A Perfect Life (25 page)

‘It's my business and my choice,' she said, but maybe he didn't hear because he was taking off his shirt over his head then folding his strong arms around her. Too tight. Her breasts hurt, pressed hard against him, but it was exciting, too. She struggled, he held her tighter. His eyes mocked her. He bent and kissed her hard, and bit her lip gently.

‘Doesn't sound like choice, it sounds like apathy to me.' He kissed her breasts again, and he bit her nipple
this time. She gasped, throbbing everywhere, wanting and not wanting pain and pleasure from him. His mouth was on hers, and his hand on her breast massaging softly where he had bitten.

‘I don't like you,' she said, and pushed back out of his arms. He laughed and pulled her back towards him. She was curious and afraid. Her body wanted him; his hand moved down between her legs and she squirmed away, avoiding showing him how turned on she was. The conflict was arousing her more; she ran her hands down his stomach and pushed her fingers down inside his jeans. He took them off, and pulled her skirt up like a fan around her. They lay together on the bed; he moved on top of her, pushing her arms flat on the pillow behind her head. She looked at his face, and all his beauty was just bits of flesh bolted together, and his eyes were flint-cold, oily with desire, and they flickered across her like a snake's tongue. And she realised that she was probably looking at him in just the same way. She wanted him. She didn't like him. She had never fucked someone she didn't like before. It turned her on.

It is funny now, twenty years later, but she remembers how powerful she felt when he came. It was her only one-night stand, and it was great sex with a man she never wanted to hear from again. In fact, this is the first time she has so much as thought of him in years.

She gets up and goes downstairs. In the hall it is difficult to navigate the lower stairs as a bank of beanbags and cushions block the way. A small green goblin
and a mysterious belly dancer with a purple veil are dragging them out through the kitchen to the barn, where music pulses fast and erotic in the gathering dusk.

Excitement catches in Angel's throat. Even though she is under strict instructions to stay at the other end of the house and not talk to anyone, a party is a party, and Coral has pulled out all the stops.

‘Hey, Mum, what do you think?' A cloud of citrus perfume, and the sugared smell of cosmetics mingled with tobacco, envelop Coral and Mel. They are both sparkly-eyed and with their skin gleaming, anticipation in their pouts and their laughter, and even the provocative way they blow a kiss to extinguish the candle guttering by the barn door. They prop themselves in the doorway and light cigarettes, looking out, chattering to one another, their eye make-up flashing kingfisher-blue above smooth cheeks. Anticipation and sex, promise and risk hang in the air, heady and exciting, intoxicating as champagne. Angel folds her arms then unfolds them and enters the barn. Wisps of sleep hang around her, and she feels clumsy and slow. The beams twinkle with fairy lights, the space smells of sea and flowers, and someone has artfully heaped cushions on a velvet bed in one corner.

No words come to mind for Angel, just a sense of relief that she hasn't had to do anything, and a proud welling of recognition that Coral can make things nice herself. She wishes Coral's father could appear – probably, she thinks dryly, on a cloud of
mind-altering drugs, but it would be satisfying to share with him the celebration of their daughter becoming an adult. Angel finds it odd to think of Ranim now with no heightened feeling. He would be middle-aged, late middle-aged, and he has missed out on knowing Coral. The sadness Angel feels in this thought is for Coral, not for him.

Having dreaded this rite-of-passage moment ever since Coral embarked on adolescence, Angel now finds herself accepting it easily. Maybe the morphine of tiredness is colouring her reaction, or maybe recognising this change is making her tired, Angel isn't sure which. She sits on the purple velvet bed and looks up at the sparkling stars Coral has hung from the beams. She is not responsible and it's a good new feeling. This is Coral's evening and Angel does not need to do anything to make it happen or to make it a success.

Waiting outside the headmaster's rooms for another sodding lecture is just so pointless. I don't know why they bother. Mum doesn't care if I smoke, Dad smokes and he used to jack up heroin every day, so what does it matter if I go and smoke a roll-up on the River Fields? It's not illegal. I am sixteen. I'll soon be seventeen. I don't want to be here anyway. It was all right getting back here after the summer. In fact, it was good to be away from everything at home. I didn't have to think about Mum and Dad at all. But now I miss home, even though it's weird there.

