The Perfect Girl (17 page)
Authors: Gilly Macmillan
Outside, the surface of the pool has gone crazy rough with the rain that’s coming down. Under the table there’s a fox gulping down bruschetta that he must have pulled off the table. He runs away when he sees me. First thing I do is pull the big doors to the kitchen closed because the rain has come into the room and run all over the stone floor and it’s slippery as hell. I grab as much as I can from the table and bring it inside, tripping through the rain and getting soaked.
Lucas is standing in the doorway to the kitchen when I turn to make a second run into the house, and now the rain’s falling hard enough that it pings off the plates and back up into my face. I’m not unaware that this could be a romantic moment, that it could be the point where the soaking wet heroine is caught and embraced by the hero. But that doesn’t happen.
‘We mustn’t leave them alone,’ Lucas says.
‘Can you help me?’
‘Come back in.’
‘I said I would clear up.’
I want to do just this one thing right tonight. I’m going to make the kitchen sparkle for my mum, and then, I’ve already thought of it, I’m going to go and lie with Grace again so that Mum isn’t disturbed in the night.
‘Why aren’t you listening to me?’
‘Because you looked deranged,’ I say, though that’s not precisely true.
I put the plates down by the sink, and I’m hoping Lucas might help me but he just stands there.
‘How did you know? About me?’ I ask.
‘I played piano at a competition in Truro once,’ he said. ‘You were there. You beat me. I remembered you.’ A crooked smile.
‘When?’ I try to remember because there’s a competition in Truro that I entered most years throughout my childhood, but I have no memory of Lucas.
‘It was years ago. You beat me so I remembered your name and I thought I recognised you. I got the rest off the internet.’
‘But my name wasn’t allowed to be reported.’
‘You can piece it together if you look hard enough.’
It makes sense that he remembers me from piano. Except for the children we saw year after year at competitions, I only ever remember the kids who beat me, which is probably why he recalls me, but not the other way around.
‘But Chris?’ I ask.
‘I was just with my mum at the time. We were spending a week on holiday, and it was bad weather so we entered the competition on a whim, for extra performance practice.’
‘Oh.’ I let that hang there because I don’t know what to say because Lucas never talks about his mum. Then I think of something.
‘How did you know about
panop
?’ I ask.
‘I saw you had it on your phone. It wasn’t difficult to find your account.’
He must have had a look on my phone one day. I’m always leaving it on the piano by mistake, where it’s hard to spot against the black shiny wood. He could easily have seen me put in my passcode too.
‘It’s what they used to send me messages on,’ I tell him. ‘The people at my old school. They bullied me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I only wanted to get your attention. I thought if you knew I’d kept your secret you’d believe in me.’
‘Did you read the old messages that people sent me?’
‘No. I couldn’t do that.’
I’m grateful for that.
‘Believe in you about what?’ I ask, because that was a strange thing to say.
‘The script.’
‘You didn’t need to do that. I would have read the script anyway.’
I feel like he’s being really weird and kind of selfish about the script with everything else that’s happening.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says, but he sounds a bit impatient when he says it and that annoys me too because the messages he sent really scared me. ‘Come in. Let’s go upstairs.’ He catches my arm, and I try to shake his hand off but his grip is quite tight.
‘You go. I’ll come when I’ve finished.’
‘Zoe!’
‘What? I want to do this for my mum!’
He looks like he wants to reply to that, but what he wants to say is too difficult, so instead he drops my arm, although his fingers have pressed into it by now, and it hurts.
‘Fine,’ he says, and he goes upstairs.
By the time I’ve finished clearing up, all is quiet and the lights are off everywhere in the house. As I pass Chris’s study I can see the steady green light of Grace’s intercom, and I realise that they’ve forgotten to take it up with them, which means there’s all the more reason for me to sleep with Grace.
Upstairs, the lights are also off in all the bedrooms and in the hall and landing, and I hear nothing. If the butterfly is still there, it’s gone quiet. Only the rain is loud, still hissing and spattering on the glass skylight at the top of the stairwell.
Downstairs, I’ve laid out all the breakfast things and made everything perfect. I’ve put my mum’s favourite cup out and a tea bag of Earl Grey tea neatly beside it with a spoon. I’ve put a mug for Chris beside it with a tea bag of English Breakfast, because that’s what he likes.
In my bedroom I change out of my wet dress and put on a T-shirt and pyjama shorts. I dry my hair with a towel. I take my iPod from my bedside table. One rule in this house is that Lucas and I must listen to recordings of the repertoire that we’re playing before we sleep. It helps us to remember the pieces, imprints the detail of them on our minds.
I creep into Grace’s room. She’s lying in her cot, on her back, head to one side. Her little fists are loosely clenched. She’s got one of them in her mouth, and the other is just touching the mad soft hair on the back of her head. It’s how she always sleeps. She’s very quiet and I know I shouldn’t but I pick her up and bring her into the bed with me. I place her between me and wall, so she won’t fall out. She doesn’t stir at all and I inhale the smell of her.
