The Good Girl (12 page)

At this point I put my fingers in Ben’s ears. He pulled away.

‘Only if she’d had an underage pregnancy,’ Mum pointed out.

‘She’s right,’ whispered Ben. ‘Aunt Rachel would have had to have given birth to Mr Harvey when she was twelve for him to be her son.’

‘You know what I mean. It’s absurd,’ said Dad. ‘She’s pissing on your parade. And when it all goes tits up she’ll be here too, wanting you to look after her.’

‘I don’t think you’re really in a position to judge Rachel’s behaviour, Harry,’ said Mum in an ominously even tone. This was news to me because historically Dad was always judging Aunt Rachel’s behaviour and finding it lacking. But before I could analyse any further Dad started shouting again. I had never heard my parents talk to each other like this. It was both shocking and mesmerizing, like the first time you learn how people really have sex.

‘You’re at work all day. I’m the one who has to get him lunch and make sure he hasn’t wandered off somewhere.
Last week when I saw him heading down the road I just let him go. It was pouring with rain and he wasn’t wearing a coat, and when he came back looking like a drowned rat I felt depressed that he hadn’t fallen in a ditch and drowned. He takes bottles of wine without asking. He puts the television on full volume. I can’t hear myself think let alone work properly.’

‘He’s only got half his hearing,’ said Mum. ‘Try and be more humane, Harry.’

‘It’s easy to be humane when you’re out of the house ten hours a day and I’m at home trying to write a book, cook dinner, get Ben to do his homework, keep an eye on Luke and remind myself not to ignore Romy because she is the only member of our family who has got her shit together. Compassion fatigue sets in pretty quickly.’

‘You seem to forget that the reason we’re here is because of you,’ said Mum coolly. That really was news to me. I waited for Dad to lob back a hand grenade of his own but he didn’t. ‘You’re starting to believe your own propaganda, Harry.’

‘You’ve brought him to live with us to punish me,’ said Dad. His voice was quieter now. He sounded defeated. And then it stopped. Or they closed the door.
Unsatisfactorily inconclusive
, I thought to myself. It was the kind of comment that Mr Harvey would write at the bottom of my Biology homework.

I realized that I must have been staring at Mr Harvey all the time I was thinking about this row, my eyes follow
ing him even as he moved to his desk. He looked up, caught my eye, checked the clock and told us we had fifteen minutes left to finish the paper. At the end of the lesson he asked me to stay behind.

‘Is everything all right, Romy?’ he asked. ‘You seem a little distracted.’

‘Sure,’ I said, wanting to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. I focused on my feet so I didn’t have to look him in the eye. Even though I’m not religious I prayed that he wouldn’t mention Aunt Rachel.

‘I rely on you to set the tone in the classroom,’ he said, piling up textbooks on his desk. ‘Don’t squander your talent.’

‘Why don’t you mark my test first and then decide if I’m squandering my talent,’ I replied. He smiled. It was a good response.

‘OK. Point taken. Now I was wondering whether you’ve thought about which medical schools you might want to apply to next year. Part of my role here is to help students who want to study science at university. Any areas you’re particularly interested in? Research or surgery? Head or heart?’

‘Something to do with the brain,’ I mumbled, embarrassed by my certainty. ‘Maybe Neurology.’

‘It would be good to get some work experience. Do you think your dad could help organize something? Your mum said that you didn’t do any after your GCSEs because of all the upheaval when your grandmother died.’

‘Before
she died,’ I corrected him. ‘The upheaval came before.’

‘Right,’ he said, clearly uninterested in the chronology. ‘Let me know if I can help with anything.’

Unlike Luke, I had never been any good at working a situation to my advantage. But suddenly I saw how my Biology teacher could help me stay in Luckmore. I liked Mr Harvey, we all did, because he really cared about our results and was genuinely interested in what we wanted to do with our lives. He was solid.

‘You can actually,’ I blurted out. ‘My aunt is so distracted by you that she’s not helping my mum to take care of my grandfather, and I think it’s putting a strain on my parents’ marriage,’ I told him. His eyes opened really wide and his forehead concertinaed. He looked so alarmed that I almost felt sorry for him. ‘My parents have had to deal with a lot of stuff the past year. Maybe you could persuade Rachel to do her share? I really don’t want to have to move house again.’

