This Perfect World (26 page)

‘Where’s the statue of the Virgin Mary?’ Claire asked.

‘Don’t know,’ I said.

‘
Is
there one?’

‘I don’t know that, either.’

Claire clapped her hand over her mouth, eyes wide.

‘She won’t come,’ Jane said, and I have to say, I did wonder
if I’d gone too far. None of us were allowed near the graveyard
on the way home – some man had strangled his girlfriend
there years ago, and the horror of it still had the whole
town freaking out. But I wanted to see just what I could get
Heddy Partridge doing for love, and besides, it was the only
place I could be sure of us being alone.

Claire and Jane wouldn’t come, though.

‘No way,’ Claire said. ‘My mum will kill me if I don’t go
straight home.’

‘You can’t go,’ Jane said. ‘She’ll never turn up.’

But I was on a roll now. I knew that Heddy Partridge
would turn up, and I wanted to see it. Besides, if I backed
out now I’d just look stupid.

Jane did come with me in the end, though she said just
for five minutes. We got out of school quickly and ran on
ahead. Heddy was always last out, lumbering along behind
everyone else. The graveyard was opposite the church on the
road out towards the river, about ten minutes from school.
It was down its own little lane and you couldn’t see it from
the road at all. You’d never go there unless you had to – I
mean, unless you were being buried or something. It was the
creepiest place and went on forever, basically field after field
full of dead people, and the graves near the entrance were
the oldest, all slipping and sliding into the loamy earth, the
tombstones crumbling and the grave beds opening up from
the force of the tree roots underneath.
Here lies Eliza Wood
,
I read, but it didn’t look much like she lay there any more
with her grave cracked wide open; you could see right inside,
right into the blackness, down into the ground.

‘This is scary,’ Jane bleated. ‘I want to go back.’

I shushed at her to be quiet. Our voices were too loud,
too out of place. It was a humid, sultry day, and away from
the street there was no sound apart from the birds in the
trees and the whisper of overgrown grass against our legs,
and the snapping of twigs, underfoot. You wouldn’t believe
how stuff grew in there: trees, brambles, stinging nettles and
grass as tall as our thighs in places, and so much ivy, tangling
itself around the gravestones, all thriving on so much human
nourishment.

‘What would a Virgin Mary look like?’ Jane hissed.

‘I don’t know. Like an angel, I suppose.’ We’d gone quite
far in, but so far it was all crosses and slabs.

‘I don’t want to go any further,’ Jane said.

‘Just a bit,’ I said, leading onwards through the bumps
and dips in the ground.

‘She’ll never come.’

‘She will.’

And then suddenly there it was, the perfect Virgin Mary.
You couldn’t miss it; she was standing high on square steps
with her head bowed, much taller than all the other gravestones.
Heddy wouldn’t miss it. Just to make sure, I took off
my red school jumper and draped it over the statue’s head,
so that Heddy would see it and think that it was Christopher’s.
Then Jane and I hid and we waited – and sure enough, just
a few moments later, along Heddy came.

I saw her first and nudged Jane, and we ducked down,
peering through the gap between the gravestones so that we
could see Heddy, but Heddy couldn’t see us. She was tiptoeing
along at quite a speed, looking nervously from side to side.
Every few steps she stopped and looked behind her, before
scampering on again. It didn’t take her long to spot the statue
with my red jumper dangling off it. And from my hiding
place I saw her looking relieved for a second, before confusion
and anxiety set in. She crept all the way around that
statue twice, as if expecting Christopher to jump out from
the other side and say
Boo!
Then she stood turning circles
on the spot, looking all around her, clutching and unclutching
her hands, and then she went back around the statue the
other way. Jane and I were almost bursting with the effort
of not laughing. Heddy was making this strange, low
murmuring sound, like a hum gone wrong.

‘I can smell her fear,’ I whispered to Jane.

And Jane whispered back, ‘That’s not her fear, it’s her
bum.’

Heddy heard us, or heard something; heard us snorting
back the giggles most likely, and glanced our way, but couldn’t
see us.

‘Oh. Oh,’ she kept saying, and she started flapping her
hands at her sides.

