A Perfect Life by Raffaella Barker

distracted by her new capacity to cry and not wanting Nick to see.
    â€˜I don’t know why you have to be so negative about everything,’ she mutters, not really wanting him to hear and start a row, but unable to keep the bitterness within her. She slams salad, spoons and a salt cellar on to a tray and marches out into the garden. Nick gazes after her, then takes himself into the playroom, shuts the door and flips through the TV channels to Extreme Sports. Surfing in Australia. Excellent. He stretches himself on the sofa and turns the volume up.
    The breeze catches the corner of the tablecloth and shivers through it, moving the leaves of the catkin tree, rattling them like sequins on an Indian shawl. Goose pimples rise on Angel’s arms as she kneels behind the courgettes in the vegetable patch, picking a bowl of strawberries from Foss’s tiny edible garden. Foss is meant to be doing this with her, as he was meant to plant the sunflower seeds and pumpkins and the row of radishes, but he cannot be persuaded to leave his snail emporium, well established and flourishing in the stone sink in the yard. She stopspicking them mid-bowl and goes back to try again with Foss.
    â€˜Come on, darling. You and Mummy can do it by ourselves – we can pick the strawberries with no one else,’ Angel urges him. It is absurd that he spends all his life in the same dank spot, though, she reminds herself cheeringly, he did come out to make jelly this morning. Now, though, he is back with his bucket, some stones and his signature snotty nose. She wipes it on her apron and he roars, ‘Get off, Mum – that’s my nose you’re picking. Leave it alone.’
    â€˜I am not picking it,’ retorts Angel, trying to hold his hand and lead him through the gate in the wall to the vegetable patch. Foss shakes her off and crouches to pull a slug off the bottom of his bucket.
    â€˜Come on, let’s go and pick strawberries.’
    â€˜No.’
    Angel takes a deep breath and counts to five. Children are so insane. Half their lives they are moaning and crying that she doesn’t see them enough, that she isn’t there to pick them up from school or watch them on the climbing frame, and the other half of the time they are refusing to interact and want to keep her at bay.
    â€˜Look, we’re running out of time and we need strawberries for Granny to have for lunch,’ she wheedles, looking at her watch and calculating that she needs ten minutes to change and pick another bunch of bloody sweet peas. Why do they die so fast? She must try and find some endurance flowers; in fact why not just go for plastic ones and forget the sodding garden?
    â€˜Well, you get them then, I don’t want to.’
    Jem, bouncing a basketball, pauses with a grin. ‘Mum, you can’t make people do what you want just because you’ve suddenly got time. He’s been working on that slug centre for days now and he thinks picking strawberries is for girls. I bet Ruby will help you.’
    Angel looks anxious for a moment then bursts out laughing.
    â€˜OK. You win. I think you’re right. How did you get so sane, anyway?’
    Jem grins again. ‘I learn from your mistakes,’ he says, and chucks the ball in through what appears to be an open upstairs window. A sound of smashing glass follows.
    â€˜Oh fuck,’ says Jem.
    Angel’s eyes follow his gaze.
    â€˜I can’t stand it,’ she sighs, not sounding as though she minds at all. And in fact she doesn’t. She has no will for anger and it is such a relief not to care.

Nick
    Dawn Mayden had been a very good advertisement for mothers-in-law when Nick met her. Just the way she poured a drink, oily gin beneath slow bubbles of tonic as she added an inch of it to the warm glass until it brimmed over and slopped on her fingers grasping it, her nails painted powder-puff pink, a little chipped but charmingly so. The unspoken, almost