This Perfect World (10 page)

Cathy was brilliant at keeping her face blank. To look at
her, you’d never know what she was doing under her desk,
not at all. Then suddenly her eyes would fill with tears – big,
blue eyes she had, like the Virgin Mary, and when she cried
her face still stayed impassive, not a muscle flickered. Those
tears just hovered on her lashes and rolled over.

Mostly we just did this in class, then at break we’d compare
our work and describe the pain and all wish that we could
be as composed as Cathy, and cry without having to sniff or
get red-eyed. But I started doing it at home, in my bedroom.
I’d sit cross-legged on my bed, in front of my mirror, and
watch my face as I cut myself. It became quite an obsession,
watching as my eyes registered the pain and absorbed it. I
told myself I was practising. I wanted the perfection of an
expressionless face; I wanted the power.

Once, I went too far.

Once, I was sitting on my bed and drawing a fine line
along the inside of my arm with a razor blade, just up from
the wrist, when I wondered what would happen if I pushed
the blade a little deeper in.

Now I know there is a whole network of veins in there
and I don’t know which one I split open, but the blood rose
up frighteningly easily. I watched it, pushing itself out, seeing
how far upwards it came before it flattened out and ran. I
held my arm out, keeping my hand down and turning it as
the blood trickled in rivers over my skin. I cupped my hand
to catch it, sickeningly warm, in my palm.

Calm, I was, at first; detached. I knew I wasn’t dying. The
blood was coming out too slow for me to be dying and the
cut was too high up, too slightly off-centre. But then it
dripped onto the floor, onto my nice cream carpet, and panic
flashed through me.

I clenched my fist, feeling the blood sticky between my
fingers, and ran downstairs. My dad was in the dining room;
he’d got the Sunday papers spread out over the table. He
looked up as I burst in. I shoved my wrist out in front of
me and instantly he was on his feet, knocking his chair back
to the floor, running after me. I turned and ran down the
hall, out of the house, racing barefoot down the drive, and
he was right behind me, chasing me, down the road and into
Fairview Lane.

I ran as fast as I could for that little distance, swept up
in my own hysteria, and then I stopped, right outside Heddy
Partridge’s house. My dad was right behind me. I wanted to
be caught now. I wanted to see the pain and fear on his face,
justifying my own, but when I turned I saw my dad’s feet in
just their socks and even though I wasn’t dying, I felt as
though I ought to be. I had to follow the drama somewhere
and, as my dad reached out to me, the heat rose up my limbs
in pins and needles, blackening into my head, and I let myself
fall.

Instantly my dad was there, lifting me up like I was five,
not fifteen. I heard his voice, but he was speaking to someone
else, not me; he was saying, ‘Let’s get her inside’, and someone
else was muttering, ‘Dear, dear, dear. Here, in here . . .’

I felt myself laid down, on a sofa. I kept my eyes glued
shut. I wanted to be dead, or nearly dead. I felt I owed it to
myself, to everyone now. But the blood was drying on my
arm, I could feel it, tightening up. Someone had got hold of
my hands; they turned them, carefully. I kept my arms limp,
not moving as cool water was washed over my stinging wrist,
then a cloth pressed down.

‘She’s okay,’ my dad said, and disappointment made me
open my eyes.

I was in Mrs Partridge’s front room. Heddy Partridge, her
brother Ian and a pile of old newspapers had been moved
off the sofa, to make room for me. The television was on,
far too loudly, even though Mr Partridge was dead and gone
now. Ian was still watching it, but Mrs Partridge, Heddy and
my dad were all looking at me.

The drama was over now, and I was in the wrong place.

And my dad was saying these weird, out-of-place things
now. He was saying, ‘How are you, Mrs Partridge? How are
you managing?’, as if she was the one in crisis, right now,
not me.

And she was saying back, ‘We get by. We get by.’

‘If there’s anything that you need . . .’ my dad said and I
shut my eyes again, tighter, wishing myself not okay, wishing
myself dead in fact, but with the sunken feeling that even
dead wouldn’t be enough. I felt hollowed out, pared down
to nothing.

