The Perfect Girl Read online

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ she said. ‘I couldn’t find you anywhere.’

  She looked disorientated and her voice was slurred.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, as she leaned heavily on me. ‘Gull? Are you OK?’

  And she puked, all over the floor.

  ‘Oh fuck!’ said Jack. ‘Get her to the bathroom.’

  He kind of manhandled Gull down the corridor. I sat by her as she threw up, again and again, into the loo. Jack went to clear up the mess on the floor, and I realised quickly that I should have locked the door to the loo because before I knew it Eva Bell was standing in the doorway, shoulder to shoulder with best friend Amelia Barlow, and both of them were looking at us with absolute disdain.

  ‘Should have stayed in the library, girls,’ she said, ‘if you can’t take your drink.’

  I heard once that Eva and her friends bought mixers to drink while they were getting ready for parties just in case there’s not enough alcohol when they get there.

  ‘Shut up,’ I said, but my heart wasn’t in it because Gull was puking so hard it was making her cry.

  ‘My mum’s going to kill me,’ she said, and I gathered her hair up and held it back from her head.

  ‘She doesn’t have to know,’ I said.

  ‘I want to go home,’ said Gull. She grabbed hold of me unsteadily. ‘I need to go home. It’s my birthday tomorrow.’

  ‘What have you been drinking?’ I asked her. I didn’t tell her it was that late it was already her birthday, because that probably would have made her more upset.

  ‘Somebody spiked my drink. I swear, somebody spiked it.’

  We had cycled to the party, sharing Gull’s bike. It was four miles, mostly downhill. The plan had been to walk home with the bike but I could see that that wasn’t going to happen. Gull was pulling herself up on me now and I didn’t think she could even manage to walk.

  Jack said, ‘I can drive you home.’ He was looking a little nervous now, as if vomit and neediness weren’t on his agenda tonight.

  Amy was right beside him, hanging off him a bit like Gull was off me only her body was pressed against his, and when he said this her eyes and Eva’s shot lasers at me. Amy was not very drunk, or if she was, she was holding it well.

  ‘How much have you had?’ she asked Jack. ‘Why don’t you let them walk home? She lives nearby, doesn’t she?’

  Amy was right. Gull’s family had a small, modern home in Hartland where the washing-up was never done and even the dogs didn’t bother licking the grease off the floor. Her mum and dad were the warmest people you could meet, it’s just they didn’t care about that kind of stuff. They cared about Gull. Every penny they had, every ounce of love and effort, went to her.

  ‘She runs like the wind, our girl,’ her dad would say, ‘like the wind,’ and my dad would mutter, ‘He used to run like the wind too, Gull’s got it from her dad.’

  Gull’s real name was Linda, but her parents, surprised by a baby when they’d given up hope of having one, began to call her Gull when, as her dad said, ‘she squawked like a gull at all hours, what else were we supposed to call her?’ ‘We used to laugh,’ he said, ‘she squawked so loud. You’d have thought we was throttling her, not getting her a meal and cleaning her ladyship up.’

  Gull didn’t like people to know where she lived, because of being a scholarship girl like me. We didn’t live in big houses like Jack and Eva Bell and Amy Barlow and the other kids at our school. We lived in normal houses where there was mud, and stuff was old, and animals lay beside fires and there was single glazing.

  ‘She can’t stay here,’ Jack said. ‘My parents are coming home first thing in the morning.’

  ‘I’m not drunk,’ I said. ‘If I can borrow a car I can drive her home.’

  ‘You can’t drive,’ Amy said.

  ‘My dad taught me how.’

  Jack had a look in his eyes suddenly. ‘We could drop Gull home and then go to the lighthouse,’ he said, ‘have you ever done that?’

  ‘No,’ I said, but I was suddenly seduced by the glint in his eye, and I said, ‘but I’d like to.’

  Amy said, ‘That’s a stupid idea, Jack. Let her drive Gull home and bring the car back. Then she can go home on the bike.’

  Jack ignored her. ‘It’s very cool,’ he said. ‘You can climb up to the top. I know a way. We could take my dad’s car.’