‘I’m really sorry about all this, Romy, but I think you’re blurring the lines between my professional and personal capacities. I don’t have as much power as you think.’

Teachers are so bloody moist.

I was almost certain that Jay would be waiting for me outside the Biology room. I checked up and down the corridor, hoping to see a woolly thatch of black curly hair emerge from a doorway. I looked at my phone to see if he’d called. Nothing. It was now ten days since
New Year’s Eve, and although we’d messaged and he was friendly at school he hadn’t shown any interest in seeing me alone again. Back then there was a lot of ambiguity with Jay, and if I’d known the complications of what was coming next I might have tried to enjoy that ride a bit more.

‘Radio silence. The kindest cut,’ Luke always said when he was trying to let a girl down gently. I would have liked to ask Luke what might be going on in Jay’s head but I knew he would take the piss and probably tell Marley. I even wondered if I had misread the signals. I had gone over that evening in my head so many times that it now ran on a loop like a well-edited short film. I remembered the weight of him as he sat on top of me, the dark hair under his arms and how he smelled of something sweet and musty, like coconut and yeast or oranges and ash. I weighed up the empirical evidence. I remembered something Mr Harvey had said about not looking for evidence to prove a hypothesis but allowing the evidence to point to the hypothesis, and finally understood what he meant. I blamed Mum for putting him off, for interfering with our energy.

In the canteen I caught up with Becca and Marnie. Every day I was grateful for the miracle of their friendship. They had adopted me on my first day at school, and forgiven me for being the daughter of the woman who had introduced a proper uniform to the school for the first time in almost quarter of a century and even worse made a rule about skirt length. Becca had come
up to me in our first Biology class and asked if I would be her dissecting partner. ‘Love your hair,’ she said as she sliced through a pig’s heart with her scalpel. Still holding the bloody scalpel she ran the fingers of her other hand through my side fringe. ‘So cool. So white. Like metal.’ It was as simple as that. The fact that I had lived in London sealed the deal. Luke and I were accepted simply because we’d come from Shepherd’s Bush.

Becca was straightforward without being straight, which I instantly appreciated. Her features were neat and in proportion, even her nose seemed certain. She wore her brown hair in a loose ponytail, with just the right amount of stray hair poking out the side. She forced us to go and see bands we had never heard of in Norwich and join the school kickboxing club.

She introduced me to Marnie later that first day. Marnie was sitting beneath a tree at the end of the playing fields. She was in crisis. The boy in her Art class who she had fancied the entire previous year had confided in her on the last day of the summer holidays that he was gay. He loved her. They had tried to have sex. He couldn’t. Marnie had draped her long hair around her face so that people couldn’t see her crying. She wondered if you could have a relationship without having sex. Whether he might become straight. She cried because it was a waste that such a perfect specimen of the male species (her words not mine) didn’t love women in the way she wanted to be loved.

‘You can pretend to be a lot of things in life, but not
a boy, so I guess that’s that,’ I had said, taking a cigarette from the packet Becca was offering me. It wasn’t meant to be funny, but Marnie and Becca found it hilarious.

‘Oh my actual God,’ laughed Marnie, using one of her favourite phrases. She stood up, so pale and thin that I wondered whether, if I blew too hard, she would topple over. Mum had this theory that everyone had a soundtrack that described their personality better than any words. After I introduced her to Marnie for the first time she played the music to
Death in Venice
and I understood completely.

‘She’s Mahleresque,’ Dad said to Mum, who immediately questioned whether such an adjective existed.

The next day when they got on the bus they came and sat down next to me.

It took a few weeks to absorb how lucky I was to have these new friends. At Highfield there were the same cliques as back in London: the geeks, the wreck heads, the goths, the cool gang. There were kids with anger issues, a girl my age who had taken a year out to have a baby, and another who was self-harming. But everything was a little less extreme than in London. Mum said London kids looked sophisticated but were more brittle inside. I agreed with this although not with her wacky theory about how the landscape made Norfolk kids strong. But they had all known each other for years, sometimes generations, and if you didn’t make friends at school there was nowhere else to go.

