The Good Girl (16 page)

She observed the man sitting beside Loveday talking animatedly. And how she took him by the hand and turned it towards the ceiling. She was probably going to
read his palm. Ailsa heard herself snort. Given that Loveday had come round to ask where and when she was born so that she could start plotting Ailsa’s astrological chart, it wouldn’t be surprising. Instead Loveday slowly traced a line across his wrist. This was more unexpected.
Careful how you react
, Ailsa thought; the biggest problems start with the tiniest gestures. The man obviously knew this because his hand balled into a tight fist and he pulled it away as though he had been stung.

She could now see his face and was taken aback to realize it was Harry. Wolf was watching and shook his finger at Loveday, laughing as you might at a child who had done something naughtily endearing. Harry’s gaze nervously flicked from Wolf to Loveday. Everyone suddenly turned to stare at the other end of the table. Ailsa saw her father get up, his trousers stained red from a glass of wine he must have just spilt. She could tell from his slow, somnambulant movements that he was drunk. Harry got up, presumably to help Adam, but instead he headed towards the sofa, where a child was stirring beneath a blanket. Harry bent down beside him and Ben sat up and rubbed his eyes. What was Harry thinking, keeping him out so late on a school night? For the second time that evening she tried to summon anger that she didn’t feel.
Let Harry sort out Ben and her father
, thought Ailsa. She went upstairs and checked on Romy. She was asleep on her side, her fingers curled around the edge of the duvet. Her curtains were open. Ailsa went over and shut them.

It was Aunt Rachel who gave the game away about Mum and Dad. She didn’t mean to. But Rachel likes a drink and can be very mouthy after a few glasses of wine. Mum always says she is the perfect example of how the same qualities that make you good can also make you bad.

Since Rachel has what my parents describe as ‘a very chequered history’ with men, I was surprised Mum had ever confided in her at all about her problems with Dad. Still am really. Perhaps Mum decided it was payback time for all the hours she had spent at the kitchen table with Rachel excitedly describing a new relationship or sobbing over the end of an old one. If Mum had asked me I would have told her that the same quality that made Rachel such awesome company might make her a flaky confidante. It didn’t make her a bad person. That’s just how she rolled.

‘Rach’s life is like one long Abba song,’ Dad used to say whenever she turned up at our old home wearing sunglasses and clutching a bottle of wine. She would head off downstairs with barely a glance at him. Sometimes he’d whistle the tune to ‘Mamma Mia’ as she and Mum talked in the kitchen oblivious to the rest of us. It
was more a tease than criticism. Dad was quite fond of Rachel.

I remembered that as Mum sympathized and gave advice she would always be doing something else, like ironing, or cooking a week’s supply of chilli con carne, or doing an Internet shop, because she couldn’t afford to stop. BTM – before the Miseries – Mum obeyed all the laws of physics. She was constantly in motion although I wasn’t convinced her forces were in balance.

Rachel would always sit in my seat at the kitchen table. As she spoke, she would run her nails up and down its oak surface, leaving tiny hieroglyphics that Luke and I named after the boyfriend that had caused the latest upset. Because even when she ended a relationship, there was still a drama. When Granny was alive she used to say that Rachel felt things more than anyone else, as though her heightened sensitivity was a superhuman quality that elevated her above the rest of us. Dad said she lacked self-control, and although I wasn’t sure what he meant I agreed with him. But back then I knew nothing about the complications of love.

The deepest grooves, a series of stubby lines close to where I still sit, we called Steve after a man who broke her heart because he chose a life of abstinence as a Buddhist monk and was sent to live in Mexico. Mum’s theory was that Steve was a good man, but because Rachel lost him to religion rather than another woman she couldn’t generate the anger necessary to truly purge him from her system. After Steve, boyfriends tended to have one
or two of Steve’s ingredients but never enough to replicate the exact recipe. I wasn’t sure that Mum’s cooking metaphor worked but we all understood what she meant.

Last year Steve came back from Mexico for a visit. I overheard Rachel tell Mum he wanted to have sex with her one last time but she turned him down because she didn’t want the responsibility of holding back a man trying to reach nirvana.

Then there was a small series of concentric circles by Ben’s seat for Budgie, an enormous motorbike courier Rachel met after he delivered a package containing a script to her home. It was a horror movie, the first one my aunt had ever worked on. Apparently she had been brought in to try and give the central character emotional depth.

Rachel’s relationship with him was completely physical, Mum explained to Dad. ‘Sounds good to me,’ Dad had teased. They used to banter like that, as if they had some private language that the rest of us couldn’t speak as fluently.

