Perfect (39 page)

D
ESPITE THE CHANGE
in temperature, the unseasonably mild weather, Jim does not go to the moor. He does not go to work. He cannot even walk as far as the phone box to ring and explain to Mr Meade. He assumes he will be out of a job and hasn’t the energy to feel, let alone do, anything about that. He doesn’t check his planting. He spends each day in the van. The rituals never stop.

Sometimes he darts a look out of his window and he sees life continue without him. It is like waving goodbye to something that has already gone. The residents of Cranham Village appear with their Christmas gifts. There are children with new snow boots and new bicycles. There are husbands with battery-operated leaf vacuums. One of the foreign students has received a sledge and, despite the absence of snow, they walk up to the ramps in their hats and Puffa jackets. The man with the dangerous dog has a new sign outside his house that warns intruders he has CCTV cameras. Jim wonders if the dog is dead and then it occurs to him that he never saw
a dog, dangerous or otherwise, and maybe the old sign was only a trick, and not the truth at all. The old man is back at his window. He seems to be wearing a baseball cap.

So this is being ordinary. This is getting by. And it is small really but Jim can’t do it.

The interior of the van is striped with duct tape. There is only one roll left. He doesn’t know what he will do when it is finished. And then it occurs to him, like a slow dawning, that he will not last any longer than the duct tape. He has not eaten, he has not slept. He is finishing everything, himself included.

Jim lies on the bed. Above his head the pop-up roof is a criss-cross of tape. His head reels, his blood thumps, his fingers sting. He thinks of the doctors at Besley Hill, the people who tried to help. He thinks of Mr Meade, of Paula and Eileen. He thinks of his mother, his father. Where did this begin? With two seconds? A bridge over the pond? Or was it there from the very beginning? When his parents decided their son’s future should be golden?

His body shakes, the van shakes, his heart shakes, the windows shake, all with the waste of it. Jim, Jim, it shouts. But he is nothing. He is hello hello. He is strips of duct tape.

‘Jim! Jim!’

He is falling into sleep, into light, into nothing. The doors, the windows, the walls of the van thump, thump, like a heartbeat. And then just as he is nothing, the pop-up roof bursts from its hinges. He feels the slap of cold air. There is sky, there is a face, and maybe it should be a woman, but it isn’t, it is frightened, very frightened, and then comes an arm, a hand.

‘Jim, Jim. Come on, mate. We’re here.’

B
YRON’S FATHER EMPLOYED
a middle-aged woman to look after the children. Her name was Mrs Sussex. She wore tweed skirts and thick tights and had two moles with hairs like spiders. She told the children her husband was an army man.

‘Does that mean he is dead like my mummy?’ said Lucy.

Mrs Sussex said it meant he was posted abroad.

When Seymour arrived for weekends, she told him to get a taxi from the station if he didn’t want to drive. She made casseroles and pies for the fridge and left heating instructions, before going to her sister’s. Sometimes Byron wondered if she might invite him and Lucy too, but she didn’t. His father spent weekends in his study because he had so much work to catch up on. Sometimes he fell over when he went upstairs. He tried to make conversation but the words smelt sour. And although Seymour never said it as such, all this seemed to be Diana’s fault.

What bewildered Byron most about the death of his mother was that,
in the weeks which followed, his father died too. But his was a different kind of death from Diana’s. It was a living death, not a buried one, and it shocked Byron in a different way from his mother’s removal because he had to keep witnessing it. He discovered that the man he had assumed his father to be, the man who stood remote and upright beside his mother, urging her to get in the left-hand lane now, Diana, and dress in old-fashioned pencil skirts, was no longer the same person once she had slipped away. After her death, Seymour seemed to lose his balance. Some days he said nothing. Some days he raged. He flew through the house, shouting, as if his anger alone was enough to make his wife come back.

He didn’t know what to do with the children, Byron overheard him saying another time. He only had to look at them and he saw Diana.

It’s only natural, people said.

But it wasn’t.

Meanwhile life went on as if his mother’s loss had not touched it in any way. The children returned to school. They dressed in their uniforms. They carried their satchels. In the playground the mothers crowded round Mrs Sussex. They invited her for coffee. They asked how the family was coping. She was reserved. Once she said that she was surprised at the state of Cranham House. It was a cold place, not a happy environment for young children. The women shared a glance that seemed to imply they had had a lucky escape.

Without James, and without his mother, Byron felt marked apart. He waited several weeks, hoping for a letter from James with the address of his new school, but nothing came. Once he even tried to telephone his home, but hearing Andrea’s voice he hung up straight away. At school he spent whole lessons staring at his exercise books and failing to write. He preferred to spend playtime alone. He overheard one of the masters describe his circumstances as difficult. Little should be expected.

When Byron found a dead sparrow at the foot of an ash tree in the
garden, he picked it up because at last there was more death and it seemed a sign that Diana was not alone in it. Really what he wanted was not one dead bird, but hundreds. He wanted them dropping from the air like stones. He asked his father at the weekend if they might bury the bird, but his father shouted at him not to play with dead things. He was strange in the head, he said.

Byron did not mention to his father that Lucy had buried her Sindy dolls.

It clearly was not true that Byron had worried too much. His mother had been wrong about so many things. Sometimes he pictured her in her coffin and found the idea of her being surrounded by darkness almost impossible to bear. He tried to think of his mother when she was alive, the light in her eyes, her voice, her way of draping a cardigan over her shoulders, and then he missed her even more. He told himself to concentrate on his mother’s spirit and not to focus on the thought of her body locked beneath the earth. Often his head got the better of him, though, and he woke in the night, bathed in hot sweat, unable to push away the image of her trying to get back to him; of her beating at the locked coffin lid with her fingers, and screaming at him to help.

