This Perfect World (30 page)

And yet she knows, I’m sure of it.

The shame blossoms inside of me. Every part of me is
stained.

Meanwhile, back in my own little world, it comes to my
attention that Tasha has sent out the invitations to her housewarming
party. I can’t help but notice this because, as well
as the usual flurry around the forthcoming end-of-term extravaganzas
at school and at nursery, there is additional
excitement, a
buzz
, if you like, centred on Tasha. Every time
I
see
Tasha these days she’s got Fiona Littlewood fawning
all over her, and giving her the benefit of her advice on everything
from canapés to glass hire to godforsaken patio heaters.
And Tasha just laps it up. Everywhere I go there are women
twittering away like birds, and it’s
Tasha this
and
Tasha that
,
like they have a little competition going on to see who can
say her name the most.

Tasha, our own little celebrity, with her big house and
her rich husband, famous around here just for being
Tasha. Everyone wants to be Tasha’s friend. So, of course,
did I.

Even Belinda has an invitation. She tries to collar me at
nursery with her schedules and her lists, and there it is,
pinned to the front of her clipboard. Like a badge, for all to
see. How proud she must be.

Two weeks ago it would have pissed me off no end that Belinda has an invitation and I don’t, but now do I care? Do
I?

Of course I do, just a little.

Then Arianne tells me that Phoebe doesn’t want to be best
friends any more.

‘But I don’t mind,’ she says, her little face all serious. ‘I
can be best friends with Sophie now instead. She’s got red
shoes
and
a pet rabbit.’

Arianne, so innocent, so unaware of the ways of our world.
I think how I steered her as I steered myself, keeping us up
there where I thought it mattered.

‘Well, it’s good to make new friends,’ I say to Arianne
now, and I talk to her about choosing them wisely, and for
the right reasons. Advice I could have done with myself.

But Thomas is not so easily consoled, and cries at night
because he’s got no one to play with at lunchtime. ‘I want
to play football,’ he sobs. ‘But Milo won’t let me.’

‘Why is it up to Milo?’ I ask.

‘He says it’s his game.’

‘Well, can’t you play with some other boys?’

But Thomas says, ‘All the boys play football. Except for me.’

And I cannot have that.

So I do what I should have done already. I speak to Mrs
Hills.

I say, ‘I don’t like to make a fuss, but this has been upsetting
me for quite some time. This really isn’t the sort of
school where language like [I mouth it]
fuck-head
is acceptable.
I do not expect my child to hear, and repeat, words
like that at school. I’m sorry, Mrs Hills, but I really do feel
you need to speak to the mother. And really, I think this is
a matter for the headmaster, don’t you? After all, Mr Littlewood is a governor and, really, do you think that is the
kind of example we expect from a governor of this school?’

Poor Mrs Hills has no choice but to agree, and it fills me
with cold satisfaction to arrive early to collect Thomas on
the Friday of that week and see Fiona Littlewood summoned
in for a word. I would love, so dearly love, to hang around
and see her face when she comes out again, but that would
be too crass. I have to content myself with imagining it, and
imagine it I do.

I write a letter to the headmaster too, explaining my distress
at my child being bullied so by the son of a governor, and
also that a governor should abuse his position in such a way
rather than remaining professional, and impartial, always.

It works like a dream.

Peter Littlewood is no longer a governor. I know this,
because a note comes around asking for nominees for a new
one.

Soon afterwards, a note comes round looking for a new
head of the PTA. Fiona Littlewood has resigned, in defence
of her husband. The end-of-term celebrations are in chaos. I
see Fiona standing, arms folded, in the playground at pickup
time, with a look on her face like a pinched squirrel. It
is not a look that Tasha would enjoy seeing over lunch.

Am I a little over-the-top here, in doing this? Maybe.

Does it make me feel any better? Yes, it does, a little, for
a while.

Now everyone wants to know why Fiona Littlewood has
resigned from the PTA, and of course she isn’t going to tell
them. So I carefully let it out that I know. It’s amazing, then,
how many people suddenly want to talk to me again.

I don’t tell them, though. I let them sweat. And I watch
as they rush about the playground like hens, fevered up with
speculation, busy jostling for position.

