Perfect by Rachel Joyce
‘Oh no,’ he said, sitting tall. ‘What’s happened now?’
‘I don’t know. A traffic jam.’ It was the last thing they needed.
His mother lifted her fingers to her teeth and ripped off a shred of her nail.
‘Is it because of the mist?’
Again, ‘I don’t know.’ She pulled at the handbrake.
‘I think the sun is up there somewhere,’ he said brightly. ‘It will burn this off soon.’
There were cars blocking the road as far as they could see; all the way into the veil of cloud. To their left the dull silhouette of a burnt-out vehicle marked the entrance to the Digby Road Estate. They never went that way. Byron saw his mother glance over.
‘We’re going to be late,’ wailed Lucy.
Snapping down the handbrake, Diana pushed the car into first gear with a crunch, yanked at the wheel and accelerated towards the left. They were heading straight for Digby Road. She didn’t even mirror, signal, manoeuvre.
At first the children were too stunned to speak. They passed the burnt-out car. The glass at the windows was smashed and the wheels, doors and engine were gone so that it was like a charred skeleton and Byron hummed gently because he didn’t want to think about that.
‘Father says we must never go this way,’ said Lucy. She smothered her face with her hands.
‘It’s a short cut through council housing,’ said their mother. ‘I’ve been this way before.’ She eased her foot down on the accelerator.
There was no time to consider what she had said; that, despite their father’s rule, she had been this way before. Digby Road was worse than Byron had imagined. It wasn’t even tarmacked in places. The mist was glued to the rows of houses so that they reached ahead, dull and indistinct, and then appeared to disintegrate. Pieces of rubbish choked the gutters; rubble, bags, blankets, boxes, it was hard to tell what it was. Occasionally washing lines appeared, strung with sheets and clothes that held no colour.
‘I’m not looking,’ said Lucy, sliding down her seat to hide.
Byron tried to find something that wouldn’t cause alarm. Something that he might recognize and feel good about in Digby Road. He worried too much; his mother had told him many times. And then suddenly there it was. One beautiful thing: a tree that glowed through the fog. It presented wide arching branches that appeared festooned with bubblegum-pink flowers, although the fruit blossom at Cranham House was long since over. Byron felt a surge of relief as if he had witnessed a small miracle, or an act of kindness, at the moment he least believed in the existence of either. Beneath the tree came a moving silhouette. It was small; the size of a child. It was spinning towards the road and had wheels. It was a girl on a red bicycle.
‘What time is it?’ said Lucy. ‘Are we late?’
Byron glanced at his watch and then he froze. The second hand was moving backwards. His voice sliced at his throat and he realized it was a scream.
‘Mummy, it’s happening. Stop.’ He grabbed her shoulder. He pulled hard.
He couldn’t make sense of what came next. It was so fast. While he tried to poke his watch, or more specifically the adjusted second hand, in front of his mother’s face, he was also aware of the miracle tree and the little girl bicycling into the road. They were all part of the same thing. All of them shooting out of nowhere, out of the dense mist, out of time. The Jaguar swerved and his hands smacked into the mahogany dashboard to brace himself. As the car slammed to a halt there was a sound like a metallic whisper, and then there was silence.
In the beats that followed, that were smaller than seconds, smaller even than flickers, where Byron sought with his eyes for the child at the roadside and did not find her, he knew something terrible had happened and that life would never be the same. He knew it before he even had the words.
Above the moor shone a dazzling circle of white light. Byron had been right about the sun. It would burn through any moment.
2
Jim
JIM LIVES IN a campervan, on the edge of the new housing estate. Every dawn he walks across the moor and every night he walks back. He has a job at the refurbished supermarket café. There is wifi access and a facility to charge mobile phones although Jim has no use for either. When he started six months ago, he worked in the hot beverages section but after serving cappuccinos with a raspberry twirl topping and a flake he was relegated to tables. If he messes this job up, there’s nothing. There isn’t even Besley Hill.
The black sky is combed with trails of cloud like silver hair and the air is so cold it pares his skin. Beneath his feet the ground has frozen hard and his boots crash over the brittle stumps of grass. Already he can make out the neon glow that is Cranham Village, while far behind car headlamps make their way across the moor and they are a necklace of tiny moving lights, red and silver, stringing the dark.
In his late teens, he was found up there in only underpants and shoes. He had given his clothes to the trees; for days he had been sleeping wild. He was sectioned on the spot. ‘Hello again, Jim,’ the doctor said, as if they were old friends, as if Jim was dressed, like him, in suit and tie. ‘Hello again, doctor,’ Jim had said to show he was not trouble. The doctor prescribed electroconvulsive therapy. It brought on a stammer and later a tingling in his fingers that even now Jim still feels.
Pain is like that; he knows. Somewhere in his brain what happened to him then has got mixed up. It has become something else, not simply the hurt he felt at the time, but another, more complicated one that is to do with over forty years ago, and all he’s lost.
