The Perfect Girl (12 page)

Beside me, really peacefully, Grace falls asleep. I love her when she’s asleep because she looks perfect: all that energy tucked away temporarily inside her silky smooth exterior, recuperating, so it can explode out of her when she wakes up later. Grace has such simple needs. Wake, give love, receive love, refuel, expend energy, sleep. I love that about her. Her energy is monumental though; she could power the Hadron Collider.

I want to stay on the bed with Grace, and sleep with her for the whole night. I’ve done that sometimes. If I’ve heard her wake up in the night before Mum or Chris do, I’ve gone in and taken her into the bed in her room with me. It gives my mum a break, and in the morning when Grace wakes I just get up with her before it disturbs Mum, and I change her and quickly make up the bed, because sleeping with her would be frowned on as ‘deviating from the routine’. When I’ve done that I take her to Mum and go downstairs and start to get her bottle ready. Grace loves to go in Mum and Chris’s bed. It must seem as big as a football pitch to her, and she spreads her arms and legs out and nuzzles her head down into their duvet and then looks up to see if anybody is laughing.

Once I heard Chris say to Mum, ‘She’s energetic, isn’t she, for a girl?’ as if he was a bit worried about that, but Mum said, ‘They all are at that age, that’s nothing to worry about.’ I didn’t hear the rest of the conversation because they kissed and I slipped away.

It would be a burning apocalypse, a red-rimmed sunset and the horsemen pounding so fast that they were almost on top of me before I watched those two snogging for longer than I had to, one of his hands all tight on her hips, puckering her silky pyjama bottoms, the fingers of the other running down to find the place where her buttock meets her thigh.

I might have just stayed there with Grace that night, and things could have gone somehow differently, but Lucas is in the doorway making the same dark shadow as his dad did earlier, and he says, ‘Zoe, you need to come.’

I pick Grace up as carefully as I can. Her limbs are warm-heavy-floppy and I cradle her head on my arm, and then lay her carefully in her cot. For a moment it looks like she might wake up again, because she tenses when her back settles on to the mattress, but then she relaxes and her head falls to one side, and I pull the thin cotton sheet just up over her legs because I don’t want her to get too hot. Her chest makes tiny rise and fall movements, which I can just see in the darkness and her lips are puckered as if she’s expecting a kiss from a prince.

Lucas is waiting on the landing. He’s noticed the butterfly, which is still flapping in the high corner, and its wings have reached a pitch that are as fast as the fastest trill I can play on the piano. I wonder how long it can go on.

‘Can you save it?’ I say to Lucas.

‘It’s too high up.’

‘Why doesn’t it fly to the light?’

‘Only moths do that. Butterflies don’t like artificial light.’

He reaches out to turn off the light switch and in the darkness the butterfly’s wings hush, as if it feels relief.

I look at Lucas and smile, but he’s looking at me in a really intense sort of a way, which isn’t that unusual for him, but what he does next is.

He kisses me.

It’s especially clumsy at first, because I’m so not expecting it. He puts his mouth over mine and kisses me like I’ve never been kissed before, not even by Jack Bell, because it’s fearsome, super-hot kissing, like in films.

It only lasts a few seconds and then he pulls away from me and I don’t know what to say.

‘Zoe,’ he whispers. ‘I know about you. I’ve known for a long time, but my dad doesn’t. We need to stay with him, and stay with your mum, we mustn’t let them be alone, do you understand? They mustn’t be alone. And listen, this is important, you need to get your mum to read my email.’

‘But we’re supposed to look after Grace,’ I say.

‘This is more important. Come on…’

He starts to walk down the stairs, but then he turns and looks back up at me because I’m still standing at the top, understanding nothing.

‘Come on.’ He offers his hand to me, palm open and ready to be held.

‘Why can’t we leave them alone?’ I ask him.

‘Because.’

‘Because what?’

I can’t see the expression on his face so I don’t know what he’s thinking in the few seconds before he answers. ‘Dad can be mean sometimes.’

And I don’t know what to say to that, so I take hold of his hand, and squeeze it a little, and follow him down the stairs.