Carefully, I put my headphones in, and start the music playing on my iPod. Chopin. A nocturne.
As the music swells, I think about my baby sister beside me and think that if there’s one way that I can pay back the world for what I’ve done, it’s to take care of her as much as I can, to make sure that she doesn’t make the mistakes that I did, to help her not to hurt people. It’s a vow that I made when I first met her in the hospital, and it’s a vow I repeat to myself all the time.
I settle down and cover myself in just a sheet because it’s still really warm in her room, and right before I fall heavily asleep, with the Chopin relaxing me through my headphones, I notice on the clock beside the bed that it’s a few minutes after midnight, which means it’s Monday now, not Sunday any more, and I hope that Monday might be better.
Sam and I watch a Hitchcock film and I relax. I curl up into him once we go to bed. After the events of the evening I feel as if I’m finally in a safe place, a place where I don’t need to be a carer, or a supporter, or anything to anybody else. I can just be me.
As Sam’s breathing settles into the rhythms of sleep, I lie awake a little longer and think about the evening and about how I’m glad I’m away from Maria’s house because it’s not my life after all, it’s Maria’s, and she is, after all, an adult who’s made her own decisions.
I haven’t mentioned what happened earlier to Sam because I didn’t want to sully our time together. I wanted the few hours we spent in each other’s company tonight to be simple and lovely, and unmarred by the imperfections that have spread like stains across other areas of my life.
But even with the warmth of his body beside mine, and the cocoon of his company sheltering me from reality for a while, I shed a tear or two before I sleep; just one or two.
I’m hardly asleep when I’m awake again and I hear screaming and for a moment, in my confusion, I think it’s me.
But it’s not.
The sound is coming from the front of the house and it’s high-pitched, and frightening.
There’s shouting too, and then commotion in the house. Feet pounding.
With Grace in my arms, I run on to a deserted landing, where all the bedroom doors are open and the lights are on, and down the stairs. The front door’s wide open too, and I go out and then run-walk across the gravel, feeling the slippery sharp stones digging into the soles of my feet. Katya and Barney Scott stand beside the wooden shed that houses our rubbish bins and they’re both drenched with rain, sopping with it, their clothes sticking to them like cling film.
They’re looking at the door of the shed, where I can see that Chris is standing in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and has his hand over his mouth.
‘Call an ambulance,’ he shouts. He turns to Katya and Barney. ‘Give me your phone,’ he says to them. ‘We need to call an ambulance.’
Grace begins to grizzle in my arms because it’s dark and wet and there’s shouting and she doesn’t know why she’s awake. She uses her fists to try to brush away rain that’s getting into her eyes but grinds it in instead.
‘Keep the baby away,’ Chris says to me, but he’s fumbling with Barney’s phone so he can’t stop me when I walk past him and look into the shed.
On the floor of the shed, lying as motionless as the grave mounds at the church, blood soaking the side of her pale angel hair, is my mother. Her eyes are open wide and they stare at nothing at all.
I am still on my knees beside her when the emergency services arrive. They’ve taken Grace from me long ago, but they couldn’t move me from my mother’s side. I have sunk my face on to her neck, her chest; I have taken in the living smell of her for the last time. I have stroked the soft, soft skin on her temple, just like she did to Grace and me. I have whispered things into her ear that I want to tell her. And while I did all that her eyes still didn’t move.
When one of the paramedics leads me out of the shed, and away from my mum’s body, I see Chris, and Barney, and Lucas standing there. Katya is in the doorway of the house, holding Grace.
I see an ambulance in the driveway, its back doors wide open, and I see a police car whose lights are slowly flashing. I see that the rain has eased so the droplets of water look like nothing more than fine dust motes in the air, swirling and shimmering, lit up blue against the black night.
I try to run back to my mother’s body, to be with her a while longer, because I’m not ready to let her go, but they don’t let me do that.
I sit in a circle with the others in the sitting room of our Second Chance House and I feel as if I would break if somebody touched me. I feel as if my skin and hair are brittle, as if my teeth will never unclench.
There are some pieces of music I’ve played which got under my skin and made me feel this way, but that feeling went away after I lifted my fingers from the piano keys.
This feeling doesn’t. It sticks, and it reminds me of before.
‘Grief blooms,’ Jason said to me at the Unit in therapy sessions, when they were trying to make sure that I wouldn’t have Unresolved Grief over the three deaths I caused. And he was right, because the pain of losing Gull and the others did unfold like a new bud at first, and it took for ever before it began to wither.
I have names for all those feelings because Jason told them to me. Adults like to put a name on everything you feel, as if a name can neutralise it. They’re wrong though. Some things settle under your skin and don’t ever go away, no matter what you call them.
Today, what I’m feeling is even bigger than before. After my mum’s death, the grief doesn’t just bloom, it bursts out. It creates a mushroom cloud, instantly. It fills the sky that night and envelops us all; it’s towering and toxic. It’s off the Richter scale.
