A Perfect Life (5 page)

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.

The twelve hedgehogs are ready now, each with a pair of raisin eyes and quiffed spines, achieved by the use of a wide-toothed comb – not entirely clean, but Angel hopes the heat of the oven will kill anything living that might have lurked on the comb. She slides the tray into the oven and resigns herself to being up for another hour. It is five now, so it isn't worth going back to bed. She turns on the radio and out swim fluid notes, liquid sound, flowing into the kitchen, soothing and invigorating. Angel does not know the piece, but its effect, of removing her from her circular guilt and inspiring civilised thought and emotions from a different, deeper part of her, is lovely. The moment of surrender to the inevitable, in this instance a night of wakefulness, is a moment of joy. Angel decides to perform a small act of love for Nick. She gets out the ironing board.

I am getting used to the boredom of the summer holidays now. Every day comes and goes and could be any old day. It's nice not knowing when a week has passed, and it's a different kind of boredom from being at school; it's a kind of free boredom, whereas at school it is enforced. They make you bored when you are there and at home I can choose to be bored. So it's not bad.

The last few days have been thundery then hot, and today is similarly bad-tempered feeling. Coral is lying on the lawn with Matt, her new boyfriend, and Melons her best friend from school. They have finished their A levels and they are free to live the rest of their lives. Lucky bastards. No surprises for guessing the big thing about Melons. Matt has glasses and is comic-book handsome with a square jaw and he blinks a lot. Could be the glasses, I suppose. I reckon he is a bit like Clark Kent with a hidden Superman lurking inside him. He is a rower and he is in a team at
university. And he smokes. Him being Clark Kent would make Coral into Lois Lane which is about right as she is skinny with dark hair and a face full of sharp edges and flat planes and the biggest brown eyes imaginable. Matt passed his driving test last year, so Coral has done well to get him as her boyfriend and now she has wheels for this summer.

Coral swipes her arm towards me and catches my ankle as I try to walk past. ‘What are we doing today?' Coral has perfected an almost effortless way of speaking that means she hardly opens her mouth. It's quite hard to understand her, but she never says anything very interesting anyway, so it doesn't matter. I like her a lot even though she is my sister. One of the best things about her is that she is eighteen, which means her friends are, and one day I will get somewhere with one of them. Hope it's Melons. Coral is still looking at me, in fact they all are. Like I know the answer to anything.

‘Dunno. Let's go somewhere.'

‘You're insane. Mum will never let us go in Matt's car with him. She is utterly against teenagers driving other teenagers. Haven't you heard her banging on about it?'

‘Does she need to know?'

Coral raises her eyebrows and shades her eyes with her hand to look at me in the glaring sunlight. ‘You are so devious,' she breathes. ‘I like it.'

‘Where shall we go?' Melons stands up. Actually, she's called Mel, but I really like referring to her as Melons even though I know I can't do it to her face. I
can't think of anywhere we could go. There is nowhere remotely cool or even bearable for miles. It is better not to even think about going somewhere because the options are so limited it's lowering to the spirits.

Suddenly Mum and the tiny twosome appear round the back of Matt's car. Ruby and Foss are dressed up like American tourists with shorts, sunglasses and backpacks. Both of them have sun cream on their noses and baseball caps on. They look purposeful. So does Mum. She is waving money around, a sure sign she wants to get rid of us.

‘Jem, Coral. Here, let me give you some money. Foss and Ruby are desperate to go to the sea – could you big ones take them, please? And I'll come and meet you later.'

‘How are we getting there?' Coral has the money pocketed before I can even see how much there is. Today is our day for making Mum look freaked. She presses both hands under her hair and lifts it off her neck. ‘Oh God,' she murmurs under her breath. ‘I hadn't thought of that – I forgot Delilah is on holiday. How could I forget that when it has made my life such hell?'

