The Perfect Girl Read online

  ‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she shouts at him. ‘I’m so sorry that I’m not perfect.’

  Chris marches around the pool towards her.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she calls and she’s taunting him. ‘Coming to tell me off? Coming to tell me to behave like a good girl? Coming to tell me I’m useless?’

  He pauses at the end of the diving board, unsure what to do.

  ‘Maria!’ I call. ‘For God’s sake!’

  And Maria, in a gesture that’s at once melodramatic and extraordinary, turns around, pinches her nose and lets herself fall back into the pool, and, for a moment or two, we all just watch the splash subside, and see that she’s sunk to the bottom, where she floats for a second or two, eyes shut.

  It’s Lucas who gets her out. He jumps in fully clothed and pulls her up to the surface, and they both swim together to the side, where he helps her up the steps, and she’s gasping and coughing, but by the time they’re both out Chris has gone indoors. Turned, and walked away, as if he’s too disgusted to deal with her at all.

  I take her sobbing, wet body from Lucas and send him inside to change, partly because he needs dry clothes, but also because I’ve got to strip her out of her sodden skirt and I don’t wish her humiliation to be any worse.

  I hold her, just as I held Zoe minutes earlier, and I’m persuading her to try to get out of her wet clothing when Chris reappears. He has a large towel with him, and a change of clothes for her. He holds the towel open and Maria looks at it for a moment before walking slowly towards him and letting him envelop her with it.

  He wraps the towel around her and holds her tight in his arms. The water from her soaking skirt still swarms down her legs in rivulets. She’s shivering.

  ‘Maria,’ he says. ‘My Maria. Come on. Let’s get you in the shower.’

  She looks up into his face and nods. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

  ‘Let’s talk about it,’ he says. She shuts her eyes and leans against him.

  ‘I think it’s probably best if you go home now,’ he says to me. ‘We’re all right. We’ll be OK.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ I say. I want to get Maria’s agreement but she’s huddled into him, shaking, seeking the warmth from his body, because the air around us is beginning to lightly shift and buffet.

  ‘I’ll look after her,’ he says. ‘Are you OK with that, honey? If Tess goes?’

  He puts a finger under Maria’s chin and lifts it gently and she looks up at him and nods. Her smile is hopeful but precarious, threatening to break into pieces like the paper napkin that’s fallen into the pool, and floats there, slowly disintegrating into many different pieces in the softly eddying water.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  ZOE

  When I get my phone out, I see that panop has notified me again. It says:

  How could you think you could keep it a secret? I’ve known all along.

  And I understand suddenly that it has to be Lucas sending me the messages, because who else could it be? It’s Lucas and he’s known for a long time like he said, and he’s kept that totally secret from me. And in a way that’s a relief because it’s not somebody from back then, but it’s frightening too.

  I’m confident enough that I’m right to send a message back:

  How do you know?

  I want to know how he found out and I want to know what it means to him, because I didn’t get the chance to ask him. I want to know why he kissed me. Was it real? Or did he just want to find out how it feels to kiss a killer. Lots of teenagers get off on that kind of stuff actually, and although I don’t think Lucas is that kind of boy, you can never be really sure about anybody.

  I also want to know why he’s using panop to contact me, because that’s horribly, awfully freaky, but Lucas is a super tech computer person so I suppose it’s not that surprising that he’s found out about me. I close panop, because I’m still curious to have another look at Lucas’s email I open my inbox and I find it, but I can’t read the attachment straight away because for some reason I have to download it again as my phone is always such a fail and needs upgrading.

  While I wait I try to control my breathing, which has become fast and shallow. To distract myself, I scroll around my phone, and I see that his email is surrounded by about twenty other unread emails, none of them personal.

  The only one that interests me is a Facebook notification, where I can see what Katya is doing. When she first arrived, Katya was really friendly to me, like a cat rubbing up against your legs, and she wanted us to be friends on Facebook; that was before she worked out that I was Social Pond Life and had no proper friends, either online, or in real life. What being her Facebook friend means is that I can see when she changes her profile picture, and in fact she’s just done that. She’s just changed it from the vampy Kardashian pout that she put up last week and now it’s a picture of her and Barney Scott together, all nostrils and foreheads and sunglasses, all teeth and chins and my heart kind of sinks because they look sexy and funny and cool like teenagers are supposed to look.

  There are no photos of me online from the trial because the press weren’t allowed to report my name or publish photos of me, which was a saving grace, as my mum said at the time.

  The only photos of me online now are from a stupid website that my mum runs to manage my profile. In those photos, I’m always groomed and wearing a concert outfit. I’m never drunk, or stoned, or sexy, or funny or wearing sunglasses. My tongue doesn’t loll out rudely like a pop star. The only prop I have in any of my online photos is a shiny silver trophy, which my mum will soon be snatching from my hands so that she can take it away and get my name engraved on it, for perpetuity, just like my criminal record.