  And I got this incredible idea of the lighthouse, with its strong beam of light raking the waves below, and I heard powerful music in my head, classical music, rising like the spray on the rocks. I knew there was a shipwreck there too, which you could see when the tide was low, basking on the stony shore like rusted orange skeleton bones abandoned after a violent death.

  ‘You should go with them, Ames,’ slurred Eva. She was drunk, definitely. ‘Make sure Jack doesn’t cop off with piano girl. He’s pissed enough he just might.’

  ‘Shut up,’ said Jack.

  A boy called Douglas appeared behind Eva and slipped his hands around her waist and buried his head in the back of her neck.

  ‘You coming too then, Eva?’ Amy said to her.

  ‘Somebody needs to hold the fort,’ she said, ‘if Jack goes off. You go, make sure he behaves himself.’

  She turned to Douglas, and her body seemed to slide up his and they kissed so long and hard that I was totally embarrassed, and in that moment it seemed that it had been decided that I would drive Gull home.

  And I remember finishing my drink while me and Gull sat on the bed waiting for Jack to find the car keys, one arm around her and the other holding that pint glass of Coke. And I remember Amy glowering as if she would rather be anywhere else but with us, but didn’t know what else to do.

  And I remember helping Gull to the car, and helping her in, and then getting into the car myself and starting the ignition, and I remember how it felt powerful and smooth, quite unlike the truck I’d driven on the farm.

  But I shut down the memories there, because this is the bit where it gets painful for me.

  I think about how I’m in the sitting room on my own, again, and I wonder if I should go downstairs and apologise for screaming like I did, because ‘apologies are always good and always necessary’, but I think my mum might want me to stay away so she can keep things smooth.

  Lucas lingers in my mind: the kiss, the fact that he knows. How does he know? I wonder. Why hasn’t he said? His request that I read his email comes back into my mind. I remember where my phone is, and I dig down under the sofa cushions and find it.

  MONDAY MORNING

  SAM

  The choice that I gave to Mr and Mrs Guerin and Zoe, when we met to discuss her case on that freezing cold morning in Bideford, was a difficult one.

  Zoe could go to her initial hearing at court, and plead guilty. The court would look favourably on this, as it avoided a costly trial, and was an admission of culpability. It would probably keep her sentence to a minimum, though she was unlikely to avoid something custodial.

  Or, Zoe could turn up at her initial hearing and make a ‘Special Reasons’ plea. She would have to admit that she drove the car, and caused the accident, but could ask a judge to decide whether she was guilty of knowingly driving when drunk. If you accepted Zoe’s explanation, it would appear that somebody spiked her drink at the party, most likely the boy she was with, Jack Bell, who was also one of the victims. We would have to prove that in court though, and that would be a tough call, especially as three of the key witnesses were dead.

  ‘Well, we’ll do that then,’ says Mr Guerin when he heard this option. ‘That’s a plan then.’

  People who are in the system for the first time are always tempted to mount a defence, because it feels like a chink of light, a way of minimising the damage they’ve done, the guilt they feel, and the harm to their reputation and that of their family.

  Maria could see pitfalls: ‘Well, wait a minute, what if they don’t believe her?’

  ‘It’s the truth, isn’t it?’ her husband said.
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  Maria didn’t speak, she was waiting for my reply.

  ‘If the court don’t accept that defence, then Zoe risks a tougher sentence than she might have got if she pleaded guilty.’

  ‘But it’s not on her conscience then, is it?’ said Mr Guerin. ‘If she pleads guilty it’s like telling the world that our daughter accepts that she murdered those children. Murdered them, Maria.’

  Zoe was shrinking into her chair.

  Maria ignored him. ‘It’s a gamble, then.’ She directed this at me.

  ‘It would be a gamble, yes.’

  ‘Would she have a chance of getting less of a sentence if the judge accepts the plea, than if she pleaded guilty in the first place?’

  ‘I doubt it, no.’

  ‘But we wouldn’t have it on our conscience,’ said Maria. ‘It would be a similar sentence but it would be proven that she didn’t know she was drunk, that it was just a normal accident.’