Delilah is our au pair and I don't think she's on holiday, I think she's left. I went into her room to see if she'd left any fags behind and there was nothing of hers in there at all – not one photograph, not one hair clip or pair of knickers. I know because I looked in all her drawers, and not one fag, which was a pain. Mum hasn't even been up there yet and I can't face telling her, neither can Coral.

‘She'll go psycho, let's not do anything. She'll find out soon enough,' was Coral's decision when I took her to look yesterday evening. She gave me one of her cigarettes and we climbed out of my bedroom window on to the flat roof to smoke, silent together when we peered over the edge and saw Mum strutting along the path through the long grass with Foss whining behind her.

‘I'm never having children,' said Coral.

‘Me neither,' I agreed. ‘They're far too much hassle and it takes years to grow them – piglets are better.'

‘Yeah, piglets on leather leads,' said Coral dreamily, and we both started snorting with laughter – no reason except maybe nicotine.

‘I could take them,' offers Matt, waving his car keys in a provocative gesture from the keyring he has hooked around his middle finger. I don't think he really means to be cheesy, but he has a bit of a crush on Mum and she is twisting her hair around and letting it fall down her back again, and smiling at him, and she is not tall, and has such an air of being rescued. She looks up and widens her eyes. I've noticed she can't help coming on to any male – she almost does it to me sometimes which is gross – anyway, whatever her motives are, she has made Matt feel massive, cool and important, like he makes a difference to someone.

‘That would be great,' she says. Just like that. As if she has never gone on about teenage drivers, or over her dead body, or any of her so-called abiding principles. I open my mouth to point some of this out, but
Coral pinches my arm and whispers, ‘We've got thirty quid.' So I keep quiet and we pile into Matt's very small hot car. He starts the engine and Hendrix comes on loud all around us and the car howls as we rev and lurch out of first gear and down the drive. I look back, anxious that Mum might have seen this evidence of bad driving, but she is already back in the house, not so much as waiting to see us out of the gate. Coral lights a cigarette.

‘Phew, we've escaped,' she sighs.

‘I feel sick,' says Ruby.

‘Are we nearly there?' Foss asks, wriggling back so his head is cushioned by Mel's enormous shelf of – well, by Mel.

Nick feels slightly retarded for admitting this, even to himself, but being away these days without Angel or the kids is like taking drugs. He can do anything. Really. He can do whatever he wants with whomever he fancies – and there are so many girls to fancy it's unbelievable. No one need ever know. It's a mid-life crisis for sure, but it's fun.

And this is how he can revisit the free-fall sense of irresponsibility, the light-headed whim-led state that took him in the mid-seventies to Sausalito, California to live on a houseboat with a girl called Tree. He didn't ever pretend to love her, but they smoked a lot of opium together, then they took cocaine, and somewhere along the way Nick got a job as a chef.

Even though he has not picked up his knives for years, Nick's fingers still sometimes ache with the memory of the cuts and wounds that never really healed through his early twenties. There is nothing else left of that part of his life now. The restaurants he
worked in were gone, and Tree has changed her name back to Theresa and lives in ecological splendour with a green banker husband and IVF twins in Marin County. He remembers her as ethereal, but it could just have been the drugs, as he also recalls she gave the best blow jobs of any woman he has known. That surely takes some practical application, but maybe that, too, is just a fantasy of Nick's from his own internal twenty-four-hour soft porn channel.

The dreamlike propulsion which was his youthful impetus is now taking him out of the fashion buyers' fair on West Broadway, Manhattan and along three blocks to a former municipal building where he will meet a real estate agent with a view to purchasing an as yet unbuilt apartment. He is feeling good, he has charmed Susie Streid, a big blonde buyer from a national supermarket chain, and has convinced her that the chain needs to revamp its image and invest in a new uniform of stretchy trousers for all its employees. From there it is a tiny step to getting them to stock the trousers to sell as well, and the deal will be worth a shed load of money. Sexy money. Not sexy trousers unfortunately, but that would be a miracle.

