Exclusive Extract: Perfect

Fairy Tales

Charlie was due to arrive at the house at five o’clock. He was looking forward to seeing the place. The process of securing the room had been tedious. The landlady had asked him to fill in a ten-page questionnaire about his life, his academic achievements, his relationship with his parents, his favourite food, favourite music, favourite books and so on. What is more, she’d insisted he send her no less than ten photographs of himself. He wouldn’t have gone through with it all if the room hadn’t been so reasonably priced, and in a fairly convenient part of London. Once he had the address, he checked it out on Google Maps and found the house was huge, with a large garden.

The room had been advertised on the noticeboard in his college, where he was studying to be an architect. A friend from another college told him the room had also been advertised on their notice boards. It made Charlie wonder in how many other places she had pinned details of the spacious room in a private house in Clapham.

It was a spring day, and as he walked from the Tube to the house the trees and bushes sprouted a jubilant green after the rain. The road was wide, with gothic red-brick detached houses set well back. A gryphon sat up on the turret of one house, and a dragon held a coat of arms on another. The variety and exuberance of these houses impressed him – the steeply pitched gabled roof of one, the stone mullion of another, stained glass glimpsed in yet another.

He was glad finally to leave his parents’ home in Epsom. Mrs Watson had sounded positive, very upbeat, on the phone, which was a change from his parents who relished their gloom. It hadn’t been easy to tell his mother that he was moving out, and he’d left it until the day before he was going. There had been a blazing row. In the questionnaire he had explained he needed a major break from his difficult mother. Putting it into words on paper had, he supposed, led to him express these sentiments very clearly, too clearly, to his mother. She had told him not to come back. Fortunately, his older sister lived round the corner and already had two children. His parents would cope without Charlie for a while, until tempers had died down. It was unusual for Charlie to be outspoken.