The Perfect Girl (14 page)

When I get back downstairs, there’s nobody in the kitchen. On the island, the box of smashed eggs lies untouched, and the mess from it drips silently off the side of the granite down on to the golden stone floor.

I go outside. Lucas and his father are standing at one end of the swimming pool, their faces washed blue and yellow by the lights, and at the other end of it, sitting on the end of the squat diving board, is my sister, the tips of her toes in the water.

Maria’s breakdown after the accident was a slow burn. It began when Zoe was sentenced, and taken to the Unit, which was when Maria stopped having a purpose, and when the adrenalin that had taken her through the trial, and the months leading up to it, crashed. She’d been closely involved in every detail up to then, liaising with Sam, and with the rest of Zoe’s legal team, discussing defence strategies. Adrenalin fuelled her. She lost weight, she more or less lost her husband because they disagreed so strongly, and still she focused only on the case. She continued to be a tiger mother.

But the minute that Zoe was taken down, Maria ceased to cope, because suddenly there was nothing to do. There was just an empty farmhouse, a husband who slept in another room, and a silence that sat with them, twiddling its fingers, looking from one of them to the other, whenever they were in a room together.

‘Philip couldn’t bear it,’ Maria told me. ‘It shamed him. He felt he’d failed her, failed at making a family.’

I think she was right. Philip Guerin had been a doting father, while the going was good, but nothing in his life had prepared him for what Zoe did, and while Maria became a dynamo, he retreated, shut himself down. Perhaps it was because he, like the families whose children died, had been rooted in that community for decades. Perhaps that meant he felt the loss of those three young folk more than Maria did. Perhaps it was because he was weaker than her. Whatever the reason, it was shocking, his inability to cope. He didn’t even protest when Maria moved out, and came to Bristol, to be near me, to make that fresh start with Zoe.

In the dense night air, on the end of the diving board, Maria has pulled her skirt up around her thighs. Her shoes have been discarded and lie poolside, one on its side. Her legs are bare, and thin. Her toenails are painted a deep black-red.

When she sees me, she calls out to me, in a voice that I barely recognise, so strained is it.

‘So,’ she says. ‘I’ve told my husband what happened to Zoe, his stepdaughter. I’ve told him that Zoe has been convicted of a crime, and do you know what, Tess: I think he’s going to dump us.’

Chris turns to me.

‘She’s drunk,’ he says. ‘She’s totally lost her mind. I can’t get any sense out of her.’

I start to walk around the edge of the pool and Maria struggles to her feet. I can’t quite understand how Maria could have got so drunk so quickly, because I reckon I’ve only been out of the house for about forty-five minutes, an hour tops. Though perhaps, as she says, she isn’t.

‘Don’t come near me!’ she shouts. ‘Nobody come near me!’

I almost laugh at that because the diving board is not high and the tone in which she says it makes it sound like a threat, as if she were teetering on the edge of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, hundreds of feet above the Avon Gorge. But I don’t laugh because Maria looks like a broken puppet, and Chris looks desperate, and I don’t want to do anything other than help them to get through this evening, in the hope that once they do, they’ll find that they still have a future together.

‘Maria,’ I say.

She staggers to her feet, skirt tight around her thighs, making her wobble. ‘Don’t come near me!’ she repeats.

So I stop, halfway around the pool. I wonder if in fact Chris is mistaking instability for drunkenness, if the real explanation is that years of ghastliness have just reached their peak, and now threaten to topple her sanity. When she got pregnant with Grace, I did worry about her, that she might not cope with the pressures of starting all over again, but she seemed to sail through that, just as she’d sailed into her new role as Mrs Christopher Kennedy, mother to Zoe, stepmother to Lucas, and now I’m wondering whether that was a plaster, masking wounds that I know run very deep.

Chris says, ‘Maria, come off there, please. Let’s talk; let’s eat. Like you wanted to.’

‘No,’ she says. ‘Because the eggs are broken, so I can’t get the breadcrumbs on the meat.’ She sounds pathetic now. She looks at me. ‘I’m sorry, Tessa,’ she says.

‘It’s fine,’ I say. ‘Of course it is. Don’t be silly.’

Teetering now on the end of the board, Maria has noticed the stain on her shirt and she starts to rub at it, and when that doesn’t work, she begins to unbutton it.

‘For Christ’s sake, Maria!’ Chris’s voice explodes around the pool. ‘What are you doing?’

Lucas turns his head away because before we know it she’s pulled the shirt off and is standing there in just her skirt and bra, a complicated, lacy bit of apparatus which holds her breasts firm and pert. Her body is perfectly taut. I think that her bra probably cost more than my entire outfit.

‘Oh, I’m so sorry!’ she shouts at him. ‘I’m so sorry that I’m not perfect.’

Chris marches around the pool towards her.

‘What are you doing?’ she calls and she’s taunting him. ‘Coming to tell me off? Coming to tell me to behave like a good girl? Coming to tell me I’m useless?’