My dad left me there while he went home to collect his
shoes, my mother and the car. My wrist had been wrapped
up in a yellowing old bandage. Mrs Partridge and Heddy
soon stopped watching me, and started watching the television
instead. Mrs Partridge perched on the arm of the sofa,
by my feet. Heddy stood beside Ian, feet planted wide apart,
stomach sticking out and arms folded, face blank. No one
sat in Mr Partridge’s empty chair.

I turned my face into the sofa to cut out the glare of the
television and I wished I could cut out the sound. The material
next to my face smelled of biscuits and socks. I was
humiliated beyond belief. This was no place to die, or not
to die.

My dad drove me to Casualty, with my mum in the front
next to him; no one said a word. There we waited among
the sprained ankles and chopped-off thumbs until a nurse
taped together the edges of my pathetic little cut. A doctor
told me that I would be referred to a counsellor, though I
could tell no one was really worried about my mind.

Back home I felt 100 per cent like the silly drama queen
I was. My dad settled down again to his paper, looking paler
and tired and in need of a whisky. My mother fetched him
one. Then my dad put down his paper again and looked at
me, and my mum stood beside him, looking at me too.

‘Why?’ my dad asked. Just,
Why?

Not
How are you?
, as he’d asked the Partridges. Not
How
are you managing?
Oh no. For me just this, this one word:
Why?

But I had no answer to give him, so I went up to bed and
tried to block it all out in the dark.

I lie right back in the water and stretch my arms out, palms
up. The scars on my arms are hair-thin. You’d hardly even
notice them, unless you looked. I told James I got them in
a childhood accident, falling through a glass door.

I had to go to see a counsellor in Redbridge for six weeks,
standard-issue course for an attempted suicide. I went on
Thursdays, leaving school ten minutes earlier than everyone
else to make sure I didn’t miss the bus. I told my friends I
was going to the chiropodist’s, to get my insteps sorted out.

The counsellor was a woman with long, straight black
hair, parted in the middle. She wore long skirts with matching
long cardigans and pendants on chains that hung low down
on her chest. We sat opposite each other on plastic chairs.
She had a clipboard and paper on her lap, as if she was
expecting to make a lot of notes.

‘Why do you feel the need to harm yourself?’ she asked,
and I’d try to make up reasons.

It struck me as absurd that I was supposed to tell a total
stranger what was going on in my mind.

The bath water is almost cold now and goosebumps are
creeping out on my chest. I sit up and pull out the plug. The
skin on my hands is swollen and wrinkled. I have been in
here far too long.

Why did I do it?

To see who would care, that’s why.

Arianne helps me in Sainsbury’s, but it wasn’t always like
that.

Now she is three she likes to be grown up; she brings her
own little pink plastic handbag and likes to help me by putting
things into the trolley. She looks very sweet with her white-blonde
curls and her pretty dress, and with her baby hands
picking up apples one by one to put them in the bag. Old
ladies stop and admire her. Arianne likes to be admired, now
that she is three.

A year ago, she couldn’t have cared less.

It used to be that the minute we pulled up in the car park
the whingeing would start, and by the time we got to the
trolley bay the foot-stamping would be under way. As soon
as we got inside the shop, all hell would be unleashed. She
wanted to sit in the trolley; she wanted to walk; she wanted
to sit in the trolley again. She wanted to carry the bread, but
then she’d throw it on the floor, scream. I’d pick it up, give
it back to her, down it would go again. I wouldn’t keep giving
her back something just to have her throw it down again if
I was at home or anywhere else, but in a supermarket you
do anything to try to stem the screaming. You’re powerless
in a supermarket, and children know this, even at two. You open packets of biscuits as bribery, putting the rest of the
packet carefully on top of your shopping so that people can
see you’re going to pay, you’re not a thief. I never thought
I’d end up doing that, but I did.

Once she wanted a banana, and I gave her one, keeping
the skin to show the woman on the checkout. I expected the
woman to charge me a nominal amount, whatever the average
price of a banana might be, but I had to suffer the humiliation
of the supervisor being called, and then I had two
disapproving faces looking me over as bananas were weighed
and a price worked out, while the woman in the queue
behind me tutted and Arianne screamed. I expect all three
of those women were mothers themselves, but it’s amazing
how quickly you forget what it’s like.

I pushed Arianne back out to the car while she screamed
and screamed, legs rigid, face on the verge of blue, and I
unloaded her and the shopping from the trolley. Then I sat
in the car and cried, with my hands over my face. She shut
up then, satisfied at last.

