The Perfect Girl (23 page)

I am fully freaking out by the time I’ve read this bit of the script. I feel sick to my core. I want to read on, I’m desperate to, because I can see that there’s another section, but I’m suddenly aware that the Family Liaison Officer is peering around the door.

‘Zoe, are you OK to come downstairs to be with the others?’ she says, but then she sees that I’m on the computer, and she moves across the room in a solid sort of way that reminds me of a Henry Hoover: round, and squat and sort of gliding, and with a fixed expression on her face.

The next thing she says is in an
I’m-handling-you
tone of voice. It’s the voice they use at the Unit before they get shouty.

In the Unit there was a progression of voices, and it went like this: first,
I’m-handling-you-calmly
voice, then
don’t-mess-with-me
voice, then
I’m-warning-you
voice, then
shouty
voice, and by then the key workers would have gathered in numbers and they’d go in with the restraint holds, the ones where kids who don’t have enough sense or have too much panic end up getting throttled just because they’ve kicked off.

It happened to one of the boys just before I arrived there. Everybody kept talking about it in my first few weeks.

The Family Liaison Officer’s
I’m-handling-you
voice is quite a good one, but it doesn’t manage to lose that holier-than-thou tone that people have when they think that they’re more sane than you.

I can’t deny that I’m online because she’s probably not stupid, but I have managed to click off the windows my mum’s email and the script were on, and even do a quick browsing history delete before she gets close enough to bother getting her reading glasses out of a top pocket and peer at the screen. I’m quick, you see, at covering my tracks. There are so many rules in the Second Chance House that you have to be.

‘What were you looking at, dear?’ she says.

‘Just YouTube.’

We’re having a different conversation with our eyes to the words that we’re speaking. Underneath a disapproving forehead that’s collapsed into wrinkle lines above her nose, hers are saying,
What the hell were you looking at?
and mine are saying,
There would have to be a planetary collision before I tell you that.

‘Anything special on YouTube?’

‘I was looking for a recording of a special piece of music.’

‘You don’t need to stop it because I’m here.’

‘It’s a piece my mum loved. I don’t really want to share it today, if you don’t mind.’

In spite of, or maybe because of, all the lectures about not crying in public, since I was little I have been able to turn tears off, but also on, and on this day it’s even easier than usual because they’re lurking anyway, in a real way.

I snivel my way out of this one and she escorts me downstairs, saying, ‘Oh, pet, it’s not easy this, is it?’ although I know she’s not dumb and I think this is a definite attempt to get me to ‘open up’ but there’s more of a chance of me becoming Henry VIII’s seventh wife before I do that.

My interview seems interminable, the only respite when we notice Zoe laying into her dad in the garden and one of the detectives asks the Family Liaison Officer to intervene, but it moves on relentlessly after that.

They question me at length about any relationships Maria might have had outside the home and I feel hotter and more tired with every question. When one of the detectives’ phones begins to buzz I feel like it wakes me up a bit, before he silences it.

But then his partner’s phone starts to buzz too. They exchange a glance and his partner says, ‘Excuse me, please,’ and slips out into the hallway, answering with a curt statement of his name before the door has shut behind him.

He leaves a newly created sense of tension, or perhaps it’s expectation, behind him like a wake. The man interviewing me glances at the door once or twice before resuming his questioning.

‘Did you know who your sister socialised with outside the home?’

I open my mouth to reply, but actually I realise that I have no idea, because Maria never mentioned friends. After Grace was born, I asked her if she was going to join any mother and baby groups but she told me in no uncertain terms that she’d done all that with Zoe in Devon and had moved on. ‘I’m in a different place now,’ she’d said, and I’d thought how that was true in many ways, but of course I didn’t articulate that because her well-being was so precarious at that time.

‘I think she might have belonged to a tennis club,’ is the best I can manage. ‘Maria sometimes played on a ladder there. It was in Clifton, I think, the club in Clifton.’

