This Perfect World (2 page)

It used to happen all the time, people badgering him for
advice over things like parking-ticket disputes or bothersome
neighbours, especially when he was newly qualified. We’d go
to dinner parties and as soon as people found out he was
a lawyer, there’d always be someone bombarding him with
their problems, or trying to catch him out with a trick
question.

Of course it doesn’t happen much any more. These days
when we go to dinner parties the other guests are mostly
lawyers, and wives of lawyers, or bankers, and wives of
bankers. It’s like a club we’ve sold up into.
People like us
,
James said when we were thinking of buying this house.
People like us live here
.

And Mrs Partridge and Heddy, they are from a different
world.

*

This is the quiet hour, before James comes home.

The children are in bed; the house is silent and the supper
prepared. Normally I’d pour myself a glass of wine and curl
up on the sofa and read for a while, cherishing the peace.
But tonight I have no peace because Mrs Partridge has broken
it. Mrs Partridge is in my head and Heddy Partridge is back
in my life.

Helen Audrey Partridge. There, the girl is so under my
skin that I can even remember her middle name. I can remember
some moment from the juniors, years ago, when we
all had to tell our middle names, and God help you if yours
was something weird, something old-fashioned, named after
a grandmother or something awful. God help you then, and
God help Heddy. Hers wasn’t the worst by any means, but
it got the loudest laugh, the longest laugh.

Heddy Audrey Partridge. God knows why they called her
Heddy instead of Helen, but everyone did. I can picture us
all now, standing in the playground in a synchronized circle
with Heddy in the middle, and reciting so carefully, so slowly,
with all the movements perfectly timed:

I tells
(touch the eye, touch the mouth)
Heddy
(point to the head, of course)
Smells
(hold the nose, wave away that stink).

I was the genius who worked out that little rhyme, and
how clever we all thought I was. I remember Heddy standing
there and letting us sing this to her. I remember her bashful
face, her hating it and loving it – loving the attention, however
absurd.

I wasn’t cruel. God, I hope I wasn’t cruel. I was a
child
.

She smelled of digestive biscuits. I said this to my friend,
when we were tiny still, back in the infants, and she said it
was because Heddy weed in her bed every night, and never
changed the sheets.

‘Then how do they dry?’ I asked, and I wondered if it was
true. I wondered it every time I was near her and smelled
that smell. Nobody ever stood very close to Heddy in assembly.

‘Heddy P smells of wee,’ my friend said, and soon the boys
started saying it too, and they went on saying it, right through
the juniors.

Heddy Audrey Partridge. Pant-wetter extraordinaire. God,
I could tell you a million things about that girl, but the thing
that sticks in my mind most of all – the thing that makes
me loathe her above all else – is the time she pissed herself
at ballet. When I think of Heddy, I think of that. I see her
plump body with its round belly and its mini-breasts, stuffed
into her leotard and tights. I see her lumbering along behind
the rest of us, slower than the rest of us. I see her getting
her steps wrong and Madame getting impatient with her
again. I hear Madame saying, ‘Come on, come on, please try,
Helen. We are a nymph, not a nincompoop . . .’

Then we were in our circle and Heddy was all over the
place, feet everywhere, and Madame was getting crosser and
crosser, and Heddy was getting clumsier and clumsier. Suddenly
there was the sound of water hitting the floor, and we
all looked at Heddy and there she was, standing with her
feet somewhere between fourth and fifth position, with a
stream of pee pouring down between her legs. She pissed like
an elephant. Loads of it, coming straight down, while we
all stopped our steps and watched, transfixed, horrified.
I remember the embarrassment, turning my insides over. I
remember Heddy’s face, moon-shaped and blank, her eyes
both bright and empty, like a rabbit’s.

We were ten years old.

On and on it went, and we couldn’t do anything until it
stopped. Even Madame was caught in stone, her ceaseless
instructions suspended. It started spreading out across the
floor. The girl next to Heddy had to quickly move away and
someone giggled. Madame regained her control, said
Okay,
girls, class is nearly over
and carried on with her one two
three, one two threes. We moved our feet and our arms, but
we were all looking at Heddy. I was looking at Heddy, and
I was feeling a loathing so strong that it shocked me. She
stood still, feet planted in her puddle, with the wet patch
visible on her leotard, a dark triangle at the top of her fat,
wet thighs.