I feel it.
Chris feels it.
Lucas feels it.
Grace does not. Because she doesn’t understand what’s happened. She carries on being a baby and we all watch her, passing her from arms to arms, not able to explain to her.
We all sit in the sitting room of our house together like in an Agatha Christie novel.
We are four teenagers, one baby and Chris.
And a police officer sits with us, and stares at the floor, but she’s listening to everything we say. I know for sure that police officers always listen.
I want Tessa, and they want to contact her too, to tell her, to get her to come and be with us, but nobody can find her. She’s not answering her mobile and her landline rings and rings over and over again, and Uncle Richard doesn’t even pick up.
Outside, the drizzle has stopped and so have the flashing blue lights, though the police cars are still there, and we see them as the sun rises up in a hazy, too-bright dawn, which also coaxes our faces from the shadows and shows them sagged and doughy as if we’ve all been slapped senseless with the shock.
Yellow tape is stretched out across the entrance to our driveway and around the shed where my mum’s body still lies.
At first, one of the policemen asks us if it could have been an accident, whether my mum had been drinking.
‘I don’t know,’ says Chris. ‘I just don’t know. She’d had a bit of wine, but we’d all gone to bed. We were all asleep.’
Chris is upset and flustered, but he’s the first to accuse somebody else.
‘It was that man,’ he says. ‘Tom Barlow. You need to go and find a man called Thomas Barlow.’
The police officer encourages Chris to sit back down, tells him that he’ll pass the information on, and that Chris will be interviewed in due course, but for now, if it’s OK, they’d prefer it if we all stayed where we were.
Lucas begins to sob, and the sound of it is painful and loud. It makes Grace crawl over to him and put her hand on his leg and pull herself up, and he reaches down to stroke her small fingers and sobs some more. She watches his face with an open mouth until it makes her cry too, and then she thumps back on to her bottom on the floor and is full of despair of her own.
Barney Scott’s dad arrives and stands in the doorway and says, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and takes Barney away after a talk with the police.
Everybody is talking. I remember it from before. Always the talking, and the building of cages with words.
Katya is tear-streaked and squashed out of her arrogant shape and she sits by me and looks like she might want to hug me like you see on TV reports where women cling and wail, but I feel nothing for her and I’m used to feeling things on my own so I edge away to make sure that she doesn’t touch me at all.
Later, when dawn has just become proper morning, they ask us if we mind being moved to the police station. They say that the house has become a ‘scene’, and I’m straight away transported back to court where they kept repeating ‘scene of the accident’ over and over again. I look around instinctively to see if Mum has had the same thought and then I remember: she’s gone.
The police come upstairs with each of us in turn to pack what they fully pedantically specify as ‘a small overnight bag’. We all do except Grace who ends up with a bag busting with stuff, which I pack myself because I don’t want Katya to do it.
Standing on the gravel, waiting to leave, feeling the heat start to push back into the day as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, as if there had been no blue dust rain, and no broken body, I concentrate on the feel of the sharp stones pushing at the soles of my Converse, to try to keep myself solid. But even doing that I can’t help myself glancing at the shed, and wondering if my mum is still in there, because the ambulance has gone. A policeman stands in front of the shed door and looks at his phone, and when I ask the question out loud, somebody else tells me that mum’s going to be moved very soon.
‘Doesn’t she need the ambulance?’ I ask, but nobody answers.
They use two cars to drive all of us away from the house but not before Chris has got angry when he tried to get Grace’s car seat out of Mum’s car and it got stuck. Normally, Mum moves the car seat. After he finally yanked it free, Chris cursed and threw the car seat on to the gravel and stones kicked up and hit the side of the police car, but nobody mentioned that. Instead, I picked up the seat, and put it in the car, and so now I’m holding Grace’s fingers tightly as we ride together in the back seat and Katya sits on the other side of me with the bag of Grace’s stuff on her knees.
In the car, the police driver tells me that they’ve finally managed to get in touch with Uncle Richard, Tessa’s husband, and he’ll meet us at the police station.
As we drive away from the house another policeman lifts the tape at the end of our road and somebody standing on the pavement with their dog stares at us, and my stomach is carved out with the feeling that the only thing I want is Mum, and my head is collapsing round an imploding feeling that my life is shattering again, and I begin to cry. Katya doesn’t see because she’s looking out of the other window with a face like an Easter Island statue and Grace is fully occupied playing with a piece of gravel which she must have picked up when we were at our house.
And, on top of everything, and through my tears, I feel guilty about that because I think Mum would have noticed it long before Grace might have had a chance to put the stone in her mouth, and I quickly take it away from her before she does.
And alongside that thought, which my mixed-up head is giving space to, my fear is beginning to unfold as quickly as my grief did.
Two questions are pushing to the front of my mind and they’re frightening me to the point where I start to shake.
One: what if my mum’s death was revenge for what I did and they’re going to come after me too?
Two: what if the police think I did it?
I’m a convicted killer, after all.