The Perfect Girl (28 page)

I lay Grace down, cover her with the sunshade and tilt back her chair. After that it’s just a few turns around the patio and she’s out like a light. She puts her hands up above her head, a fist by each ear, and looks really sweet. Her tummy is bare and the whole of it goes up and down as she breathes.

Lucas and me walk her down to the end of the garden, pushing the buggy carefully over the bumpy bits and we park it in the shade underneath a leafy tree that’s grown tall beside Uncle Richard’s shed.

I beckon to Lucas to follow me into the shed. It feels boiling-point hot inside, and it smells of wood shavings and paint and glue. I shut the door behind us anyway.

There’s a workbench along one side with tools and stuff on it and above that is a shelf where Richard’s models are displayed. Mostly, they’re aeroplanes made out of balsa wood, but there are also Airfix models up there, painted really perfectly, and some complicated-looking Meccano type things with engines and wires. Some of the plane models are hanging from the ceiling on transparent threads and they turn a little after we come in.

Lucas doesn’t look at any of it, instead he sinks down so that he’s sitting on the floor and then looks up at me. ‘What do you want?’ he says. ‘Don’t you hate me?’

I kneel down, right up close to him. We don’t have much time before one of the busybody adults finds us and wants to know what we’re doing.

‘Lucas,’ I say, and I take his hands, one in each of mine and I squeeze them because I want to make him concentrate on me, completely and entirely. ‘This is really, really important.’

‘I’m ready to tell them everything.’ The sobbing begins again. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘No!’ I say. ‘No you mustn’t. Not yet.’

‘I have to,’ he says and his sobs are so choking that I shake his hands to try to make him snap him out of it, but nothing works, so eventually I slap him as hard as I can around his cheek. It really stings my hand, that slap, and it knocks his head from one side to the other.

‘Lucas,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. Stop crying.’

His eyes are bloodshot and there’s still dampness around his lips and under nose. He looks wrecked. His expression has so many things going on in it, but I’m super-focused and I block everything out except for the thing that I want to say to him.

‘Does your dad know what you did?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He says we have to protect each other. We both have to say we were asleep, and we know nothing. Nobody can prove otherwise.’

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘After we went to bed last night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard you come up, and then I was lying in my bed for ages, until I heard them arguing in their bedroom. It sounded like he was bullying her, and I was afraid he was so angry about the lies you both told him that he was going to hurt her, so I got out of bed and I went and opened their door because I wanted to tell him to stop. He had hold of her, but when he saw me he let go, but then he started coming for me, and he was very angry. I stepped back on to the landing to get away from him, but he caught me and he pushed me back against the wall, by the top of the stairs. And your mum… your mum came after him, and she caught him by surprise and managed to pull him off me just for a second. She was standing between him and me, but she turned her back to him, to check that I was OK. Behind her, I could see that he recovered really quickly and he was coming to get her, so I tried to push her right out of his way, on to the ground. But when I pushed her she hit the banister post at the top of the stairs, and she sort of bounced off it, and she fell down the stairs.’

I can see it all in my head; I can see her lying broken on the stairs.

‘There was blood,’ he says. ‘She hit her head when she fell, and there was blood.’

And all this while I lay in my bed sleeping, with Chopin playing on my iPod, and Grace in my arms. That thought almost stops me in my tracks completely, almost robs me of my courage.

‘He made me clean the blood up,’ Lucas says, and he retches at the memory. ‘He made me clean it up while he carried her outside. I didn’t know he was going to put her by the bins. I’m sorry. She deserved so much better than that.’

It takes me a while to find the words to ask my next question because it’s the hardest I’ve ever had to work to keep my emotions under control. But I do it for Mum.

‘Why did you want me to delete the script?’

‘Because Dad said we have to cover up for each other. He didn’t know about the script, but I thought it would make the police suspicious of him and then he might tell them that I did it. But I want to tell them everything because I can’t take it any more.’

I’m so close to Lucas that I examine his face almost forensically, wanting to understand every line and curve of it. I look at every pore, I see the arc of his damp, clotted eyelashes and I recognise that the smell of him is the same one that hung in the air of the Unit sometimes.

It’s the smell of fear.

‘He hurt your mum too.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he kill her?’

‘No.’

‘But she died because of him?’

‘She killed herself because he made her feel useless.’

I know that feeling; it inhabits every cell in my body.

‘But she was dying anyway?’

‘She never fought the disease. She might have fought it if her life wasn’t so shit. She had no reason to want to live. I told you that.’

I put my finger to Lucas’s mouth. ‘Shh,’ I say.

I don’t say, ‘But she had you,’ because sometimes I understand that it’s best to keep things to yourself when they are a hundred per cent guaranteed to hurt others.

His breath smells sour, but it doesn’t gross me out. I realise that I love the way that only I can see into his soul. Lucas has been carrying a secret around with him, just like I have, and that’s a powerful thought. It makes my heart begin to beat a little faster.

I press my cheek against his where the wetness of his tears seals us together, and then I rest my head on his shoulder while he cries, and cries again, like his sadness is never going to end, and all the time my mind is working, and my thoughts are becoming very, very clear.

Then he says, ‘I filmed it on my phone. I filmed him hurting her when I opened the bedroom door, because I was going to show you what he’s like.’

‘Is it still on your phone?’

The police will find it there, surely, if it is.

‘I deleted it at the same time as the script.’

It might take them a little bit longer, but they’ll still find it. The thing is, I want to act quickly.

‘But I uploaded it,’ he adds, ‘before I deleted it. In case I had to prove that I was trying to help her, because Dad was hurting her.’

He describes the film to me and, as he does, my thoughts crystallise. Perfectly.