But even as I say it I’m not really sure, though I think I recall seeing Maria in tennis whites one day. ‘Chris or Katya, the au pair, will have a better idea than I do about what she did day to day,’ I say, to cover up my embarrassment at knowing so little about my sister’s life. There was a time when I knew everything about her, because we shared a bedroom, clothes, secrets, everything. But that was when we were teenagers.

‘And I think she might have belonged to a book club,’ I say, as another memory comes to me: Maria in her kitchen, dressed in figure-hugging jeans and a silk shirt, heels on, putting cling film over a plate of hors d’oeuvres, issuing instructions to Katya and to Zoe, and telling Lucas that his dad would be back in an hour or so. Me following her down the hallway and saying: ‘Sorry, I was just passing, I didn’t know you were going out.’

‘I’m dreading it,’ she said, as she wedged the plate of food into the back of the car. ‘Do you think that’s going to be OK?’

She didn’t wait for an answer. Maria never liked taking my advice.

As the boot slammed shut, I said, ‘Why are you dreading it?’

‘Because the book we’re supposed to read is really long and
really worthy
, and I couldn’t finish it.’

‘Will they mind?’

‘Yes! They will! And I don’t want to humiliate myself.’

‘Do you have to go?’

‘It’s run by the wife of one of Chris’s colleagues. It’s good if I go.’

‘Oh. Have you read a synopsis?’

‘I’m not as stupid as I look.’

She winked, and smiled, and I knew she’d be OK that night. It was a typical Maria comment to make, a brief flash of her feisty, much younger self, and the kind of thing she’d probably never have said in front of Chris. For him, she smoothed away all of her insecurities, and appeared fresh and calm and purposeful and content.

‘I’ll phone you,’ she said and I waved her off before clambering back into my own car and wondering what the book was, before remembering with a smile the dog-eared copies of Jackie Collins and Jilly Cooper novels that we’d once shared.

I didn’t report that conversation to the detective, of course, because it was irrelevant, but he told me, with one of those annoying sniffs that jerk the side of people’s mouths up, that Chris had already told him about the book club, and given him names.

Our interview got no further because his colleague returned and beckoned to the detective interviewing me, from the door.

‘Would you mind if we resumed this later?’ he asked me, a veneer of professionalism barely masking an urgent tone.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Of course not.’

I’m relieved they haven’t got around to asking me where I was last night.

Once I’ve left the room, I realise the interview has left me feeling thoroughly jangled; I feel as if I’m starting to question everything I ever thought.

I want to phone Sam and I go to use our landline, which is a useless, old-fashioned thing that’s not even cordless. It lives in our kitchen, but I find Philip sitting in there.

He still has his mobile and I guess the police aren’t bothered about taking it because he wasn’t in Bristol last night. He’s talking on it now, in a low voice. When he sees me, he mutters an apology to whoever he’s speaking to and ends the call.

Philip always did wear all his emotions on his sleeve – I think that was one of things that attracted Maria to him in the first place – and now is no exception.

The emotion he’s displaying now is guilt, and there’s a certain neediness there too, which is typical of him. That quality of extreme emotional availability and the urge to share and talk that made him attractive in his youth hasn’t developed as he’s aged, but rather lingers as a sort of immaturity which I know is about to annoy me beyond measure.

‘I’m not sure what to do tonight,’ he says.

‘None of us are sure what’s happening tonight,’ I say. ‘But if you need somewhere to sleep I’m sure we can muster up a duvet and a few sofa cushions at the very least.’

My irritation levels are swelling because I don’t want to deal with domestic trivia like sleeping arrangements at this moment, and they increase further still when I see from his face that that wasn’t the answer he was hoping for and I suspect he might have had something else in mind.

‘You can’t drive home tonight,’ I say. ‘What about Zoe?’

‘I’m not sure what I can do for her.’

‘You’re not sure what you can do for her?’

‘Well, what can I do for her, Tess? We’re estranged. What comfort can I offer her?’

