Free Perfect by Rachel Joyce Page A

fingers. I guess that’s why you’re good at gardening.’ She glances back at the café, and he realizes she must be looking for an excuse to get away.
    He would like to say something else. He would like to stay a little while longer with this woman who stands with her feet wide, whose hair is the colour of flame. But he has no idea how you do small talk. It’s easy, a nurse at Besley Hill told him once. You just say what’s on your mind. A compliment is always nice, she told him.
    ‘I l-l-like your sandwich,’ says Jim.
    Eileen frowns. She looks at the sandwich and then she looks back at him.
    Jim’s mouth is like sandpaper. Maybe the sandwich was not a good starting point. ‘I like the way you have set out the crisps,’ he says. ‘On the side.’
    ‘Oh,’ she says.
    ‘And the – and the – lettuce. I like the way you have cut the tomato like a s-s-star.’
    Eileen nods as if she has not considered that before. ‘I’ll make you one, if you like.’
    Jim replies that he would like that very much and watches her deliver the sandwich. She says something to the customer that makes him roar with laughter. Jim wonders what it might be. As she strides back to the kitchen, her orange hat jumps about in her hair and she lifts her hand to bat it in the way other people might swat a fly. He feels something inside, like a tiny light switch going on. He doesn’t want to think about the day nobody came to meet him any more.
    Despite the fact he was cured again when he was twenty-one, and released again, Jim was back at Besley Hill within six months. In that time he had tried to get it right. He had tried to be like everyone else. He enrolled at night school to catch up on his education. He tried to make conversation with his landlady and the other men who rented bedsits. But he found it hard to concentrate. Since the second set of electric shock treatment, he seemed to forget things. Not just the facts he had learned that day, but the most basic things, like repeating his name, for instance, or the street where he was living. He failed to sign on one day because he couldn’t remember where to get off the bus. He tried to take a job on the rubbish trucks but the other men laughed when he kept arranging the bins in order of size. They called him queer when he said he had no girlfriend. They never hurt him, though, and by the time he lost the job, he felt he had begun to belong. Sometimes he watched the dustbin men from his bedsit window,carrying the bins on their backs, and he wondered if they were his team or a different one. In working with them, he had begun to understand a little more about what it was to be strong, and part of a group. It was like looking inside another person’s window and seeing life from a different perspective.
    There was a downside. For months afterwards he could still smell the rubbish bins in his clothes. He took to visiting the laundrette every day. The woman behind the counter lit one cigarette after the other; she held the smouldering stub of one to the fresh tip of the next. After a while he couldn’t tell if it was the smoke in his clothes or the bins, but whatever it was, he had to keep going back to wash them because they were never fully clean. And eventually she said, ‘You’re funny in the head, you are.’ So he couldn’t go back there either.
    It was wearing dirty laundry that upset him the most. Some days he couldn’t even get dressed. From here came thoughts he didn’t want. And when he tried to do other things to get rid of the thoughts, like saying no to them or going for a walk, the tenants began to notice and steer clear of him. Then, opening his door one day, he happened to call hello to the Baby Belling. It wasn’t even meaningful. It was simply to be kind because it occurred to him the miniature oven looked lonely. But he noticed something happened afterwards, or rather that nothing happened, not once all day. He had no bad thoughts. A little while later his