School is run by a bunch of losers. I mean, who cares if you walk on the grass or don't do up your shoelaces? And the new kids are so tedious and they've got over that silent and polite bit when they first arrive, and now they are all acting like they are auditioning for
Just William
. Someone told them about speech day and how these guys took a car to bits and took it up the octagon tower of the cathedral and
reassembled it there and now they never stop taking things to bits. It is so random.

‘Ah, Jem, come in, please.' Mr Manson – named after a serious killer, according to Dad – pokes his head out of his door. I hadn't noticed before how tall he is, but his head appears round the door miles above where I was expecting to see it. In the room he waves me to sit on the sofa, where I know from past experience that if you throw yourself into it, you more or less vanish. It is so deep your feet don't touch the floor, which is a disadvantaged position to be in. This time I just sit down perched on the edge.

‘I am sorry to see you again, Jem.'

Jesus. What kind of life is this? I mean, do I need to be called into rooms by people just to be told they don't want to see me?

‘I'm sure you are, sir,' I say, as a silence yawns between us. There is no way I am going to look at him, though his small eyes are fixed on me the whole time. I find a carved bunch of grapes on the fire surround and look at that. Mr Manson's swivel chair is to the right of the fireplace. He moves in it and it creaks. From the corner of my eye I notice that the arm rests are engulfed by his massiveness, and the stand with its little wheels looks way too small. It will tip up soon, I hope.

‘Your parents have written back to me in response to the last letter I sent about your smoking. I dare say you have spoken to them?'

Have I? Why did they write to him? I don't think anyone mentioned that they were writing to him.
Mind you, I hardly ever speak to them anyway any more. Dad's been away for so long that I wonder if he's really in jail, not in America at all, and Mum can't be bothered because she's too busy getting divorced and talking on the phone to her friends. And probably getting together with Jake, though I asked her at Coral's party when I was pissed and she said she was just friends with him and we had nothing to worry about or some crap like that. Anyway, she isn't so busy she hasn't got time to interfere right now. Manson is looking at me just like I imagine his serial-killer relation looked at his victims.

‘I shall read it to you,' he says.

‘Good,' is all I can think of to say. He gives me a filthy glare – more hostile than murderous – and he reads:

Mr Manson, I was surprised and disappointed to receive your letter concerning Jem and his inability to follow the school rules. I feel Jem has huge integrity and that given the right support, he will do well in the rest of his school career. If you decide to ask him to leave, you will be doing him a great disservice.

I can't believe Mum has done this. For a moment I wonder if Manson made it up, but, weirdly, he is frowning too. I would have thought he would be pleased to get Mum backing him up like this. She has betrayed me. I shouldn't be surprised. I mean, look at the other things she's done without telling
me. I feel like all my escape routes have been blocked and I am stuck in childhood with stupid rules for the rest of my life.

My next thought is maybe she is on my side in some coded way, but that, too, has to be banished when Manson folds up the letter and presses his fingers together. It would be too much to say that he looks triumphant, but let's say he certainly does not have the air of someone who has just been warned off by a kid's parents. And that's the other thing. Has Mum told the school that she and Dad are getting divorced? I wonder why I hadn't thought about it before. But if she has, they will all be expecting me to crack up, so I may as well get on with it. God, why does everyone expect so much of me? I just want to get on with my life and my mistakes. I wonder where Dad is?

Driving is good. Ruby up in front next to him, Foss in the back. Straight to Woolworth's to get one of those DVD players that go in the car, and a stack of films featuring slugs and molluscs. That sorts Foss out; Ruby is different. And the way she is different is that she is like Angel. Guiltily, Nick tunes back in to her monologue; he has not been listening since they left Woolworth's. He has been thinking about Angel's back, her lower back – a part of her body she has never seen. A part of her body he always felt had been created to have his hand placed upon it. This morning she bent to pick up Foss and kiss him goodbye and when she lifted him into the car her T-shirt rose halfway up her back and he wanted to touch her there more than he had wanted to for years. Why is that? Why want her now? She is unavailable. What is the fucking point?

‘DADDY! LISTEN. I AM TALKING TO YOU!' Ruby waves her pale blue cap in his face, calling him to attention.

‘Daddy?'

‘Yes, Ruby?'

