The Idea of Perfection (40 page)

No, she started, but her voice seized up on the dust again.

She coughed, feeling him watching her.

No, she said. I’ll walk.

It was partly the dust, but she could hear how her voice sounded very thin and cold.

He stood there patiently with the dust in his eyebrows, the sun beating down on the thin sandy hair on his crown. His shirt was wrinkled and stuck to his chest with sweat and his shorts were loose around his skinny legs.

She realised she feared him, as being a man too easy to do violence to. Or was it herself she feared?

She clamped the hat down tighter on her head against the wind so the brim hid her eyes. Now she could see only his boots, standing in the dust, and his hands dangling defencelessly.

It’s too hot, he said. Let me take you.

But before he had finished, a cold stern voice, from which the dust had gone, spoke out of her mouth, out of her stunted and dangerous heart.

I’ll walk, thanks.

He received this like a large ball thrown at his head: turned aside, blinked. A blast of wind gusted into his face, laden with the pale dust, and he closed his eyes against it.

He went on standing there while she walked around him and on up the road past the ute. She kept the hat down. She could see the edge of the brim, and the road moving past her feet.

He drove past so slowly it seemed to take hours, and so far on the other side of the road she could hear the tyres snapping against stones on the verge. She did not look at him, but put her shoulders further back and got her chin up like someone enjoying their constitutional. A fly, excited by the expanse of sweaty cheek and nose, harassed her but she would not turn, would not acknowledge the white ute creeping along on the far side of the road. Even when it had passed, drawing its funnel of yellow dust behind it, she continued to stride along through the haze of fine dust as if she did not notice it.

Only when the ute was out of sight round the next bend did she put down her basket, take her hat off, flail it at the fly, wipe the sweat off her forehead. A crow whined sardonically and she turned to frown at it.

 

 

The river fell down a short rock-face and turned a dogleg corner, and there, hidden in the armpit of the hill, was a big dark body of still water that sucked the sunlight down into itself.

She had vaguely imagined a clear blue pool out of a picture-book. She had not expected it to be this dirty brown, with the wind roughening the surface so that it looked solid. Sparks of white sunlight glinted and winked harshly against the ripples.

The far bank rose up steeply, covered with dense bush that was tossing itself around frantically in the wind. So many leaves clashing together made a brittle sweeping sound.

She was standing on a kind of beach of pale rounded stones, where a few stunted she-oaks struggled up and cast thin patches of shade. In every blast of the hot wind, the trees whistled and hissed with a noise like fire.

When she picked up a rock and hurled it towards the pool, it disappeared into the water with hardly a splash. The wind gusted over the place, rubbing out the ripples.

Awkwardly she sat down on the stones, her legs sticking out stiffly in front of her. The stones were not made for sitting on. A fly hovered near her eye and she flapped at it irritably. It circled back and tried the other eye. She flapped it away again. It avoided her hand, but languidly, unconcerned. It could do it all day, circle and land, circle and land. It could go on for ever. She could not.

Even in the shade, the heat beat up from the bleached stones. The sun was a solid malevolent weight and the wind brought no coolness. Sweat had stuck her shirt to her back and made her toes slimy in her sandals. Everywhere she looked her eyes met glare.

She had planned to swim naked. She had imagined it: the clear blue pool, framed by graceful drooping branches, herself, her skin sliding through the water.

But she did not want to undress here, or go into the pool. It was the wind, and the roughness of the water, and the ugly darkness of it. It was the trees tossing themselves around angrily, and the way the sun fell so harshly out of the sky.

Trudging back the way she had come was an exhausting prospect. She imagined it.
How was your swim?
She was not quite sure who she heard asking the question. Coralie, it could have been. Or him. Douglas, the engineer.
How was your swim?
She would have to admit that she had walked all that way and then come back without going in the water.

She turned suddenly and stared across the pond as if she had heard someone calling, but the wind blew on indifferently, covering everything with its noise.

She had made a mistake. She was prepared to admit that. But she could not go on sitting there, with a fly circling and landing, circling and landing. She bent forward and took her sandals off, then stood up to undo her skirt, teetering awkwardly on the stones.

The dog, lying panting in another patch of thin shade, watched as she stretched her tee-shirt down. The stones were hot, and nasty to walk on, but she made her way over to where a flat brown rock jutted into the pool, and sat down with her feet dangling into the water.

On such a hot day, it should have been pleasant to have your feet in a river, but the water was too cold, the air too hot. Her body, happy only in such a narrow band of temperature, felt fragile. Too hot, too cold: either one was fatal.

The dog was splashing along between the rocks on the edge of the pool. Its wet paw-prints on the dry rocks vanished as soon as they were made.

It glanced over at her, panted, licked its nose, then as if setting an example it waded purposefully into the water and began to swim towards the other side. She could only see the top of its head, cutting through the water, leaving behind a vee of ripples. A dandelion head skimmed along the water, rolling along the surface, very white against the heavy brown.

Quickly, like downing medicine, she slid over the edge of the rock into the water, feeling with her feet for the bottom but not touching anything. Under the water her body was an unfamiliar amber shape that shadowed away into darkness, the tee-shirt ballooning up around her armpits. When she held up a hand it looked like someone else‘s, sallow in the metallic light reflected from the surface.

The cold slowly wrapped itself around her. The further down into the water you penetrated, the colder it got.

She stroked slowly across the pool, parting the water quietly in front of her. At every stroke she could feel it painting itself against her skin, washing another layer of warmth off her body. She swam shallowly, keeping herself up out of the colder depths. It was thin and slippery water that seemed to draw her down, rather than buoy her up, so that her movements felt laboured, as if she had forgotten how to swim.