He pauses at the end of the diving board, unsure what to do.

‘Maria!’ I call. ‘For God’s sake!’

And Maria, in a gesture that’s at once melodramatic and extraordinary, turns around, pinches her nose and lets herself fall back into the pool, and, for a moment or two, we all just watch the splash subside, and see that she’s sunk to the bottom, where she floats for a second or two, eyes shut.

It’s Lucas who gets her out. He jumps in fully clothed and pulls her up to the surface, and they both swim together to the side, where he helps her up the steps, and she’s gasping and coughing, but by the time they’re both out Chris has gone indoors. Turned, and walked away, as if he’s too disgusted to deal with her at all.

I take her sobbing, wet body from Lucas and send him inside to change, partly because he needs dry clothes, but also because I’ve got to strip her out of her sodden skirt and I don’t wish her humiliation to be any worse.

I hold her, just as I held Zoe minutes earlier, and I’m persuading her to try to get out of her wet clothing when Chris reappears. He has a large towel with him, and a change of clothes for her. He holds the towel open and Maria looks at it for a moment before walking slowly towards him and letting him envelop her with it.

He wraps the towel around her and holds her tight in his arms. The water from her soaking skirt still swarms down her legs in rivulets. She’s shivering.

‘Maria,’ he says. ‘My Maria. Come on. Let’s get you in the shower.’

She looks up into his face and nods. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says, ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Let’s talk about it,’ he says. She shuts her eyes and leans against him.

‘I think it’s probably best if you go home now,’ he says to me. ‘We’re all right. We’ll be OK.’

‘Are you sure?’ I say. I want to get Maria’s agreement but she’s huddled into him, shaking, seeking the warmth from his body, because the air around us is beginning to lightly shift and buffet.

‘I’ll look after her,’ he says. ‘Are you OK with that, honey? If Tess goes?’

He puts a finger under Maria’s chin and lifts it gently and she looks up at him and nods. Her smile is hopeful but precarious, threatening to break into pieces like the paper napkin that’s fallen into the pool, and floats there, slowly disintegrating into many different pieces in the softly eddying water.

When I get my phone out, I see that
panop
has notified me again. It says:

And I understand suddenly that it has to be Lucas sending me the messages, because who else could it be? It’s Lucas and he’s known for a long time like he said, and he’s kept that totally secret from me. And in a way that’s a relief because it’s not somebody from back then, but it’s frightening too.

I’m confident enough that I’m right to send a message back:

I want to know how he found out and I want to know what it means to him, because I didn’t get the chance to ask him. I want to know why he kissed me. Was it real? Or did he just want to find out how it feels to kiss a killer. Lots of teenagers get off on that kind of stuff actually, and although I don’t think Lucas is that kind of boy, you can never be really sure about anybody.

I also want to know why he’s using
panop
to contact me, because that’s horribly, awfully freaky, but Lucas is a super tech computer person so I suppose it’s not that surprising that he’s found out about me. I close
panop
, because I’m still curious to have another look at Lucas’s email I open my inbox and I find it, but I can’t read the attachment straight away because for some reason I have to download it again as my phone is always such a fail and needs upgrading.

While I wait I try to control my breathing, which has become fast and shallow. To distract myself, I scroll around my phone, and I see that his email is surrounded by about twenty other unread emails, none of them personal.

The only one that interests me is a Facebook notification, where I can see what Katya is doing. When she first arrived, Katya was really friendly to me, like a cat rubbing up against your legs, and she wanted us to be friends on Facebook; that was before she worked out that I was Social Pond Life and had no proper friends, either online, or in real life. What being her Facebook friend means is that I can see when she changes her profile picture, and in fact she’s just done that. She’s just changed it from the vampy Kardashian pout that she put up last week and now it’s a picture of her and Barney Scott together, all nostrils and foreheads and sunglasses, all teeth and chins and my heart kind of sinks because they look sexy and funny and cool like teenagers are supposed to look.

There are no photos of me online from the trial because the press weren’t allowed to report my name or publish photos of me, which was a saving grace, as my mum said at the time.

The only photos of me online now are from a stupid website that my mum runs to manage my profile. In those photos, I’m always groomed and wearing a concert outfit. I’m never drunk, or stoned, or sexy, or funny or wearing sunglasses. My tongue doesn’t loll out rudely like a pop star. The only prop I have in any of my online photos is a shiny silver trophy, which my mum will soon be snatching from my hands so that she can take it away and get my name engraved on it, for perpetuity, just like my criminal record.

I can hear somebody coming. Chris takes the stairs up from the basement two at a time, passes the sitting room door, and continues up to the first floor. ‘Sshh,’ I want to say, ‘don’t wake the baby,’ but I would never dare. That phrase is in my head because it’s what he and Mum say all the time to me and Lucas, and once somebody has said something one thousand times it’s in your head for ever. I just let my mouth form the words silently instead. He reappears again quite quickly, holding bundles of things, heading back down. He doesn’t look at me, he doesn’t know I’m watching and I wonder what’s happening.

