This Perfect World (16 page)

The annoying thing is, if Thomas hadn’t scratched Milo’s
cheeks, if Milo hadn’t been wearing such a sick-makingly
perfect Baloo outfit and if there hadn’t been such a tortuous
annual event as book week in the first place, we’d have gone
back to the Littlewoods’ as planned and I’d have been out
and have missed her call, and believe me, I’d have had my
mobile switched off.

I loosen myself from my children’s arms to pick up the
phone and have to listen to her thanking me again for my
time given up and my most appreciated concern. I feel like
God is having a laugh at my expense. Then she gives me a
full unwanted update on Heddy’s progress, or rather the lack
of it, since my bountiful visit to St Anne’s. Right now I couldn’t
care less.

She falls short of asking me outright what I’m going to
do, but the question is there, hanging in the long pause, when
she finally shuts up.

I feel a deep tiredness, which I think you might call resignation,
sinking into my bones.

‘I have given it some thought,’ I say, which is true enough.
‘We need to get her out, back with Nathan. That’s the main
thing.’ The children loosen themselves from my legs and stare
up at me, intrigued.

Mrs Partridge remains quiet on the other end of the phone,
waiting for me to tell her something she doesn’t already
know.

‘It seems to me that Heddy’s caught in a cycle. We need
to break that cycle.’ I am talking complete rubbish. I can tell
by her silence that Mrs Partridge thinks this too. Even the
children have forgotten their tears and are starting to giggle
now. I’d laugh too, if the joke wasn’t on me.

I tell her I’ll help. I tell her I’ll do whatever I can. I say it
just to get her off the phone, but it’s true. I have no choice.
It seems to me that on one of his particularly boring days
above the earth God decided to make the Partridges my
problem, and so I am stuck with them unless I can sort them
out and get rid of them for good.

The first thing I do is write a letter to the local paper. Not
just my local paper, here in Ashton, but all the local papers
around here that get printed out of the same office. So we
have a pretty large area covered. I am surprised at how easy
it is to write your own little feature and get it into print. In
fact there’s no writing involved at all, I just phone the central
office number and speak to the nice guy on the phone and
he writes it all down for me.

‘Mental illness is still a social taboo,’ I tell him, ‘and the
trouble is that people like these become lost in the system.
They don’t have the confidence to stand up for themselves,
or, frankly, the brains. Their social status marks them out as
victims; it is incredibly unfair.’

I feel quite pleased with myself. I am a pioneer for the
working classes. I find myself quite liking this role and
the easy sleep it brings, until I see my article in print, one
week later.

I have been completely misquoted. Every ‘they’ I said has
become ‘we’. I read the article with drop-dead horror. ‘“Mental
illness is still a social taboo and people like us get lost in the
system,” says Ashton mum Laura Hamley. “Just because we
don’t have the confidence or the brains to stand up for
ourselves, we’re marked out as victims. It isn’t fair.”’

Embarrassment settles over me like a heavy blanket. The
local paper is posted through every door, in every street, in
Ashton.

James thinks it’s hilarious. He half-kills himself laughing
when he reads it. ‘Oh dear, oh dear,’ he says, ‘what will the
ladies of Ashton do, now they know they’ve got a nutter in
their midst?’

Nobody says anything. That makes it worse.

I feel like all of Ashton is looking at me, and I wish
someone would say something, make a joke about it at least.
I wish I could make a joke about it. I would, if they’d give
me the chance.

I get kind looks in the playground, if I get any looks at
all. Mostly people are suddenly very busy, dashing here,
dashing there. I find myself painfully invisible. No one is
pushing for coffee, or lunch, or tea, later, with the children.
Even Penny, Tasha and Liz are suddenly unavailable when I
call, but I’d bet my bottom dollar they’re not unavailable to
each other.

It is a strangely quiet week. Whatever we three do, we do
alone. Tennis lessons, swimming lessons, after-school recorder
practice. All the things we normally rush to and from are
suddenly so much less of a rush when there is no tea to be
fitted in before or after; no tea, and no chat. It seems to me
that for days I speak to no one but my children, and my
husband – and he, obviously, doesn’t count.

‘Oh, Laura,’ James laughs, oblivious of his place at the
very bottom of the list of those I would like to chat to, ‘how
are the ladies of Ashton going to get over that one?’

