A Perfect Life by Raffaella Barker Read Free Book Online

would be great,’ she says. Just like that. As if she has never gone on about teenage drivers, or over her dead body, or any of her so-called abiding principles. I open my mouth to point some of this out, butCoral pinches my arm and whispers, ‘We’ve got thirty quid.’ So I keep quiet and we pile into Matt’s very small hot car. He starts the engine and Hendrix comes on loud all around us and the car howls as we rev and lurch out of first gear and down the drive. I look back, anxious that Mum might have seen this evidence of bad driving, but she is already back in the house, not so much as waiting to see us out of the gate. Coral lights a cigarette.
    â€˜Phew, we’ve escaped,’ she sighs.
    â€˜I feel sick,’ says Ruby.
    â€˜Are we nearly there?’ Foss asks, wriggling back so his head is cushioned by Mel’s enormous shelf of – well, by Mel.

Nick
    Nick feels slightly retarded for admitting this, even to himself, but being away these days without Angel or the kids is like taking drugs. He can do anything. Really. He can do whatever he wants with whomever he fancies – and there are so many girls to fancy it’s unbelievable. No one need ever know. It’s a mid-life crisis for sure, but it’s fun.
    And this is how he can revisit the free-fall sense of irresponsibility, the light-headed whim-led state that took him in the mid-seventies to Sausalito, California to live on a houseboat with a girl called Tree. He didn’t ever pretend to love her, but they smoked a lot of opium together, then they took cocaine, and somewhere along the way Nick got a job as a chef.
    Even though he has not picked up his knives for years, Nick’s fingers still sometimes ache with the memory of the cuts and wounds that never really healed through his early twenties. There is nothing else left of that part of his life now. The restaurants heworked in were gone, and Tree has changed her name back to Theresa and lives in ecological splendour with a green banker husband and IVF twins in Marin County. He remembers her as ethereal, but it could just have been the drugs, as he also recalls she gave the best blow jobs of any woman he has known. That surely takes some practical application, but maybe that, too, is just a fantasy of Nick’s from his own internal twenty-four-hour soft porn channel.
    The dreamlike propulsion which was his youthful impetus is now taking him out of the fashion buyers’ fair on West Broadway, Manhattan and along three blocks to a former municipal building where he will meet a real estate agent with a view to purchasing an as yet unbuilt apartment. He is feeling good, he has charmed Susie Streid, a big blonde buyer from a national supermarket chain, and has convinced her that the chain needs to revamp its image and invest in a new uniform of stretchy trousers for all its employees. From there it is a tiny step to getting them to stock the trousers to sell as well, and the deal will be worth a shed load of money. Sexy money. Not sexy trousers unfortunately, but that would be a miracle.
    He should have taken Susie Streid out to dinner, but he has a bit of property to speculate over today. Susie can wait. The ‘unbuiltness’ of the property is what makes him able to contemplate spending several hundred thousand dollars of as yet un-borrowed money on a bachelor’s loft he has no intention of telling his wife about. Compartmentalising is what Nick’s life is all about. He kicks a Starbucks paper cup offthe sidewalk and crosses in front of a heaving row of taxis, motorbikes and delivery vans at the traffic lights.
    New York, even though he only arrived yesterday, and is still treacle-legged with jet lag, is full of promise, and Nick intends to extract every ounce – or do they deal in grams now? – from it. The triggers are all here, and unconsciously he scratches the palms of his hands with his clenched middle finger, an echo of a past