Perfect (37 page)

‘I’ve forgotten how to wear heels,’ she laughed.

Seeing the wishing star seemed to lift his mother’s spirits further. The following day she worked in the garden while the children were at school. She dug over the rose beds and, as the sun began to slide from the sky, Byron helped her pile the first of the fallen leaves into a wheelbarrow to make a bonfire. They collected windfall apples and watered the flower beds near the house; they needed rain. Then she talked about Hallowe’en, how she had read in a magazine they carved faces out of pumpkins in America. She would like to do that, she said. They stopped to watch the bank of
cloud, flaming like pink candyfloss towers over the moor. His mother said it had been a truly beautiful day. People didn’t look enough at the sky.

Maybe it was as simple as believing things were what you wanted them to be? Maybe that was all it took? If there was anything Byron had learned that summer, it was that a thing was capable of being not one but many different things, and some of them contradictory. Not everything had a label. Or if it did, you had to be prepared to re-examine that label from time to time and paste another alongside it. The truth could be true, but not in a definite way. It could be more or less true; and maybe that was the best a human being could hope for. They returned to the house.

It was almost teatime when his mother remembered she had left a cardigan outside. She called that she was going to fetch it and would only be a few minutes.

Byron began a game with Lucy. Rising to switch on the lamps, it occurred to him it was getting dark. He made sandwiches because Lucy was hungry and sliced them into triangles. When he glanced again at the window, the light was green.

He told Lucy he had to fetch something from the garden, and set out a new game of Snakes and Ladders. ‘You have your go first,’ he told her. ‘Count very carefully. I’ll be back for my turn.’ When he opened the front door, he was shocked.

Outside, the cloud over the moor was dark as a stain. There was a storm coming, no question. He called out to his mother from the threshold but she made no answer. He checked the rose beds and the perennial borders and there was no sign of her. A sudden gust of wind tore at the trees and, as the clouds raced forward, corners of the hills were briefly illuminated in silver shafts of light and then eclipsed. The leaves in the branches began to tremble and rattle. He made a dash through the garden and towards the picket gate just as the first drops of rain came.

They were bigger than he expected. The rain was driving down from the
upper peaks in thick curtains. There was no way she could be at the pond. He turned back towards the house and tried to hide from the rain, tucking his hands into his armpits, ducking his head, but very quickly water was sliding from his hair and down his collar. It surprised him how quickly he went from dry to wet. Byron dashed back through the garden towards the garage.

The rain hit like peppercorns at the roof but his mother’s furniture was still under its sheet and Diana was not there. Briefly he wondered if she was sitting in the Jaguar, if she was asleep on the seat, but the doors were locked and the car was empty. She must have gone back to the house. Maybe she was drying her hair and talking to Lucy even as he shut the garage doors.

Lucy was waiting for him at the threshold. ‘Where did you go, Byron? I waited and waited. Why did you be so long?’ She looked frightened and seeing her like that he realized he was frightened too. The rain had leaked all over the hall floor. It was only when he turned and saw the pools of water behind that he realized they had come from him.

‘Where’s Mummy?’ he said.

‘I thought she was with you.’

Byron began to go over all that had happened, trying to calculate the time his mother had been gone. Stooping to remove his school shoes, he found they were soft like pulp. His fingers couldn’t manage the laces and in the end he had to yank them off without undoing them. He began searching the house. Gently at first and then faster, until he was hurrying from bedroom to bedroom, flinging open doors. At the opened windows, the curtains ballooned like sails, and beyond them, the branches of the trees shook helplessly up and down. He secured the windows and the rain shot at the glass in rods and splattered on the roof. All over the house, he heard the wind throwing doors open and punching them shut.

‘Where is Mummy? What are you doing?’ said Lucy. She was trailing him like a shadow.

He checked his mother’s bed, the bathroom, his father’s study, the kitchen, but there was no sign, no hint, of her.

‘Why are we rushing everywhere?’ wailed Lucy.

It was all right, he kept saying, everything was all right, as he ran back to the front door. His chest was beginning to hurt. He fetched the umbrella and his mother’s waterproof coat from her peg.

‘It’s all right, Luce,’ he said. ‘I will have Mummy back in a minute.’

‘But I am cold, Byron. I want my blanket.’ Lucy clung to him so hard he had to wriggle free.

It was as he was guiding her to the drawing room and fetching her blanket that it struck him. What was he doing? He shouldn’t be fussing over the blanket. He should be outside. He couldn’t understand why he had even come back to the house. ‘Just sit and wait,’ he said, and he led Lucy by the hand to an armchair. After that he tried to run away but came back to kiss her because she was crying again. ‘Just sit still, Luce,’ he said. Then he suddenly dropped everything, the coat, the umbrella, the blanket, on the drawing-room carpet. He fled.

He thought all this had taken minutes but outside the hood of sky was darker. The rain shot straight down, as hard as spikes. It smashed against the leaves. It flattened the grass. It pelted at the house as if it meant harm, and poured from the gutters on to the terrace. The noise was deafening.

As he ran, he shouted his mother’s name but the crashing of rain was so loud he seemed to make no noise. He was still in the garden. He couldn’t even see as far as the pond. Shoulders hunched, he threw open the picket gate, without stopping to close it. He moved towards the pond and it was no longer a run. He was sliding and slipping, arms out to steady himself; he could barely lift his head. The land was saturated. The water swelled through the grass. With each footfall, it splashed as high as his face.