‘She’s trying to fly,’ I whispered and Jane screeched and
fell backwards, giving us away.

Heddy watched us as we struggled to stand up, clutching
at each other, half-collapsing again with laughter. She had a
look on her face of absolute jaw-dropped horror.

‘What’s the matter, Heddy?’ I said. ‘Have you seen a ghost?’

‘There are lots of ghosts out here,’ Jane said. ‘Lots and
lots.’

‘Yes, look!’ I gasped and pointed. ‘There’s one right there.
And there, look!’

Heddy turned to look, and so did Jane. Just then a bird
or a squirrel caused a rustling in the bushes right beside us,
and all three of us jumped. Jane screamed, and Heddy began
to make a low groaning noise in her throat.

‘Where’s Christopher?’ she asked, as if she actually thought
he might be there.

‘I don’t know, Heddy,’ I said, all quiet and mysterious. ‘Is
he here somewhere? Is he?’ I put my finger to my chin in
concentration and looked slowly around, peering through
the trees and gravestones, and Heddy peered with me. Then
I took a sharp breath and pointed to my red jumper, hanging
off the statue. ‘His jumper is here,’ I whispered. ‘And so he
must be, too. But where can he be? What do you think,
Heddy? Where can Christopher be?’

Heddy shook her head, and kept on looking around with
her frightened, pleading eyes. She was clutching her skirt at
the sides with both hands, bunching it up, pulling it shorter
across her thighs.

‘Do you think – do you think something could have
happened to him? Something
awful
?’

‘Let’s go now!’ Jane said. ‘You’re scaring me, too!’

I was scaring myself, but I couldn’t stop.

‘Do you, Heddy? Do you think something really terrible
has happened to Christopher?’

Heddy screwed her skirt up even tighter; her thighs were
practically wobbling with fear. And still she was making that
groaning sound. I began to creep from side to side in front
of her, slowly moving in on her.

‘What if he’s been murdered? What if he came to meet
you and, while he was waiting, he was murdered? That
would be your fault then, Heddy, wouldn’t it? It would be
your fault if he was murdered because of you.’

She was snivelling now. Snot was running out of her nose;
she curled her tongue up over her top lip to meet it. She
filled me with revulsion: her fat thighs, her snotty nose, her
stupidity
in thinking someone like Christopher would ever
be interested in her. And every time I moved, she moved. It
was like my birthday party all over again, but Heddy was
well and truly trapped this time. She could run off into the
depths of the scary graveyard, but she couldn’t run past me.

‘Do you think that’s what’s happened, Heddy? Do you
think he’s been murdered?’ I shivered as I said it, and at the
same time a bird came batting its way noisily from the leaves
of a tree above us.

‘Come on, I’m going,’ Jane said and started heading for
the exit, but I was too wired up now, driven on by all the
anger, all the resentment I had ever felt towards Heddy
Partridge.

‘What were you going to do with him anyway, Heddy?
Were you going to snog him? Were you planning on meeting
Christopher Chapman and
snogging
him?’ I tipped my head
back and laughed; the sound of it crackled out, witch-like
in the heavy air. ‘Did you really think that Christopher would
actually want to snog
you
, Heddy Partridge?’

Heddy was panicking now, looking round for an escape,
but there was none. She moved to the left, I moved to the
left. She moved to the right, I moved to the right. Then suddenly
she turned and just
ran
, going I don’t know where. And straight
away she tripped over an old tree root or something, and fell
so hard that when her top half hit the ground, her lower half
bounced up again, like in a cartoon, and her skirt flew right
up, showing off her big white knickers. And I was laughing
so much I was going to wet myself if I wasn’t careful.

‘Come on!’ Jane called from the gate and I called back
that I was coming, but not before I saw that the wrist Heddy
had landed on was broken, the bone sticking right out, the
hand discolouring already.

She tried to pick herself up from the ground, but got no
further than her knees. She wasn’t even crying, just breathing
in short, hard gasps. And then she retched, and threw up all
down herself.

And I turned and ran after Jane, and I left Heddy there.

