This Perfect World (12 page)

‘This is the man,’ she says, without even a pre-emptive
hello, thank you for coming. ‘This one here.’ She waves a
letter at me, pointing at the signature. ‘Dr R. D. Millar. He’s
the one you need to talk to.’

Do I, indeed? And what, exactly, do I want to talk to him
about?

‘You don’t want to bother with the rest,’ she goes on, and
I hear in her voice the weird mixture of inherent suspicion
and isolation that some people – old people, especially – seem
to have when faced with anyone in authority. ‘Dr Millar, he’s
in charge of Heddy.’

She prods her bony finger against the papers as they flop
in her hand. She’s not looking at me. She’s staring at the
writing, as if everything that matters is there in the black-and-white print. She seems to have shrunk since Thursday,
and she’s looking very, very tired. ‘Dr Millar,’ she says again,
to herself, not me. ‘Dr Millar.’

She stuffs the letters back into her bag, wedging them
down the side of all the other things that she’s squeezed in;
you’d think we were going for a week, not just an hour or
so. I watch as she checks the contents of that bag. There’s a
rolled-up towel in there, sticking out the top, a washbag and
sandwiches wrapped in tin foil.

‘Only ham, dear,’ she says. ‘I didn’t know what you’d like.’

I haven’t the heart to tell her I’m planning to be back long
before lunch.

Then she’s patting her pockets, feeling for her keys, fussing,
looking around for anything she might have forgotten. Finally
she takes a deep breath and lets it out on a sigh, and I see
her brace her tiny shoulders inside her coat. Suddenly I find
myself feeling very sorry her. Heddy is her daughter, after all.

On the way to the hospital Mrs Partridge talks non-stop.
She tells me how normally she takes the bus, two buses in
fact. The one that comes only once an hour and goes up
through Barton Village and all the way to the airport eventually
if you stay on it. She gets off before then, by the junction
on the Great West Road, and catches another bus, the
911, that takes her right through Hounslow. The whole journey
takes her about two hours, she says, and she does this every
day, when Nathan is at school. Two hours there, two hours
back, one hour with Heddy. It’s not so bad. The 911 stops
almost right outside St Anne’s, and she normally makes
herself up a sandwich to eat on the way home. And she gets
a good hour with Heddy, if the buses run to time. Long
enough to brush her hair and give her a bit of a wash.

Dread uncurls itself inside me. I hope to God I don’t have
to have anything to do with washing Heddy Partridge.

We drive through Barton Village and I glance sideways at
Mrs Partridge, keeping one eye on her, one eye on the road.
I am dead curious to know which road Heddy lived in, and
I expect Mrs Partridge suddenly to turn her gaze, to look
sideways in a poignant way, marking out the spot, but she
doesn’t. She carries on staring ahead, and she carries on with
the endless stream of nervous chat.

‘I did go, yesterday,’ she says, and by the tone of her voice
I can’t tell if she’s criticizing me for not coming with her, or
reassuring me that she went on her own. ‘They’d put dressings
on her neck, you know, where she’d hurt herself. And
they’d given her something.’ She pauses, for just a second,
and sighs, and when she speaks again I can hear the helplessness
in her voice. ‘She wasn’t in any pain,’ she says, but
I can tell that isn’t the point. Pain is there, whether you try
to numb it out or not.

‘It’s Nathan she wants,’ Mrs Partridge says to me. ‘She’s
pining for him. But what can I do?’ She waits, as if she
expects me to have the answer. I cannot think what to say
so I say nothing, and concentrate on the driving. ‘Straight
across up here and then left, at those lights,’ she directs as
we come into Fayle, and I realize that we are following the
bus route, and that we’ve probably added twenty minutes or
so to our trip in the process. Sure enough, she says to me,
‘You go on up here, dear. That’s where I normally change
buses.’

‘What about Nathan’s father?’ I ask. ‘Where’s he?’

‘Oh, we haven’t seen him for a long time,’ she replies, breezily,
far too breezily. ‘He sends the odd card, you know, at Christmas.
And a bit of money, when he can. But we haven’t seen him.
Not for a long time. They moved in with me, Heddy and
Nathan,’ she explains, ‘when they had to sell that house.
John, Heddy’s husband, he made other arrangements, and we
haven’t seen him since. Poor Heddy, she was in a very bad
way. It was a terrible time, a terrible time.’

