The Good Girl (30 page)

‘That’s very kind of you, Ben,’ said Adam, his bottom lip trembling.

‘I’ll come and visit every weekend,’ Ben promised.

‘I’m six miles up the road,’ Adam reassured him. ‘Less, as the crow flies.’

‘Why is it a crow?’ asked Ben. ‘Why not a pigeon? Do crows have a better sense of direction than other birds?’

‘In the States we say “as the wolf runs”,’ said Wolf. This distracted Ben. Ailsa was grateful.

Her anxiety about Matt’s discovery had displaced her feelings about taking her father to his new flat in Cromer the following day, but now these emotions spewed to the surface unchecked. Conversation continued around her. Ailsa tried to focus. Rachel said something about their father starting a new phase of his life as if he was Ben starting secondary school. Harry had a discussion with himself about how new experiences released dopamine in the brain and told his father-in-law that he might have a whole new lease of life. Ailsa, however, was blindsided by the conviction that this was another ending. Not a beginning.

She swallowed over and over again, and when she couldn’t get hold of herself retreated into the kitchen and leaned against the cool wall beside the cooker, where
no one could see her. The good thing about large groups of people was that it was easier to hide in the shadows for a while. She noticed the floor beneath her feet was slippery with olive oil, grabbed some kitchen roll and kneeled down to wipe it up. She imagined Matt in the room next door surreptitiously glancing from Harry to Luke, looking for their similarities or more likely spotting their differences. He would be wondering how Harry could not have questioned Luke’s paternity when he looked so unlike every other member of the family. ‘Like father, like son,’ he might say in a well-meaning attempt to reinforce the bond between them. Ailsa had done a bit of that herself over the years.

This made Ailsa feel terrible. She and Harry had wreaked horrible destruction on their relationship. But the cruellest cut was other people knowing you had been betrayed when you didn’t. Matt would treat Luke differently from her other children, more favourably perhaps, because he felt sorry for him. Or perhaps more cautiously. His attitude to Harry would be more restrained, in case he let something slip. Her thoughts ricocheted from Matt back to her father and then back to Matt like a game of pinball in her head. She was aware that someone was in the room beside her and knew even before she looked up that it would be him.

‘Are you OK?’ Matt asked. ‘I just thought … There’s a lot going on …’ His voice trailed off. He stepped towards her and dropped down on his haunches until he was at her level. They were now invisible to the
people on the sofas. Ailsa applied meticulous attention to the oil.

‘Stop, Ailsa,’ Matt said quietly. ‘Please.’ Her wiping became less vigorous. She noticed a small hole at the end of his trainers and then the pointy shape of his knee through his threadbare suit trousers.

‘I’m fine,’ she said finally. He stretched out his arm and covered her clenched fist with his hand until finally she dropped the ball of kitchen roll. But instead of releasing her hand his fingers slid between hers. He searched for her gaze and found it.
Look away
, she told herself.

‘I didn’t mean for this to happen,’ said Matt eventually.

A few words about Wolf and Loveday. The standout characteristics at least, because you could write a whole book about them: they considered seven to be a magical number because the menstrual cycle occurs in four units of seven, as does the orbit of the moon around the earth. They sprinkled salt across their doorway to absorb negativity. They didn’t really believe in sit-down toilets and worried about obstructed colons more than exam results. They even had a special machine in their bathroom imported from California for colonic irrigation.

Oh, and they lived by their conviction that men should ejaculate no more than twice a month to prevent chronic fatigue. Jay told me this was the best example of irony that he had ever come across. I tried to laugh with him but couldn’t. Dad called them an anachronism. I wasn’t sure what he meant but he said it fondly. Mum said they were kooky. Her tone was more disapproving.

I think in part she was envious because every Friday Wolf came home very publicly with a present for Loveday. Sometimes it was a bunch of flowers that he had picked from a hedgerow. Once it was an old Afghan coat that he had found in a second-hand shop in Norwich. In
December he arrived with a pot of translucent shells that he had picked up on the beach.

I thought of Dad’s kindness to Mum over the past year and wondered whether Wolf was atoning too and whether all marriages were a series of atonements.

What I do know was that they professed to believe in personal freedom, trust and the essential goodness of humankind. Qualities which meant Marley’s eighteenth-birthday party quickly became the hottest ticket in Luckmore. There would be no bouncers on the door frisking for alcohol, parents turning off the electricity when the music got too loud or rooms declared off limits.

The morning of the party I went to a hairdresser in Norwich with Marnie and Becca. I showed the stylist a picture of Jennifer Lawrence’s pixie cut and came out one hour later feeling cold rather than cool. I hadn’t realized how vulnerable the back of your neck could be. It didn’t help that Marnie and Becca gave me sideways looks all the way back to the bus stop. ‘So Audrey Hepburn,’ Marnie kept repeating. We took a selfie and posted it on Instagram.