You could see the look of relief on Madame’s face when
she could dismiss us at last, and then the whispering started.
Our coats were at the back of the hall, hanging up on pegs.
Heddy’s was an anorak. She put it on and it only just covered
her bottom. Then she stood there looking back across the
hall at the trail of footprints she’d left, and she waited for
me.

‘Pull your coat down,’ I snapped as she got into the
back of my dad’s car. ‘And make sure you’re sitting on it.’ I
noticed exactly how much of her was covered by that anorak
and exactly how much of her horrible self was in contact
with the seat of the car, and I swore I would never, ever sit
on that side again – not ever.

I hated that we had to give Heddy a lift to ballet, and to
Brownies too. I wouldn’t have minded so much if it had been
Melissa or Claire, but why Heddy?

‘Because she wouldn’t be able to go if she didn’t have a
lift,’ my dad would answer, irritated, for the umpteenth time.

Well,
good
, I’d think. I didn’t want her at ballet or
Brownies. I didn’t want her always there, following along
behind me like a lost dog. It was embarrassing. People might
start thinking I was her friend. Just to make sure they didn’t,
I’d leap out of the car before Heddy, leaving her to say
goodbye to my dad and shut the door, and I’d run on in to
the Brownie hut or the village hall where we did ballet, and
I’d ignore her for the whole time we were there. Pointedly.
One hour at ballet on Saturday afternoons. One and a half
hours at Brownies on Thursday nights. I’d see her standing
on her own with her long, dopey face and I’d dismiss her; I
was too cross with her to care. And when it was time to go
home again she’d annoy me even more, hanging around me
when I just wanted to chat with my friends and say goodbye.

I didn’t see why we had to give Heddy a lift at all. I didn’t
see why we had to even
know
the Partridges. But my mum
said that Mr and Mrs Partridge had always lived in Forbury
and that Mrs Partridge had done a lot to help other people
when she was younger, looking after other people’s children
and calling on the old people, that sort of thing, and now
Mrs Partridge herself was in need of a bit of help. ‘And I
really don’t think it’s too much to ask that you try to be nice
to poor Heddy Partridge, either,’ she said, yet again.

Once, I dared say that it
was
too much to ask. ‘But I don’t
like her,’ I wailed. ‘She’s stupid and she
smells
.’

My mum flinched, visibly. And for a second I thought I
saw something like pity flash across her face, and I thought
that maybe I was getting somewhere, because I thought that
pity was for me. But then she trussed her face back up into
its usual sanctimonious mask, closed the kitchen door so that
my dad wouldn’t hear and hissed at me, ‘A long time ago
Mr Partridge used to work for your father sometimes, fitting
carpets. Well, for Grampy, really. Grampy was still in charge
then. Your father was in the office, but it was still Grampy’s
business.’ She spoke fast, as if she wanted to tell me and
didn’t want to tell me. And she stared at me, hard – like I
was supposed to have a clue what she was going on about.
On her cheeks there were red mottled splodges of anger. ‘Mr
Partridge was a good and loyal worker,’ she snapped. ‘And
I really think that the least we can do is give that poor girl
a lift sometimes.’

As if that was answer enough – which to me, when I was
only eight or nine or whatever I was, it wasn’t.

We used to own Forbury Floors, in the High Street. It was
a family business; my grandfather set it up and then my dad
took it over.

God knows what Grampy would say if he could see it
now; it’s a pizza takeaway. My dad sold up, before they went
to Devon. I don’t think he got all that much for it in the
end; that’s partly why they had to downsize. Though my
mum would die rather than ever admit that, of course.

The Partridges lived near us, in the little road that separated
our road from the council estate; Tin Town, we all called the
estate, because the council houses were prefabs, slapped up
after the Second World War. Heddy didn’t live in a prefab,
she lived in one of only two tiny cottages on their own, the
only two houses in her street. Next to them was open space
and overgrown bushes backing onto the reservoir, wasteland,
fenced off, and next to that was Tin Town. Fairview Lane,
Heddy’s road was called, which is ironic, because there was
nothing very fair about the view from her house.