  I can hear somebody coming. Chris takes the stairs up from the basement two at a time, passes the sitting room door, and continues up to the first floor. ‘Sshh,’ I want to say, ‘don’t wake the baby,’ but I would never dare. That phrase is in my head because it’s what he and Mum say all the time to me and Lucas, and once somebody has said something one thousand times it’s in your head for ever. I just let my mouth form the words silently instead. He reappears again quite quickly, holding bundles of things, heading back down. He doesn’t look at me, he doesn’t know I’m watching and I wonder what’s happening.

  I think it’s best if I stay away from downstairs, though, because I’m messing everything up tonight. So I close the Facebook email and go back to the one from Lucas.

  The attachment is downloading so slowly, which is incredibly annoying. I think about the title of it, and it makes my heart start to beat a little faster because now I wonder what ‘What I Know’ is referring to, and if the script is going to be about our life now, after it’s talked about his mum, and if it will tell me how Lucas knows about me. I kind of take a mental deep breath because I’m always wary now of people turning on me and I wonder if Lucas is about to. People can, even if they’ve kissed you, even if they’ve kissed you deeply.

  ‘It’s complicated that,’ Jason told me once when we were talking about what happened with Jack Bell, ‘because you’d be surprised how easily people can mix up feelings of love and hate. You wouldn’t think they can, but they do, and it’s because they’re both strong and sometimes frightening emotions.’

  I had to agree with that, because although I’ve never told anybody about it, I fully remember what happened in the car right before we crashed, right before they died.

  We argued. I was driving super slowly, and I mean super slowly because it was icy out and I was still struggling to handle the car. In the rear-view mirror I could see Gull’s head lolling and Jack said, ‘Come on! Let’s go to the lighthouse now – all of us – you can look after her, Ames – you won’t mind, will you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I think I need to get Gull home.’

  I felt odd then suddenly, queasy and dizzy, and the road ahead seemed to have a life of its own like a ribbon twisting in the win
d. I blinked and it steadied. Ahead in the lights I could see frost-tipped hedges and I knew that around the corner, just after the junction to the lighthouse, was the lane where Gull’s parents’ house could be found.

  I clasped the wheel carefully, hands at ten to two, and in the back Amy said, ‘For God’s sake, Zoe, you’re driving like such a girl.’

  ‘She is a girl,’ said Jack. ‘She’s doing fine,’ but then he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Though you could probably speed up a little bit.’

  He turned on the car stereo and cranked up the volume until it was blasting out: ‘“Highway to Hell”, ACDC,’ he said and he gave me a massive grin, which I just loved. As the music pumped around the car I put my foot down a little. Jack peered into the back seat. ‘Gull’s asleep,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s just go to the lighthouse.

  ‘No, no,’ I said. ‘We should take her home. Actually, I don’t feel so good myself.’ In fact I felt disorientated and strange and uncertain, because suddenly the hedges we were driving between somehow didn’t look familiar and I wasn’t sure where I was.

  ‘Oh relax,’ said Jack. He was thumping the tops of his legs in time to the music. ‘You won’t believe how awesome it is at the lighthouse, honestly, I’m telling you.’

  And then Amy said, ‘What are you planning to do with her there anyway, Jack? She’s just a pathetic little slut you know.’

  And I heard that loud and clear and I turned around for just a second to say something to her, to tell her that her comment proved that she was the bitch who was sending me the panop messages, but as I did Jack said, ‘Zoe! You’re missing the turn,’ and I looked back round at the road to see the turn to the lighthouse but as I did I hit the accelerator by mistake and the car surged forward just as Jack reached out to turn the wheel away from Gull’s house and down the lane which led to the lighthouse, and it was only a millisecond before there were no memories any more because there was only blackness, until I woke up to hear somebody phoning for an ambulance, and then the rest of my life started.

  I remember all this like a slow motion film as I’m watching the attachment trying to download, achingly slowly, like death by volcanic ash burial, when Tessa comes upstairs.

  ‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Mum slipped into the pool. She’s fine, but we’re not going to do dinner because it’s getting a bit late, so I’m off home.’

  ‘Did she go for a swim?’

  ‘No, it was more of an accident.’

  My mum is clumsy like me but I think that this really takes the biscuit, as Jason would say.

  ‘Do you have to go?’ I ask.

  I don’t want her to go. I really don’t. Aunt Tessa is sort of my best friend these days, and it’s like she can read my mind because she says, ‘Do you want to come and stay the night with me?’

  And I do, I really, really so badly do, but I know that Mum might need me here and I don’t want her to be alone if there’s going to be an argument or ‘a talk’, so I say, ‘I’m fine. I’d better stay.’

  She hugs me again, warm and lovely, and pats my back while she’s hugging me in the way that she’s always done. I feel a tear slip down my cheek. Just one.

  ‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ she says. ‘Be strong, Butterfly, you’ve nothing to feel bad about. Nothing. Remember that. You’ve paid for what you did and you have a right to a life.’

  I stand behind one of the heavy drapes and watch from the front window as she crunches down the drive. She turns once to look back at the house before she disappears from sight.

  MONDAY MORNING

  SAM

  Zoe did not plead Guilty. Against her father’s wishes, and guided by her mother, she pleaded Not Guilty and went for the Special Reasons defence instead. It was an unusual defence – I had repeatedly warned the whole family of that – but, at first, it seemed that we might be successful.

