The Perfect Girl (15 page)

Zoe did not plead Guilty. Against her father’s wishes, and guided by her mother, she pleaded Not Guilty and went for the Special Reasons defence instead. It was an unusual defence – I had repeatedly warned the whole family of that – but, at first, it seemed that we might be successful.

Zoe went into the stand and presented herself fairly well when speaking about the events that had taken place that night. She showed that she had terrible regrets, and she admitted her guilt by accepting that she had been the driver, but assured the judge that she wasn’t knowingly drunk. She agreed that she’d had a drink when she arrived at the party, a spritzer, but insisted that she’d asked only for Coca-Cola after that, and repeated her conviction that her drink must have therefore have been spiked.

It wasn’t until Eva Bell, Jack Bell’s twin sister, and a witness for the Crown, took the stand that any chance of success we might have had was ruined.

The Crown called Eva Bell to give evidence that Zoe knowingly drank an excessive amount of alcohol, and Eva couldn’t have been a more successful witness.

There were a minimum of people in the courtroom, because of Zoe’s age, and we’d been there for a week already hearing testimony from experts about the site of the accident, the condition of the car and blood alcohol levels, so some of the tension had left the proceedings to be replaced by boredom. The walls of the courtroom were clad in wooden strips and there was no natural light so it felt a bit as though we’d all been buried underground for a week. Zoe had agreed to her mother attending but didn’t want her father to be there, because she was embarrassed that she’d ignored his preference for an early Guilty plea. If she’d done that, there would have been no trial.

Eva Bell arrived with her own mother. They were ushered into the court from a separate waiting area to Zoe and her mother, a service the court provided to minimise ugly scenes. They sat alone on a bench across the aisle from the prosecutor.

In contrast to how Zoe had described her, which was as some kind of tormentor, Eva Bell presented as demure, intelligent and, most of all, incredibly sad. Her mother sobbed audibly as she gave evidence, and Eva did not once look at Zoe.

It didn’t help us that the prosecutor was a woman who you’d like to make godmother to your children. She led Eva down a gentle path of questioning that was devastating to us.

‘Were you with your brother Jack when he got a drink for Zoe?’

‘Yes, I was.’

‘In your view did Jack add anything to the drink that was alcoholic?’

‘I poured the drink myself, so I know he didn’t.’

‘Did you pour the drink from a bottle?’

‘Yes, but I had to open it.’

‘So you don’t think the drink was spiked?’

‘No. I saw him carry it to the room they were in. If he spiked it, he would have had to do it in front of her.’

I saw the panic on Zoe’s face during this testimony and I willed her to stay calm, because of course the story that she’d told the court directly contradicted this.

‘And did you see Zoe taking a drink earlier in the evening?’

‘Yes.’

‘And what did she drink?’

A tiny stumble in Eva’s composure here, but it could easily be read as grief by the judge.

‘She drank,’ Eva said, ‘vodka and coke.’

‘Did you make that for her?’

‘No. She made it herself. And she was generous with the vodka.’

‘And did you see her refill her glass?’

She pursed her lips, before replying, ‘Yes, yes I did,’ and Maria’s gasp was audible throughout the entire courtroom.

And the prosecution hadn’t finished there. Another girl, a friend of Eva and Amelia, testified to the same thing and there was nothing we could do to contradict it. It was their word against Zoe’s, and they were in the majority.

As I drive away from Chris and Maria’s house, I feel absolutely wrung out. It’s eleven o’clock at night and I need my bed. I send a text to Sam, who I hope isn’t waiting up for me, to say that I won’t be coming round because I need to go home and sleep. We didn’t have any sort of definite arrangement, but he knew I went to the concert alone, and that I might have an opportunity to visit him afterwards, so I feel I owe him the courtesy of letting him know at least.

I always feel guilty when I see Sam, and that’s never easy, but I don’t seem to be able to stop myself going back to him, because, although I love Richard, I’m tired of his joyless existence.

