A Perfect Life by Raffaella Barker

Author:Raffaella Barker [Barker, Raffaella]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Tags: Fiction, General
ISBN: 0755324102
Google: SyhRAgAAQBAJ
Amazon: B00H7ZF2TK
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2014-01-09T00:00:00+00:00

Jem

Sometimes I just feel so real. It is a weird feeling and it makes me realise how not real most of my life is, and how I hang around without really living or seeing or hearing except though a filter of my headphones and my mobile phone. But something about today got to me when I woke up. Maybe it was the fact that the sun had warmed the patch on the pillow right next to my head but the rays had not hit me in the face, so when I moved my head I was suddenly in this warm patch, clean-smelling like the airing cupboard. I was already smiling when I became aware I was awake. Then the cornflakes were super crunchy and the milk tasted just right, and I was standing by the fridge eating the third bowlful and I must have been making a noise because Coral came in and said, ‘Are you on drugs, man? – that’s just cereal, you know.’ And I nodded with my mouth full, thinking, Yeah, she’s right, but it’s delicious.

I would have definitely eaten the whole packet if Ruby hadn’t come in prancing and singing some boy band noise pollution.

‘Hey, Roobs, what about the song I taught you about you?’

She does this hip thing, wiggling as if she is twenty-five and performing in a lap dancing club, and it’s like punctuation to show she’s finished one song. Then she starts on the Rolling Stones. I brainwashed her with: ‘Goodbye, Ruby Tuesday’, but she breaks off before I can check that she knows the whole verse.

‘I want you to grow bosoms now to trick Mummy and Daddy,’ she commands, proffering a pair of tennis balls and tugging at my T-shirt. God, small children are insane, but then, why not? Obediently, I stuff the tennis balls inside my T-shirt. Going into Mum’s room did puncture the ultra reality a bit, because I started to imagine I was in a time warp and I was seven again like Ruby. Sometimes I can remember things so immediately it feels like they are happening now. This time it was smelling Mum’s perfume which she always wears and she has always worn, so it is as much her as the way she laughs, maybe even more so because the perfume isn’t separate at all in the way laughter can come into a room with the person not there yet. But the scent is in every room with Mum always, and usually it’s hardly noticeable, it’s just there, but sometimes, like this morning, it comes and wraps around me like a hug from her.

I don’t know why Dad isn’t here. I don’t notice him by his own personal absence, or by his smell, thank God, but by the presence of things he should be in. His trainers are at the bottom of the bed on the side that he should be sleeping in right now if he wasn’t up and ready for our game of tennis and wearing the trainers.

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