‘You know Tom, don't you?'

‘Uh.'

She has her large grey eyes fixed unblinkingly on his profile. He has no idea who or what she is talking about. There are no references in that sentence, no clues. Maybe Tom is the man who now puts his hand on the small of Angel's back and pulls her towards him –

‘Anyway, Tom sits next to Michael and he's got dark hair. It's darker than fairy hair usually is – he had the cat's brain, remember?'

Christ. Doesn't sound Angel's type, unless she's gone very Aleister Crowley, but maybe Ruby's talking about a horror film.

‘Cat's brain?'

Ruby nods, distracted. ‘Yes, but they're not real. You know Mrs Peel, she's the one you asked about my piano music?'

Nick spots the clue – this is school she is talking about, not a film. ‘Oh yes,' he says untruthfully.

‘Well.' Ruby crosses her legs, brushing her skirt smooth and the gesture is so familiar to Nick as the way Angel punctuates conversation, that it is hard to believe this is not her beside him in the car. He pulls himself together, making an effort to bring his mind back to Ruby here and now. There is no more Angel in his car. That is finished. Ruby chatters on.

‘Mrs Peel is Tom's mother – did you take me to school the day when he had cat's intestines or was it Mummy?'

‘Cat's intestines?' What sort of school is it that she and Foss go to? As far as Nick can remember it used to be quite normal, so what's with all the foulness?

‘Yes, he had them in the classroom one day. I really like Tom Peel, you know, Daddy. The cat's intestines weren't real.'

‘Oh. Good. What were they for, then?'

‘Oh science, I suppose. Actually, I think the day you took me he had a huge snail. Do you remember? But it wasn't real.'

It wasn't real. What is real? Nick wonders, and what the fuck is he going to do with Ruby and Foss? It is Saturday morning, ten-thirty. They have already spent a couple of hundred quid in Woolworth's, it's raining, and Angel is not expecting them back until Sunday night. They think he knows what he is doing; worse still, they trust him to know what he is doing, and he has no idea. Indicating out into the traffic on the main road, Nick pauses as a lorry swishes by. He pulls out behind it; the wipers clean an arc like a curtain, pulling back over and over, rhythmic and repetitive.

‘Anyway, Tom Peel has got freckles and he had to wear a hair slide and pretend to be a girl in our drama lesson because he was being Achilles when he's on the island of Skyros and he is hidden among the maidens and then he can't resist catching the ball they throw.' Ruby giggles at the thought. Nick glances across at her and can't help laughing too. God, she is cute. He feels he has made a terrible mistake until now. He has not noticed the full extent of Ruby's adorableness. He needs to catch up.

Suddenly he knows what they should do.

‘Let's go to the Larkham lighthouse. Maybe we can stay the night there. I'm sure someone told me it's a bed and breakfast.'

Ruby is dubious. ‘But it's raining. Do they work when it's raining? I think it's a waste of money to have them on when it's raining. And is it expensive to go to bed and breakfast? Tom Peel went in a taxi to his dad's house in London and it cost one hundred and forty-five pounds and his dad paid it himself, well, I think—'

Foss interrupts with elliptical assurance from the back. ‘No, they are meant for rain because storms are when they get wrecked. Ships get wrecked in storms, don't they, Dad?'

‘Mmm.' Nick shoots the car into a garage forecourt. ‘Go and buy some sweets,' he says, giving Ruby a fiver. ‘I'll wait here.'

Ruby is gleeful. ‘Five pounds. Yippee! Shall I give you change, Daddy? Or is it two pounds fifty each? I think Foss is a bit young for that many sweets, you know.'

Ruby jumps out of the car and opens the back door for Foss. He climbs out and puts his hand in hers and they walk into the garage. Nick bangs his fist on the steering wheel and grits his teeth, pinching the bridge of his nose. He shuts his eyes and sadness like a blade pierces him. Just now he cannot remember why this has happened. What is he doing on a rainy Saturday with Foss and Ruby and no Angel? He cannot feel any faith in his ability to function, to be with the
children, to survive the next twenty-four hours. It's just too lonely. He bangs his fist on the steering wheel again and reaches for his phone. He doesn't have anyone to call, but using it is one of his pain-masking reflexes. He turns it on; it beeps a message.