The irony was that I only went to the supermarket for
something to do. No one ever talks about that, do they –
about how desperate you are for something to do when
you’re stuck at home with a small child all day, day in, day
out? No one ever talks about the boredom, the loneliness.
My goodness me, no. What with the rounds of coffee mornings
and baby-gym mornings and music-time mornings . . .
how can it be that on the one morning of the week there’s
nothing on, you end up so desperate that you’d rather go to
the supermarket and have your child scream there than be
at home?

I didn’t always shop in Sainsbury’s. I used to go to Tesco,
before Arianne was born. Thomas was good, so I thought.
He didn’t scream the whole time. He’d sit quite content in
his trolley chair, no bother at all, while I got on with the
shopping. Sometimes I got strange looks from people, but I
put that down to some bizarre sort of jealousy, or curiosity
even; why wasn’t this child howling when all the others were?
But one day, as I was weighing out grapes, a woman whom
I had seen in there often, herself the mother of girls, glared
at me with a face profuse with outrage. She glared at me,
then pointedly she glared at Thomas in the trolley behind
me. When I turned round to look at him sitting in his trolley
seat, he’d managed to wriggle his shorts and his pants right
down and was pulling away on his newly nappy-free willy,
perfectly happy.

I didn’t go to Tesco again.

Now, of course, I get what I can delivered, but there are
still always all those things you forget, or run out of unexpectedly.
There are still those dark, pervading moments when
domesticity sucks you up because you’ve run out of something,
dishwasher tablets, peppercorns – something you didn’t
even think of when you put your order in. And it eats you
up, the need for that run-out-of thing, as if the security of
your whole little empire depends on it. So you think
I know,
let’s make a trip of it
, as if you’re some numb-headed halfwit,
lulled by the call of the fluorescent-lit aisles, the cloying,
pumped-out smell of baked bread. And so you end up there
again, back in the supermarket, pushing your trolley.

Today, as Arianne and I unload our things onto the conveyor
belt at the checkout I can hear some child screaming. In fact,
I’ve been hearing it for quite some time as we’ve been moving
around the aisles. There aren’t many people shopping on a
Monday morning and sound really travels in these places.
The screaming is getting closer now and the woman behind
the till and I exchange a look. Her expression tells me that
here comes yet another howling brat giving her a headache,
and what wouldn’t she do to shut it up! I cannot imagine
what my face says to her.

The unfortunate owner of the screaming child appears
from the frozen-foods aisle. Frantically she scans the tills for
the shortest queue, and decides on mine. She’s a young mother,
with greasy hair tied back from her face and tired, numb
eyes. She pushes the trolley one-handed, shoving her thin
body against it for extra leverage, as she tries to still her
child with the other hand. He’s pinching at her arm, then
he’s throwing himself backwards as far as he can within the
confines of the wire seat, twisting round, head flung back,
and screaming.

The woman parks her trolley up behind me and mutters,
‘Bloody pack it in, won’t you, Connor?’ Then she steps back
from the trolley and stands, face turned away from her child
and staring at the floor, eyes fixed on the tiles. If I was her,
I’d be in tears by now. Everyone is looking at her. You can
feel the disapproval rippling along from checkout to checkout.
The woman serving me lets her breath out on a long,
slow sigh as she passes my stuff across the scanner.

The child really is going for it. The pitch is unrelenting.
Arianne stops helping me and stares at him. He’s thrashing
around in his seat, wrestling against the straps that are holding
him in, trying to grab the sweets now, piled up in a dumper
bin right next to him at the end of the checkout. In a burst
of frustrated fury, his mother shoves the trolley, getting him
away from those sweets; then she’s back, arms folded, staring
at the floor. Arianne jumps slightly and holds on to my skirt.
I don’t want to seem to be staring, so I try to keep my eyes
down, as I pile up the last of my things onto the conveyor
belt. As I look down and up, down and up, I can’t help
noticing the contents of her trolley: it’s a sharp contrast to
mine. There’s not much in it, and no fresh stuff at all. Bread
and tins from the economy range, a couple of pizzas, three
jumbo bottles of Coke – buy two, get one free – some frozen
chips and a multi-bag of crisps.