Heddy wasn’t in school for the last days of term. Out of
sight was out of mind as far as Jane and Claire were concerned;
they seemed to forget about the whole thing instantly. They
didn’t know about Heddy’s wrist, of course. No one did. No
one would be interested in why Heddy was off school.
No one would even notice.

But I expected there to be some kind of comeback.

It wasn’t my fault that Heddy had broken her wrist. It
wasn’t my fault that she ran and tripped. It wasn’t my fault
that she wanted to go sneaking into the graveyard to meet
a boy after school. She should have known better.

None of it was my fault. I went over and over this reasoning
in my head and absolved myself from blame.

And then one evening over dinner my mum said, ‘I saw
Mrs Partridge in the chemist’s this afternoon – she was in
there getting something for poor Heddy. She told me something
shocking. Heddy’s been in an accident. Apparently she
was chased by some older boys on her way home from school
and she tripped over. She’s got a broken wrist and a huge
gash on her forehead, according to Mrs Partridge. Isn’t that
awful?’ And then she said to me, ‘Do you know anything
about this, Laura? Did they say anything at school?’

The gash on the head was news to me. I shook my head,
unable to speak.

‘That’s terrible,’ my dad said. ‘Did they call the police?’

‘I asked her that, but she said not. They ought to have
done, but you know . . .’ My mum shrugged a shoulder,
raised an eyebrow, saying so much about the Partridges with
so few words.

‘I’ll go and see them,’ my dad said, and I waited in fear
to be found out.

And I waited and waited.

Either Heddy lied to her mum because she’d be in trouble
for being in the graveyard in the first place, or because she
was scared of what I’d do to her if she told the truth. Either
way, my dad came back with the same story.

We’d all quit Guides by then and now she stopped going
to ballet too – after all, she’d look pretty stupid prancing
around with her arm in plaster. And we moved up to secondary
school, and that was it: Heddy Partridge was finally out of
my life.

And it seemed that I’d got away with it.

And yet, and yet.

I picture myself lying prone and bleeding on her mother’s
worn old sofa, offering myself up like some badly bodged
sacrifice. And I think how she always seemed to be there in
the distance, watching as I chiselled out the shape of this
not-so-perfect life of mine, and I think of what she saw.

She saw what I really was. She saw what I had done to
her all those years, and what that had done to me.

I can’t face going straight home, so I drive round and round,
catching myself in the endless loop of the one-way system,
then I veer off following the signs to the multi-storey car
park, and park up, and find my way down to the shopping
precinct. And there I wander from shop to shop in search of
anonymity; I blend myself in with everyone else, just like any
other woman, on any Saturday. But it brings no respite. I
cannot lose myself because my self comes with me; we are
anchored, chained together, inseparable. Myself and my ghosts.
All that I did, all that I am.

So I go back to my car, and again I just drive, slotting
myself into the stream of crawling traffic, and I end up taking
the route back that I took with Mrs Partridge that first day,
following the bus route back to Forbury, through concrete
street after concrete street. We are near the airport out here,
and today the planes are frequent and low, roaring in and
out of my consciousness. The air is sour with kerosene,
and I close my window and switch on the air filter, closing
myself into my bubble.

I don’t know why I am doing this. This is no pleasant trip
down memory lane. I drive through the council estate that
leads into Barton Village. Living in Ashton, you could almost
forget that places like this exist, and yet this is the world
just forty-five minutes away. This is life. These are the people
I was at school with, and it could be me, too, but for chance
and determination.

At least there’s the odd field out here, and the hills alongside
the reservoir. Forbury seems almost rural, the houses
small, the cars even smaller. I drive past the turning of Fairview
Lane and turn down the road where we used to live, my
mum and dad and me. I drive past our old house; there’s a
huge builder’s skip in the driveway and a half-built extension
on the side. All those years I lived here and now it
belongs to someone else – it isn’t even familiar. My family
are scrubbed out, just as we are from the shop in the High
Street where my father and my grandfather sold carpets for
so many years. I drive up past here and I would never, ever
recognize the place. The pizza delivery bikes parked up outside,
the skinny, spotty boys clustered around smoking their cigarettes,
talking on their phones. It is so strange, how things
can be one thing for so long, and then so suddenly and so
quickly they are entirely gone.