The Perfect Girl Read online

  ‘Maria,’ Chris says, ‘I’m glad that you’ve told me. Thank you.’

  Mum’s lips disappear inside her mouth. The tears roll down her face faster now. Chris doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t look at Mum. He’s looking at the computer monitor, as if he’s mesmerised by it. He leans forward and uses the mouse to click on the play button, and the film begins to move.

  ‘Travesty!’ Tom Barlow shouts. ‘It’s a travesty.’

  On the screen, in the movie of myself, I finally notice Tom Barlow. I stare at him, then I get up, and I bang my leg against the piano, as I run out of the frame. I look like a fairy tale girl, fleeing from a wolf. Lucas just stays staring, and then my mum is standing up at the front, turning, and she says, ‘Mr Barlow, Tom…’ and Chris clicks pause.

  ‘I’m just finding,’ says Chris, ‘the fact that you lied to me twice difficult to accept.’

  That’s therapy-speak, that ‘difficult to accept’ stuff. I’ve had enough therapy to know it when I hear it. ‘It’s better to describe your emotions than display them,’ Jason would repeat patiently at our Monday meeting when I’d raged or sobbed my way through the weekends at the Unit, ‘then people can help you manage them instead of feeling as if they’re bearing the brunt of them.’

  Chris keeps talking and I think that if his voice were a cat then it would be padding quietly and unstoppably towards my mother with unblinking eyes.

  ‘You lied to me about Zoe’s history, and I suppose I can understand it, I think I can. What Zoe and you have experienced is obviously… well, I’m at a loss for words to describe it just now. You should have told me, but I understand why you didn’t, it was a lie by omission. What I cannot understand, what feels like a slap in the face, is why you lied to me earlier, when you denied knowing that man. That was an out and out lie and you know how I feel about lying, and I’m finding that very difficult to accept.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ my mum says. She stands and walks towards him.

  ‘He came to my house!’ Chris says. ‘He’s unstable. He needs managing, and he came to this house!’

  ‘I never wanted to lie to you,’ Mum says.

  ‘You know how I feel about lying. You know it must not happen in my house.’

  ‘Our house,’ I say. I don’t know why. It just slips out, because twice he’s said ‘my’ house, but I should have kept it in my head.

  ‘You! Stay out of it.’ He doesn’t look at me because he’s watching Mum, but his arm shoots out and he points a finger at me while his gaze is locked on to hers.

  Mum goes right up to him. She looks smaller than usual against him because she has bare feet. She slides her arms around his waist and rests her head on his chest. He’s too angry to return the hug so his arms stay in mid-air, actively keeping distance between him and her. She looks up at him, like some kind of supplicant, trying to bathe her face in the light of him. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘I panicked. I should have trusted you. I was very stupid, I was insecure.’

  Mum’s arms snake further round Chris until her hands are linked and I can see his body soften a little at her touch. I marvel a bit at that. Beside me, Lucas is staring at them too but he feels my eyes turn to him and he looks back at me briefly, and I wonder if I have that power, with him, or if he’s in charge.

  Chris unpeels my mum’s arms from his body and holds her hands in his, between them, as if they might pray together.

  ‘It’s going to rain,’ he says, and he’s right because I’m suddenly aware of a sharp, cool breeze that makes the open window rattle and we can hear the foliage shifting outside. ‘Let’s clear up and go to bed.’

  ‘Chris.’ There’s a desperate note in Mum’s voice that makes my heart tear, because I can tell that she still doesn’t know which way this is going.

  He hears her desperation too. ‘We’ll talk more,’ he says, ‘upstairs.’ He tucks her hair behind her ear.

  ‘Let’s talk here,’ says Lucas, ‘all together.’

  Chris looks at him. ‘This is probably something Maria and I need to discuss alone at this point.’

  I agree with him, although I know Lucas doesn’t want us to leave them, but I don’t understand that, and I want Mum to have a chance, so I say, ‘I’ll clear up,’ and, as rain begins to smatter on to the windowpane, I stand up.