I think it’s best if I stay away from downstairs, though, because I’m messing everything up tonight. So I close the Facebook email and go back to the one from Lucas.

The attachment is downloading so slowly, which is incredibly annoying. I think about the title of it, and it makes my heart start to beat a little faster because now I wonder what ‘What I Know’ is referring to, and if the script is going to be about our life now, after it’s talked about his mum, and if it will tell me how Lucas knows about me. I kind of take a mental deep breath because I’m always wary now of people turning on me and I wonder if Lucas is about to. People can, even if they’ve kissed you, even if they’ve kissed you deeply.

‘It’s complicated that,’ Jason told me once when we were talking about what happened with Jack Bell, ‘because you’d be surprised how easily people can mix up feelings of love and hate. You wouldn’t think they can, but they do, and it’s because they’re both strong and sometimes frightening emotions.’

I had to agree with that, because although I’ve never told anybody about it, I fully remember what happened in the car right before we crashed, right before they died.

We argued. I was driving super slowly, and I mean super slowly because it was icy out and I was still struggling to handle the car. In the rear-view mirror I could see Gull’s head lolling and Jack said, ‘Come on! Let’s go to the lighthouse now – all of us – you can look after her, Ames – you won’t mind, will you?’

‘No,’ I said, ‘I think I need to get Gull home.’

I felt odd then suddenly, queasy and dizzy, and the road ahead seemed to have a life of its own like a ribbon twisting in the wind. I blinked and it steadied. Ahead in the lights I could see frost-tipped hedges and I knew that around the corner, just after the junction to the lighthouse, was the lane where Gull’s parents’ house could be found.

I clasped the wheel carefully, hands at ten to two, and in the back Amy said, ‘For God’s sake, Zoe, you’re driving like such a girl.’

‘She is a girl,’ said Jack. ‘She’s doing fine,’ but then he leaned over to me and whispered in my ear, ‘Though you could probably speed up a little bit.’

He turned on the car stereo and cranked up the volume until it was blasting out: ‘“Highway to Hell”, ACDC,’ he said and he gave me a massive grin, which I just loved. As the music pumped around the car I put my foot down a little. Jack peered into the back seat. ‘Gull’s asleep,’ he said. ‘Come on, let’s just go to the lighthouse.

‘No, no,’ I said. ‘We should take her home. Actually, I don’t feel so good myself.’ In fact I felt disorientated and strange and uncertain, because suddenly the hedges we were driving between somehow didn’t look familiar and I wasn’t sure where I was.

‘Oh relax,’ said Jack. He was thumping the tops of his legs in time to the music. ‘You won’t believe how awesome it is at the lighthouse, honestly, I’m telling you.’

And then Amy said, ‘What are you planning to do with her there anyway, Jack? She’s just a pathetic little slut you know.’

And I heard that loud and clear and I turned around for just a second to say something to her, to tell her that her comment proved that she was the bitch who was sending me the
panop
messages, but as I did Jack said, ‘Zoe! You’re missing the turn,’ and I looked back round at the road to see the turn to the lighthouse but as I did I hit the accelerator by mistake and the car surged forward just as Jack reached out to turn the wheel away from Gull’s house and down the lane which led to the lighthouse, and it was only a millisecond before there were no memories any more because there was only blackness, until I woke up to hear somebody phoning for an ambulance, and then the rest of my life started.

I remember all this like a slow motion film as I’m watching the attachment trying to download, achingly slowly, like death by volcanic ash burial, when Tessa comes upstairs.

‘Hey,’ she says. ‘Mum slipped into the pool. She’s fine, but we’re not going to do dinner because it’s getting a bit late, so I’m off home.’

‘Did she go for a swim?’

‘No, it was more of an accident.’

My mum is clumsy like me but I think that this really takes the biscuit, as Jason would say.

‘Do you have to go?’ I ask.

I don’t want her to go. I really don’t. Aunt Tessa is sort of my best friend these days, and it’s like she can read my mind because she says, ‘Do you want to come and stay the night with me?’

And I do, I really, really so badly do, but I know that Mum might need me here and I don’t want her to be alone if there’s going to be an argument or ‘a talk’, so I say, ‘I’m fine. I’d better stay.’

She hugs me again, warm and lovely, and pats my back while she’s hugging me in the way that she’s always done. I feel a tear slip down my cheek. Just one.

‘I’ll call you in the morning,’ she says. ‘Be strong, Butterfly, you’ve nothing to feel bad about. Nothing. Remember that. You’ve paid for what you did and you have a right to a life.’

I stand behind one of the heavy drapes and watch from the front window as she crunches down the drive. She turns once to look back at the house before she disappears from sight.