  Zoe went into the stand and presented herself fairly well when speaking about the events that had taken place that night. She showed that she had terrible regrets, and she admitted her guilt by accepting that she had been the driver, but assured the judge that she wasn’t knowingly drunk. She agreed that she’d had a drink when she arrived at the party, a spritzer, but insisted that she’d asked only for Coca-Cola after that, and repeated her conviction that her drink must have therefore have been spiked.

  It wasn’t until Eva Bell, Jack Bell’s twin sister, and a witness for the Crown, took the stand that any chance of success we might have had was ruined.

  The Crown called Eva Bell to give evidence that Zoe knowingly drank an excessive amount of alcohol, and Eva couldn’t have been a more successful witness.

  There were a minimum of people in the courtroom, because of Zoe’s age, and we’d been there for a week already hearing testimony from experts about the site of the accident, the condition of the car and blood alcohol levels, so some of the tension had left the proceedings to be replaced by boredom. The walls of the courtroom were clad in wooden strips and there was no natural light so it felt a bit as though we’d all been buried underground for a week. Zoe had agreed to her mother attending but didn’t want her father to be there, because she was embarrassed that she’d ignored his preference for an early Guilty plea. If she’d done that, there would have been no trial.

  Eva Bell arrived with her own mother. They were ushered into the court from a separate waiting area to Zoe and her mother, a service the court provided to minimise ugly scenes. They sat alone on a bench across the aisle from the prosecutor.

  In contrast to how Zoe had described her, which was as some kind of tormentor, Eva Bell presented as demure, intelligent and, most of all, incredibly sad. Her mother sobbed audibly as she gave evidence, and Eva did not once look at Zoe.

  It didn’t help us that the prosecutor was a woman who you’d like to make godmother to your children. She led Eva down a gentle path of questioning that was devastating to us.

  ‘Were you with your brother Jack when he got a drink for Zoe?’

  ‘Yes, I was.’

  ‘In your view did Jack add anything to the drink that was alcoholic?’

  ‘I poured the drink myself, so I know he didn’t.’

  ‘Did you pour the drink from a bottle?’

  ‘Yes, but I had to open it.’

  ‘So you don’t think the drink was spiked?’

  ‘No. I saw him carry it to the room they were in. If he spiked it, he would have had to do it in front of her.’

  I saw the panic on Zoe’s face during this testimony and I willed her to stay calm, because of course the story that she’d told the court directly contradicted this.

  ‘And did you see Zoe taking a drink earlier in the evening?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what did she drink?’

  A tiny stumble in Eva’s composure here, but it could easily be read as grief by the judge.

  ‘She drank,’ Eva said, ‘vodka and coke.’

  ‘Did you make that for her?’

  ‘No. She made it herself. And she was generous with the vodka.’

  ‘And did you see her refill her glass?’

  She pursed her lips, before replying, ‘Yes, yes I did,’ and Maria’s gasp was audible throughout the entire courtroom.

  And the prosecution hadn’t finished there. Another girl, a friend of Eva and Amelia, testified to the same thing and there was nothing we could do to contradict it. It was their word against Zoe’s, and they were in the majority.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  TESSA

  As I drive away from Chris and Maria’s house, I feel absolutely wrung out. It’s eleven o’clock at night and I need my bed. I send a text to Sam, who I hope isn’t waiting up for me, to say that I won’t be coming round because I need to go home and sleep. We didn’t have any sort of definite arrangement, but he knew I went to the concert alone, and that I might have an opportunity to visit him afterwards, so I feel I owe him the courtesy of letting him know at least.


  I always feel guilty when I see Sam, and that’s never easy, but I don’t seem to be able to stop myself going back to him, because, although I love Richard, I’m tired of his joyless existence.

  We’ve tried everything to lift Richard’s spirits: a chemical cosh, a course of therapy, a holiday, hobbies, a different diet, exercise, and more. And we’ve tried all kinds of different combinations of the above, but, in the end, none of them have worked.

  Richard’s black dog is his constant companion, and he leavens the intensity of their relationship with alcohol. If I have a role in his life any more, it’s to make sure that while he’s in the teeth of the dog, the rest of his life doesn’t disappear. I do this because I hope that his depression will lift one day. If it never does, I’ve made a very bad call. His addiction will have got the better of me. It’s ironic, really, as it’s my life’s work to cure and to rehabilitate.

  It means that I dread going home. I dread it every day. I dread the monotony of his despair and the way that he can leach the colours from everything. I dread his inability to enjoy even a hot cup of tea or the smell of a freshly plucked mint leaf. I sympathise with his feelings, because I understand depression, or at least I think I do, but I dread it too, with every cell of my body.

  It was why I was extremely happy for Maria when she met Chris. She was in the teeth of the black dog too up until then, put there by Zoe and by the shock of the loss of their world on the farm in Devon. You don’t think of farming families imploding, or I never did. There’s something about the continuity of their way of life that makes it seem, from the outside, more stable than the choices the rest of us have made. But clearly, I was wrong. So when Maria met Chris, and things between them developed, I was glad for her, and I was glad for Zoe; in fact, I was unbelievably relieved.