Perfect (6 page)

A slim hand tugs at his sleeve. ‘You missed my table,’ a female voice is saying. It’s the woman Mr Meade has just served. Jim recoils from her fingers as if burnt. He can’t even look her in the eye.

The inpatients used to walk side by side at Besley Hill. Never touching.
If the nurses helped them dress, they took it steadily, not wanting to cause alarm.

‘Can you see?’ The female customer asks the question as if he is stupid. She points towards a table in the middle of the café, positioned exactly halfway between the window and the servery counter at the opposite end. Her new coat is already draped on the back of a chair and she has left her coffee on the table, beside the condiments and paper sachets of sugar. He follows her and she lifts her cup so that he can clean. If only she wouldn’t stand so close; Jim’s hands tremble. She sighs impatiently.

‘Quite frankly, I’m shocked at the state of this place,’ she says. ‘They may have spent all that money refurbishing but it’s still a tip. No wonder no one comes.’

Jim squirts. Twice. Once. He wipes. Twice. Once. In order to relax he empties his mind, just as the nurses used to tell him. He thinks of white light, of floating, until he is yanked to the present by a further disruption: ‘Fucking steps. Oh. Oh. Oh. Fuck this.’

He can’t continue. He steals a sideways glance at the rude woman but she wears an appalled look and so do the two male customers who previously appeared refrigerated. They all stare at the Christmas tree at the top of the stairs.

‘Bugger me,’ it says.

Jim wonders if Mr Meade knows that, as well as flashing, the tree both talks and swears, when the face of the new cook, Eileen, emerges over the steps. She hauls herself to the top as if she has climbed a bare rock face to get here.

‘Fuck this,’ she says.

Flash, flash, flash, goes the Christmas tree.

She is not supposed to use the customer stairs. She is supposed to use the staff stairs. It is enough to give Jim the jitters. And she has also interrupted the rituals. He must squirt again. Wipe again—

‘I don’t have all day,’ says the female customer. ‘Would you please get a move on?’

He tries not to think about Eileen but she is like the approach of a badweather front. It’s hard to pretend she isn’t happening. Sometimes he hears her laugh with the two young girls in the kitchen and there is something so chaotic about the noise, so joyous and unequivocal, he has to cover his ears, waiting for it to pass. Eileen is a tall, big-boned woman with a stiff shower of titian hair – a darker shade than the regulation hat – that shoots from a shocked-white parting in the centre of her head. She wears a holly-green coat that puckers at the seams in its effort to contain her.

‘For heaven’s sakes,’ the female customer almost shouts. ‘I’m only asking you to wipe my table. What’s wrong with you? Where’s the manager?’

Eileen frowns as if she has heard. Then she begins her approach to the kitchen. She will have to pass right next to him. Jim begins again. He squirts and he wipes. He must empty his mind—

‘Hurry, hurry, will you?’ repeats the rude woman.

Despite the solidity of Eileen, she is surprisingly nimble and the rude woman is directly in her path. Why doesn’t she get out of the way? Why doesn’t Eileen go a different route? At this rate, she will ramrod the rude woman. Jim’s breathing comes faster. His head bangs. If the woman doesn’t move, if he doesn’t do this right, something terrible will happen.

Left, right, left, right. Left, right. His arm jerks so fast the muscles feel on fire. His fingers tingle.

Eileen is almost at his side. ‘T-table,’ he mouths. The wiping is clearly not working, so he needs to do the words as well. ‘Hello—’

‘What
are
you talking about?’ says the rude woman, stepping closer in order to hear. As if through an opened sluice gate, Eileen lumbers past. The crisis is over.

Whether Eileen hits the chair by accident or design is unclear but, as she passes, it rocks and sends the woman’s coat slithering in a silk puddle
to the floor. ‘Fuck it,’ says Eileen, not stopping. It rhymes with bucket.

This is a disaster. The crisis is not over at all.

‘Excuse me,’ says the rude woman, only in a shrill way so that the two words take on their opposite meaning. ‘Excuse me, madam, aren’t you going to pick that up?’