He did not tell anyone, just as he could not bear to confide that he had begun the string of events that led to her death.

The Jaguar remained in the garage until a pick-up truck came to take it away. It was replaced with a small Ford. October passed. Leaves that his mother had once looked at loosened from the trees and twisted through the air, gathering in a slippery carpet at his feet. The nights grew longer and brought days of rain. Crows fronted the storm and were scattered by it. In one night alone, the rain was so heavy the pond began to refill and Seymour had to have it drained again. Hedgerows were bare and black and dripping, but for the ghostly weaving of old man’s beard.

In November the winds moved in and the clouds scudded over the
moor until at last they joined forces and lay so thick the sky was a slate roof over the land. The mists returned and they hung over the house all day. When a winter storm felled an ash, the tree lay butchered in pieces across the garden. No one came to clear it. With December came flurries of snow and hail. The Winston House boys spent every day preparing for their scholarship exam. Some had private tutors. The substance of the moor changed from purple to orange to brown.

Time would heal, Mrs Sussex said. Byron’s loss would grow more bearable. But here was the nub. He didn’t want to lose his loss. Loss was all he had left of his mother. If time healed the gap, it would be as if she had never been there.

One afternoon, Byron was talking to Mrs Sussex about evaporation when she dropped the knife and cut her finger. ‘Ouch, Byron,’ she said.

There was no connection between Byron and her injury. She was not blaming him. She merely fetched a plaster and continued to peel potatoes but he began to have thoughts. Thoughts he didn’t want and couldn’t stop. They even came when he was asleep. He thought of his mother screaming from her coffin. He thought of Mrs Sussex rinsing her finger under a tap, and the way the water turned red. He became convinced it would be Lucy next, and that, just as the accident had been his fault, and also Mrs Sussex’s cut, Lucy’s injury would be his fault too.

To start with, he hid his fears. He found simple ways of leaving the room when Lucy entered, or perhaps if he couldn’t leave, if it was dinner, for instance, he would gently hum to distract himself from thinking. He took to placing a ladder outside her bedroom window at night so that if anything happened, she would have a safe escape. Only one morning he forgot to move it in time, and Lucy woke, saw the ladder at her window, ran into the hall screaming and slipped. She needed three stitches just above her left eye. He was right. He caused injury, even when he didn’t want to.

The thoughts that followed were about boys at school, as well as Mrs Sussex, and the mothers. Even people that he didn’t know; people he saw from the window of the bus as he sat behind Mrs Sussex and Lucy. He saw he was a danger to each and every one of them. What if he had already hurt someone and he didn’t realize? Because he had thought the awful thing, about hurting a person, it must be that he had done it. That he was the sort of person who
could
– because otherwise, why would he be having those thoughts? Sometimes he did little things to himself to show people he was not well, maybe bruising his arm, or pinching his nose until it bled, but no one appeared concerned. Ashamed, he pulled his shirt towards his knuckles. He needed something different to keep the thoughts away.

When the truth emerged in the playground about Lucy’s stitches, Deirdre Watkins telephoned Andrea Lowe. She suggested to Mrs Sussex a marvellous chap Andrea knew in town. When Mrs Sussex said that all the boy needed was a good cuddle, Deirdre Watkins rang Seymour. Two days later, Mrs Sussex resigned.

Byron remembered very little about his visit to the psychiatrist. This was not because he was drugged or mistreated in any way. Far from it. In order not to be frightened, he hummed, first gently to himself and then, because the psychiatrist had raised his voice, he had to sing somewhat louder. The psychiatrist asked Byron to lie down. He asked if he had unnatural thoughts.

‘I cause accidents,’ said Byron. ‘I am unnatural.’

The psychiatrist said he would be writing to Byron’s parents. At this, Byron went so silent and still, the psychiatrist called an end to the session.

Two days later Byron’s father told him he was to be measured for a new suit.

‘Why do I need a new suit?’ he said. His father staggered from the room. This time it was Deirdre Watkins who accompanied Byron to the
department store. He was measured for new shirts, pullovers, two ties, socks and shoes, both indoor and out. He was a big boy, said Deirdre to the assistant. She also asked for a trunk, full sports kit and pyjamas. This time Byron didn’t question why.

At the cash till, the assistant wrote out a bill. He shook Byron by the hand and wished him luck at his new school. ‘Boarding is marvellous, once you get the hang of the place,’ he said.

He was sent to a school in the north. He had the impression no one knew what to do with him and he did not fight that. If anything, he agreed. He made no friends because he was afraid of hurting them. He lingered on the edge of things. Sometimes people jumped because they had no idea he was in the room. He got ridiculed for being quiet, for being strange. He got beaten up. One night he woke to find himself being carried outside on a sea of hands and laughter but he simply lay very still and did not fight them. It amazed him sometimes how little he felt. He no longer even knew why he was unhappy. He only knew that he was. Sometimes he remembered his mother, or James, or even the summer of 1972, but thinking of that time was like waking out of a sleep with shards of dreams that made no sense. It was better to think of nothing. School holidays were spent at Cranham House with Lucy and a succession of nannies. His father visited rarely. Lucy began to choose to stay with friends. Back at school he failed exams. His reports were poor. No one seemed to mind either way, if he was clever or stupid.