She was never ready when we picked her up. We’d always
have to park up outside her house and my dad would send
me to call for her, and I’d have to run up the pathway to
her door while the dogs next door barked at me. They had
a bell that chimed the first three notes of the national anthem,
and those long, multicoloured plastic strips hanging down,
just inside the door, like a curtain. Heddy’s mother or her
stupid lump of a brother would open the door and I’d have
to go inside, and those strips would smack me in the face as
I parted my way through them.

The house always smelled of eggs and the fat they were
fried in. Heddy was never ready; she was always upstairs,
hunting for a shoe or her scarf or something, and I’d have
to go into the living room and wait while Mrs Partridge
yelled up the stairs for Heddy to hurry up, as Heddy’s brother
slouched on the sofa and stared at me. They always had the
TV on too loud and the gas fire up too high, for the benefit
of Mr Partridge, who’d had to give up work because of his
chest and now sat all the time in his chair, getting smaller
and paler and more and more deaf. He died not long after
we started at secondary school. My parents went to his funeral.
And I remember looking at Heddy soon after, to see if she
looked any different. She didn’t. She looked just as dopey as
ever.

Fleetingly I imagined how I would feel if my dad died,
and panic spread across my chest – cold, terrifying. But it
wasn’t the same. You couldn’t attribute the same feelings to
Heddy.

And now poor Heddy is in a mental hospital, closed in,
spent out.

It would seem that poor Heddy did have some feelings
after all.

The next day I take Thomas to school and head straight on
to nursery with Arianne. Tuesday mornings are always a
rush; I’ve a yoga class at nine-thirty and the traffic is usually
dreadful first thing.

The nursery is run by Carole, in a huge old house in
Gloucester Road. It’s actually called Les Petits Génies –
there’s a big sign out the front with the letters all in bright
colours – but you feel just a tiny bit self-conscious saying
that all the time, so we tend to just call it nursery or Carole’s.
Everyone in Ashton wants to send their children here, but
only some are successful. There’s a waiting list like you
wouldn’t believe, and then there’s the interview to pass. I did
hear a rumour that Carole is thinking of setting an entrance
exam, which has got to be the world gone mad, though I
wouldn’t say that to my friends, of course. Nor they to me.
Just like no one says it’s madness to send three-year-olds
home with homework every week, and to grade them at the
end of term.

No, we don’t say anything because we are the lucky ones,
and everyone else can see our little darlings with their Petits
Génies purple book bags and know that we are the lucky
ones. As in all areas of life, it is better to be in than out. So
Arianne is in, on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, nine-fifteen
until two with a good lunch included, and the odd
extra hour here and there. Carole is flexible like that. With
the fees she charges, she can afford to be.

Carole is marvellous; we say that to each other often,
Penny, Tasha, Liz and I. Marvellous; the children are getting
such
a good start.

Penny pulls up outside Carole’s in her Land Rover with
Sam in the back, just as I’m pulling away. I honk my horn
to get her attention. ‘Speak to you later,’ we both mouth
simultaneously at each other through our windscreens as I
drive past.

The traffic isn’t too bad on the back roads, but once I’m
up on the High Street I get stuck in the queue for the lights.
It’s always the same here. It can take ten minutes sometimes
just to clear the lights. You’d be better off walking, if you
had the time. I check my mirrors for police cars and phone
Liz on my mobile to see if we can put coffee back half an
hour, because I’m going to have to dash into town straight
after yoga to get the stuff for Thomas’s book-week outfit.

As it is, I still end up running late. There’s a bit of a furore
after the class because one of the women is thinking of
buying a bread-making machine and isn’t sure which sort
would be best. Should she go for the top-of-the-range deluxe
model with slow-bake and fast-bake, simulated kneading
facility, plus an option for muffins and buns? Or should she
go for the slightly smaller model, which doesn’t do the muffins
and buns, but does come in a stainless-steel finish and would
therefore sit so well in her kitchen?