The Perfect Girl Read online

  When one of the paramedics leads me out of the shed, and away from my mum’s body, I see Chris, and Barney, and Lucas standing there. Katya is in the doorway of the house, holding Grace.

  I see an ambulance in the driveway, its back doors wide open, and I see a police car whose lights are slowly flashing. I see that the rain has eased so the droplets of water look like nothing more than fine dust motes in the air, swirling and shimmering, lit up blue against the black night.

  I try to run back to my mother’s body, to be with her a while longer, because I’m not ready to let her go, but they don’t let me do that.

  MONDAY

  ZOE

  I sit in a circle with the others in the sitting room of our Second Chance House and I feel as if I would break if somebody touched me. I feel as if my skin and hair are brittle, as if my teeth will never unclench.

  There are some pieces of music I’ve played which got under my skin and made me feel this way, but that feeling went away after I lifted my fingers from the piano keys.

  This feeling doesn’t. It sticks, and it reminds me of before.

  ‘Grief blooms,’ Jason said to me at the Unit in therapy sessions, when they were trying to make sure that I wouldn’t have Unresolved Grief over the three deaths I caused. And he was right, because the pain of losing Gull and the others did unfold like a new bud at first, and it took for ever before it began to wither.

  I have names for all those feelings because Jason told them to me. Adults like to put a name on everything you feel, as if a name can neutralise it. They’re wrong though. Some things settle under your skin and don’t ever go away, no matter what you call them.

  Today, what I’m feeling is even bigger than before. After my mum’s death, the grief doesn’t just bloom, it bursts out. It creates a mushroom cloud, instantly. It fills the sky that night and envelops us all; it’s towering and toxic. It’s off the Richter scale.

  I feel it.

  Chris feels it.

  Lucas feels it.

  Grace does not. Because she doesn’t understand what’s happened. She carries on being a baby and we all watch her, passing her from arms to arms, not able to explain to her.

  We all sit in the sitting room of our house together like in an Agatha Christie novel.

  We are four teenagers, one baby and Chris.

  And a police officer sits with us, and stares at the floor, but she’s listening to everything we say. I know for sure that police officers always listen.

  I want Tessa, and they want to contact her too, to tell her, to get her to come and be with us, but nobody can find her. She’s not answering her mobile and her landline rings and rings over and over again, and Uncle Richard doesn’t even pick up.

  Outside, the drizzle has stopped and so have the flashing blue lights, though the police cars are still there, and we see them as the sun rises up in a hazy, too-bright dawn, which also coaxes our faces from the shadows and shows them sagged and doughy as if we’ve all been slapped senseless with the shock.

  Yellow tape is stretched out across the entrance to our driveway and around the shed where my mum’s body still lies.

  At first, one of the policemen asks us if it could have been an accident, whether my mum had been drinking.

  ‘I don’t know,’ says Chris. ‘I just don’t know. She’d had a bit of wine, but we’d all gone to bed. We were all asleep.’

  Chris is upset and flustered, but he’s the first to accuse somebody else.

  ‘It was that man,’ he says. ‘Tom Barlow. You need to go and find a man called Thomas Barlow.’

  The police officer encourages Chris to sit back down, tells him that he’ll pass the information on, and that Chris will be interviewed in due course, but for now, if it’s OK, they’d prefer it if we all stayed where we were.

  Lucas begins to sob, and the sound of it is painful and loud. It makes Grace crawl over to him and put her hand on his leg and pull herself up, and he reaches down to stroke her small fingers and sobs some more. She watches his face with an open mouth until it makes her cry too, and then she thumps back on to her bottom on the floor and is full of despair of her own.

  Barney Scott’s dad arrives and stands in the doorway and says, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and takes Barney away after a talk with the police.

  Everybody is talking. I remember it from before. Always the talking, and the building of cages with words.

  Katya is tear-streaked and squashed out of her arrogant shape and she sits by me and looks like she might want to hug me like you see on TV reports where women cling and wail, but I feel nothing for her and I’m used to feeling things on my own so I edge away to make sure that she doesn’t touch me at all.

  Later, when dawn has just become proper morning, they ask us if we mind being moved to the police station. They say that the house has become a ‘scene’, and I’m straight away transported back to court where they kept repeating ‘scene of the accident’ over and over again. I look around instinctively to see if Mum has had the same thought and then I remember: she’s gone.

  The police come upstairs with each of us in turn to pack what they fully pedantically specify as ‘a small overnight bag’. We all do except Grace who ends up with a bag busting with stuff, which I pack myself because I don’t want Katya to do it.

  Standing on the gravel, waiting to leave, feeling the heat start to push back into the day as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, as if there had been no blue dust rain, and no broken body, I concentrate on the feel of the sharp stones pushing at the soles of my Converse, to try to keep myself solid. But even doing that I can’t help myself glancing at the shed, and wondering if my mum is still in there, because the ambulance has gone. A policeman stands in front of the shed door and looks at his phone, and when I ask the question out loud, somebody else tells me that mum’s going to be moved very soon.

  ‘Doesn’t she need the ambulance?’ I ask, but nobody answers.