‘You’re her father!’

My hands are plunged into the hair on either side of my head. I’ve forgotten the advice of every people-handling seminar I’ve ever sat through for work. I am beyond being reasonable or understanding. Philip Guerin’s attitude is absolutely inexplicable to me and if he doesn’t respond properly, right now, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I just don’t know how to be her father! How can you be a father to somebody like Zoe?’

I slap him.

I hit him hard, across the cheek and his head snaps to one side before he steps away from me and stands with his hand to the hurt cheek.

‘You deserve it,’ I say.

‘It’s how I feel.’ There’s a wobble to his voice, the sound of self-righteousness bubbling up and demanding attention, but I am absolutely unrepentant.

I believe that if you are lucky enough to have a child then you should love them, whether or not society labels them as flawed, whether or not you label them as flawed.

‘You have a duty to your daughter,’ I say.

‘I’ve met someone new,’ he tells me. ‘I don’t know if we can have Zoe.’

My heart sinks. Philip, like Maria, has embarked on a Second Chance Life, and he obviously thinks that damaged Zoe constitutes a threat to its success.

‘Are you serious?’

His head bows.

‘Then the least you can do is tell her yourself, but not today, Philip, not today.’

‘All right,’ he says.

‘And I don’t know who you think she’s going to want to be with. Have you even thought about that?’

‘You?’ he asks, and I can hardly believe my ears.

‘Is everything all right?’ Chris speaks from the doorway. He looks from one of us to the other, searching our expressions for clues as to what’s going on. I have no idea how long he’s been standing there, or what he’s heard.

I want to lash out at Philip, to say something that will shame him, to ask him what is wrong with him, to tell him that he must have lost his mind and his daughter is his responsibility, not mine, but what stops me is that Chris is the father of Zoe’s sister.

Whatever happens, Zoe is a child whose future we must consider, and Grace must be a part of that future, because she means the world to Zoe, and even emotionally retarded Philip Guerin would be able to recognise that if he’d seen them together before this day. Relationships with Chris, then, need to be managed. I know it’s what Maria would want.

‘It’s difficult for everybody,’ I say.

I wonder how much Chris knows about Philip. I know that Maria told Chris that they had a spectacularly messy divorce, which is why there isn’t much contact between Zoe and her father. But that was before the concert. Chris might have more thoughts on that particular version of events now.

Chris says, ‘I understand,’ but before we’re forced to continue like this Richard enters the room with the baby.

‘Could I give her to you for a bit, old man,’ he says to Chris, handing her over. ‘Just need to pop to the bathroom.’

I hate that phrase when it comes from Richard. It can mean anything from the truth, that Richard’s bladder is full, to a euphemism for the bottle of something alcoholic being dragged out from the ‘hiding’ place under the bath and slugged back, at top speed, before a redundant flush of the loo tries to disguise the onset of the inevitable fumy breath and strained veins across his face.

Chris takes Grace, who gives him a look of surprise as if to say,
Fancy meeting you
here.

He sits her on the crook of his arm in an easy motion and they look at each other.

‘So like your mother,’ he says. He buries his face into her neck and she responds with a squeal of delight and wraps her arms around his head. Grace is good at hugging. They are intense, baby hugs, but all the better for it.

‘Thank God for you,’ Chris says to his daughter, with tears in his eyes, and I feel a bit of a lurch in my stomach, as I understand that Grace, who has my parents’ blood coursing through her veins, might live a life that’s very separate from our family now, and that thought is, if I’m honest, terrifying.

Will Chris raise her and Lucas together in that big house? And where will Zoe be? Will Philip accept that he needs to raise his daughter, or will she be better off with us, or even with Chris, so she can be near her sister?

‘We have a lot to discuss,’ I say.

‘I know,’ says Chris.

But neither of us can bear to start the conversation just then, and so we move away from each other, to the safety of different rooms. Philip stays sagged in his seat.