The Perfect Girl Read online

  I chide myself immediately for the feeling though, because it’s not going to change anything he’s going to say to me; it’s no more than a futile attempt my pride is making to assert myself as a fellow professional, and, anyway, the doctor seems oblivious to it. He must see this twenty times a day. To him, I’m just a patient, somebody to keep at a safe professional distance, just as, I suppose, my clients are to me.

  ‘I only want a pen,’ he says, eyebrows raised. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

  I hand him a pen from my own pocket, and he scribbles something on a fat, dog-eared set of notes, bursting out of their cardboard wrapping, before he puts it to one side.

  ‘Right! Sorry about that. They always show everybody in too quickly. Always rushing.’

  He takes a slim brown folder from a neatly stacked pile. It’s pristine, and on the front of it is my name. When he opens it, I see a letter from my GP, a referral, and only one or two other sheets of paper.

  ‘Aha,’ he says. ‘Yes. You’ve just had a scan.’

  I nod.

  ‘So we need to take a look at that.’

  He begins to tap at the computer keyboard. He has to watch his fingers to find the right keys.

  ‘Let’s hope the system is going to be kind to us today,’ he tells me. ‘There are many hurdles we can fall at when we want to access scans.’

  I’m silent, I just watch him. I must not dislike him, I think, because this man is going to be looking after me. On his head there’s just a shadow of hair around the back and sides, cropped extremely close, and petering out on the crown where there’s a shine that I suspect he wouldn’t like if he could see it. His suit is an expensive one, and his tie is extravagantly knotted, and certainly made of silk; there’s a thick gold wedding band on his ring finger and an expensive watch clamped ostentatiously around his wrist. I suspect he has a lucrative private practice.

  He must be feeling the heat in all that finery, I think, because I am.

  ‘Ah yes! Here we are,’ he announces finally. ‘Got it.’

  And I see his face collapse into a frown as he studies it and I feel as if I’m watching a piece of my world detaching itself and falling into a void.

  ZOE

  I want to tear Lucas’s eyes out.

  But I want to hold him too.

  Grace is still in my arms and I have squeezed her so close to me that she has started to cry. Lucas is still standing over us, looking down at us, not moving, though his hand is on the bathroom door handle.

  ‘What were you trying to protect my mum from?’ I ask.

  ‘From Dad.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was about to hurt her, and I tried to get her out of his way, because I could see him coming for her. I pushed her, because I didn’t have time to do anything else, but we were at the top of the stairs, and she fell down and hit her head. I didn’t mean it to happen, I was trying to help her. It was an accident; I swear it, Zoe. I’m sorry.’

  And before I can say anything to that he unlocks the door, turns the handle and he’s gone, and the movement of the door sends a hot barrage of air into the room. I’m left sitting there in all the wet that Grace has made, just holding her while she grizzles. The force of what he’s just told me makes it feel difficult even to breathe, let alone to try to understand what’s happened, but I must.

  Lucas says he’s tried to protect my mum from Chris, and he’s killed her instead. He said the same words to me that I said at my trial: ‘It was an accident.’

  ‘How are you getting on?’ It’s Richard, standing on the landing; it’s like he’s appeared out of nowhere. ‘Are you all right, lovey? Have you been crying again?’

  ‘I don’t want Chris and Lucas to take Grace,’ I tell him. I blurt that out, because it’s how I feel, but also because something tells me not to tell him what Lucas just said, and I think it’s because I don’t want it to be true.

  Richard is looking at me a bit oddly, and for a moment I wonder if he was listening at the door before, whether he heard what Lucas said.

  ‘Is Lucas OK?’ he asks.

  ‘He’s fine. He was just helping me.’

  He stares at my face for a second, and then his eyes fall to Grace.

  ‘I understand why you don’t want her to go,’ he says. He strokes Grace’s head and she reaches out her arms to him and he takes her from me.

  ‘I want to stop them.’

  ‘I don’t really think we can.’

