Perfect (13 page)

The young couple insist on taking another minicab and dropping him at the estate. They refuse to accept his money. Paula tells Darren about a number of accidents she has witnessed, including a real-life pile-up on the motorway and the burning of her friend’s ear with hair tongs. Jim is so tired he can think of nothing but sleep. His fold-out bed seems to take shape in the dark, along with his blankets and pillow. He can hear the squeak of its hinges.

Once they have passed the sign welcoming careful drivers, the Green and the skate ramps, he asks to get out.

‘But where’s your van?’ says Paula, peering at the tightly packed houses and the Christmas lights pulsing all over Cranham Village, like fast blue headaches. Jim points towards the cul-de-sac. He lives right at the end, he says, where the road stops and the moor takes over. Beyond his van, the black branches of the trees tremble as a gust of wind takes up.

Paula says, ‘We could take you inside. We could put the kettle on.’

‘You might need help,’ says Darren.

But Jim declines. No one has ever been inside his van. It is the deepest part of himself, the part that no one must see. And thinking this, he is aware of a searing pain that is like a fresh rift between him and the rest of the world.

‘Sure you’ll be OK?’ calls Darren.

Jim nods because he cannot move his mouth to speak. He waves to the minicab driver to show that he is all right, that he is happy.

Beyond the estate, the moor looms dark and solid. Timeless layers of earth and grass have been ground to stone. An old moon shines over the land and a thousand million stars send points of light across the years. If the land
stretched now, opened right up and swallowed the houses, the roads, the pylons, the lights, there would be no memory of anything human. There would be only the dark, sleeping hills and the ancient sky.

The minicab makes its way past the Green, its tail lamps glowing. Turning the corner, it is gone with a snap and there is only Jim, watching the dark.

W
HEN THE SECRET
came out it was by mistake. It spoke itself. It was like having a dog that ran into other people’s gardens before you could do anything about it; except that they had no dog, of course, because pet hair made his father sneeze.

His mother had only come to Byron’s room to take his temperature before bed. Lucy was already asleep and he had been waiting for his mother a long time, but there had been a telephone call from his father. He couldn’t hear what she was saying because her voice was slow and quiet. There was no fluttery laughter. When she entered his room she had stood for a moment, with her face lowered to the floor, as if she was somewhere else, not his bedroom, not even seeing him, and that was when he had mentioned his tummy ache. It was like reminding her who he was.

On studying the thermometer Diana sighed and said she couldn’t understand what was wrong. ‘You don’t seem to have any real symptoms,’ she said.

‘I was fine before it happened.’ The words flew out and then he realized what they were and smacked his hand to his mouth.

‘What do you mean?’ said his mother. At this point she was busy wiping the thermometer with a cloth. She replaced it in its slim silver case. ‘You were fine before what happened?’ She cocked her head. She waited.

Byron studied his nails. He hoped that if he kept quiet, if he acted as if he wasn’t there, the conversation might go away. It might lose interest in Byron and saunter off to become an entirely different set of words about an entirely different set of problems. ‘Nothing,’ he said. Once again all he could picture was the red bicycle and the little girl.

His mother stooped and pressed a kiss to his forehead. She smelt sweet, like flowers, and her soft hair tickled his forehead. ‘She shouldn’t have been running into the road,’ he said. This sentence too shot out so fast it was hot and fluid.

His mother gave a laugh. ‘What are you talking about?’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘My fault? What wasn’t?’ Again she laughed, or at least she gave a smile with a noise attached to it.

‘You haven’t done anything wrong because you didn’t know. There was the mist and the extra seconds. You’re not to blame.’

‘I’m not to blame for what?’

‘The little girl. The little girl in Digby Road.’

His mother’s face pleated. ‘What little girl? I don’t know what you mean.’