  They use two cars to drive all of us away from the house but not before Chris has got angry when he tried to get Grace’s car seat out of Mum’s car and it got stuck. Normally, Mum moves the car seat. After he finally yanked it free, Chris cursed and threw the car seat on to the gravel and stones kicked up and hit the side of the police car, but nobody mentioned that. Instead, I picked up the seat, and put it in the car, and so now I’m holding Grace’s fingers tightly as we ride together in the back seat and Katya sits on the other side of me with the bag of Grace’s stuff on her knees.

  In the car, the police driver tells me that they’ve finally managed to get in touch with Uncle Richard, Tessa’s husband, and he’ll meet us at the police station.

  As we drive away from the house another policeman lifts the tape at the end of our road and somebody standing on the pavement with their dog stares at us, and my stomach is carved out with the feeling that the only thing I want is Mum, and my head is collapsing round an imploding feeling that my life is shattering again, and I begin to cry. Katya doesn’t see because she’s looking out of the other window with a face like an Easter Island statue and Grace is fully occupied playing with a piece of gravel which she must have picked up when we were at our house.

  And, on top of everything, and through my tears, I feel guilty about that because I think Mum would have noticed it long before Grace might have had a chance to put the stone in her mouth, and I quickly take it away from her before she does.

  And alongside that thought, which my mixed-up head is giving space to, my fear is beginning to unfold as quickly as my grief did.

  Two questions are pushing to the front of my mind and they’re frightening me to the point where I start to shake.

  One: what if my mum’s death was revenge for what I did and they’re going to come after me too?

  Two: what if the police think I did it?

  I’m a convicted killer, after all.

  TESSA

  When I arrive at Maria and Chris’s avenue I’m not allowed to drive down it. I park on an adjoining str
eet and run until I’m held back by the raised arms of a police officer who’s guarding the strip of crime scene tape that sags across the entrance to their road.

  ‘I’m family,’ I say. ‘It’s my sister.’

  He begins to explain why that’s not a good enough reason to encroach on the ‘crime scene’ but I can’t stand to listen, because I need to see, and so I duck away from him and under the tape and run the hundred yards down the street until I’m standing at the entrance to Chris and Maria’s driveway taking breaths that scorch my throat.

  I’m just in time to see a body bag being carried out of the shed, and placed on a gurney. Faintness almost fells me and I have to lean against the golden stone column at the entrance to the driveway. It’s the realisation that this is true.

  Maria’s my younger sister; she was always a sprite compared to me, a waif, she was my shadow when we were younger, the one who could make our dad beam even when he was supposed to be cross with her, and now she’s gone. Your younger sister is not supposed to die before you, it’s not right. As I have no child who I fear will predecease me, this upsets the natural order of things for me in a way that’s unexpectedly shocking. Our parents are both dead, but I didn’t feel orphaned until now, because I had Maria.

  As I watch the men carry her, I imagine how it feels to them, because I know the weight of a dead body. I’ve hauled an animal corpse out of the back of a car, or off a surgical table, on more than one occasion. When all the tissues are lifeless and the heart has stopped pumping, the weight of death is extraordinary. If someone brings a dead animal to us, when we prepare to move the body from our surgery car park into the building for cremation, we usually wait until passers-by have gone, to spare their feelings, but the folks with the gurney outside Maria’s house take no such precautions. They’re not paramedics, because there’s no need for paramedics now. These are men whose jobs are rarely advertised, because they collect the lifeless bodies. They wheel the gurney towards the back of a van, which is unmarked. There’s no need for an ambulance now either.

  The policeman is by my side, and he guides me away, but he’s kind enough to support me too and to explain gently that Maria’s body is in the care of the coroner now, pending a post-mortem investigation, and a murder inquiry has been launched.

  And as I take my last look back at their house I think something that I’ve thought before: ‘What a waste.’ And even my sceptical soul can’t help but wonder if our family is somehow cursed.

  ZOE

  I feel safe in the police car in a sort of way because if Tom Barlow hurt my mum then he can’t get me here, but I also feel afraid, because being in the police car feels like it did before.

  It’s not cold, or dark, and I’m not in my party clothes with shards of glass in my hair and cuts on my face, and I’m not over the limit, but it is a police car and I am being transported.

  That’s when I get the idea that I need Sam.

  I know he’s in Bristol now because Tessa told Mum once that she’d run into him and that he lives here now too, like us.

  ‘That’s a funny coincidence, don’t you think?’ she said to Mum, but of course Mum didn’t want to talk about it so Tess had to keep her little smile at the coincidence just for herself.

  The only person who can take me to see Sam is Uncle Richard, but I can’t mention it to him at first, because when he meets us at the police station he gives me a too tight hug, but then all he does is try to tell the police that Aunt Tessa didn’t come home last night. Nobody listens to him at first, but after he’s told them like a thousand times eventually one of them asks him if Richard has any reason to fear for her safety, or if he thinks Tess might have had a reason to have argued with her sister.

  ‘No!’ Richard shouts in a too dry voice that lurches up an octave. ‘No she bloody hasn’t. How dare you?’ Uncle Richard is always fierce about Tess and my mum says that’s because he loves her so much.