  ‘But Grace belongs to me and Mum. She always has.’

  ‘Listen, I know it’s really, really hard, but Chris is her dad. There’s nothing we can do.’

  ‘Help me. I want her to stay here, just for a bit.’

  Uncle Richard looks even more red and sweaty than he did this morning. He sits down on the side of the bath, holding Grace on his knee.

  ‘What if we offer to keep Grace for the day, just until they’ve checked into the hotel and got themselves sorted out?’ he says. ‘Then we can take her over there later.’

  ‘She needs a nap.’

  ‘Then I’ll say that. She can nap here before she goes.’

  I look at Grace. She doesn’t often settle down quickly or quietly, and if that happens then Chris might just take her anyway. He’s never patient about that kind of thing.

  ‘I’ll put her in the buggy,’ I say. ‘If we push her around she’ll fall asleep.’

  Grace has a buggy that’s padded like an emperor’s chariot. When she’s tired, she never lasts five minutes in it before nodding off, because it’s way too comfy and Mum says she likes the feeling of being in motion.

  ‘Can you tell Chris?’ I know he won’t listen to me, and I don’t want to say even a single word to him.

  ‘Leave it with me,’ Richard says.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder and I feel like I can trust him, and that he’s on my side, and I suddenly understand that there’s something even more important that I should be doing: I need to find Lucas before he talks to anybody else.

  The stairs make a sound like thunder as I run down them and I’m lucky because I find Lucas straight away. He’s standing in the hall, in front of the sitting room door. There’s nobody else there, and the door is semi-closed. He looks like he’s steeling himself to open it, and tell everybody what happened.

  I take his arm. ‘Come with me,’ I whisper.

  He shakes my hand off. He’s psyched up.

  ‘I have to do this.’ His words sound as if he’s having to force them out from between his clenched teeth.

  ‘I need you first. Please.’

  I take his hand again and pull it to my mouth, and put my lips on the back of his fingers, just very gently. It’s the only thing I can think to do. I want him to feel my touch because after my First Chance Life ended I felt like nobody wanted to touch me because of what I did, because I wasn’t worth it.

  They all talked and talked to me and at me about what I did and how to ‘move forward’ and guilt, and reparation, and sentences served, and future opportunities, and I understood all of that; but the reason I never felt encouraged by it, or strengthened was partly because I was sorry for what I did, so sorry that it hurt me every day, and partly because I was angry about what happened at my trial, but mostly because I felt I would never be worth anything, ever again.

  ‘Your self-esteem,’ Jason told me, ‘is at rock bottom, and I don’t like to see it that way.’

  ‘Go figure,’ I said back to him. It was at the end of our second to last session, it was nearly the last conversation we ever had; the last nice conversation, anyway.

  Lucas starts to shake, and his fingers relax against my lips.

  ‘Once you’ve told them,’ I whisper, ‘they’ll take you away, straight away and we won’t ever get to see each other again for a very long time, maybe never. I just want to talk to you one more time before you tell them, please.’

  He looks nervous of that. Or is he nervous of me, and of what I might do to him now I know what happened.


  ‘I want to hear your story,’ I say, because that’s the other thing I never had, the chance to tell my story without people always lecturing me around it. Sometimes I think I would have liked to tell my story to the mums and dads of the children I killed, that they might not mind so much if they heard it from me, away from court and judges and solicitors.

  ‘Bad idea,’ Jason said. ‘Reparation justice does recommend meetings between victims’ families and prisoners in some situations, but this doesn’t qualify as one of them.’

  ‘Lucas,’ I breathe the word on to his hand, terrified that we’ll be interrupted, or overheard, that I’m too late. ‘Please.’ My breath feels hotter than the day even as it spreads across his fingers.

  His shaking intensifies. I play my final card. I put down my ace.

  ‘I understand,’ I say, ‘I promise.’