Suddenly she leans forward and turns on me, anxious. Her
seatbelt catches and yanks her back. ‘It wasn’t me that put
her in hospital,’ she says, and I can feel her staring at me. I
keep my eyes fixed on the road. ‘I’d never do that. We were
managing all right. Heddy had her problems, but we
were managing. I did my best.’ Her voice is small and shrill
and insistent. ‘She was out. Gone on the bus to Fayle, when
Nathan was at school. Next thing I know there’s a policeman
knocking on my door telling me they’d picked Heddy
up outside the shopping centre. They’d had to call the ambulance.
It was a terrible to-do. She’d smashed a bottle on the
ground and cut right down her arms with the glass.’

The skin across my shoulders prickles, cold.

‘It was help she wanted, poor Heddy. Breaks my heart to
think that I couldn’t help her, my poor girl. They took her
into hospital and then they moved her to St Anne’s. Nothing
I could do.’

Mrs Partridge leans forward now and rummages in her
bag. She comes out with tissues, one of those handy packs.
Out of the corner of my eye I can see her hands shaking as
she pulls out a tissue and blows her nose. I cannot think of
anything to say.

‘It wasn’t the first time, see,’ she says in a thin voice.
‘They’d taken her in before. Nothing so bad as that last time,
but . . . Thing is, you can’t go doing things like that in public.
People don’t like it, do they?’ There’s a tight, bitter tone to
her voice now. ‘Of course they don’t. It’s not what they want
to see when they do their shopping. My poor Heddy. It was
a cry for help, that’s all. It’s always a cry for help, isn’t it,
dear?’

Mrs Partridge’s words are weaving a strange and cloying
magic inside my car. I feel misplaced, as if I’m caught up in
somebody else’s nightmare, trapped in one of those journeys
that go on and on, going nowhere.

Is it always a cry for help? Is it?

Heddy Partridge and I, were we crying about the same
thing? Did we feel the same things as we hacked ourselves
up with our House of Hammer, kitchen-sink torture tools?

I try to take myself back, to remember what I was feeling
that long-buried and newly dug-up day.

I remember the challenge. I remember pushing the blade
down into my wrist, seeing the skin peeling back as it split,
and watching the slow rise of blood.

I remember the voice in my head, saying
What if, what
if?

Thick people don’t have feelings.

I have a sudden flash of my nine-year-old self, hands on
hips, imparting that little gem of wisdom to my friends.
Thick
people don’t have feelings.
You can tell them to get lost
and call them names and make them the brunt of your
jokes – they may not like it much, but that doesn’t matter
because they don’t have feelings, not proper feelings. They
don’t have the brains, so how can they feel? How can they
know how to hurt?

Heddy always reminded me of a cow, a big, slow cow, fit
for nothing more than chopping up and eating. Even more
so in her Brownie uniform. Then she was a big, slow, brown
cow.

On saints’ days we were allowed to wear our Brownie
uniforms to school. We liked that; it showed everyone else we
were special. There were only about three of us in my class
that went to Brownies, three of us and Heddy. Now a Brownie
uniform is not the most fetching of outfits, but if you were
thin and dainty with nimble arms and legs you could wear the
dress pulled in at the middle with a belt and look quite sweet.
Heddy’s uniform was a hand-me-down, too short, too tight,
too straight-up-and-down and with no belt round her big middle.

We rounded on her at playtime.

‘What are you wearing
your
uniform for?’ I demanded,
outraged.

‘It’s St George’s Day,’ Heddy mumbled, staring at the
ground.

‘Well, St George doesn’t care about
you
.’ I looked her up
and down. ‘You’re a disgrace.’

‘And we don’t want you trying to copy us,’ Claire said.
‘Or following us around.’

Heddy carried on staring at the ground, her white face
going slightly pink.

‘You shouldn’t even be in the Brownies,’ I told her. ‘You’re
far too fat.’

‘And stupid,’ Jane said.

‘You’re a fat, stupid cow.’ I made my eyes big and pulled
a long cow face. ‘Moo,’ I said.

‘Moo,’ said Jane and Claire.

Now I think of Heddy, wanting herself to be dead.

Again, I remember her watching us at school, when we were
older, when we cut ourselves for kicks. I remember her spying
on our private world of self-inflicted pain. I think of the
criss-crosses under my sleeves, and the constant threat of
what if?