Ben cried when I got home because I didn’t look like me any more. Luke glanced up from his phone for a nanosecond and said he’d already seen the picture that I’d posted. Mum said it looked great but I could hear the words getting caught on the lump in her throat. The last time I had such short hair I was a toddler, she explained.
Dad was speechless. He loved my long hair. Which is exactly why I had cut it off.

Marnie and Becca came back to my house to get ready. By this time the sun was going down. I opened the bedroom window so that we could hear when the music started. Wolf and Loveday had agreed the party could be held in the sweat lodge in the wood on condition everyone took off their shoes before they went inside. This was the sort of thing they obsessed about, Jay said. They would probably get angrier about dirty footprints on the new wooden floor than if he got a girl pregnant. Not that this was likely to happen soon, he quickly added. There was a note of caution in his voice that I hadn’t heard before.

Only Ben was worried about the party venue. He’d come into my bedroom, ignoring the fact that Marnie was standing there in her most attention-seeking bra and knickers, and asked me to make sure that no one hurt his sweat lodge. His chubby hand squeezed my forearm tight. I was a little taken aback by his proprietorial tone but reasoned that he was still smarting from the disappearance of his film from Wolf and Loveday’s website.

‘Of course we’ll take care of it, Grub,’ I said. ‘It’s nice that it’s being used though, isn’t it?’

‘I helped build it,’ he told Marnie and Becca proudly. ‘The stones in the centre represent our ancestors. They’re special volcanic rocks. If we hurt them we hurt ourselves.’

Becca and Marnie laughed. They were used to Ben by now and his offbeat view of the world. We were
in that pre-party mood where everyone laughed at everything even if it wasn’t funny. If I had seen Dad before we left he would have said that our nucleus accumbens was releasing dopamine in anticipation of new stimuli.

‘I’m being serious. Why does no one take me seriously?’ Ben said.

He stropped out of the room. Usually I would have gone after him, but I was struggling to zip Marnie into a fluorescent pink glow-in-the-dark catsuit that she had bought that morning in Norwich.

I glanced over at Jay’s bedroom. The curtains were pulled shut. I guessed he was out at the sweat lodge helping Marley fine-tune the playlist. They had spent days putting it together. Wolf believed atmosphere should define music and lectured them on the importance of spontaneity and living in the moment. They agreed with him and then ignored everything he had said. A strategy everyone should probably adopt with parents.

‘What do you think?’ Marnie asked. She spun on the spot to demonstrate how the cloudy pink silk wings that she had sewn to the shoulders of the catsuit blew in the breeze like tattered sails. She wore a ribbon around her forehead, silver filigree fairy ears and thin bangles on her arms which jingled every time she moved. On her arm was a quote from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
: ‘And though she be little she is fierce.’

‘Do I embody the spirit of Titania?’

‘You look amazing,’ I said, meaning every word.

‘Good
enough for Marley?’ she asked.

‘Don’t you mean good enough for Stuart? I thought you were getting with him?’ I asked. Becca looked surprised in that way that girls do when someone else from the group knows something they don’t. ‘Luke told me,’ I quickly added because I hate there to be an atmosphere between friends.

‘He’s a means to an end,’ said Marnie with a wicked smile.

‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

‘So this is my thinking.’ She sat down on my bed, cross-legged, looking serious. ‘Stuart thinks I’m hot. He can’t keep this kind of thing to himself, so he tells Marley, who sees me in a whole new light. Marley comes on to me. We drink a love potion and float off together to the Kingdom of the Fairies, for ever. Marley and Marnie. We are meant to be, like Bonnie and Clyde.’

‘Remember the love potion made Titania fall in love with a donkey,’ I warned.

‘And Romy, you and I can do double dates with Marley and Jay,’ said Marnie, too wrapped up in her fantasy to consider Becca’s feelings. ‘Oh my actual God!’

‘I’ll look forward to that,’ said Becca flatly.

‘Marley’s attitude has changed already,’ Marnie said dreamily.

‘How exactly?’ I asked.

‘He’s paying me more attention.’

Becca raised an eyebrow.

‘He says hi every time he sees me at school. He asks
me for cigarettes and twice in the same day checked whether I was definitely coming to his party.’ She paused for dramatic effect. ‘He said I could stay over.’

‘Only because Stuart is,’ I pointed out, then when her smile briefly faded, I felt as though I had been cruel. Like kicking a puppy. ‘What are you going to tell your mum?’

‘That I’m staying at your place. She trusts your parents. Don’t say anything. I’ll be back in your bedroom by the time they get up.’

‘You know, that’s pretty fucked-up logic, Marnie,’ said Becca. I was glad she had relieved me of the burden of pointing this out. ‘Marley won’t want to steal his best friend’s girlfriend. He might think you’re slutty and have sex with you once and then dump you. Girls who put it out always get hammered.’ I think she could have been a little gentler but Becca was punishing Marnie for not telling her about Stuart.