  I hope I can keep this up. My impulse to punish him, attack him, rip him to shreds, bend and break his body like the kids who were in the car with me is strong, and it’s fighting a hard battle with my sensible head.

  ‘Where shall we go?’ he says just when I think all is lost, and he’ll confess and go to prison and Chris will disappear out of our lives with Grace, and I’ll have nothing.

  I exhale with relief and tell him that there’s one place I can think of.

  TESSA

  Chris and Philip and I are sitting more or less in silence, as the Family Liaison Officer makes many and varied attempts to engage us in small talk, or any kind of talk. She talks about cups of tea, she talks about the process of grief, she talks about the structure of police investigations, and she talks about the weather.

  Chris is managing to offer her a few responses, which she leaps on to as if they were scraps thrown to a dog. I think she must have been taught to try to engage with us, to become our friend. I want to tell her that I don’t give a fig’s leaf how many times a day she has to water her geraniums in the heatwave, but instead I manage to zone her out, so that her words become a wall of white noise, against which I try to think.

  Philip is in our most comfortable armchair, head back, mouth open, snoring gently. The drive, he told us, and the early start, have worn him out. I have no words to describe my anger at his selfishness.

  I watch Chris out of the corner of my eye as he talks to the Family Liaison Officer. I wonder if I should say something to her about my suspicions and, if so, what. If I make them known to her, and Chris guesses who has done so, and if I’m wrong, we’ll never recover from that, and I don’t know if I’m sure enough to risk that.

  In a way, I’m grateful that Chris wants to go to a hotel. It’ll give me a chance to speak to Richard about him, and to get advice from Sam. And besides, Chris isn’t behaving like a guilty man; he seems devastated.

  I also can’t deny that I crave the space that he and Lucas and the baby will leave in my house, because it might give me a chance to mourn my sister, and give Zoe a chance to mourn her mother.

  So when Chris stands to look out of the window, to see if his taxi has arrived, I find that I’m willing it to be there.

  ‘Any sign?’ the Liaison Officer asks him.

  ‘No,’ he says, and then, ‘Oh wait, yes, I think this is it.’

  It occurs to me then, as he begins to move to answer the door, that if he is guilty of something he might flee, but that immediately seems a wild, stupid thought, and something for the police to be concerned about, not me. This is not television, I tell myself, where people can just disappear in an instant, especially not with a successful business that needs running, a reasonably high public profile, and a baby and teenager in tow.

  ‘Lucas!’ Chris calls up the stairs. The three of us are gathered in the hall now, though there’s no sign of Richard or the kids.

  ‘Lucas!’

  None of them answer.

  ‘I’ll find him,’ I say.

  Chris opens the front door and there’s a driver there, smart in a crisp open-necked shirt and chinos. It’s definitely not the usual comfortable attire of the shift taxi driver, and behind him I glimpse a sleek black vehicle. Chris has called one of his work drivers, I realise; ‘taxi’ wasn’t quite an accurate description. It reminds me once more how little I’ve understood about the life he and Maria have been leading.

  I run upstairs to the bathroom to see if anybody is still there with the baby. There are signs everywhere that Grace has been bathed: water on the floor and bubbles gathered around the plughole, but the room is empty of people.

  ‘Zoe?’ I call. ‘Richard?’

  Again, no answer.

  ‘Lucas?’

  I see that his backpack has been slung on to one of our spare beds, all zipped up.

  Then I glimpse them through a window; Lucas and Zoe are out in the garden, and it looks as if they have the baby in the buggy. They’re patiently pushing her backwards and forward in the shade of our patio.

  It’s a lovely sight, as if they’ve come together to form surrogate parents for Grace, and I know Maria would be happy if she could see them. I watch as they peer at Grace together, under the sunshade, and then, carefully, they begin to walk up the garden with her, although the uneven slabs and the tufts of tough, desiccated grass that protrude between them make it slow going.

  I hear talking downstairs in the hall and make my way down.