Byron felt solid ground had been suddenly swept away, and that he was stepping once more on stones and branches, while water swelled at his feet. He only went forward with the conversation because the option of going backwards seemed to have sailed out of reach. Twisting the corner of his sheet, he described how he had seen the little girl shoot from her garden gate on her red bicycle and how he had seen her again, after the car
stopped, not moving. He found he only had a small number of words at his disposal and so he kept repeating them. Digby Road. Mist. Two seconds. Not your fault. Then, because his mother was not speaking, only listening with her hands pressed over her mouth, he said: ‘I told you to drive on because I didn’t want you to be scared.’

‘No,’ she said suddenly. It was a small sound and it was also the answer he was least expecting. ‘No. That can’t be true.’

‘But I saw. I saw the whole accident.’

‘Accident? There wasn’t an accident.’ Her voice grew with each phrase. ‘I didn’t hit a little girl. I’m a careful driver. I’m very careful. I drive exactly as your father taught me. If there was a little girl, I’d know. I’d have seen. I’d have stopped the car.’ She kept her eyes fixed to the floor. It looked as if she were replying to a patch of the carpet. ‘I’d have got out.’

Byron felt his head spin. He took shallow gasps, more and more of them, which yanked at his chest and throat muscles. He had thought about having this conversation so many times, or rather about not having it, and now that it was finally happening, everything seemed wrong. It was too much. It was too much to deliver his mother the truth and discover that, after all this, she could not see it. He wanted to fall to the floor and not think. Not feel.

‘Are you all right?’ she said. ‘What’s happening, sweetheart?’

When he had nothing else to say – when all the words were used up and the room was wheeling on its axis, walls sliding and floors tipping – he said, ‘Excuse me. I’m going to be sick.’

He wasn’t. He gripped hold of the toilet bowl and shoved his head down. He even tried to push out with his stomach muscles and constrict those of his throat. His body retched but nothing came. When his mother knocked at the door and asked if she could come in, if she could fetch something, he repeated that he was all right. He still couldn’t understand why she didn’t believe him. He turned on the taps and sat very still on the
floor, waiting for her to go, and when at last he heard her heels on the stairs, slow, as if she were not in a hurry but drifting, or deep in thought, he unlocked the door and returned swiftly to his room.

Byron missed James very much that night. It wasn’t even that Byron had anything specific to say, it was more that James was in his head and so was the memory of the bridge they had built on the pond. If he knew about the accident James would know what to do, just as he had understood about load bearing and gravity.

Byron remembered how it felt to fall; the moment between losing his balance and landing in the cold water. The shock of that. The mud bed had pulled at his feet and even though he knew the pond was shallow, he had thrashed about, fearing suddenly he might drown. The water had swamped in at his ears and mouth and nose. ‘Mrs Hemmings, Mrs Hemmings!’ James had screamed from the banks. He couldn’t seem to do anything. He just flapped his arms. Byron saw his mother running so fast to his rescue her arms and legs flew out and she appeared to be falling. She had waded into the water without even throwing off her shoes. She had walked the two boys back to the house with her arms around their shoulders and despite the fact that James was dry, she had cocooned them both in towels. ‘It was my fault, it was my fault,’ James kept saying. But his mother had stopped and held him by the shoulders. She told him he had saved Byron and that he should be proud. Afterwards she had made sandwiches and sweet tea for them to have on the lawn and James had said through chattering teeth, ‘She is so kind, she is so kind, your mother.’

Byron unfolded the map he had drawn in his father’s study. With the aid of his torch, he studied it under the sheet. He traced the path of arrows with his fingertip and his heart pounded when he reached the red mark where the Jaguar had pulled to a sudden halt. He knew he was right about the accident. After all, he had seen everything. Downstairs he heard the
clunk of the fridge door as his mother opened it, and the slamming of the ice-cube tray on the draining board. A little later he heard her music from the gramophone and it was so sad, this song, he wondered if she was crying. He thought again of the little girl in Digby Road and the trouble his mother was in. More than anything he wanted to go to her but he couldn’t move. He told himself he would go in a minute and yet a minute passed, and another and another, and he was still lying there. In telling Diana what she had done, he felt he had become part of the accident too. If only he’d kept quiet, the whole thing might have disappeared. It might have remained not real.