  ‘I’ll do it, you go to bed,’ I say.

  When I reach the doorway I turn and I look for a moment at them both standing there and I say, ‘I’m sorry, Mummy and Chris.’

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  TESSA

  One of the tube lights under my kitchen cabinets is flickering silently. It needs replacing.

  Sam doesn’t answer his phone so I leave a message to ask if I can come over, although I wonder if he’s asleep. I apologise for potentially disturbing him. We’re very polite to one another, Sam and I, though it’s not formality. I think it’s fear that we’ll lose each other.

  I put my phone down on the kitchen table and watch as the screen dims to black. I roll my shoulders back to ease the tension that’s grabbed them in a pincer grip.

  The room is stuffy and the smell of Richard’s lasagne still lingers; it’s cloying and it feels as though it will make the back of my throat catch. I get a glass and turn on the tap at the sink, waiting for the warm water to run through until it’s cold before I fill it, and then I drink it all in one go. I look out into the darkness of our garden, and see the shape of Richard’s shed at the end of it, and remember how I found him there earlier in the day.

  And even though I know that the homes and the streets of Bristol will be full of people having normal, comfortable Sunday evenings, I feel as though I’m the last person on earth.

  And suddenly I can’t stand to be in my house any longer. I grab my bag and leave. I’ll just take my chances and go and turn up at Sam’s flat, because there’s nowhere else I can bear to be.

  I’m halfway there, and about to pull over and try to phone him again to give him some warning, when I remember that I’ve left my phone at home, on the kitchen table, and I just can’t face going back to collect it, not now that I’m nearly at Sam’s.

  No matter, I think. It won’t do Richard any harm to not be able to contact me for a while, to understand how it feels to have a spouse who is utterly unavailable for support. It won’t do him any harm to feel frightened in the morning because he has to cope with the unreliable actions of the person he’s supposed to be sharing his life with. If I go straight to work in the morning I can manage without it, and Richard can always phone there to track me down. I’ll tell him I stayed at Maria’s, or with a friend.

  I surprise myself a little with these sharp feelings of spite towards him, but the thing is, you need energy to cope with an alcoholic spouse, and I have none tonight, so the malice creeps in.

  Rain begins to fall as I drive. It’s not heavy, but it’s persistent and my windscreen wipers creak noisily across the glass.

  The city centre is empty and I find a parking space easily near Sam’s apartment building.

  Before I go up to Sam’s flat I sit in the car for a moment and I wonder whether I should go back to Maria’s house and check on them, before I remind myself that she’s an adult and I mustn’t interfere.

  I wonder what Tom Barlow is doing, or thinking. I wonder if he’s lying awake beside his wife and stewing, or whether he’s online, searching for more information about Zoe, and her new family.

  Raindrops spatter on the roof of the bus with a tinny persistence, like a fusillade of toy guns. My thoughts have become exhausting enough that I decide I’ve had enough of sitting in the car. I step out and run across the wide pavement that separates the road from Sam’s building and I don’t stop until I’m safely under the partial cover of the meanly proportioned porch, and I press the buzzer for his apartment.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  ZOE

  Outside, the surface of the pool has gone crazy rough with the rain t
hat’s coming down. Under the table there’s a fox gulping down bruschetta that he must have pulled off the table. He runs away when he sees me. First thing I do is pull the big doors to the kitchen closed because the rain has come into the room and run all over the stone floor and it’s slippery as hell. I grab as much as I can from the table and bring it inside, tripping through the rain and getting soaked.

  Lucas is standing in the doorway to the kitchen when I turn to make a second run into the house, and now the rain’s falling hard enough that it pings off the plates and back up into my face. I’m not unaware that this could be a romantic moment, that it could be the point where the soaking wet heroine is caught and embraced by the hero. But that doesn’t happen.

  ‘We mustn’t leave them alone,’ Lucas says.