She paused to rest, treading water. Down in the darkness beneath, her feet were gripped by the cold. Moving them was like pushing heavily through some thick dull substance.

In front of her, a duck spread its wings, thrust its webbed feet out ahead of it, and skidded into the water with a hiss. Its invisible feet pedalled quickly, propelling it along as secretively as if on ball-bearings. The reptilian head turned this way and that, and for a moment the tiny round eye stared coldly at her.

She seemed to be a long way from the bank. It was an effort to go on treading this thin water. She seemed to be pedalling away furiously, just to keep her chin above the surface, and her legs were tiring. The tee-shirt was a dead weight now, dragging at her shoulders.

She looked back to the bank, where the basket and the towel were crisp-edged miniature things and trees cast confusing shadows on the rounded stones. The brown water seemed to have done something to her eyes that made the world look colourless.

Along the bank there were many shifting shadows, but none of them was the dog. The emptiness of the pond was suddenly frightening. It was as if she was the only living creature in the world. It was just herself and her shaky heart.

Alone had always seemed like freedom. Suddenly it seemed like a life sentence.

Hey, she called.

The sound rose up thin and silly from the surface of the water, a grasshopper voice under the big empty sky. It was swept away, rubbed out by a gust of wind that shivered across the pool and puckered the steely surface. Three ducks flew up suddenly with a great clatter of wings.

Now that she had stopped moving, the cold was penetrating her body, cell by cell replacing warmth and energy with a numb inertia. Weakness was spreading up her legs, along her arms, into her shoulders. Cold closed around her chest like a hand. Her legs were stuck in something too dense and resistant to kick, her arms had become ponderous.

Something seemed to be going wrong with her breathing, too, as if sandbags were pressing in on her from all sides. She felt her mouth straining open for the air she needed to keep the legs moving, the arms circling, the heart believing in its mission. She could hear her breathing, in and out of her mouth, like someone else’s: ragged, rasping, on the edge of panic.
Unh, unh,
she heard herself. It was like a plea.
Unh. Unh.

Hearing herself, she was frightened.

Help, she called, without conviction.

The noise of the wind and the water and the leaves scraping against each other flowed back smoothly over the word as if it had never been.

It was like being on two different planets: her head was up in blasts of hot air, her body was in the unmoving cold of the water. When a gust of wind hit her in the face like a blow she let her head slip below the surface.

Underwater was a serene and silent amber world, hung with languid fragments of leaf and twig that eddied away from her hand. After the torment of the wind, it was peaceful.

It seemed that the water was making an inviting space within itself. She did not feel cold any more, only weak. Legs and arms floated at a great remove from her. Messages from the brain did not seem strong enough to overcome the paralysis that had settled into her body. She imagined it, like a dye, a softness working its way into every cell.

It did not seem to be like having an
infarction.
There was no pain, spreading like lava along her limbs. There was no struggle. There was only a feeling of yielding to the inevitable.

Like this?
she thought in amazement.
This? Now?

No one would ever find the body in this unmeasured water. There would just be her sandals on the bank, and the picnic basket. The dog, too, perhaps, panting towards the place where her hand had come up for the last time.

Not my heart, after all,
she thought, and wanted to laugh.

It was a shame there was no one to share the joke with.

They might even think she had done it on purpose,
taken her own life,
drowned it like a bag of unwanted kittens.

She had thought about it, in the past, when things got complicated: how much simpler it would be to just go out the back and shoot herself. It had seemed a simple solution, even rather romantic.

But that was before Philip had
taken his own life.
People did not understand that if a person had driven a man to
take his own life,
they no longer had that option for themselves. They had to go on living with themselves, doing their best not to remember certain things too clearly, until they died
of natural causes.

Not remembering was harder than you would think. It took up a great deal of energy, and even then, memories sliced through the not-remembering, as sharp as ever. The saw, for example. It had stopped before it got all the way through his neck. It had jammed in his spinal column. The high whine of the straining motor was what had taken her to the shed in the end, and when she pushed the door open the first thing she noticed was the melted-plastic smell of an electric motor seizing up.

At first glance she had thought it was an accident, and her scream had been an angry one, that the machine had done this to him. When she saw the string he had rigged up, and the ingenious arrangement of pulleys and counterweights to pull him down on to the blade, it was not possible to let it in. Her insides had erupted out of her mouth, had gone on and on in spasms, rejecting it.

She pushed the memory away, as she had been doing for all those years, but as she pushed, she saw something new in it. If she drowned now, it would turn out that Douglas would be the last person to see her alive. He would probably be called on for evidence.
She was walking along the road,
he would tell them.
That was the last I saw of her.
She could imagine it, the bewildered look on his face.
I wanted to give her a lift,
he would keep telling them.
But she said sheil
rather
walk.

They would turn out to be her last words, what she had said to him.
I’ll walk, thanks.
She had looked into his face — the last face she would ever see — and spoken those words, and had seen him recoil as if from an unexpected missile.

Those words could sound like proof.
Wanted to be on her own,
they would explain to each other.
To take her own life.

It brought her back to it again: he would be the last person to have seen her alive. She knew what that meant, to be the one left looking at a space where someone had recently been. Philip had just gone out to the shed, after dinner, the way he often did. She had tried to remember the dinner, the conversation, what she had said, what tone she might have used. She could have been more enthusiastic, perhaps, could have shown more interest, could have made sure it was all soft and coaxing. Perhaps she should have lit the candles.

But it had just been a normal family dinner. The boys had argued over the last potato, and been full of a toy that the boy down the road had, some kind of new water-pistol that could squirt the water all the way from his front gate to theirs.