  I want Sam, because of what I did before. I need him and his advice because I’m scared people will put the blame on me.

  I hold my head together enough to put my plan into action because I’m able to put my grief in a box and put my thinking cap on. Jason at the Unit taught me how to do that. ‘Imagine your grief as a flower that has bloomed,’ he said in one of our sessions and I was like, ‘You already said grief blooms.’

  ‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘Imagine it.’

  So I shut my eyes and did; I made my grief into a peony, big and blowsy.

  ‘Now convert that flower into something made of paper.’

  I opened my eyes when he said that. ‘What?’

  ‘Hang in there. Do you know what origami is?’

  ‘Of course. Japanese. “Ori” means “folding” and “kami” means “paper”. First clear reference to paper models is in a 1680 poem by Ihara Saikaku.’

  Jason leaned back and looked at me. ‘Zoe-pedia,’ he said and this encouraged me to say: ‘The poem is about butterflies, in a dream, and they are made from origami. Traditionally, they would be used in wedding ceremonies.’

  I drew breath because there was more I could have said. I thought that I could probably tell him the line of the poem in Japanese because I read it phonetically once, but Jason interrupted me:

  ‘So imagine an origami flower.’

  In my head, the peony I pictured morphed from a mass of bloomy petals so soft that they could suffocate you, into something made of sharp folds and symmetry.

  ‘Now, fold that flower up tight. Fold the blooms back in.’

  I saw it in my mind. The collapsing of the flower, the neatness of the package I could make it into. It un-bloomed.

  ‘Now imagine that you’re going to stow that folded-up flower in a box. You’ll take it out later, and you’ll let it open out again, but for now we’re going to fold it away and keep it safe, and see what happens when it’s gone for a little while.’

  It didn’t happen right away, but once I’d practised these thoughts, and finally believed Jason when he said it was OK sometimes to step away from the grief, and the guilt, I discovered that I got my concentration brain back. That’s the brain that lets me memorise anything that I see, the brain that connects with the music. It’s the brain that Granny Guerin said was like our family’s laundry basket: always packed to the brim, always overflowing, you could never keep everything stuffed into it and close the lid.

  So on the morning after my mum dies I’m using Jason’s advice, and putting my grief for her in a box. I know it can’t stay there for long, because it’s too big, but I also know that it’s essential to do it, and to have my wits about me. I ask Richard to take me to Sam; I tell him we have to because of what happened to me before. I tell him that Sam knows Tessa from back then so he might be able to help us find her.

  Richard looks at me and says, ‘Well, he can’t be any more useless than they are here, come on then, let’s give it a go.’

  Uncle Richard finds Sam’s office address really quickly on the internet on his phone and when they don’t answer his call he says it’s probably because it’s a bit too early and it’s best just to go there.

  At first, we have a bit of a problem persuading the police to let us go, because they act like they don’t know what to think about it, and Chris and Lucas and Katya just stare at us like they’re in shock that we’re abandoning them. But Richard is clever, and he knows that the police can’t keep us at the station because we’re not actually arrested, so they can’t stop us leaving, especially if it’s just for a little while. He tells them that Sam is a family friend as well as a solicitor and it would be a great comfort to me if I could see him.

  The policeman obviously doesn’t like it, but when it seems like he’s made all the objections he can and Richard has answered them, all confident, he just asks Richard if he thinks he should be driving. Richard makes a nervous look at me like people always do when drink driving is brought up, and then assures the policeman that he’s going to call us a taxi which is how he arrived at the
police station in the first place. I can tell the question hurts his pride, but he’s trying not to be too indignant or cross, because he wants them to let us go.

  When we arrive at Sam’s office there are people just opening up, but we have to wait for a while because it’s Sam’s day off, which I didn’t think of, and some of the people stare at us a bit as they walk past in their smart business suit clothing while Sam’s secretary phones him.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ she says after she’s spoken to him. ‘You’re lucky I could get hold of him.’

  Once Sam arrives it’s much better because we can be private in his office and I feel a surge of relief because Sam is somebody who knows every detail about what I did. With him, there’s nothing to hide, and I don’t have to pretend to be somebody else.

  Sometimes, I think I’m more happy when I’m with people who know about it. In the Unit, all of us were there because we’d done something bad so it didn’t make me different from anybody else, and that was relaxing in a way, it truly was. And with Sam, I feel like he doesn’t judge me, he just helps me. I can say anything to him. With the Second Chance Family it wasn’t like that. There was so much that I couldn’t say, so much that I had to be ashamed of, even though the verdict at the trial was unfair to me and the idea of that twists and turns inside me every single day.

  Sam sits, and we sit too, and in his hot, dark office with a scratchy carpet and framed certificates wonky behind his desk, I know I’m ready to tell him everything that’s happened.

  SAM

  It’s déjà vu: Zoe Maisey sits in front of me, and once again she’s white with shock. The only difference is that there’s no glass in her hair this time, and no hospital outfit. She’s wearing a teenage-girl tracksuit-pyjama-type outfit, covered by a flimsy cardigan, which she’s wrapped around herself tightly. She’s shaking.