Eileen does not stop. She keeps walking towards the kitchen.

‘Pick up my coat,’ orders the woman.

‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’ says Eileen, over her shoulder.

Jim’s heart gallops. The coat lies at his feet. ‘I will not have this,’ says the woman. ‘I will call the manager. I will lodge a complaint.’

‘You do that,’ says Eileen. And here – oh no – she stops walking away. She turns. Eileen is looking at the rude woman and the rude woman is looking at Eileen and here, in the middle, is Jim, squirting and wiping and whispering Salt Pot hello, Canderel hello, to make things right. If only the coat would magic itself on to the chair. He closes his eyes and gropes in his pocket for his keyring. He thinks of duct tape and being calm but none of it works. The woman will be hurt. Eileen will be hurt. The supermarket customers and Mr Meade and the girls in the kitchen will be hurt and it is all Jim’s fault.

He stoops for the coat. It is like water in his fingers. He folds it over the back of the chair, only his hands are shaking so hard the coat slips off, and he has to stoop again and lift the coat again and hang it again. He can feel the women watching, both Eileen and the customer with her metallic voice. It is like being peeled. He is more them than himself. Then the rude woman sits. She folds her knees but she doesn’t say thank you.

At the kitchen, Eileen pauses. She turns her face towards Jim and gives a broad smile that lights up her face. Then she thumps open the door and disappears. Jim is so shaken he needs fresh air but he mustn’t. He must wipe another table and this time he must get it right.

‘Why do you have to do the rituals?’ a psychiatric nurse asked once. ‘What do you think will happen if you don’t?’ She was a pleasant-looking girl, fresh from training. She said he was over-catastrophizing, he must confront his fears. ‘Then you will see them for what they are. You will see the rituals make no difference.’ She spoke so kindly about his fears, as if they were a piece of furniture he could move into another room and forget, that he wanted her to be right. She obtained permission from the doctors to take Jim to a railway station where people freely came and went, where there was no opportunity to check the hidden spaces and secure exits and entrances. ‘It’s all in your mind, you see,’ she said, as they stepped off the bus and crossed the station forecourt.

But here she was wrong. There were so many people, there was so much chaos – there were fast trains, and busy platforms, there were pigeons missing feet, broken windows and cavernous air vents – that what he learned that morning was that life was even more hazardous than he had previously realized. If anything, he had not been worrying enough and neither had anyone else. He had been under-catastrophizing. He must do something. He must do it immediately. Racing to the restroom to perform the rituals in private, he had narrowly missed colliding with a steam urn in the station tearoom, thereby causing major injury to a roomful of commuters. It was too much. Jim pressed the station alarm. An hour later – after the arrival of so many fire engines there were delays to all south-west services – he was found in a tight ball under a bench. He never saw the fresh-faced nurse again. She lost her job and that was another thing that was his fault.

Later, Jim is fetching a new roll of blue paper towels for the lavatories when he overhears Eileen again. Now she is in the kitchen, next to the supplies cupboard, talking to the two young women who are responsible for the dispatching of hot food.

‘So what’s with Jim?’ he hears her ask. It’s a shock to hear her use his name. It suggests they have a connection and they clearly don’t.

He stands very still, with the roll of blue handtowels clutched to his stomach. It isn’t that he wants to eavesdrop; it is more that he doesn’t want to be here and acting as if he isn’t appears to be the best alternative.

‘He lives in a van,’ says one of the girls. ‘Over on the new estate.’

‘He doesn’t have a house or anything,’ says her friend. ‘He’s just parked there.’

‘He’s a bit—’

‘A bit what?’ says Eileen impatiently because whatever it is that Jim is, no one seems prepared to voice it.

‘You know,’ says the first girl.

‘Backward,’ says the other.

‘Jim has tissues,’ corrects the first girl. And then he realizes he has misheard. Issues are what she has said he has. ‘He’s been up at Besley Hill most of his life. When they closed it, he had nowhere to go. You have to feel sorry for him. It’s not as if he’d hurt you or anything.’ He had no idea she knew all this.