We’ve tried everything to lift Richard’s spirits: a chemical cosh, a course of therapy, a holiday, hobbies, a different diet, exercise, and more. And we’ve tried all kinds of different combinations of the above, but, in the end, none of them have worked.

Richard’s black dog is his constant companion, and he leavens the intensity of their relationship with alcohol. If I have a role in his life any more, it’s to make sure that while he’s in the teeth of the dog, the rest of his life doesn’t disappear. I do this because I hope that his depression will lift one day. If it never does, I’ve made a very bad call. His addiction will have got the better of me. It’s ironic, really, as it’s my life’s work to cure and to rehabilitate.

It means that I dread going home. I dread it every day. I dread the monotony of his despair and the way that he can leach the colours from everything. I dread his inability to enjoy even a hot cup of tea or the smell of a freshly plucked mint leaf. I sympathise with his feelings, because I understand depression, or at least I think I do, but I dread it too, with every cell of my body.

It was why I was extremely happy for Maria when she met Chris. She was in the teeth of the black dog too up until then, put there by Zoe and by the shock of the loss of their world on the farm in Devon. You don’t think of farming families imploding, or I never did. There’s something about the continuity of their way of life that makes it seem, from the outside, more stable than the choices the rest of us have made. But clearly, I was wrong. So when Maria met Chris, and things between them developed, I was glad for her, and I was glad for Zoe; in fact, I was unbelievably relieved.

Richard hasn’t found that thing which will allow a slice of light to pierce the darkness in his head yet, and if I’m honest I’m not sure why the darkness ever fell so completely. He had disappointment at work, for sure. He was passed over for a prestigious appointment, which should have been his, because he was never good at playing the politics in his department, but others have survived that kind of thing without succumbing to such a complete breakdown.

I sometimes wonder whether our childlessness has deprived him of what might have been a source of happiness. Would the Richard who worked so enthusiastically in his department, who loved to travel, who decorated our house, and so carefully planted up our garden in the early years, and dreamed of blooms and sunshine in the summer, have been saved by becoming a father? Would that have made the difference? Or would I have spent my time explaining to our confused offspring why Daddy wasn’t getting out of bed today, or hadn’t smiled even though it was Christmas.

I’ll never know; it’s just something I wonder about when I’m looking for reasons. Alone, I’m not enough to anchor Richard in the present, and so of course I wonder if a family would have been.

So many ‘what if’s. It’s something that must roll around Zoe’s head too. What if I hadn’t got in the car that night? What if I hadn’t gone to the party? When Zoe was in the legal process, surrounded by lawyers and court papers, and police reports, the thing that got to me was how her case bowed every head. Sam would talk about that too. How the police handled her with kid gloves, how everybody around her was sunk by the misfortune of her situation.

Maria would have felt the ‘what if’ factor then too. What if I hadn’t tried to save face? What if I’d let her plead guilty in the first instance? What if…

I park in the driveway of my house and, when I let myself in, I find that it’s completely quiet, though a light glows from the landing upstairs.

Richard is in our bed, on his back. He’s asleep and his snoring is loud and persistent. The bedroom is clear of bottles, but I find one stuffed into the poky dark area at the bottom of his cupboard. The neck of the bottle is still damp and smells of fresh wine. My heart sinks because it probably means he stashed it there before passing out on the bed, and that probably means that his bladder is full but he’ll be too drunk to feel it. I sigh because it means I’m going to have to wake him.

I spend a good ten minutes shaking him into a state resembling consciousness so that I can persuade him to pee. He manages it, unsteadily, lurching along the landing like the drunk he is, words slurring and sliding out of his mouth, as clumsy as his physical movements. When he’s done, he passes out on the bed again, exactly the same as before, and I’m left with aching arms and a pounding heart from supporting him down the corridor, from talking him through what he’s got to do, and from dodging the amorous advances that he always makes when he’s this far gone, but which we both know won’t amount to anything once he’s horizontal again.

