Free Perfect Day by Imogen Parker Page B

side.
    Nell stares at Lizzy Angel in the rearview mirror, wondering how it is that a small doll with red wool for hair and a cross-stitched nose succeeds in unnerving her.
    On the radio there’s the unmistakable syncopated intro to Bowie ’s ‘Let’s Dance’. Nell turns the volume up, dancing from the waist up, as much as the confines of her seatbelt will allow.
    When she was at university she must have danced to the song at a hundred discos, but the picture it produces in her mind is of Alexander. Alexander wearing a pair of red swimming shorts and a shirt with palm trees on, looking very brown, standing in the shadows of a bar, swigging beer from a bottle. His face is lit up every other second by the flash of gaudy Christmas lights. He raises his bottle in greeting.
    Then Frances comes back from the bar with two bottles of beer, and says, ‘Well, of all the bars in all the world...’
    ‘Let’s Dance’ was one of the few discs that worked on the jukebox in the bar and it played over and over. They drank a lot of beer. She and Frances danced, drunk, prancing around exaggeratedly and laughing, with Nell half-aware of him watching them from the table, beer bottle in his hand. She stopped dancing, smiled at him, and something about the beat and Bowie ’s voice and the smile Alexander gave her made it impossible to think of anything except going to bed with him.

    ‘Why have you got a worried face?’ Lucy asks.
    She’s looking at Nell in the rearview mirror.
    ‘I haven’t!’
    Nell makes her face bright.
    ‘I like it when you have a happy face,’ Lucy says.

    That was the beginning. Once she had seen Alexander’s face relaxed, she couldn’t remember how cool and disdainful he had looked before.
    That night, she lay awake under the palm leaf thatch of the beach hut, listening to Frances ’s beer-laden sleep, feeling as if she were somehow on the brink of something that might disappear if she were to close her eyes.
    The following day they had planned to go snorkelling together, but the boat was full, and two people had to stay behind. She and Alexander were the last two on and so they were the ones bumped off. Frances watched them as the little boat chugged out towards the reef, and Nell felt slightly treacherous, as if she had somehow engineered their separation.
    ‘What’s Nell short for?’ Alexander asked her.
    ‘Helen.’
    ‘Helen,’ he repeated, making it sound like a special name. ‘Did you know that Helen of Troy had flaxen tresses too?’
    He touched her hair.
    When the boat became a dot on the horizon, he said, ‘So what shall we two do today, Helen?’
    We!
    They lay on the beach talking all morning, for lunch ate barbecued squid with their fingers, and in the afternoon, they made love on the floor of his hut.
    When the boat returned, they were waiting on the beach, holding hands.
    ‘I thought this might happen,’ Frances said.
    ‘Did you?’ Nell was astonished. ‘Why didn’t you say?’
    And Frances laughed, drily.
    Frances always knows more than other people.

    ‘How long now?’ Lucy’s getting a bit restless in the back.
    ‘Soon we’ll be able to see the sea.’

    When Nell thinks about that holiday, the pictures that go through her mind are of two people falling in love, talking, talking all the time. But she cannot hear what they are saying. And screwing, licking, penetrating, trying every imaginable position, laughing. But she cannot feel how it felt. It’s as if she’s watching a silent video of the two of them.
    When she was three years old, she toppled off her tricycle into a bed of nettles and she has an image of herself sitting wailing on her mother’s lap while her mother rubbed dark green dock leaves up and down her shins, but she cannot remember how the nettle stings felt, nor the sound of her howling. She knows that falling in love with Alexander was thrilling, surprising, terrifying, wonderful . She knows that she floated round in a state of amazement. She even