Always jostling, jostling.

And then I run into Tasha; she’s coming out of nursery with
Phoebe, just as I’m going in. And in the second before she
hides it, I see something like panic crossing her face. Like
what does she do now? Ignore me, drag up the whole asylum-seekers
thing again, or try to act like nothing’s happened?

She makes a poor attempt at the last.

‘Laura,
hi
,’ she says, just so much friendlier than she’s been
for a long time. ‘Haven’t seen you for
ages
.’

‘Well, no,’ I say,
equally
friendly back. ‘I’ve been very busy
actually.’

‘Really?’ Tasha says. ‘What have you been doing?’ And it
is so obvious that she thinks I can’t have been doing
anything
if I haven’t been having lunch and coffee with her.

‘I’ve been helping that family, you know, the one with the
girl I was at school with. The one who had the mental breakdown.
You remember, I told you about her?’ I say this straight,
as if I expect her to remember, though it’s quite clear to me
that she doesn’t. I mean, why should she remember something
as unimportant to her own little world as that?

‘Oh,’ she lies. ‘Yes, of course.’ And then she starts searching
in her handbag, and out comes my invitation to her party,
at last. ‘I’ve been meaning to give you this,’ she says, presenting
it to me like a prize. ‘Only I wasn’t sure if you’d want to
come.’

‘Oh, right,’ I say. ‘Thanks.’ And I stick it in my bag and
forget all about it.

They leave in dribs and drabs.

Most of their stuff is for the bin: old sheets and bits of
curtain kept just in case, endless odd mixing bowls and
baking trays with literally decades of blackened fat crusted
into the corner, school books and worn-out shoes and, would
you believe it, Heddy’s old Brownie dress. There’s even an
ancient suitcase full of Mr Partridge’s old trousers stuffed
under Ian’s bed and forgotten about. I’m there when Mrs
Partridge opens the suitcase up and finds them all; I hear her
sharp, indrawn breath and the clatter of her teeth as her chin
starts to wobble. And I see her face, raw with shock. She
takes those trousers out, and she folds them again, smoothing
them down with her brittle hands. And I think if it wasn’t
for my being there as a misplaced witness, she’d be gathering
them up in her arms and burying her face into their
smell and crying.

As I am crying, just having to watch.

I try not to let her see, but all of this is
heartbreaking
.
Seeing the way Mrs Partridge so carefully sifts through the
hoarded-up scraps of her life, I realize that every frayed little
bit is precious to her.
Everything
is a memory to Mrs Partridge.
All this junk, all this rubbish . . . it’s her
world
.

I want to help her, but what help am I, coming over with
my Sainsbury’s boxes and saying you can keep only this
much?

Downstairs Heddy sits on the sofa in that hideous blue
sack of a dress that is the only thing that fits her, with her
hair looking as though it hasn’t been washed once in the
whole week since she came home, and she watches TV. And
when the TV is gone, she watches the space where it was.

And Nathan, when he comes in from school, sits on the
floor near his mother and watches her as if he doesn’t know
quite what to make of her, now he’s got her back.

Every now and again Mrs Partridge finds something upstairs
that she wants to show Heddy. ‘Oh, look at this!’ she cries.
‘Heddy, it’s that old Christmas tree we had before we got
the white one, do you remember?’ Or ‘Look, Heddy, here’s
that hot-water bottle cover I knitted you because your feet
got cold. Oh, look, Heddy, it’s still got the hot-water bottle
in it, and it’s still filled . . .’

Up and down the stairs Mrs Partridge scurries, bringing
Heddy this thing to see, and that thing, and leaving stuff on
her lap until Heddy is piled up like a jumble-sale table.

And Heddy just sits there, and does nothing to help, and
says not a word.

We stack the boxes against the wall in Mrs Partridge’s
bedroom, until there is barely room for her to get into her
bed. She doesn’t want them in Heddy’s room in case it upsets
her, though I don’t see why it would, and Nathan sleeps in
the boxroom; no room in there for anything anyway, apart
from his bed and the few clothes and toys upon the floor.

Mrs Partridge’s room is Heddy’s old room – they’ve
swapped around. They’ve swapped beds too, so that Mrs Partridge lies alone at night in a single bed squashed up
against the wall, while Heddy gets the double in the bigger
room, the better to take her weight.