  In my view, this is what you call clutching at straws, but this family was obviously trying to clutch at anything.

  Mr Guerin was on his feet now, standing at the window of my office, which had a view of the waterside, where the tide was low that morning, leaving the boats mostly stranded on the mud. A low, immovable grey sky waited patiently above the scene while this family considered their options, and it dulled and flattened the landscape across the harbour. Below it, seagulls hovered and circled, just as they did every day.

  Mr Guerin had his back to us but when he spoke his voice was firm, and it was clear that he’d made a mental U-turn.

  ‘It’s not worth the risk,’ he said. ‘What if they don’t believe her?’

  ‘I’ll tell them the truth,’ said Zoe.

  ‘You’ve killed people, Zoe,’ he said, ‘who’s going to believe you?’

  Quite apart from the hopeless resignation in his tone, and the effect it had on his daughter, this statement got to me because Philip Guerin was exactly the kind of man who was likely to be on a jury in this part of the world, and while I knew that there would be no jury in a youth court, where Zoe would be tried, it was an attitude that could well be shared by the magistrates, or judge.

  ‘They’ll believe her.’ Maria was suddenly adamant. ‘We can coach her. They’ll feel sorry for her, she’ll be a good witness, and perhaps we can get some of the other children in the witness box.’

  ‘No,’ said Mr Guerin. ‘I’m fed up with you coaching her. You’ve coached her enough, Maria. We wouldn’t be in this mess if you hadn’t coached her so she got a music scholarship. She’d be at the local school, which was good enough for me by the way, but not good enough for your daughter. If she’d gone there none of this would have happened. It’s going to that jumped-up school and trying to keep up with the kids there, that’s why this has happened. No. I won’t do it. She should plead guilty, and take the consequences for what she’s done, pay for it, and then perhaps we can get some forgiveness one day.’

  ‘I don’t agree,’ said Maria. ‘Think of Zoe. Think of us!’

  ‘I am thinking of her. And of the other families. I grew up with Matt.’ His voice choked. I recognised the name of Zoe’s friend Gull’s dad.

  ‘I know you did,’ Maria said.

  ‘I won’t put him and Sue through a trial.’

  ‘We have to give Zoe a chance to clear her name.’

  ‘No! Gull was their only child, you know that.’

  ‘I’m not willing to jeopardise Zoe’s future to save the feelings of the other families.’

  ‘Sometimes, Maria, you have a hard heart,’ said her husband. ‘What future does Zoe have now anyway?’

  I wanted to jump in and defend Zoe, but Maria was on her feet now too, and both of them were seemingly oblivious to Zoe.

  ‘How is it having a hard heart to protect your daughter?’ Maria spoke quietly but with a vehemence that was startling.

  ‘And what if it doesn’t protect her? What if it goes wrong and she goes to jail for longer than she would have if she pleaded guilty?’

  They were facing each other across the table, although it was hard to see Mr Guerin’s expression because his back was to the window now.

  ‘Zoe,’ I said, because it was definitely time for me to calm things down and I wanted to remind these two adults that their child was listening to them. ‘Do you understand what the decision is here?’

  ‘I don’t want to go to prison, but I don’t want to make it worse for the families,’ she said. ‘I’ll say I’m guilty.’

  As there was a sharp intake of breath from Maria, Mr Guerin came around the table and put his hands on the back of Zoe’s shoulders. He had huge, red, dry, calloused hands, and they made Zoe look smaller and more fragile than ever.

  ‘Well done, girl,’ he said.

  But I looked at Maria, and at Zoe, who watched her mother anxiously, and I didn’t think this decision was made yet.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  TESSA

  When I get back downstairs, there’s nobody in the kitchen. On the island, the box of smashed eggs lies untouched, and the mess from it drips silently off the side of the granite down on to the golden stone floor.

  I go outside. Lucas and his father are standing at one end of the swimming pool, their faces washed blue and yellow by the lights, and at the other end of it, sitting on the end of the squat diving board, is my sister, the tips of her toes in the water.