The second girl says, ‘He plants things. Bulbs and seeds and that. He buys them cut price in the supermarket. Sometimes he gets manure and stuff. It smells like shit.’

Eileen makes a noise that is so ragged, so colossal, it takes him a moment to realize what it is. It’s her laugh. It isn’t unkind, though. This is what strikes him. It is as if she is laughing
with
Jim, and this is strange but he isn’t laughing. He is crushed to the wall against a blue roll with his heart beating like an explosion.

‘Oh for fuck’s sake,’ says Eileen. ‘How the fuck is this hat supposed to work?’

‘We use hairgrips,’ says the first girl. ‘You have to stick them right through the rim.’

‘Stuff it. I’m not wearing the fucker.’

‘You have to. It’s regulations. And the net cap. You have to wear that too.’

Jim fails to hear what happens next. The door shuts and their voices snap out of hearing; they are a sound but without distinction, just as the rest of the world disappears when he is planting. He waits a little longer and when it is safe, he delivers the roll of blue crêpe paper to the lavatories and disinfects the sinks and taps. For the remainder of the morning, Jim wipes tables and carries trays to the young girls in the kitchen who have described him as backward. The customers come and go, but they are few. Beyond the windows, the snow cloud is so heavy it can barely move.

He has spent his adult life in and out of care. Years have passed and some of them he can’t even remember. After treatment, he could lose whole days; time was merely a selection of unconnected empty spaces. Sometimes he had to ask the nurses what he had eaten that day and if he had been for a walk. When he complained about memory loss, the doctors told him it was his depression. The truth is he found it easier to forget.

All the same, it was terrible to leave Besley Hill for the final time. It was terrible to watch the other residents go, with their suitcases and their coats, driven away in minibuses and relatives’ cars. Some wept. One patient even tried to make a getaway across the moor. They did not want to go to family members who had long since abandoned them. They did not want to live in hostels or supported housing. After his reassessment, it was a social worker who found Jim his job at the supermarket. She was friendly with Mr Meade; they were in the same amateur dramatics group. And after all, she pointed out, Jim could live in his van. One day, if he wanted, he could get a mobile phone. He could make new friends. He could text them and meet up.

‘But I’m frightened,’ he had said. ‘I’m not like normal people. I don’t know what to do.’

The social worker had smiled. She did not touch him but she placed her hands beside his on the table. ‘No one knows how to be normal, Jim. We’re all just trying our best. Sometimes we don’t have to think about it and other times it’s like running after a bus that’s already halfway down the street. But it’s not too late for you. You’re only in your fifties. You can start again.’

The next time Jim passes Eileen, he averts his eyes and goes to wheel round her, when she pauses and says, ‘Watcha, Jim. How’s things?’ She is delivering a toasted sandwich to another customer.

It is open and easy, her question. Nevertheless he can’t answer. He looks at his shoes. They are long and narrow. His trousers do not even reach his ankles. In the years since he was a boy, his body seems to have set its sights on the sky, rather than the suits and chairs that other bodies aim to fill. He buys boots and trainers a size too large because he is afraid his body will take him unawares and notch up a further inch overnight.

Jim continues to stare pointedly at his feet as if they are very interesting. He wonders how long he can keep this up and whether Eileen will go soon.

‘Don’t mind me,’ she says.

Even without looking at her he can see the way she stands, one hand on her hip, her feet squarely on the ground. The silence is unbearable.

‘See you around,’ she says at last.

She is about to go when Jim lifts his head. It is too much to look her in the eye but he wants her to know – what? He tries to smile. Eileen is holding a seasonal sandwich with trimmings; he has his anti-bacterial spray. So it isn’t a big smile. It’s a minor exercising of his facial muscles. All he wants is for her to understand; though what he would like her to understand, it
is hard to say. It’s a bit like waving a flag, his smile. Or shining a light through the dark. It’s like saying, Here I am. There you are. That’s all.

She frowns at him as if he’s hurt.

He will have to work on the smile.