Rachel spent quite a lot of time trying to work out why she found Budgie’s blend of leather and motorbike fumes quite so intoxicating. Finally, Mum, who was usually really patient, told her that all she was doing was trying to inject the relationship with a mythology it didn’t deserve. ‘Never forget, sex is a chemical addiction, Rach.’

I tried to imagine Dad being an addictive substance and felt slightly sick.

I also overheard Rachel telling Mum that she pre
ferred having sex with Budgie when he wore his leather trousers, even though the leather chafed her thighs so badly that it looked as though someone had had a go at her with a cheese grater. Even more interestingly, Budgie could only have sex to the sound of a motorbike revving in the background. Mum had laughed so much when Rachel told her this and even more when she revealed that it had to be a 990cc Harley-Davidson engine. Rachel had finally managed a smile. She knew it was time to tell Budgie the relationship was over. ‘You can’t compete with a motorbike,’ were Mum’s last words on the subject.

And of course now there was Mr Harvey, my Biology teacher. I had overheard Mum on the phone earlier in the week explaining to Rachel that she couldn’t, for professional reasons, listen to her talk about their sex life. But because Mr Harvey was a new teacher who was very hot on pastoral care and mistakenly thought that age made you wise, he asked Rachel’s opinion about issues at school and she in turn told Mum what was going on. Which was something Mum described as a virtuous circle.

So this is how I learned the reason Stuart Tovey was such a freak was that his stepdad knocked his mother around. Mr Harvey thought this accounted for his outbursts of anger and poisonous attitude towards women, especially female teachers. I didn’t understand why watching your mother getting beaten up by your stepdad would make you angry with her rather than him or how
this might make you offer a tenner to a girl in the year below to give you a blow job in the lunch break, but apparently Mr Harvey did. He firmly believed that deviancy was created, not inherited. And like Mum he went on and on about context all the time.

I was less sure. I was born on 22 June, the same day that, in 2003, a DNA sequence of the human genome was finally unravelled. So maybe my view was coloured. But Dad told me researchers have discovered a gene that is linked to antisocial and aggressive behaviour and that murderers and psychopaths have a smaller and less active pre-frontal cortex. We now know that anything from baldness to eczema is genetic. So maybe Stuart was born plain bad rather than made bad. And, as Ben said, the only fact you needed to know about Stuart Tovey was that it was best to stay away.

Mum also told Dad that apart from the fact that when Rachel went out on their first date people wondered if Mr Harvey was her son, he came ‘without any obvious complicating issues’, so perhaps there would be no grooves on the table. I wondered if Jay came without complicating issues and knew instinctively that he didn’t.

Grandpa had been staying with us for around ten days when Rachel came to visit. Apparently she couldn’t come earlier because of work commitments, Mum explained as we sat around the kitchen table waiting for her to arrive. Apparently all the actors in her zombie film were getting
together for a script read-through. There were always lots of apparentlys with my aunt.

Since the film would be less than two hours long Mum couldn’t understand why it had taken ten days to get from beginning to end. It was a fair point. Dad didn’t react because he knew that while Mum could say what she liked about Rachel, nobody else was allowed to criticize her.

‘That’s the thing about zombies, Mum,’ said Ben seriously, after listening to Mum complaining. ‘They’re very unpredictable. That can be a big problem. Especially if there’s a horde.’

We all laughed apart from Ben, who always suspected he wasn’t being taken seriously. He was sitting at the kitchen table fiddling with Mum’s old iPhone.

‘I know a lot about this kind of stuff,’ he said without looking up.

‘Thank God there’s only one of you and not a horde,’ said Dad, tickling him until he begged for mercy and the iPod Touch tumbled to the floor.

‘Don’t!’ Ben shrieked. ‘I’m editing my film to show Aunt Rachel.’

‘Can we have a look?’ asked Mum.

‘Sorry. I promised she would see the premiere,’ said Ben apologetically.

‘How did you do that?’ asked Mum.

‘On Skype,’ said Ben.

‘You have a Skype account?’ Mum turned to Dad and gave him one of her questioning looks. Dad shrugged.

‘What’s
your film about?’ he asked Ben.

‘The sauna Wolf is building at the end of their garden.’

‘Sounds like it’s got massive popular appeal,’ commented Luke from the sofa. ‘Who plays the sauna?’ I looked away so that Ben couldn’t see me smile.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Mum. Ben knew this had grabbed her attention.