He follows the road to the estate. There is a sign, welcoming visitors to Cranham Village and asking them to drive carefully. Recently the sign has been vandalized, along with the bus shelter and the children’s swings, and now reads Welcome to Crapham. Fortunately Cranham is the sort of place people visit only if their satnav has made a mistake. Jim wipes the sign because it is a shame to see it humiliated like that, but the ‘n’ will not come back.
The new houses are packed tight as teeth. Each has a front garden, no bigger than a parking space, and a plastic window box where nothing grows. Over the weekend many residents have strung their guttering with Christmas lights and Jim stops to admire them. He especially likes the ones that are flashing icicles. On the top of one roof, an inflatable Santa appears to be dismantling the satellite dish. He is possibly not the sort of man you want coming down your chimney. Jim passes the square of mud residents call the Green and the fenced-off ditch in the middle. He picks up some empty beer cans and carries them to the bin.
Entering the cul-de-sac, he looks at the house rented by foreign students, and the one where an old man sits every day at a window. He passes the gate with the dangerous dog sign, and the garden with the laundry that is never taken down. Ahead his van shines in the moonlight, pale as milk.
A couple of young boys whizz past on a bicycle, shrieking with excitement, one on the seat, the other balanced on the handlebars. He calls, Be c-careful, but they don’t hear.
How did I get here? Jim asks himself. There were two of us once.
The wind blows and says nothing.
3
Lucky Talismans
WHEN JAMES HAD first mentioned the addition of seconds to Byron, he had presented it as another interesting fact. The boys liked to sit outside the chapel during their lunch break while the others ran about on the field. They showed their Brooke Bond tea cards – they were both collecting the History of Aviation set – and James told Byron stories from his newspaper. It had not been a leading article, he explained, and he had been obliged to read quickly because his boiled egg was ready, but the gist of it was that, due to the leap year, recorded time was out of kilter with the natural movement of the Earth. In order to change it, he had said wisely, scientists would have to look at things like the expansion of the Earth’s crust, and also how it juddered on its axis. Byron had felt his face flatten. The idea appalled him. And even though James had talked about how exciting this was, and then gone on
Unlike James, Byron was a substantial boy. They made an odd pairing. James was slight and pale, his fringe sliding into his eyes, nibbling his mouth as he thought something through; while Byron sat tall and stolid beside him, waiting for James to finish. Sometimes Byron would pinch at the folds of flesh at his waist and ask his mother why James didn’t have them, and she’d say he did, of course he did, but Byron knew she was being kind. His body frequently burst through buttons and seams. His father said it straight out. Byron was overweight, he was lazy. And then his mother would say this was puppy fat, there was a difference. They would speak as if Byron was not there, which was strange when they were discussing the fact there was too much of him.
In the beats that followed the accident, he felt suddenly made of nothing. He wondered if he was hurt. He sat waiting for his mother to realize what she had done, waiting for her to scream or get out of the car, only she didn’t. He sat waiting for the little girl to scream or get up off the road and that didn’t happen either. His mother remained very still in her driving seat and the little girl lay very still beneath her red bicycle. Then suddenly, with a snap, things started to happen. His mother glanced over her right shoulder and adjusted her mirror; Lucy asked why they had stopped. It was only the little girl who stayed not moving.
Starting up the engine, Byron’s mother placed her hands on the steering wheel in the exact position his father had taught her. She reversed the car to straighten it and pushed the gearstick into first. He couldn’t believe she was driving away, that they were leaving the little girl where they had knocked into her, and then he realized it was because his mother didn’t know. She hadn’t seen what she had done. His heart thumped so hard it hurt his throat.
‘Go, go, go!’ he shouted.
In answer, his mother bit her lip to show she was concentrating and pressed her foot on the accelerator. She went to angle her mirror, twitching it a little to the left, a little to the right—
‘Hurry up!’ he shouted. They had to get away before anyone saw them.
Steadily they made their way down Digby Road. He kept twisting from left to right, craning his neck to see out of the rear window. If they didn’t hurry, the mist would be gone. They turned on to the High Street and passed the new Wimpy Bar. The Digby Road children made shadowy queues at the bus stop. There was the grocer, the butcher, the music shop and then the Conservative Party local headquarters. Further along, uniformed assistants from the department store were polishing windows and unwinding the striped awnings. A doorman with a top hat was smoking outside the hotel and a delivery van had arrived with flowers. It was only Byron who sat clutching his seat, waiting for someone to run out and stop the car.
Yet this did not happen.
Diana parked in the tree-lined street, where the mothers always parked, and lifted the school satchels from the boot. She helped the children from their seats and locked the Jaguar. Lucy skipped ahead. Other mothers waved good morning and asked about the weekend. One said something about the heavy traffic while another wiped the sole of her son’s school shoe with paper tissue. The mist was thinning fast. Already the blue sky shone through in patches and drops of sunlight pricked the sycamore leaves like tiny eyes. In the distance, the moor trembled pale as the sea. Only a trail of smoke lingered over the lower foothills.
Byron walked beside Diana, expecting his knees to give way. He felt like a glass that had too much water inside, and that if he rushed or stopped abruptly he might spill. He couldn’t understand. He couldn’t understand how they were still going to school. He couldn’t understand how everything was continuing as before. It was an ordinary morning except that it wasn’t. Time had been splintered and everything was different.