We find Mum and Chris in the kitchen. They’re standing with the island in between them. Chris has his hands on the granite as if he’s about to try to lift it up. On the other side, Mum is stuffing hunks of white bread into the top of her food processor, which is whirring and rattling at top speed and pulverising the bread into fine crumbs.

My mum has been crying. Her mascara has smudged a bit around her eyes.

‘I thought I told you to look after Grace,’ Chris says to Lucas and me.

Obviously we’re not holding hands any more. Lucas dropped my hand before we got to the kitchen door. We’ve got the usual six feet between us.

‘She’s asleep,’ I say.

‘Where is she?’ Mum asks, fluttery-panicky, as if I’m stupid enough to leave Grace on the bed on her own.

‘I put her in the cot. On her back. I put the sheet just on her legs.’

‘Oh! She might be too hot like that. Where’s the monitor?’

I fetch it. It’s on the table outside, amidst the debris of the bruschetta, which hasn’t been cleared up yet. I wipe a bit of tomato off it and turn the volume on. Grace is quiet. Inside, Mum takes the monitor from me. ‘It’s nineteen degrees in her room,’ she says to Chris. ‘Do you think a sheet is OK?’ Grace’s monitor tells you practically everything about her bedroom, although it does stop short of videoing her.

Chris hasn’t moved. I’ve barely dared to meet his eye but I can see that he’s moving his jaw a bit, clenching and unclenching it.

‘I don’t know why you’re asking me, darling,’ he says, and he sounds mean. ‘Because, it seems you don’t even respect me enough to be honest with me about who you and your daughter are.’

My mum detaches the lid from the blender very slowly and decants the breadcrumbs into a wide, shallow dish. She takes a very deep breath in, she practically inhales a reservoir of air, and then she lets it out through puffed cheeks. All the time, she’s smoothing the breadcrumbs flat with the side of her hand, so they’re ready for covering the chicken breasts.

‘Here’s what I suggest,’ she says, ‘I suggest that we sit down, with some food, and talk about this as a family. There is something that Zoe and I would like to explain to you both, but I would like to do it properly, the way we always do things.’

‘Isn’t it a bit late for that?’ says Chris.

My mother straightens her back and walks to the fridge. She hefts open the dungeon-sized stainless-steel door, and takes out a box of twelve organic, free-range eggs. Her lip wobbles as she walks back to the island and when she gets there she raises the box of eggs high into the air and slams it down on to the island, hard.

‘Only,’ she says to Chris, facing him over the denuded basil plants, the egg box in front of her looking as if it’s been crushed, oozing egg white and yolk in every direction, ‘if you don’t care about these two children, about that baby upstairs and about everything else that we have built up together. Only if you want our lives to end up like this!’

And she opens the lid of the box. The slimy, shattered carcasses of eight or nine eggs lie within it, and I have to look away because I don’t like to see things all smashed up.

‘Is that what you want?’ she says to him. ‘Is it? Is this what you want?’

She’s scooping her hands into the egg now, dredging up bits of broken eggshell and showing them to him on fingers that are dripping with the slimy insides. It’s disgusting. Some of it has fallen down the front of her silk shirt.

‘Have you gone mad?’ Chris asks her. ‘Look at yourself. Have you gone totally stark raving mad?’

They face each other in silence, in a kind of still, mute combat.

Lucas steps forward and starts to take the egg box away, but just as he’s got it in his hands Chris says, ‘Leave them,’ and Lucas does. He slides the box back on to the counter in front of my mother, and steps away, his movements as careful as if he were performing an operation.

My mother says, ‘Mad? Is that what you think this is?’

The wrecking of the food isn’t something that makes me think my mum has gone mad, because that’s the kind of thing my parents used to do when they rowed, before the accident. Food got thrown, maybe a mug, there was shouting, then it was all over, all cleaned up, all settled back to normal, hugs on the sofa.

What’s freaking me out now, apart from the obvious, which is that Chris is about to know all about me, is that Mum never behaves this way around Chris. Around Chris she’s like the butterfly. When it’s appropriate she sits, wings closed tight, demure and tidy, patient, twitching almost indiscernibly until the moment when he’s ready for her to spread her wings and show how beautiful she is, and then she’s gorgeous, admired. But only when he wants her to be. And that’s it. She never, ever gets out of control. The Second Chance Family is not like that.