‘I’ve filmed it at the same time every week so you can see Wolf’s progress. He’s paying me to do it.’ He said this with a mixture of pride and bluster.

‘That huge building is going to be a sauna?’ Mum asked.

‘A sweat lodge is the correct term,’ said my grandfather.

‘You knew about this?’ Mum asked.

‘Can someone explain to me in God’s name what a sweat lodge is?’ asked Dad. Now they both sounded exasperated but at least they were in agreement.

‘Your mother and I once saw one on a Navajo reservation,’ said Grandpa dreamily.

‘Wolf and Loveday aren’t Navajo,’ Mum interrupted.

‘He was very interested in my experience,’ continued Grandpa. ‘We were on a fishing trip in Nebraska. Have I ever told you about it? We went up into the mountains to go fishing in Big Elk Park. I caught a huge salmon but your mother wanted me to put it back in the water and –’

‘We’ve heard it all before, Adam,’ said Dad sharply.

‘Please,
Harry,’ warned Mum.

‘What’s a sweat lodge, Grub?’ I asked Ben, hoping to derail yet another argument about my grandfather, who was blissfully unaware of the tension he caused between my parents.

‘It’s like a sauna,’ explained Ben. ‘You light the fire in the middle and it gets really, really hot. Wolf chants and plays the bongos in total darkness. Then you sweat out all your toxins for hours and come out reborn because you are reconnected with the universe and your problems have gone. Wolf’s can fit sixty people inside. They’re going to charge thousands of pounds.’

‘What a load of bollocks,’ Dad laughed. ‘Sweating is the way the body regulates temperature. Sweat glands don’t get rid of toxins.’

‘Surely you need planning permission to build something like that, Harry?’ Mum asked Dad.

‘Who’s going to notice out here?’ said Dad. ‘Or care.’

‘My film is going on their website,’ said Ben defensively. ‘Jay is helping me load it.’

At the mention of Jay’s name a jolt of electric pleasure shot through my body. I got up from the table and went over to the big window that looked out onto the side of the Fairports’ house, to see if he was waiting for me. His curtains were open and his lamp bathed his room in an orange glow.

It was exactly two weeks since our first encounter. And one day since our last.

I hadn’t told Becca or Marnie what was going on
because the excitement was slightly dampened by my lack of vocabulary to describe it and the sense that it wasn’t quite normal. The experience didn’t resemble anything my friends had ever discussed. I looked for answers on the Internet, willing what had happened to fit the definition of mutual masturbation, which sounded very Zen, and at least fitted with my expectations of sexual possibilities as outlined by Marnie. But since Jay and I hadn’t touched, it didn’t. We weren’t going out with each other. We hadn’t hooked up. We weren’t having sex. I knew what the relationship wasn’t but I wasn’t sure what it was.

‘Are you looking for Juliet, Romeo?’ asked Luke, making me jump. For someone totally wrapped up in his own world, Luke had a spooky way of accidentally stumbling upon essential truths.

‘God, you’re pathetic,’ I said, rolling up a newspaper and hitting him on the head as hard as I could.

Ben filmed the fight.

‘Hit a nerve, have I, Romeo?’ teased Luke. I hit him again.

‘Hey!’ shouted Dad. ‘Cut it out, you two.’

‘She’s killing hundreds of neurons with every blow,’ said Luke, holding his head in his hands.

‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ I said, throwing the newspaper on the floor so that it scattered into a patchwork of loose pages. Dad cleared his throat as he always did when he was about to go into scientific mode.

‘Actually,’ Dad started, ‘even a mild blow can cause a protein called tau to fall off the microtubules inside the
neurons. In fact a series of mild blows can be as serious as a couple of bad bumps.’

He looked at his watch and began carping on about Rachel being late again.

‘Maybe she’s doing a trilogy,’ suggested Luke. He had picked up one of my A-level Chemistry books just to be annoying. I grabbed it from his hand. Dad asked why he was suddenly interested in Chemistry when he’d done so little work for his GCSE that he’d given it up a couple of weeks before the exam. I could tell by the way Luke’s eyes narrowed that this had hurt him. I felt bad for Luke and then irritated that I felt bad when he had started the argument.

‘That’s what they do nowadays with action movies. They work out all the sequels before they even release the first film.’ He began listing examples. Luke was impressive like that. ‘Maybe Ben should plan
Sweat Lodge II
,’ he suggested.

‘Good idea,’ said Ben. He thought for a moment. ‘But what would it be about?’