In the playground he stood wedged at his mother’s side, listening so hard that his eyes became ears. Yet no one said, ‘I saw your silver Jaguar, registration number KJX 216K, in Digby Road.’ No one said that a little girl had been hurt just as no one mentioned the extra seconds. He accompanied his mother to the girls’ school entrance and Lucy seemed so carefree she didn’t even remember to wave.
Diana squeezed his hand. ‘Are you all right?’
Byron nodded because his voice wouldn’t work.
‘Time to go now, sweetheart,’ she said. He sensed her watching as he walked across the playground and it was so hard to go that even his spine ached. The elastic of his cap cut into his throat.
He needed to find James. He needed to find him urgently. James understood things in ways that Byron couldn’t; he was like the logical piece of Byron that was missing. The first time Mr Roper had explained about relativity, for instance, James had nodded enthusiastically as if magnetic forces were a truth he had suspected all along, whereas for Byron the new idea was like tangles in his head. Maybe it was because James was such a careful boy. Byron watched him sometimes, aligning the zip fastening on his pencil case or wiping the fringe out of his eyes, and there was such precision in it that Byron was filled with awe. Sometimes he tried to be the same. He would walk carefully or arrange his felt-tip pens in order of colour. But then he would find his shoelaces were undone, or his shirt got untucked, and he was back to being Byron again.
He knelt at James’s side in chapel, only it was hard to get his attention. As far as Byron knew, James did not believe in God (‘There is no proof,’ he said), but once he was engaged, as with most things, he took the business of praying very seriously. Head forced down, eyes screwed tight, he hissed the words with such intensity it would be blasphemous to interrupt. Then Byron tried to linger beside James in the queue for the refectory but Samuel Watkins asked what he thought about Glasgow Rangers and James got held up. The problem was, everyone wanted to know his opinion. He thought things before you were even aware that there was anything to think about them and by the time you had realized there was, James was off thinking about something else. At last Byron’s opportunity came during games.
James was outside the cricket pavilion. By now the day was so hot, it hurt to move. There was not a cloud in the sky and the sun was almost shouting. Byron had already been to bat and James was waiting his turn on a bench. He liked to concentrate before a game and preferred to be alone. Byron perched at the other end but James did not look up or move. His fringe hung over his eyes and his luminous skin had begun to burn below the sleeves.
Byron got as far as ‘James?’ when something stopped him.
Counting. A steady stream of it. James was whispering, as if someone very small was tucked between his knees and he needed to teach this small person their prime numbers. Byron was used to James’s muttering, he had witnessed it many times, but normally he did it under his breath, so that you could easily miss it. ‘Two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two.’ Above Cranham Moor the air shimmered as if the upper peaks would melt into the sky. Byron felt himself overheating inside his cricket whites. ‘Why do you do that?’ he said. He was only trying to start the conversation.
James jumped as if he had not realized he had company and Byron laughed to show he meant no harm. ‘Are you practising your times tables?’ he said. ‘Because you know them better than anyone. Take me. I’m useless. I get my nines wrong. Aussi my sevens. Those are très difficile for me as well.’ The boys voiced in French the things that were either too dull or difficult to explain in English. It was like having a secret language, except that it wasn’t really because anyone could join in.
James dug the tip of his bat into the grass at his feet. ‘I am checking I can double numbers. To keep me safe.’
‘Safe?’ Byron swallowed hard. ‘How will that keep you safe?’ James had never spoken in this way before. It was completely unlike him.
‘It is like running to your bedroom before the lavatory stops flushing. If I don’t do it, things might go wrong.’
‘But that’s
‘Actually it is very logical, Byron. I am not leaving anything to chance. The pressure is on, with the scholarship exam. Sometimes I look for a four-leaf clover. And now I have a lucky beetle too.’ James pulled something from his pocket and it flashed briefly between his fingers. The brass beetle was slim and dark, the size of Byron’s thumb, and shaped like an insect with closed wings. There was a silver hook where you might keep a key.
‘I didn’t know you had a lucky beetle,’ said Byron.
‘My aunt sent it to me. It comes from Africa. I can’t afford to make silly mistakes.’
Byron felt an ache behind his eyes and inside the roof of his nose and he realized with a stab of shame that he was going to cry. Fortunately there was a shout of ‘Out’ and a round of applause from the cricket field. ‘My turn to bat,’ said James with a gulp. Games was his least successful subject. Byron didn’t like to mention it, but James tended to blink when the ball came towards him. ‘I have to go now,’ he said. He stood.
‘Did you see, ce matin?’
‘See what, Byron?’
‘The two seconds. They added them today. At a quarter past eight.’
There was a tiny hiatus where nothing happened, where Byron waited for James Lowe to say something and James Lowe didn’t. He simply stared down at Byron in his intense, waxy-pale way, with the beetle tight in his hand. The sun was right behind him and Byron had to squint to keep looking. James’s ears shone like prawns.