He should have taken Susie Streid out to dinner, but he has a bit of property to speculate over today. Susie can wait. The ‘unbuiltness' of the property is what makes him able to contemplate spending several hundred thousand dollars of as yet un-borrowed money on a bachelor's loft he has no intention of telling his wife about. Compartmentalising is what Nick's life is all about. He kicks a Starbucks paper cup off
the sidewalk and crosses in front of a heaving row of taxis, motorbikes and delivery vans at the traffic lights.

New York, even though he only arrived yesterday, and is still treacle-legged with jet lag, is full of promise, and Nick intends to extract every ounce – or do they deal in grams now? – from it. The triggers are all here, and unconsciously he scratches the palms of his hands with his clenched middle finger, an echo of a past but never-to-be-forgotten sensation, as he walks past a metal double-height door where he dimly recalls he may once have scored a bag of useless smack. The heat is sticky already, although the sun has not yet beamed down between the tall blocks on to the narrow SoHo street. It is a good thing in Nick's opinion that he put on a black T-shirt when he got up today, and not the white linen shirt Angel had packed in his case with a post-it note saying, ‘Thursday for Trade Fair. Make sure you hang it up in the bathroom as creases will drop out that way.'

The shirt is still in the bottom of his case, and Nick has no plans for removing it. He has never entirely shed the remnants of his youthful musical aspirations, although now all that is really left, apart from a collection of guitars and twenty-three pairs of cowboy boots, is a tendency to wear over-tailored jackets with jeans and to leave his hair a bit too long. Angel's determination to style the whole of her life even extends to her husband, and his packing for a business trip. Unbelievable. But, as Nick likes to remind himself, she can't help it. It's a disease, and boy does he know about disease. And Angel, governed as she is
by guilt, is a great wife. Nothing is too much for her, and there are times when Nick is overawed by her determination and her strength. For example, when she decides to clean the back of the cooker and inside the kettle after a day of meetings and business administration, she honestly seems to believe that if she scrubs hard enough, she will get rid of her own demons. Pour out a bottle of bleach on the world and let there be light. And the more Angel purifies her surroundings, the more Nick obscures his, covering his tracks, keeping every bit of his life separate so no one can see the whole of him. Least of all himself. He crosses the road, and because he has time to spare, and the brick wall of jet lag has just hit him on the head, he enters a coffee shop, orders an espresso and drinks it on the sidewalk. The hot bitterness jolts him into the present, and he winces at the honking of car horns and the pulse of a pneumatic drill a few blocks away. A girl with black, belligerent sunglasses and a snake of plaited hair gets up from the round table outside the café door and glides away on roller blades. Nick sits down in her place, and the sun glances off his wedding ring.

Angel's sense of guilt has given Nick a lot of slack rope, and her desire to assuage it keeps him in luxury. He's not complaining, or not on the surface, but those whom Nick shares with in his twice-weekly AA meetings know a different truth. The real truth. Nick doesn't really accept it at all. He is fed up with doing life Angel's way, and he's fed up with his own guilt for the things he does in defiance. He may be powerless
over her actions, but he is accountable for his own, and the marriage is suffering.

In his quietest moments he wonders if he and Angel were ever really suited. He was drinking, he rescued her, and she was grateful. When he stopped drinking he saw the confusion that had brought them together, or as much of it as he could deal with, but there were the children by then, and life just kept on going. And like he always says, Angel is a great wife, and he loves her. He has to believe this truth, and that she loves him too. Without this, Nick knows the whole of his life would have to be rewritten.

He finishes the coffee and, leaving three dollar-bills under the sugar shaker, he crosses the road and turns the corner. He walks half a block then pauses, looking for a number on the building he has reached. It makes no sense to think about Angel now anyway. She's miles away and right now she is not his problem.

‘Hey, Mr Stone, good morning.' A glossy girl with peach-pink lips and huge pale purple sunglasses turns to walk up the steps to the building alongside Nick. Joy of joys, she is wearing a miniskirt and her legs are not especially long, but are the right shape, bare, honey-brown and smooth as a caffé latte.