Later, when his mother eased open his door, bringing a sharp arc of light into the room that hurt his head, and when she whispered, ‘Byron, are you awake?’ he lay still, with his eyes pressed tight. He tried to make his breathing heavy like someone who was asleep. He heard her footsteps creak on the carpet and he caught the sweet smell of her, and then the room flicked to dark.

‘Are you all right?’ she asked the next morning. It was Friday again and he was cleaning his teeth in the bathroom. He had no idea his mother was behind him until he saw her fingers on his shoulder. He must have jumped because she laughed. Her hair was a golden cloud around her face and her skin was soft like ice cream.

‘You didn’t come and wait for my alarm this morning. I missed you.’

‘I overslept.’ He couldn’t turn and look at her. The mirror son was talking to the mirror mother.

She smiled. ‘Well, it’s good that you slept.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Did you?’

‘Did I—?’

‘Sleep.’

‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘I slept well. Thank you.’

For a moment, they fell silent. He felt they were searching for the most
acceptable words, in the way that his mother tried on clothes before his father’s arrival, slipping them on and sighing and slipping them off again. Then Lucy called for her school uniform and they both laughed. They did it long and hard as if it was a relief to have something that wasn’t talking.

‘You look pale,’ she said, when the laughter had drained away and there was nothing left.

‘You won’t go to the police?’

‘The police? Why would I do that?’

‘Because of the little girl in Digby Road.’

His mother shook her head as if she couldn’t understand why he would say these things all over again. ‘We went through this last night. There was no little girl. You made a mistake.’

‘But I saw.’ He was beginning to shout. ‘I was sitting right beside the window. I saw the whole thing. I saw the extra seconds and then I saw the little girl. You couldn’t see because you were driving. You couldn’t see because of the mist.’

His mother placed her forehead in her hands and then raked her fingers through her hair as if she was clearing a space through which to see. She said slowly, ‘I was in the car, too. And nothing happened. I know it. Nothing happened, Byron.’

He waited for her to say something else but his mother simply looked across at him, without speaking. And so all there was between them was the thing she had already said. Her words flapped over their heads and beat through his ears like an echo; even in the silence they found a voice. Nothing happened. Nothing happened, Byron.

It did, though. He knew it.

His father visited at the weekend and so there was no opportunity to speak to his mother again about the accident. The only time he found her alone was when his father checked the monthly accounts in his study. She was
pacing the floor of the drawing room. She kept picking things up and putting them back down again without looking. When his father appeared at the door and said he had a query, her hands flew to her neck and her eyes widened. There was a blank, he said.

‘A blank?’ She repeated the word as if she did not know what it meant.

It was not the first time, said his father. He remained still but his mother went back to straightening things that were already straight and lifting her fingers to her mouth. She couldn’t think why there would be a blank, she said. She promised to be more careful in future.

‘I wish you wouldn’t do that.’

‘I said it was a mistake, Seymour.’

‘I mean, your nails. I wish you wouldn’t bite them.’

‘Oh darling, there are so many things you wish I didn’t do.’ She laughed and went to tidy the garden. Once again his father left on Sunday morning.

As the third week began, Byron trailed his mother like a shadow. He watched her washing up at the sink. He watched her digging over the rose beds. Their blooms were so full now he could barely see the stems, the petals all floppy and pink; they covered the pagoda like a skyful of stars. At night he listened to Diana, playing her music downstairs on the gramophone. The only thing in his mind was Digby Road. He couldn’t believe he had gone and told her. For the first time, there was something between them, like the fence separating the pond from the meadow, and it was to do with the fact she believed one thing and he knew another. It even carried the implication that he was in some terrible way accusing her.