The pond came into view, and he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He had to flail at the rain with his arms in order to clear it away.

‘Mummy! Mummy!’ he tried to shout but she didn’t hear.

There she was, on the pond. Her hair, her clothes, her skin, were so wet she shone. Only here was the thing. She was not on the turfy hummock in the middle, but balancing on the watery space between the island and the bank. How could this be? He had to rub his eyes to check. Glass in hand, she was at a midway point that was no longer earthbound, that was only water. She moved slowly, arms outstretched, as if she were dancing. Occasionally her body seemed to buckle and sway but she kept her balance and went forward, back straight, chin high, arms wide, through the hard silver lines of rain.

‘Over here!’ he shouted. ‘Over here!’ He was still at the top of the meadow.

She must have heard because she suddenly stopped and waved. He gasped because he was afraid she would fall but she didn’t. She remained upright and balanced on the surface.

Diana shouted something back at him but he couldn’t hear what it was, and then she held up her hand, not the one with the glass but the other, and he saw she had something white and heavy. It was a goose egg. She was laughing. She was happy she’d got it.

The relief at finding his mother filled Byron like hurt. He didn’t know any more what was crying and what was rain. He tugged his handkerchief from his pocket to blow his nose. It was soaked but he bowed his face into the cotton, not wanting her to know he had been crying. Just as he folded it and returned it to his pocket, he looked up and something seemed to strike at the back of his mother’s knees. He thought she was doing it to make him laugh. Then her body gave a sudden downwards jolt, her hands flew upwards, and both the glass and the egg went spinning out of her grasp. A movement caught her upper body, rippling along one arm,
through her torso, and out to the other shoulder. It was like witnessing the gathering of a wave.

She shouted something else to him and then she seemed to fold and go down.

Byron stood a moment, waiting for her to re-emerge. He couldn’t move. It was as if time had slipped or fallen away. And then when she did not reappear, when there was only rain hammering at the pond, he began to shift, slowly at first and then faster and faster, knowing he didn’t want to get to the water’s edge, but sliding through the mud all the same, his shoes gaining no purchase. Knowing, even as he fell forward, that when he arrived he would not want to see.

The following morning soft plumes of mist rose from the hills, as if all over the moor small fires were being lit. The air creaked and pattered, although there was no rain now, there was only the memory of it. A frayed moon lingered like a ghost of the sun and all through the sky swarmed tiny summer flies, or were they seeds. Whatever they were, it was a beautiful beginning.

Byron walked down the meadow where the overflow of water lay on the land as huge as silver plates. He climbed the fence and sat at the pond’s edge. He gazed at the sky’s reflection, like another world, or a different truth, one that was coral-coloured and upside down. Already his father was home, talking in his study with the police, and Andrea Lowe was boiling the kettle for visitors.

A flock of gulls flew east, rising and falling, as if they might clean the sky with their wings.

A
MOUNTAIN OF
cloud is stacked against the night sky, so solid it is like another horizon. Briefly Jim watches from the opened door of his van. The church clock chimes nine across the hills. It’s dark, though. So this must be night-time. The rituals are back but they are worse than ever. He cannot stop.

It is over for Jim. There is no escape. He does the rituals all day. And yet they make no difference. It is like being pressed against the bars of a cage. He knows they do not help, he knows they never work, and yet he has to do them. He has not slept or eaten since he fled from Eileen.

The very thought of her makes him shut the door and move inside the van. She was his one hope. She asked for his help. How could he have abandoned her like that?

Christmas has come and gone. Days have been nights and he has lost track of how many of them have passed. It could be two, three, he has no idea. He has heard rain, wind, he has noticed the van interior lit by patches
of sunlight, but it is only once they are gone that he registers they may have been present. Catching his reflection in the window, he jumps, thinking someone is staring in, someone who intends him harm. His face sails flat and pale against the black square of glass. Stubble pins his jaw. Deep shadows hang beneath his eyes. The pupils are dark and bulging. If he were a stranger, passing himself on the street, he would skirt round. He would pretend he had not seen.

How did he get here? When he first started, all those years ago, the rituals were small. They were his friend. He could say, Hello Baby Belling, and it felt like a secret between himself and his bedsit. It was something easy to make things right. Even when he realized that he had to say it every time he entered the room, it only took a moment and then he could get on. If he felt a little panicky, if he was frightened, he could say hello quickly in a public place and make it sound like a joke. ‘Hello, Cup of Tea!’ he could laugh and people might think he was thirsty, or jovial, but not that he was weird. He could hide the words with a little cough.

Time changed the rituals. It was only when wrong thoughts or words swooped into his head that he began to experience new anxieties about them. He began to see that if you wanted everything to be safe, you couldn’t expect that to happen simply because you had said hello and moved on to do something else. You had to work for everything to be truly safe, otherwise it would not be strong enough. This was logical.

He is not sure how he got to the number twenty-one. That idea seemed to present itself as a rule to his mind and then get stuck. There was a period when he was terrified if the time did not involve a 2 or a 1. He had to keep doing the rituals, until the hands of the clock reached one of those numbers. His favourite times were two minutes past one. Or one minute past two. Sometimes he set his alarm so that he could wake up and look at them.

Soap hello. Plug Socket hello. Teabags hello.

He thought he was cured. He thought he could be ordinary. But the social worker was wrong and so was the psychic counsellor. It is too late for Jim.

There is nothing but him and the rituals.