobs, what about the song I taught you about you?'

She does this hip thing, wiggling as if she is twenty-five and performing in a lap dancing club, and it's like punctuation to show she's finished one song. Then she starts on the Rolling Stones. I brainwashed her with: ‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday', but she breaks off before I can check that she knows the whole verse.

‘I want you to grow bosoms now to trick Mummy and Daddy,' she commands, proffering a pair of tennis balls and tugging at my T-shirt. God, small children are insane, but then, why not? Obediently, I stuff the tennis balls inside my T-shirt. Going into Mum's room did puncture the ultra reality a bit, because I started to imagine I was in a time warp and I was seven again like Ruby. Sometimes I can remember things so immediately it feels like they are happening now. This time it was smelling Mum's perfume which she always wears and she has always worn, so it is as much her as the way she laughs, maybe even more so because the perfume isn't separate at all in the way laughter can come into a room with the person not there yet. But the scent is in every room with Mum always, and usually it's hardly noticeable, it's just there, but sometimes, like this morning, it comes and wraps around me like a hug from her.

I don't know why Dad isn't here. I don't notice him by his own personal absence, or by his smell, thank God, but by the presence of things he should be in. His trainers are at the bottom of the bed on the side that he should be sleeping in right now if he wasn't up and ready for our game of tennis and wearing the trainers. Normally though, he is not ready, and is pretending to be asleep with his pillow over his head while Foss and Ruby spring about the place. There is nothing very unusual about him not being here; he's been away on and off for ages, but with the way I feel today it is weird. When I say to Mum, ‘So where is Dad, then?' she look at me as though I am talking to her through mists and layers of time and in a language that she has to translate to understand. Basically her eyes are darting about me and she is trying to avoid answering me. She doesn't want to say where he is. And I get it. This is the moment that I know she doesn't love him any more, even though I am not aware that I know it yet. And I don't know if she knows it either. What I am aware of at this moment is my insides have swooped, doubled up like I have been hit in the stomach and on through to my spine and ribs. They are crumbling and if I knew what to panic about, I would be panicking.

Ruby still thinks I am playing the boobs-are-tennis-balls game with her again. I mean we had that one yesterday, why would I want to do it again? The trouble with little kids is they never give up and they never forget that you said you would do something, no
matter how throwaway you were feeling when you said it. But I can't. Everything that was real and felt good before I spoke to Mum is flat and heavy now. And Coral isn't here so I can't even talk to her about it.

Nick wakes up with a bad taste in his mouth and it isn't alcohol, that's for sure. The light sneaks through thick brown darkness in the room, and all of his senses battle to make sense of what he can see is not a familiar place. It smells of old cigarettes, so it is definitely not his bedroom at home. There, Angel's scent and the fresh-air breath of clean laundry mingle in the air with sunshine and sleep. The room is always warm, and always soft, and in his mind he can see it. The odd thing is there is nothing of him or his in it. The pale pink walls with gold-feathered wallpaper, the raspberry richness of the velvet bed-spread, the rack of shoes and boots in the fireplace – all of them are Angel's. Somehow Nick has got into the habit of trailing a small suitcase around with his book, his trainers, a toothbrush and a couple of shirts, and this is the only bit of him he can see in his mind's-eye view of the marital bedroom.

Sighing, he looks around the Travel Lodge room. Everything is nicotine-brown, even the telephone
next to the bed flashing an intermittent yellow light. There is a maddening broken buzzing sound; sitting up, Nick rubs his head and allows desolation to seep into him. If any conspicuous way to make things worse were to emerge at this moment, Nick would use it. He experiments with fantasy, daring himself along a familiar tightrope; if the brownness of the room was to yield a bag of brown powder, for example, he could take it. If a gun glinted on the window sill, he could use it. What else? Ah yes, if the mini-bar was stocked with alcohol, he could drink it. Oh yes, hallelujah – there is the key. He unlocks it with ease, and the click of the key in the plastic-fronted fridge door awakens a thousand toxic memories and sets his senses on alert. Inside, there is a row of beer cans and the jewel-bright glint of tiny glass bottles of gin, vodka and whisky. With self-destruction on his mind and not much else, Nick grabs a can of beer and pulls the key from it. He raises it to his lips. He is about to gulp it down, thus annihilating for today at least the good that seven years of being clean has done him, when something in him tugs at his willpower. It is, he recognises, his Higher Power, zapping in to save him in the nick of time.

‘It works if you work it,' he mutters to himself, feeling ironic, post-ironic and also hugely relieved. Today he is not meant to relapse.