I see her face, her dark, still eyes looking down on me as
I lay bleeding and trying to die on her mother’s brown Dralon
sofa on that otherwise very dreary Sunday afternoon. Was
that a cry for help? What did I have to cry about except the
constant emptiness, gnawing away inside?

Didn’t I hear it all the time, how lucky I was, how fortunate
I was, how grateful I ought to be? I think of my mum,
at every opportunity, telling everyone how good Laura was
at dance, at English, at maths, at everything . . .
Bragging
, if
you like, painting her perfect picture of her perfect family.
And I went along with it. I thought it had to be so.

And yet, and yet.

I think of my dad, always so distant, and always so slightly
disappointed. And I think of my childish self, so very far
from perfect, and of the terrible things that I did.

Mrs Partridge falls silent as we pull off the road and into
the concrete grounds of St Anne’s, looking for the car park,
which turns out to be not a car park at all really, but just
lots of parking spaces squashed in here, there and everywhere
in the network of roads and small empty spaces that weave
their way around the hospital site. St Anne’s is an old, grey
sprawling building built way back in the Victorian age, and
it’s long overdue for demolition. There are letters about it
sometimes, in the local paper, which I read occasionally when
I’m really bored.
Save St Anne’s
, someone pleads, but no one
takes any notice; why should they?

Eventually we find a spot tucked away at the back of
the hospital, between the bottom steps of a black iron fire
escape and the kitchen bins. I open my door to go and buy
a ticket from the machine. Mrs Partridge is horrified and
flaps and blusters, digging her purse out from her carrier bag
and hunting for change, which I do not take. It’s a big purse,
with lots of compartments, some zipped, some clipping
together.

‘Never thought you’d have to pay,’ she says, flustered with
outrage. ‘To visit a hospital? It’s disgusting.’ She’s still flapping
when I come back with the ticket. ‘Shouldn’t have to
pay to come to a hospital,’ she mutters, fussing with her bag
now, and her coat, as she gets out of the car. She looks worryingly
frail as she bangs the door shut, and anxiety is pulling
at the muscles in her face. ‘How do people manage?’ she
says. ‘Shocking, it is, shocking.’

‘Really, Mrs Partridge, it’s okay,’ I say, to try to calm her,
but she’s still muttering as we try to find our way to the
Arthur Mitley Wing, where Heddy is.

Mrs Partridge knows her way from the main entrance, of
course, which is where she normally comes in from, off the
bus, so first we have to find our way round there, which takes
a while in itself. The place is a maze of covered walkways
that seem to go on forever. God knows how you find your
way back out again. One corridor leads on to another and
then another, through plastic, swing-shut doors. The sound
of our shoes clack-clacking on the concrete floor echoes off
the walls, and the deeper in we go, the hotter it gets and the
more I can smell the horrible hospital smell of disinfectant
and boiled cabbage, masking the sweeter, sickly smell of human
decay. It’s like an invisible gas, choking out the air.

Walking along those endless corridors, it suddenly occurs
to me: how will Heddy feel about seeing me?

I’ve never given a thought to how she must feel towards
me. I think of all those times I was mean to her and of all
the cruel things that I said. She never said anything back,
ever. I never gave a thought to how she might feel about me.
And now here I am, turning up in her life again, just like
she’s turned up in mine.

Heddy Partridge must hate me, surely. Way more than I
ever hated her.

Mrs Partridge sticks her finger on the buzzer outside the
Arthur Mitley Wing and presses hard. Through the blue of
the window I can see a nurse sitting at a desk writing up
notes. Slowly she rises to her feet to tap in the code to let
us in. It reminds me of the maternity ward where Arianne
was born – there was keypad security there, too, but just to
keep the dodgy people out. Not to keep them in.

‘I’ve brought a visitor with me today, dear,’ Mrs Partridge
says, to explain my presence. ‘And we’d like to see Dr Millar,
if we may.’

The nurse looks from Mrs Partridge to me and back to
Mrs Partridge again. She’s about my age, with mousy blonde
hair scraped back from her world-weary face. ‘I’m not sure
if Dr Millar’s available,’ she says.

‘No, dear,’ Mrs Partridge says and I’m surprised by her
assertiveness. ‘He wasn’t available yesterday, but he will be
today. That’s what the nurse here yesterday told me.’