Down in the kitchen I clear up the mess he’s made heating and eating the lasagne and I lock the back door, which he’s left wide open to the stifling night air.

Then I sit at the kitchen table, now scrubbed as clean as my surgery at work, and think about the conversation that he and I will have in the morning, an old conversation, where we both know our lines off by heart. It’s a conversation about going to rehab, and how I want him to, and how he doesn’t feel it’s necessary because he feels he can get better on his own, and when I think of that, and of Tom Barlow, and all the things Maria will be having to explain to Chris tonight, weariness and loneliness saturate me and make me cry, just for a moment or two. And suddenly I crave company, not sleep, so I do what I shouldn’t: I try to phone Sam.

A short time after Tessa has gone, Lucas comes into the sitting room where I’m lying with my phone watching his PDF fail to download quickly. He tells me that we’re all going to talk in Chris’s study. He’s changed his clothes and his hair is wet.

I start to say to him,
How do you know about me?
, but he puts a finger to his lips.

He holds out a hand to pull me up and I get a frisson of electricity when I touch it. I wonder if this means he’s my friend now, or my boyfriend, or neither, but I don’t dare ask him and now isn’t the moment anyway.

When I was in the Unit I made friends with people who I can’t tell my mum about; actually, I can’t tell anybody in the Second Chance Family. In the Unit, I sometimes felt like it was easier to make friends than at school. You have crime in common, after all, and I know that sounds stupid, and it doesn’t make things easy always, but it does ‘level the playing field’, as Jason the Key Worker used to say.

My friends in the Unit were Connor (breaking and entering, repeatedly) and Ellie (common assault, three strikes and you’re out). They were what Jason called ‘Revolving Door Cases’.

‘You’re categorically
not
a Revolving Door Case, Zoe,’ he said. ‘Cat-e-gor-i-cal-ly not.’ He pronounced each syllable separately to make his point. Jason didn’t have much apart from verbal tricks to make his points. And laser eye contact. No PowerPoint presentations for him. Just me and him, in a room with a barred window to the outside, and a reinforced sheet of glass in the door, and a table and two chairs, which were bolted to the floor.

I would be wearing my lovely Unit attire of green tracksuit bottoms and top and Jason would be in jeans and a T-shirt. Unless it was winter, when a little line of snow rimmed even the barbed wire coils outside, until a sharp wind dispatched it into soft whorls, and then blew it into every crack and crevice in the building. Then Jason might wear a short-sleeved jumper over his T-shirt which, if I’m honest, made him look like a sad nineties pop star having a quiet night in.

‘Put the f*****g heating on,’ shouted Ellie from her cell, all night for the first night when it was got cold. ‘Turn up the f*****g heat you f*****g c***s I’m freezing my f*****g tits off in here.’ Her language was so bad it fully made me blush.

She banged her door too that night, an ear-splitting rhythmic pounding with a metallic edge that made me press my hands down hard on to my ears. You could make a good racket if you banged the door with a tin cup. The next day we got extra blankets, which had ‘HMP Dartmoor’ printed on them and were thin and grey and made me wonder who had slept under them before, and whether they were Revolving Door Cases who’d revolved all the way into an adult centre. You only have to be eighteen to go into an adult prison.

The reason I wasn’t a Revolving Door Case, according to Jason, was because of my family, which meant that I had a chance when I got out. My mum, he said, was determined to make a fresh start for me, determined to help me. I also had a talent, he said, with my music, my mum had told him all about it, and they had agreed that they couldn’t think of any better way to rehabilitate me. Revolving Door Cases had no chance. They would go back into lives of abuse, and deprivation and neglect, and they would be reoffending and back in court before they knew it, their families watching dully, looking drowned by the inevitability of it all, if they bothered to turn up at all.