‘If it works you’ll be congratulating me on the brilliance of my strategy,’ said Marnie.

‘Or going to your funeral if Stuart discovers,’ said Becca.

‘Are you still taking things very, very slowly?’ Marnie turned to me with genuine curiosity as though I was one of those American kids who swear off sex before marriage. I nodded because what else could I tell her? In some ways I felt as if I was taking things very fast. But back then I often felt like that about my life. I felt very old and very young, sometimes all at the same time. One minute I would be guessing that Miss Scarlett killed
Professor Plum in the billiard room with the spanner, getting it wrong on purpose so Ben would win at Cluedo, the next I would get a message from Jay telling me he had watched the video (again) and that it was as hot as anything he had ever seen online. But the more he said it, the worse I felt because it underlined the fact that nothing had really changed between us.

There was one small but significant recalibration. Jay had taken to skyping me at night. He liked to watch me watching him as he watched the video of us. I had tried to explain to him that this reminded me of the Dr Seuss book where there was a bee watcher-watcher watching the bee watcher, and that at some point you had to stop being an observer and actually participate.

‘Dad has an entire collection of first edition Dr Seuss books,’ he said, hoping to change the subject.

‘When you replace something in your life with technology you need to think about what it is that you are really replacing,’ I advised him.

‘What do you think I’m replacing?’ he asked, interested in this new angle.

‘Contact with real women,’ I said. ‘You need to connect physically with me. Not just visually. You need to use all your senses. Smell, touch.’

He kissed me and told me how much he adored it when I got scientific on him.

I got more direct. I said that we needed to try and be more like normal people, and he looked worried and said defensively that there was no such thing as normal.
I told him I understood that he was scared of trying in case it didn’t work but that I was his best chance of being cured. ‘I’m not ill,’ he said. His tone had definitely got more defensive recently.

‘Addiction is a disease of the brain,’ I replied. ‘If you don’t stop this it might ruin your ability to ever properly love another human being.’

‘But I love you, Romy,’ he insisted. It was the first time anyone who wasn’t family had told me that they loved me but although I wanted more than anything for it to feel right, it didn’t. He didn’t seem to get it. Later it occurred to me that he didn’t want to get it. And later still that he couldn’t get it. It was first love with complications, and that stays with you for ever.

I turned to Mum for comfort. I could only pose the most oblique questions. I wondered if there was a moment in her life when she felt she had finally become an adult and everything made sense. She said that everyone was just muddling through as best they could, and that as the years went by you just learned to do a better impersonation of being a grown-up. I wanted to warn her that Dad was doing a particularly poor job on this front but instead found myself giving her a hug and promising always to be there for her. The important thing, Mum said as I held her, was to try and avoid making any decisions that I might regret down the line. She said that she thought it was a mistake not to apply for medical school and that I should at least try and get some work experience before making such a dramatic
decision. I couldn’t face an argument about this so I retreated.

‘It’s good to take things slowly,’ said Becca, sensing I was struggling. ‘More romantic. He’ll have more respect for you. Virginity is so retro chic, like vinyl and Polaroid cameras. In the long term less is definitely more with boys.’

I couldn’t work out if she really meant what she was saying or was still working through some residue of resentment towards Marnie. If Marnie hadn’t been there I might have told Becca about Jay. Not only was Becca completely trustworthy, she was also unshakeably unshockable. She would have told me to walk away. That Jay’s problem was bigger than I was. She would almost certainly have told me to get rid of the video. It seems crazy now but the only thing I didn’t worry about was other people seeing our film. I trusted Jay absolutely.

I pulled the dress I had borrowed from Marnie over my head and was freaked out by how short it was. It was made of a floaty material that would billow in the breeze. But it was too late to do anything about it. Becca crimped my hair. She drew three silver stars on my cheek while Marnie applied a cherry-black lipstick. I put on a pair of heavy black leather cowboy boots to balance the delicacy of the rest of the outfit.

‘You look like someone from
Game of Thrones
,’ said Becca. ‘Forget taking it slowly. When Jay sees you like
this, he’ll throw you over his shoulder and take you straight up to his bedroom.’

‘Really?’ I asked, because despite what Mum thought I dressed for myself not other people.

‘God, how am I going to pee?’ Marnie shrieked. ‘I hadn’t thought that through either.’ She had forgiven us. As I was soon to discover, that was one of Marnie’s best qualities: her ability to forgive and forget so quickly. Although, as Mum said, perhaps if she forgave a little more slowly, she wouldn’t forget so quickly and might learn more from her mistakes. Becca and I rashly promised that one of us would accompany her to the toilet at all times.

Ben came in to tell us excitedly that there were so many lights flashing in the Fairports’ garden that the astronauts would be able to see the party from the International Space Station when they orbited over Norfolk later that night. Mum had already left for her teachers’ party at school so I instructed Ben to tell Dad that we had gone. I guessed Dad was probably downstairs in his office. There was no way that I ever wanted to set foot in that room again.