  Maria’s breakdown after the accident was a slow burn. It began when Zoe was sentenced, and taken to the Unit, which was when Maria stopped having a purpose, and when the adrenalin that had taken her through the trial, and the months leading up to it, crashed. She’d been closely involved in every detail up to then, liaising with Sam, and with the rest of Zoe’s legal team, discussing defence strategies. Adrenalin fuelled her. She lost weight, she more or less lost her husband because they disagreed so strongly, and still she focused only on the case. She continued to be a tiger mother.

  But the minute that Zoe was taken down, Maria ceased to cope, because suddenly there was nothing to do. There was just an empty farmhouse, a husband who slept in another room, and a silence that sat with them, twiddling its fingers, looking from one of them to the other, whenever they were in a room together.

  ‘Philip couldn’t bear it,’ Maria told me. ‘It shamed him. He felt he’d failed her, failed at making a family.’

  I think she was right. Philip Guerin had been a doting father, while the going was good, but nothing in his life had prepared him for what Zoe did, and while Maria became a dynamo, he retreated, shut himself down. Perhaps it was because he, like the families whose children died, had been rooted in that community for decades. Perhaps that meant he felt the loss of those three young folk more than Maria did. Perhaps it was because he was weaker than her. Whatever the reason, it was shocking, his inability to cope. He didn’t even protest when Maria moved out, and came to Bristol, to be near me, to make that fresh start with Zoe.

  In the dense night air, on the end of the diving board, Maria has pulled her skirt up around her thighs. Her shoes have been discarded and lie poolside, one on its side. Her legs are bare, and thin. Her toenails are painted a deep black-red.

  When she sees me, she calls out to me, in a voice that I barely recognise, so strained is it.

  ‘So,’ she says. ‘I’ve told my husband what happened to Zoe, his stepdaughter. I’ve told him that Zoe has been convicted of a crime, and do you know what, Tess: I think he’s going to dump us.’

  Chris turns to me.

  ‘She’s drunk,’ he says. ‘She’s totally lost her mind. I can’t get any sense out of her.’

  I start to walk around the edge of the pool and Maria struggles to her feet. I can’t quite understand how Maria could have got so drunk so quickly, because I reckon I’ve only been out of the house for about forty-five minutes, an hour tops. Though perhaps, as she says, she isn’t.

  ‘Don’t come near me!’ she shouts. ‘Nobody come near me!’


  I almost laugh at that because the diving board is not high and the tone in which she says it makes it sound like a threat, as if she were teetering on the edge of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, hundreds of feet above the Avon Gorge. But I don’t laugh because Maria looks like a broken puppet, and Chris looks desperate, and I don’t want to do anything other than help them to get through this evening, in the hope that once they do, they’ll find that they still have a future together.

  ‘Maria,’ I say.

  She staggers to her feet, skirt tight around her thighs, making her wobble. ‘Don’t come near me!’ she repeats.

  So I stop, halfway around the pool. I wonder if in fact Chris is mistaking instability for drunkenness, if the real explanation is that years of ghastliness have just reached their peak, and now threaten to topple her sanity. When she got pregnant with Grace, I did worry about her, that she might not cope with the pressures of starting all over again, but she seemed to sail through that, just as she’d sailed into her new role as Mrs Christopher Kennedy, mother to Zoe, stepmother to Lucas, and now I’m wondering whether that was a plaster, masking wounds that I know run very deep.

  Chris says, ‘Maria, come off there, please. Let’s talk; let’s eat. Like you wanted to.’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Because the eggs are broken, so I can’t get the breadcrumbs on the meat.’ She sounds pathetic now. She looks at me. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa,’ she says.

  ‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Of course it is. Don’t be silly.’

  Teetering now on the end of the board, Maria has noticed the stain on her shirt and she starts to rub at it, and when that doesn’t work, she begins to unbutton it.

  ‘For Christ’s sake, Maria!’ Chris’s voice explodes around the pool. ‘What are you doing?’

  Lucas turns his head away because before we know it she’s pulled the shirt off and is standing there in just her skirt and bra, a complicated, lacy bit of apparatus which holds her breasts firm and pert. Her body is perfectly taut. I think that her bra probably cost more than my entire outfit.