  ‘Can you help me?’

  ‘Come back in.’

  ‘I said I would clear up.’

  I want to do just this one thing right tonight. I’m going to make the kitchen sparkle for my mum, and then, I’ve already thought of it, I’m going to go and lie with Grace again so that Mum isn’t disturbed in the night.

  ‘Why aren’t you listening to me?’

  ‘Because you looked deranged,’ I say, though that’s not precisely true.

  I put the plates down by the sink, and I’m hoping Lucas might help me but he just stands there.

  ‘How did you know? About me?’ I ask.

  ‘I played piano at a competition in Truro once,’ he said. ‘You were there. You beat me. I remembered you.’ A crooked smile.

  ‘When?’ I try to remember because there’s a competition in Truro that I entered most years throughout my childhood, but I have no memory of Lucas.

  ‘It was years ago. You beat me so I remembered your name and I thought I recognised you. I got the rest off the internet.’

  ‘But my name wasn’t allowed to be reported.’

  ‘You can piece it together if you look hard enough.’

  It makes sense that he remembers me from piano. Except for the children we saw year after year at competitions, I only ever remember the kids who beat me, which is probably why he recalls me, but not the other way around.

  ‘But Chris?’ I ask.

  ‘I was just with my mum at the time. We were spending a week on holiday, and it was bad weather so we entered the competition on a whim, for extra performance practice.’

  ‘Oh.’ I let that hang there because I don’t know what to say because Lucas never talks about his mum. Then I think of something.

  ‘How did you know about panop?’ I ask.

  ‘I saw you had it on your phone. It wasn’t difficult to find your account.’

  He must have had a look on my phone one day. I’m always leaving it on the piano by mistake, where it’s hard to spot against the black shiny wood. He could easily have seen me put in my passcode too.

  ‘It’s what they used to send me messages on,’ I tell him. ‘The people at my old school. They bullied me.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to get your attention. I thought if you knew I’d kept your secret you’d believe in me.’

  ‘Did you read the old messages that people sent me?’

  ‘No. I couldn’t do that.’

  I’m grateful for that.

  ‘Believe in you about what?’ I ask, because that was a strange thing to say.

  ‘The script.’

  ‘You didn’t need to do that. I would have read the script anyway.’

  I feel like he’s being really weird and kind of selfish about the script with everything else that’s happening.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but he sounds a bit impatient when he says it and that annoys me too because the messages he sent really scared me. ‘Come in. Let’s go upstairs.’ He catches my arm, and I try to shake his hand off but his grip is quite tight.

  ‘You go. I’ll come when I’ve finished.’

  ‘Zoe!’

  ‘What? I want to do this for my mum!’

  He looks like he wants to reply to that, but what he wants to say is too difficult, so instead he drops my arm, although his fingers have pressed into it by now, and it hurts.

  ‘Fine,’ he says, and he goes upstairs.

  By the time I’ve finished clearing up, all is quiet and the lights are off everywhere in the house. As I pass Chris’s study I can see the steady green light of Grace’s intercom, and I realise that they’ve forgotten to take it up with them, which means there’s all the more reason for me to sleep with Grace.

  Upstairs, the lights are also off in all the bedrooms and in the hall and landing, and I hear nothing. If the butterfly is still there, it’s gone quiet. Only the rain is loud, still hissing and spattering on the glass skylight at the top of the stairwell.

  Downstairs, I’ve laid out all the breakfast things and made everything perfect. I’ve put my mum’s favourite cup out and a tea bag of Earl Grey tea neatly beside it with a spoon. I’ve put a mug for Chris beside it with a tea bag of English Breakfast, because that’s what he likes.

  In my bedroom I change out of my wet dress and put on a T-shirt and pyjama shorts. I dry my hair with a towel. I take my iPod from my bedside table. One rule in this house is that Lucas and I must listen to recordings of the repertoire that we’re playing before we sleep. It helps us to remember the pieces, imprints the detail of them on our minds.