So as I headed towards Becca and Marnie with a tray
that was empty apart from a neat pile of salad I said a quick thanks to Philotes, the Greek goddess of friendship. I did a quick sweep of the canteen for Jay but I couldn’t see him. Unlike his brother he was good at melting into the background.

‘We were here first,’ whispered Marnie, sounding elated. I noticed she had undone an extra button of her shirt and had taken the tie out of her sleek chestnut hair so that the ends formed upside-down question marks over each breast, but I didn’t understand the significance of what she was saying until Becca’s eyes darted to the opposite end of the table, where Marley, Stuart and Luke were sitting.

‘What’s he doing now?’ Marnie asked as she fiddled with her phone.

‘He’s scratching his hair with a plastic fork,’ said Becca.

‘God, I wish I was that fork,’ said Marnie.

‘It’s a disposable fork,’ I pointed out.

‘Is he still doing it?’

‘Significant development. He’s putting the fork back down on the table,’ said Becca.

‘What do you think it means?’ asked Marnie, taking tiny sips from a carton of orange juice because she couldn’t eat when Marley was around. She swallowed the juice delicately like a little bird.

‘He’s got an itchy scalp,’ I said. ‘It’s a sign of something.’

‘Of what?’ asked Marnie hopefully because she wanted to keep the conversation focused on Marley.

I
leaned across the table towards her. ‘Of nits,’ I said.

We all giggled, which attracted their attention. Luke looked up and nodded at me as though I was a business acquaintance. Then they stood up together and headed over, holding their trays. I looked for traces of Jay in Marley, noting the same wide shoulders and slouchy gait. But his face was more angular, less flat, and his eyes slanted up like his mother’s.

‘I can’t believe this is happening,’ whispered Marnie. ‘I have waited so long for this moment.’

‘Fags, Romeo,’ said Luke, putting out one hand and holding up the tray in his other like a French waiter. ‘Three, please.’

I undid my blazer and pulled out the packet hidden in the lining and gave Luke three cigarettes.

‘I always get my little sister to do my dirty work,’ he told Marley. ‘Nothing sticks with her.’

‘I’d like your sister to do my dirty work,’ said Stuart.

‘Shut the fuck up,’ said Luke.

Why did he want to hang out with such a loser?

‘I’m having a party, Romy. Come if you like,’ said Marley, in passing, as they were about to walk away. ‘You can keep Jay company.’

Becca kicked me under the table.

‘Can I bring a couple of girlfriends?’ I asked a little too quickly.

He paused for a moment, looking Marnie and Becca up and down as though he’d just noticed them for the first time.

‘Sure.’

They
slouched away. I expected Marnie to be elated. But as she did up the button of her shirt ready for her next class I saw her big lower lip tremble in the way that it did when she was on the verge of tears. All Marnie’s emotions went to her mouth.

‘Result,’ said Becca, slapping Marnie on the back. ‘Let’s talk outfits.’

‘He didn’t ask me. Romy asked if we could come. It’s not the same.’

‘Five minutes ago, all you wanted was to be asked to Marley Fairport’s party. Now you’ve got the invite you’re even unhappier than you were before. Sometimes I don’t get you,’ said Becca.

‘He didn’t have to say yes,’ I pointed out. ‘That’s a good sign. He could have said no.’

‘Do you really think so?’ Marnie persisted.

‘You’re on his radar now,’ said Becca, looking at me for back-up. ‘You might even get to speak to him at his party.’

‘He asked about you at New Year,’ I said, remembering the comment about the freckles.

‘What exactly did he say?’

‘He said you reminded him of the night sky,’ I said.

Becca frowned at me disbelievingly. Marley Fairport had good ball skills. He could mend broken computers and talk to girls without being weird. But he wasn’t poetic.

‘Luke says he’s broken up with his girlfriend. So you’ve
got as good a chance as any,’ I said. Luckily the bell rang and we had to go back to class.

Sometimes after school I walk home from the bus stop in the dark. It usually takes less than twenty minutes but Mum generally doesn’t like me going alone because there are hardly any street lights and the houses either side of the main road are set back behind rows of trees and super-size hedges. After the clocks changed in October it became non-negotiable. Either I had to walk with Luke, or Dad had to pick me up. Mum had found a story on the Internet about a twenty-year-old woman who had gone missing a few years earlier.