I wonder how Heddy feels, having to sleep in her parents’
old bed, the bed in which her father lay and coughed and
slowly died. And it is the same bed, I’m sure. It has to be. It’s
so old that with the covers pulled straight, as they are now, I
can see how the mattress sags in the middle. And I see how
Mrs Partridge sits herself down on the edge of the bed now,
hands absently, lovingly smoothing over the blanket at her
sides, as she looks around the near-bare room. How many
memories can there be for her here in this one room? She sits
with her thin shoulders hunched up slightly, and her head tilted
to one side. Her eyes are glassy bright, and I look away and
concentrate on stuffing Heddy’s old clothes into bin bags.
Clothes that should be going to the recycling, but Mrs Partridge
won’t hear of it. Mrs Partridge won’t go throwing away perfectly
good clothes, no matter that they don’t fit anyone any more.

‘My Heddy was born in this room,’ she says suddenly and
her voice wobbles over the words. ‘We would have gone to
the hospital, but Mr Partridge was out working and we didn’t
have a phone back then, and by the time I’d gone next door
to use theirs, and by the time we’d tracked Mr Partridge
down and called the ambulance – well, my Heddy was on
her way by then.’ She laughs a fragile laugh as she speaks,
but she’s sniffing too, and digging around inside her sleeve
for a bit of tissue, which she rubs across her eyes with a
trembling hand. ‘Dear, dear,’ she says, ‘look at me being all
silly.’ And she stands up, shoving that tissue back up her
sleeve and patting her hands briskly against her thighs before
getting back to the sorting, the folding, the stuffing into
boxes of all this musty, dust-covered
stuff
.

I shouldn’t
be
here.

We find Heddy’s old school reports. I can’t bring myself to
look at them for even a second, and stick them in a box before
Mrs Partridge sees them. And a photo, of all of us, in our last
year of junior school. I know that photo. My parents have a
copy of it. I’m there in the front row near the centre, my
blonde hair cut shoulder-length and tucked back behind one
ear. Is Heddy in it? I guess she must be, somewhere.

My throat is so tight I can barely speak. ‘Mrs Partridge,
I really am so sorry . . .’

‘Sorry, dear?’ Her hands work fast, shaking out and folding,
pulling off stray bits of fluff.

‘I’m sorry for all the times that I wasn’t nice to Heddy.’
What feeble words I use. ‘When we were children.’

‘Your parents have always been very kind to us, Laura,
and for that I am very grateful.’

‘Yes, but I wasn’t kind. They kept forcing Heddy and me
together and I was
horrible
.’ My heart is pounding. ‘Mrs
Partridge, why did you never tell them what I did?’

Mrs Partridge’s face is very pale, but there are two dark-red
dots rising on her cheeks. ‘I’m sure your parents only
wanted the best for you, Laura,’ she says. In her hands she
holds a single blue woollen glove, from which she carefully
unpicks a loose thread, and snaps it off, fast, between her
fingers. ‘Just as I wanted the best for my Heddy.’

And did wanting the best for Heddy mean accepting the
kindness of my parents, in the hope that it was real? Kindness
is never kindness if it comes at such a price.

Why could we not just have kept well away?

For a week, Ian chugs back and forth along the motorway
in his van to take away the wardrobe, the boxes, the TV and the various carpets all rolled up like sausages, until the last
day, when he makes several trips one after another, until there
is nothing left but the sofa with Heddy sitting on it and the
kettle and two cups. It is a Thursday; the schools have broken
up now, and I am here with my children, to say goodbye.
They’re out the front, playing on a mattress that’s been left
for the council. And Ian and Mrs Partridge are outside too,
trying to work out if they can squeeze the sofa into the van
now or if Ian will have to come back for it, and there’s just
me and Heddy left inside.

The house smells strange now that there is so little in it.
I mean stranger than usual, like it’s been flossed out like a
set of dirty teeth. And the stains behind the furniture are
so stark now they’re revealed, like yellow nakedness. Fluff
clings along the skirting boards and it seems that you can
hear the noise from right down the end of the street, now
that the carpets have gone.