  I creep into Grace’s room. She’s lying in her cot, on her back, head to one side. Her little fists are loosely clenched. She’s got one of them in her mouth, and the other is just touching the mad soft hair on the back of her head. It’s how she always sleeps. She’s very quiet and I know I shouldn’t but I pick her up and bring her into the bed with me. I place her between me and wall, so she won’t fall out. She doesn’t stir at all and I inhale the smell of her.

  Carefully, I put my headphones in, and start the music playing on my iPod. Chopin. A nocturne.

  As the music swells, I think about my baby sister beside me and think that if there’s one way that I can pay back the world for what I’ve done, it’s to take care of her as much as I can, to make sure that she doesn’t make the mistakes that I did, to help her not to hurt people. It’s a vow that I made when I first met her in the hospital, and it’s a vow I repeat to myself all the time.

  I settle down and cover myself in just a sheet because it’s still really warm in her room, and right before I fall heavily asleep, with the Chopin relaxing me through my headphones, I notice on the clock beside the bed that it’s a few minutes after midnight, which means it’s Monday now, not Sunday any more, and I hope that Monday might be better.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  Midnight

  TESSA

  Sam and I watch a Hitchcock film and I relax. I curl up into him once we go to bed. After the events of the evening I feel as if I’m finally in a safe place, a place where I don’t need to be a carer, or a supporter, or anything to anybody else. I can just be me.

  As Sam’s breathing settles into the rhythms of sleep, I lie awake a little longer and think about the evening and about how I’m glad I’m away from Maria’s house because it’s not my life after all, it’s Maria’s, and she is, after all, an adult who’s made her own decisions.

  I haven’t mentioned what happened earlier to Sam because I didn’t want to sully our time together. I wanted the few hours we spent in each other’s company tonight to be simple and lovely, and unmarred by the imperfections that have spread like stains across other areas of my life.

  But even with the warmth of his body beside mine, and the cocoon of his company sheltering me from reality for a while, I shed a tear or two before I sleep; just one or two.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  Midnight

  ZOE

  I’m hardly asleep when I’m awake again and I hear screaming and for a moment, in my confusion, I think it’s me.

  But it’s not.

  The sound is coming from the front of the house and it’s high-pitched, and frightening.

  The
re’s shouting too, and then commotion in the house. Feet pounding.

  With Grace in my arms, I run on to a deserted landing, where all the bedroom doors are open and the lights are on, and down the stairs. The front door’s wide open too, and I go out and then run-walk across the gravel, feeling the slippery sharp stones digging into the soles of my feet. Katya and Barney Scott stand beside the wooden shed that houses our rubbish bins and they’re both drenched with rain, sopping with it, their clothes sticking to them like cling film.

  They’re looking at the door of the shed, where I can see that Chris is standing in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and has his hand over his mouth.

  ‘Call an ambulance,’ he shouts. He turns to Katya and Barney. ‘Give me your phone,’ he says to them. ‘We need to call an ambulance.’

  Grace begins to grizzle in my arms because it’s dark and wet and there’s shouting and she doesn’t know why she’s awake. She uses her fists to try to brush away rain that’s getting into her eyes but grinds it in instead.

  ‘Keep the baby away,’ Chris says to me, but he’s fumbling with Barney’s phone so he can’t stop me when I walk past him and look into the shed.

  On the floor of the shed, lying as motionless as the grave mounds at the church, blood soaking the side of her pale angel hair, is my mother. Her eyes are open wide and they stare at nothing at all.

  I am still on my knees beside her when the emergency services arrive. They’ve taken Grace from me long ago, but they couldn’t move me from my mother’s side. I have sunk my face on to her neck, her chest; I have taken in the living smell of her for the last time. I have stroked the soft, soft skin on her temple, just like she did to Grace and me. I have whispered things into her ear that I want to tell her. And while I did all that her eyes still didn’t move.