A Perfect Life Read Online Free PDF Page A

there’s a kind of
In the Night Kitchen
insanity in my house and I must focus on that now. Let’s talk later on. Actually, you should call Jake. He’ll have a good take on it, and he’s responsible with me out of the picture and Nick away. Look, I must go, we’re about to be engulfed by dough!’
    God. I so know this one. Mum is so good at making it sound as though whatever we are doing here is wonderful and creative and she is enabling it. Other people are always saying, ‘Angel, you give your children a perfect life.’
    Well, if this is perfect I may as well shoot myself and save Mum and Dad a whole load of money and grief. And by the way, if this is perfect, please never show me flawed. Mum presses the off button on the phone, slams it on the dresser and stomps over to the kitchen sink.
    â€˜Can’t any of you even pick up a teaspoon?’ she demands, standing like a wooden martyr at the sink. ‘I do feel, Jem, that you could take responsibility for yourself now and get yourself up and dressed before lunch. How can you have a sense of fulfilment if you’re asleep all day?’
    â€˜I don’t want a sense of fulfilment, I just want some sodding breakfast,’ I snarl back at her. Mum raises one eyebrow – a really irritating thing she can do which I have tried to copy.
    â€˜It’s lunchtime,’ she says, trying to be withering and not succeeding.
    â€˜Mummy, when you do that you get wrinkles on one side of your face,’ says Ruby, pulling Mum towards her with a floury hand, commanding her attention. ‘Mummy, help me make this plait. I need you to do it and put sprinkles on it.’ Ruby is kneeling on a corner of the kitchen table. Actually, she looks as if she is rising out of a big flap of greaseproof paper, a bit like the
Venus de Milo
in that seashell which we have just been doing in art. The reason that it springs to my mind is that Ruby is wearing a bikini decorated with felt cut-out conch shells and she’s got ice cream on her nose and a streak of green in her hair where Coral sprayed it with a can of coloured dry ice. She looks quite neglected, but also very like my art project. I need a photograph of her. I think there’s a camera in the dog bed – most things seem to end up in the dog bed. Except the dog – she is behind me eating an egg that has rolled off the table and smashed on the floor.
    â€˜Mummeeeee. Help me!!!!!’ bellows Ruby, more like Goebbels than the
Venus de Milo
, but that’s another whole project for History and I am not going there today.
    â€˜Just a minute, darling, let me finish talking to Jem, he needs – Oh look, Jem, where did you find my camera? I’m sure you could take a better picture ofRuby if she wiped her face and we got all that mess off the table, and what about some flowers – oh look, there’s that jug of hollyhocks over there –’
    Racing about, Mum starts trying to ruin everything by poncing it up, but I’ve got the picture already so it doesn’t matter.
    â€˜Mum, what are we doing today?’ I interrupt her because I don’t want to hear her half-baked rubbish about what she thinks I need, what she thinks I should photograph and how cute she can make it. I am so bored of life with my family I could lie down and go into a trance and never stand up again.
    The phone rings again, and Mum shrieks, ‘God, I can’t stand it!’ and starts scrabbling around on the dresser because she can’t remember where she put the handset down. She’s got no bra on and her boobs are drooping like pancakes and more or less showing at the sides of her strappy dress. The phone is in the dog basket. There is so much stuff in there it’s like an office and there is actually no room for Vespa. That’s my excuse for why she sleeps in my bed. I fish the phone out and hand it to Mum, clicking the on switch. She is so lucky to have me instead