Lucas’s PDF still hasn’t downloaded by the time we all troop into Chris’s study. It’s on sixty-five per cent with five minutes remaining. I’m thinking that because Chris’s study is where our WiFi hub is, that it might download a bit quicker once we’re in there, but I forget all about that as soon as we get into the room.

It’s not a room I normally go into. It’s Chris’s sanctuary; it’s where he talks to Lucas when they need to ‘chat’. Lucas never looks happy when he’s going in there. My mum goes in there sometimes, but usually only when she’s bearing a gift of some sort for Chris: a cup of tea, or coffee, or a Tom Collins if it’s after six o’clock. I’ve been in once or twice and when I do I usually look at the frame that’s on the wall behind Chris’s desk. It’s a black frame, about 12 inches square, and in the middle of it, mounted on a black background, is a single computer chip. Chris invented it and it’s the reason he’s minted. Chris was like Midas when he made that chip; it made everything turn to gold.

Not that you’d think that from the look of his study, because it’s really plain. My mum always wants to decorate it, and sometimes she brings swatches of things home: new fabrics for Chris’s sofa, or for curtains, but he always refuses. The sofa he keeps in there is one that he had in his office at work when he invented the chip back in the day. He says he’s ‘not a sentimental man’ but he ‘can’t let go of that sofa’. It’s a lucky sofa for him.

I get that, because I have a lucky hair ribbon that I wore at my first piano competition. I don’t wear it any more because my image has moved on, but I always have a little feel of it before a competition, or a concert. I touched it before the concert tonight, not that that helped me much. The ribbon is black, and velvety, it looks like nothing much and the ends are a little frayed now, but the feeling of it is a lucky thing for me.

Beside the rank sofa, Chris has two club chairs, which my mum did persuade him to buy, because she said he ought to be able to have meetings in the home office without it looking like an Ikea showroom. Opposite the rank sofa, against the wall of the room, Chris has a big long desk, which is surrounded by bookshelves where there are tons and tons of books about computer coding and stuff like that, including three books that he has written.

Chris is very, very clever, my mum told me when she came home after her first date with him, and a basic knowledge of genetics will tell you that that is probably why Lucas is too. Lucas once told me that his mum was clever too but she never got a chance to show it before she died, but I couldn’t really have that conversation with him because it made me think too much of Gull.

‘A student with exceptional potential,’ the prosecution said about her in their summing up, ‘a bloom cut down before it could flower,’ which I thought was a bit much, but that was definitely something I was not allowed to point out, though I think if Gull had heard it she would have snorted, definitely. She always snorted like a pony on a cold morning when she heard something blousy like that.

I sit first, on the sofa. The cushions tilt backwards so I have to perch on the very edge of them if I want to preserve any kind of what my mum would call ‘suitable decorum’. I’m careful to cross my legs at my ankles, not my knees, and I tug down the skirt of my dress so that it’s covering as much of me as possible. Unfortunately, that does make the top of my dress ride down a bit so I have to wriggle a little to cover myself up as best as I can, and I can tell that Chris’s eyes are on me under a frowning brow.

Lucas sits on one of the club chairs and, as he settles into it, I see a resemblance to Chris that I don’t always notice. Lucas’s looks mostly favour his mum, that’s obvious. There are no photographs of her anywhere in our house apart from Lucas’s room, but I’ve been in there and I could see how much they look like each other.

Chris is holding Grace’s intercom and, as he puts it down on his desk, he jogs the mouse of his computer and the huge screen comes to life. On it, frozen in super-high definition, is an image of Lucas and me, sitting at the piano, in the church. Lucas is looking towards the camera and I’m playing, bent over the piano, one of my hands poised over the next note, the tips of my hair brushing the keys.

In the foreground is Tom Barlow, or rather the back of him, and it’s him that Lucas is looking at.

It’s the moment it all started to happen and, as my mum comes into the room, she gasps at the sight of it.