Tasha makes the first move, to break my exile.

After Tumbletots on Monday, when we have each sat and
clapped and separately applauded the musical, balancing
and all-round marvellous performing skills of our children,
Tasha turns to me with a generous smile and says, ‘Hi, Laura.
How
are
you? Haven’t spoken to you all week – I’ve been
so
busy.’

‘Me too,’ I reply, as required, although we all know that
Coventry isn’t the busiest of places when you’re sent to it.

‘Listen,’ she says, ‘I’m having drinks at my house on
Thursday night, for the girls. Rupert’s away, on business. You
will come, won’t you? I’ve got something exciting to tell.’

‘I’ll have to check my diary,’ I say, which is what we always
say. ‘But that should be fine. I’d love to come.’

My smile is at least as big as Tasha’s, so wide it’s almost
cracked out into my ears.

Oh, what it is to be relegated to second-rate invitee rather
than first-rate planner in this powerful, powder-puff world
of ours.

I arrive latish, so no one feels compelled to talk to me before
the action gets under way. Tasha is holding court already,
tippy-toeing about so that her heels don’t dent her new, soft
oak floor. Everyone else is doing the same; I walk in and see
this and it occurs to me just how de rigueur it is, this funny
indoor walk, and how I’d laugh and point it out to them all
if I wasn’t in enough disgrace already.

I myself am wearing flats tonight.

‘Laura!’ Tasha trip-trips over to me and kisses the air on
each side of my face. ‘So glad you could come.’

And so I am greeted all round, and so I greet back. Everyone
is here tonight. Tasha’s star is clearly in the rising, whereas
mine has plummeted to earth. No one mentions my dreadful
faux pas with the local paper.

Now we’re all on our second glass of champagne, and we’re
all starting to get just the tiniest bit ditzy. Tasha herself is rosy-cheeked and starry-eyed, but not from the champagne. She
has pointedly kept one hand placed over her glass all evening.

‘Girls,’ she announces now, after trilling one nail against
her glass to get our attention. ‘I know you’re all dying to
know . . .’ She lets her words trail off as she coyly smiles
around the room, and then she extends her free hand, waggles
her manicured fingers and slowly pats her incredibly flat
stomach.

The room erupts into squeals.

‘Oh Tasha, you’re not!’

‘Tasha, how could you keep it from me?’

‘Oh Tasha, you dark horse – I knew it, from the moment
you went off coffee!’

‘And gin!’

And so we crowd around and we gush and push and shove
in our efforts to be favourite friend. My new position in the
back row makes the viewing of this social zoo all the more
entertaining.

After enough of a fuss has been made of Tasha, and a
little more champagne has been drunk, we start on the obligatory
tales of pregnancy and childbirth. We all have a stack
of such tales, to be brought out on occasions like these. It’s
the one thing we all have in common, I suppose – that and
our love of shoes.

Fiona Littlewood starts it off, telling us all how she spits
them out, like shelling peas. Personally I don’t actually think
this is something to be proud of, especially as she goes on
to give them all such ridiculous names.
Minka
, she called the
last one, for God’s sake. I suppose that’s what comes of
having too much energy left over after pushing, and not
enough decorum. The harder the push, the plainer the name,
that’s for sure.

I mean, look at Penny.

‘It took me days to have Joe, and I mean
days
,’ she states
and though we have all heard this story several times before,
we are all ready to hear it again, curling up our toes and
our noses in anticipation. ‘Forceps, suction, cut from here to
here,’ and she holds up her hands in what I sincerely hope
is an exaggerated estimate of the distance down below. ‘It
was years before I could have sex again, and I mean
years
.
And then look what happened. I got Sam. Same thing all
over again.’ She shudders, and we all shudder too, glorying
in the delight that at least there is one couple out there having
sex less often than ourselves.

‘Well, I went through all that and still ended up having a
Caesarean,’ Juliet squeaks, pulling a poor-me face and crossing
her eyes.

‘How awful,’ we all say, sympathy itself, ‘imagine it, all
that pain for nothing.’

‘And in the days before tummy tucks!’ someone laughs,
and we all laugh too, though terribly politely of course. I
mean, no one would actually suggest that Juliet could have
done with a tummy tuck.

