The Quest For Perfection (Is A Damn Fine Thing)

Part I: The Strangeness of Fredrick Street - Chapter 3

3

The crackle of fat in the pan, accompanied by the smell of French toast and bacon wafting up the stairs, woke Mark Fleming from his sleep that Wednesday morning as it tended to most mornings when his wife Kim rose before he did. A quick swipe out with his left arm confirmed that she had indeed stepped out of bed before him this morning and was the conductor of the breakfast band playing downstairs. Mark lay there for a few minutes, letting the warm rays shoot through the slats of the blinds, giving him a few gentle slaps into the land of the living. Turning over, he opened his eyes and smiled as he looked at the alarm clock, which read 7:59. If there was anything he loved more than waking up to the smell of bacon or the sound of his wife singing downstairs it was beating the sound of his alarm. It had been his sworn enemy throughout his teenage years and now, approaching 40 as Mark was, he took a real pleasure in beating the little wake-up box to the punch and not giving the snooze button the satisfaction of that early morning control over him. It was the small things Mark lived for.

Waiting till the digits turned to 8.00 and turning the alarm off before it had the chance to bleat, Mark rose out of bed, his feet hitting cold on the wooden flooring (sometimes he wished they were carpeted, particularly this current moment) and threw on his dressing gown. Stretching, he opened the blinds and squinted outside at the rest of the houses in Fredrick Street. It was quiet, always had been but recently it had been more so. The only other families he had seen was Sarah Barr's across the street, Albert Molineaux and his wife Betty and the Young's, although he only ever spoke to the youngest Jessica, purely because she was interested in following in Mark's footsteps for a career in medicine. He was just a surgeon at the small hospital in the city but he had promised he'd do his best to give her all the advice and help he could, and his best was what he was going to do. As for the rest of Fredrick Street, he hadn't seen The Guthries, The Hendricks, The Murphy's or any of the other residents for a while, not since Albert's 70th a few months ago and even then, some he hadn't seen since they all moved in precisely a year ago.

He was still looking out onto the street when he saw Albert come out of his house to pick up the paper from his grass and looked up. Mark gave him a little wave, which Albert returned with a wave of the paper before returning into the house. He watched Albert go, thinking of how he'd quite like to be as happy, agile and nimble as Albert was when he himself reached 70. And he'd love a good head of hair like the man himself with all his mental faculties in tact.

Moving away from the window, Mark made his way into the bathroom for a quick shower. Catching his reflection in the mirror, he couldn't help but give himself a little smile. He'd been a fat kid, from what he remembered, with a bad case of bacne but now, he had skin fit to feature in an advert for L'Oreal and a slender physique that wouldn't go a miss on the cover of Men's Health. The first flecks of grey were starting to threaten the deep black that currently crowned his head but he wasn't bothered. I'll just let this bit of stubble grow into a bushel and that'll distract the world from the grey. Not that anyone was as bothered about his hair as he was; even Kim wasn't bothered – she was looking forward to him becoming a silver fox. And by the looks of it, he was on track to being just that. Still smiling, he jumped in for a quick shower and started to get ready for the day.

Wrapping a towel around his waist, and picking up a small one to dry his hair, Mark headed back into the bedroom. As he finished drying himself off, and threw on his work shirt, suit and tie, he stopped. Looking around, he couldn't shake the feeling that something wasn't right; something was different. Pulling on his socks, he sat on the edge of the bed and listened as Kim entered the room with a plate.

"Don't get used to this honey. It won't happen every day. You want any sauce?" Kim said.

"Hmm?" Mark was distracted, he still wasn't sure what it was that was bothering him so much. It felt like something in the room had changed in the time it took him to go for a shower. "Have you been tidying?"