  ‘She just conked out,’ Richard is saying, ‘absolutely blotto in my arms after her bath, so we’ve put her down in the pushchair, and we thought you might prefer to go on ahead to the hotel and get settled in and come and collect her later. Or we could bring her to you?’

  Chris doesn’t look happy. He checks his watch impatiently.

  ‘I don’t want to be going backwards and forwards later on so how about I send the driver to work to pick up some things for me, because I need to do that anyway, and by the time he gets back she should have had an hour or so of sleep. Do we think that would work?’ he says.

  ‘Of course,’ I say. That sounds like a fair plan to me and, besides, I’m flat out of the energy required to make any other kind of response.

  ZOE

  I lay Grace down, cover her with the sunshade and tilt back her chair. After that it’s just a few turns around the patio and she’s out like a light. She puts her hands up above her head, a fist by each ear, and looks really sweet. Her tummy is bare and the whole of it goes up and down as she breathes.

  Lucas and me walk her down to the end of the garden, pushing the buggy carefully over the bumpy bits and we park it in the shade underneath a leafy tree that’s grown tall beside Uncle Richard’s shed.

  I beckon to Lucas to follow me into the shed. It feels boiling-point hot inside, and it smells of wood shavings and paint and glue. I shut the door behind us anyway.

  There’s a workbench along one side with tools and stuff on it and above that is a shelf where Richard’s models are displayed. Mostly, they’re aeroplanes made out of balsa wood, but there are also Airfix models up there, painted really perfectly, and some complicated-looking Meccano type things with engines and wires. Some of the plane models are hanging from the ceiling on transparent threads and they turn a little after we come in.

  Lucas doesn’t look at any of it, instead he sinks down so that he’s sitting on the floor and then looks up at me. ‘What do you want?’ he says. ‘Don’t you hate me?’

  I kneel down, right up close to him. We don’t have much time before one of the busybody adults finds us and wants to know what we’re doing.

  ‘Lucas,’ I say, and I take his hands, one in each of mine and I squeeze them because I want to make him concentrate on me, completely and entirely. ‘This is really, really important.’

  ‘I’m ready to tell them everything.’ The sobbing begins again. ‘I’m so sorry.’

  ‘No!’ I say. ‘No you mustn’t. Not yet.’

  ‘I have to,’ he says and his sobs are so choking that I shake his hands to try to make him snap him out of it, but nothing works, so eventually I slap him as hard as I can
around his cheek. It really stings my hand, that slap, and it knocks his head from one side to the other.

  ‘Lucas,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. Stop crying.’

  His eyes are bloodshot and there’s still dampness around his lips and under nose. He looks wrecked. His expression has so many things going on in it, but I’m super-focused and I block everything out except for the thing that I want to say to him.

  ‘Does your dad know what you did?’ I ask.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What does he say?’

  ‘He says we have to protect each other. We both have to say we were asleep, and we know nothing. Nobody can prove otherwise.’

  ‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

  ‘After we went to bed last night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard you come up, and then I was lying in my bed for ages, until I heard them arguing in their bedroom. It sounded like he was bullying her, and I was afraid he was so angry about the lies you both told him that he was going to hurt her, so I got out of bed and I went and opened their door because I wanted to tell him to stop. He had hold of her, but when he saw me he let go, but then he started coming for me, and he was very angry. I stepped back on to the landing to get away from him, but he caught me and he pushed me back against the wall, by the top of the stairs. And your mum… your mum came after him, and she caught him by surprise and managed to pull him off me just for a second. She was standing between him and me, but she turned her back to him, to check that I was OK. Behind her, I could see that he recovered really quickly and he was coming to get her, so I tried to push her right out of his way, on to the ground. But when I pushed her she hit the banister post at the top of the stairs, and she sort of bounced off it, and she fell down the stairs.’

  I can see it all in my head; I can see her lying broken on the stairs.

  ‘There was blood,’ he says. ‘She hit her head when she fell, and there was blood.’