And meanwhile Tasha sits there, centre stage, touching
those beautifully painted fingernails to her mouth, her forehead,
her stomach in a parody of anticipated dread. ‘Bang
go my Joseph trousers,’ she moans now and again. ‘And as
for my new Prada skirt – why on earth did I buy it? What
have I done? I’m ruined.’

I have my own little repertoire of ever-so-amusing stories
from the arena of childbirth and I’m wondering which little
ditty I should share tonight.

There’s the one about my first day at the NCT group where
the group leader handed around picture cards to the eight of
us in her group. On these cards were pictures of women, in
various types of attire. Well, I say various, but mostly they
were of a type, what you might call the comfy type – dare I
say it, the mumsy type – make-up-less, hairstyle-less, clad in
joggie bottoms and sweatshirts and their husbands’ big denim
shirts. Clothes I would not be seen dead in. All of the women
in the pictures were like this except for two, who between
them were wearing lipstick, decent highlights, cute jackets and
heels.

‘Now pick out the images that most represent you,’ our
leader said to us, as if we were imbeciles. I thought she was
checking to see if our brains had all gone with the arrival
of our bumps.

Naturally I picked out the two women wearing the lipstick,
the decent highlights, the cute jackets and the heels; after all,
that’s how I dressed for work every day. And even though I
wasn’t going straight back to work – my job in PR meant
erratic hours and too much travel – I assumed I’d still carry
on dressing the way I liked.

But, ‘Oh
no
,’ our leader admonished, shaking her head,
and the other women all shook their heads too, like oversized
puppets. ‘You can’t go around looking like
that
when
you have a new baby to look after. You won’t have time to
put on make-up, or worry about your hair. You’ll be lucky
if you manage even to get dressed in the morning.’ All around
there was a general murmur of agreement, and relief.
Obviously no one else had been so stupid as to think they’d
carry on being themselves, after they’d had their babies. ‘And
smart jackets
,’ she added, with a good deal of contempt in
her voice, she herself most definitely being someone who did
not go in for such frivolities, ‘don’t look so smart with sick
all down the lapel. This is what you’ll be wearing,’ she finished,
jabbing her finger at a picture of a washed-out woman in a
sweatshirt so hideous it might as well have been covered in
sick, ‘when you’re a mum.’

The girls always love to hear that one. They think it’s
hilarious, they love to imagine my horror. Of course when I
tell that story I paint myself as the rebel, the one that got
away, the one who did sit up in bed and ask for her lipstick
and a mirror, the minute her stitches had been sewn.

I never tell them how isolating it was to be told, in effect,
that you might as well just give up on yourself once you
became a mother. That just wouldn’t be funny.

Or there’s the one about the time I took Thomas along to
the clinic to be weighed, when he was just a few weeks old.
I went along to the clinic a lot when Thomas was tiny, just
for something to do, and to have the nurses tell me my little
boy was fine, though I didn’t see how he could be fine when
he cried all the time. Thomas hated being weighed. He hated
having all his clothes taken off and being placed on the
scales, much like a bunch of bananas in the greengrocer’s.
He’d scream as soon as the cold metal touched his skin. One
time, as he lay on the scales, screaming, his little willy popped
up and sent out an arc of pee, right across the room. It hit
one of the nurses, square on the chin. She screamed in surprise,
making Thomas scream all the more and wriggle about, thus
sending the arc across the other side of the room and squirting
another nurse, also in the face. He was like a high-powered
garden sprinkler, spraying around the room. Soon everyone
was screaming and trying to dodge his fire.

But today I decide to tell them about the cabbage-leaf
woman.

‘Oh no, not the cabbage-leaf woman!’ squeals Penny, who’s
heard this story before.

Oh yes. The cabbage-leaf woman turned up as guest speaker
at one of our antenatal classes, come to talk to us about
breast-feeding. She was a very curious-looking woman, somewhat
round in shape and squeezed into an all-in-one green
jumpsuit, the sort of thing I vaguely remembered being fashionable
way back in the 1980s. And she’d obviously had it
since the 1980s – it was fraying a little around the ankle
hems, just above the straps of her red Jesus sandals. She had
very pale skin and wore no make-up except for two matching
bolts of electric-blue eye-shadow applied midway between
her eyes and her overplucked brows. Her hair was a shocking
frizz of yellow curls cut to just below her ears, in such a
style that it seemed to be the same length all over, as wide
as it was deep as it was long.