‘Do you know what mad is?’ my mum says. Now she’s leaning forward with her hands on the granite, and she’s fully facing up to Chris. The greasy lock of hair has fallen back over her forehead and the only kind of butterfly she looks like now would be an injured one, circling on the ground, wings shredded and useless, waiting for a foot to put it out of its misery.

‘Mad is this! All of this!’ She gesticulates theatrically, spreading her arms wide.

Chris looks at her, and then at us, and then at the used, empty wine glass in front of my mother on the granite, which narrowly escaped being knocked over by the egg box.

‘You’re drunk, Maria,’ he says to her. ‘It’s not attractive.’

‘I am NOT drunk,’ she says.

Chris raises his eyebrows slightly. ‘I think we both know that you are,’ he says.

‘Don’t patronise me!’

‘I’ll take you upstairs,’ he says. ‘We’ll talk about this in the morning.’

‘No!’ Lucas says, and that gets all of our attention. ‘Where’s Tessa?’ he says. ‘Isn’t she having supper?’

Chris and Mum stare at Lucas for a moment as if they’re only just remembering that he and I are here, then Mum says, ‘Tessa popped out for a few minutes, but, yes, let’s have our supper.’ She runs her forearm over her forehead and then looks at her hands as if she can’t understand whey they’re covered in gunk.

‘Dad?’ Lucas says to Chris, who’s still staring at my mum.

‘Out,’ he says to me and Lucas. ‘Out of this room. Now!’

And he bellows that in a way that makes my hands go up to my ears and makes me feel like the world has turned dark and I’ll never be able to see again, and I open my mouth because the only thing I know to do now is to scream.

When I get back to Maria and Chris’s house I park on the street again and then I let myself back in, and the first thing I hear is a scream. It’s long, and high-pitched, and it makes me hurtle down the stairs into the kitchen.

Zoe is screaming. She has her hands over her ears and her mouth open wide and she’s screaming as if something’s unbearable.

Maria stands at the island and says, ‘Stop it, Zoe, stop it! Stop it! Will you stop it!’ but it’s not until I have Zoe wrapped tightly in my arms that she does stop and I feel her body go limp against mine. Lucas hovers beside us, anxious. Chris looks on aghast.

Something’s gone wrong; that’s obvious. I think Chris has confronted Maria. She looks awful: smudged eye make-up, a dirty shirt, red eyes, and there are eggs smashed on the counter.

‘Come with me, honey,’ I say to Zoe, and I usher her towards the door, and upstairs into the sitting room, which is decorated as if the family regularly entertain minor royalty, which, for all I know, they do. I sit her down and, although it’s too hot for hugs, I keep my arms around her for all the long minutes that it takes for her body to stop shaking.

Zoe’s a convicted killer. There are no two ways around that. Tom Barlow would probably qualify that further by saying that she is a murderer. But she’s still my niece. She’s the baby I visited within hours of her birth all those years ago, a scrumpled-up scrap of a thing, at that moment full of all the potential in the world. She’s the toddler I took to the beach and made a sandcastle with, she’s the girl I took to the zoo and helped to be brave when she wanted to feed the lorikeets but was afraid of the feel of them when they landed on her hand. She was the nine-year-old I cheered on when she made it to her first regional piano final in blinding style, making me swell with pride even though I’d bitten my fingernails to the quick.

She was the child I loved and thought about and took an interest in.

And so, in spite of what she’s responsible for, I love her still. Zoe made a stupid mistake one night of her life, which has had the most terrible consequences. But I will always love her. Somebody has to.

I know Maria loves her too, but Maria is closer, obviously, and the fallout from Zoe’s actions has fractured Maria’s life before and might now fracture it again and that, however much you love somebody, is complicated. They are tied together too tightly for their love to be easy. But I think Zoe has a good heart. I believe her story about what happened all those years ago, on the night of the accident, and I want her to know that somebody loves her after the accident just the same way they did before it. I think she deserves that.

And so, as my body gets hotter, and damper, from the close contact with hers, I wipe her tears gently as they fall, and I just hold her, and I whisper to her that I’ll always be there for her, no matter what, and that I love her to bits, and when she’s calmed down enough I encourage her to lie down and I slip back downstairs to see what’s happening.