‘What the fuck –' Nick holds the can away from himself as if it is a viper, and leaps out of bed, staggering sideways into the bathroom, not taking his eyes off the lager can in his hand. Sweating and
panting he lifts the lavatory seat and pours the brown liquid away from a height, gazing into the loo pan. It would be a good moment to cry, but instead he pees, thinking the release of any body liquid must be good. It is somewhat worrying to be looking into a lavatory pan and see it frothing with pungent brown. Nick gazes on, unable to move away from this depressing position, and gathering in his mind a thousand ways to feel sorry for himself. They all seem to stem from being surrounded by brown. The obvious thing to do to improve things would be to open the curtains, get dressed and get out of the Travel Lodge. But where shall he go? There is something intrinsically foolish about the position Nick finds himself in. Although he has always tried to cultivate an air of mystery and inaccessibility, by never saying where he is going to be, normally he is going somewhere and he is meant to be somewhere. So wherever he is has a purpose, even the negative one of not being where he is meant to be. Dragging his eyes away from the lavatory pan, he returns to the bedroom and lies down to dissect his options.

Maybe he should go home. A bubble floats into his head with his house, the Mill Stone, picture-book perfect with the sunlight falling across the red brick, warming it, and some children tumbling pleasingly and in no way damagingly, across his immaculate lawn. The curtains are all shut in his mind, and the only animation is the somersaulting of the children. Then, like the beginning first act of a play, the curtains are swept back and Angel, her arms stretched the full
span of the window, is hovering like her namesake, a twisted smile playing on her lips in the drawing room. Nick flinches involuntarily on his brown bed. God, how unbearable. No, he cannot go home. It is out of the question. He could go to the office, of course. Another bubble pops up in his mind, this one full of desks and noticeboards in an open-plan room with ten-foot-tall barn windows. In the corner, partitions separate a smaller room – and in his mind's eye, Nick enters to find Angel and Nat Rosstein sitting at the large desk, on either side, facing each other, both of them looking as if they are about to rear up and fight. When Nick enters, they glance round but do not move. Nick sighs and continues. No, he cannot go to the office, it is also out of the question.

In a welter of panic, Nick jumps off the bed and walks around the room, pausing in front of the blank screen of the television. He gazes at it for a while then turns it on. The caring expression of a true-life interviewer appears. The discussion underway is fathers' rights.

Oh God. Oh God. Fathers' rights. Nick has never thought that much about his marriage, or his family, until recently. It all happened to him and Angel, it never felt as though either of them was driving it, it just happened. It was fate. They met. She was fleeing, though she did not realise it at the time. He was looking for something to fill his emptiness. They fell in with one another. Did they fall in love with one another? It is hard to remember, and impossible to know what real feelings he had then as Nick was off
his head or drunk most of the time. Not rampagingly drunk, but the habit that formed in California of a beer or two at the restaurant he worked in while preparing lunches, became a beer or two for breakfast that was much improved by a vodka shot and a line or two of cocaine. Purely for flagging energy, not because he needed it. In fact, as a chef, there was no escaping drugs or alcohol, you needed them just to get your exhausted body through the long days and nights in hell's kitchen. And the heroin he took was the only way to come down and forget. The only way to take time off.

Being with Angel was such a soft ticket after that. Working for her family business was so relaxing. Nick spent many hours lying on the sofa in the office watching cricket on television, drinking and smoking a bit of heroin – purely recreationally as he told himself. He was waiting for someone to notice, he was waiting for someone to tell him what to do. No one did.

The soft option turned out to be handcuffs, albeit made of elastic and profitably produced by Fourply. Nick didn't mind, why would he? They were so comfortable and so seductive. His mother was in Switzerland on a religious retreat, and had no plans to come back. Nick sent her a postcard when he got married, and she sent one back a while later saying she had prayed for him and his bride. Everyone else seemed to think him so lucky it would have been absurd to rail against his new circumstances.

So the scars from his chef's knives healed and vanished from his fingers and Nick took up golf as a
way of communicating with Angel's dad Lionel in his last few years of activity. Aged twenty-eight he could easily have chopped off his arms and legs and not felt a thing, so removed from his heart had he become.

Jem was born and Nick found that he loved him. It was the first sign he had had for some years that he could love. He thought of what Coral's father had lost in leaving Angel. He did not want to lose that too. He stopped taking drugs and believed he had become a functioning human being, though he still drank vodka with his breakfast. Fathers' rights. What rights might they be? Who has any rights over any other human being? The notion is absurd. Running his hands through his hair, Nick picks up his keys and walks out of the door of the Travel Lodge room. He has no idea what he is going to do next. He is utterly alone. Reacting without thinking, he punches Jeannie Gildoff's number into his phone and presses the green button.

There is nowhere for Angel to hide. She feels hunted and fragmented, she really wants a cigarette even though she doesn't smoke and she is unable to sit down or be still for a moment. If she does sit down, she ought to have a good reason, so she has a telephone like a relay baton in her hands at all times. When it rings she looks surprised, and immediately jumps up and begins marching to and fro again.