I take Lucas’s hands in mine, once again, and I take a deep breath.

Then I say to him, ‘I forgive you,’ because those are the words that I’ve always wanted to hear. I give them to him right here and now, because I know, even if he doesn’t yet, that they’re the greatest gift that I can give him, and I just hope that they’re enough.

For, you see, I’ve suddenly understood something even more important than knowing what Lucas did to my mother; I’ve understood that Lucas is my only chance of keeping Grace.

Because otherwise Chris will have her.

And he will hurt her.

I know it in my bones.

The consultant says, ‘I believe you’ve had a conversation with your GP about what to expect today?’

‘I have.’

‘As we suspected there might be, there are lesions visible in your scan. They’re in both the brain, and the spine.’

He swings the computer monitor around towards me, and I see an image of my skull.

‘This shows you a slice of your brain,’ he says, ‘as if we were looking at it from the top of your head down towards your feet,’ and with my pen he points at several different areas on the screen. ‘There are lesions visible there, there, and there’s one more, which you can probably see here.’ He’s pointing out small smudges, which are pale grey and look distinct from the rest of the scan, as if somebody had left several small, dirty fingerprints on the inside of my head.

‘For me,’ he continues, ‘taken in conjunction with the rest of your symptoms, this goes significantly further to suggest a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis, but I would like to do a lumbar puncture to confirm it. Do you know what that is?’

I struggle for a second to find words because my throat has gone dry. ‘Taking fluid from your spine,’ I say.

‘And we do that because we’re looking for things called myelin proteins. If we find them, then your diagnosis will be confirmed. If we don’t, it won’t unfortunately mean that you don’t have the condition, just that there were no proteins in the sample, so we might need to repeat the test. But based on this scan, I think it would be sensible to prepare yourself for an MS diagnosis.’

He starts tapping on his computer again.

‘I think the best thing to do now might be to discuss how we can alleviate the symptoms you’re having. Can you describe them for me?’

An hour and a half later, after a long wait at the hospital pharmacy, I leave the building holding a bag of medication and an appointment card for a lumbar puncture for the following week, as well as the contact details of the hospital’s specialist MS nurse who I’ve just met.

Out on the baking hot streets, I feel affronted by the bright glare of the sun, the way it glints off car bonnets and roofs and the windows of the surrounding buildings.

I’m told the medication should ease the symptoms of numbness and joint pain soon, and I’ll be grateful for that because it makes me feel vulnerable when I’m out, especially in crowded situations, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to hide it from others.

I knew the diagnosis was likely, and, though it’s not confirmed, I don’t think the doctor would be advising me to prepare myself if he wasn’t certain.

Even standing in the shade, I feel overwhelmed by the heat, and by the momentous news I’ve just received. I take my phone out. Tess hasn’t called me back yet.

‘Sorry,’ I say to her even though she can’t hear me, and I turn the ringtone to silent.

I approach one of the taxis that are waiting outside the hospital and ask the driver to take me home. I don’t answer any of his chatty questions and, in the silence that I’ve imposed, I see him glancing in the rear-view mirror, wondering what’s just happened to me.

At home, in the empty flat, I wish more than anything that I had somebody who would come home to me tonight, somebody I could tell, somebody who would be with me through it, to the end.

When your world explodes all the pieces of it shatter and spread, and you don’t see some of them ever again, and nothing is ever like it was before.

I lost the world I had before the accident and my mum helped me to build a new one. Now that world has gone too, and I will never see my mum again, but I don’t want to lose all the other bits.

Before I left the Unit, Jason taught me one last thing. We’d just finished our final session, two days before my release, and I asked him why all of us kids were locked up like animals when what some of us had done was just a mistake, or unavoidable, because we were stupid, or young, or had other excusable reasons for what we did like a witness who lied and a judge who didn’t believe the truth when he heard it.

‘Punishment is considered an effective deterrent,’ Jason replied and he adjusted the neckline of his ‘Bowling for Soup’ T-shirt, which was a gesture he always made when he was feeling awkward.

‘That’s the theory anyway,’ he added. ‘Look, it’s an imperfect system, and we know it is, but that’s why these sessions are important, because they’re when you get a chance to unpick what happened to you and understand the reasons for it, so that we can try to find a way forward.’

‘I told the truth at my trial and they put me in jail anyway,’ I said.

‘Well, as I said, it’s imperfect, but you know kids didn’t even used to get therapeutic sessions at all, so you’re lucky in that sense.’

The clock high up on the wall told both of us that our time was up. As a way to end our last ever session, it felt like a damp squib, because he’d said this stuff to me loads of times before.

It wasn’t the final thing he taught me.

I stayed sitting because I wondered if Jason might be about to say something cheesy and nice as a goodbye, actually I kind of wanted him to, but instead he said it was time to go, and he started to walk me back to my corridor in the Unit as usual.

There were places in the Unit where the surveillance cameras couldn’t see you. Most of us avoided them, because they could be frightening places to be alone in. You learned that very quickly after you arrived.

Jason stopped in one of those places, between two sets of doors, which linked separate areas. I was waiting for him to swipe his security pass and push open the next set of doors so that we could carry on as usual, but instead he paused, and put his hand on my upper arm. There was nobody else around, because it was a time when most people were in lockdown.

‘Zoe,’ he said. ‘You’re leaving in two days, and I think you’ve got every chance of not coming back here, I really do. I’ll personally be very disappointed if you do.’

‘I won’t.’

I said it quickly because I didn’t like the way his fingers were pressing into my arm. I stepped away from him but I couldn’t move far, because the space was so small, and every muscle in my body seized up with fear.

It meant that I was frozen to the spot even when he released his so-tight grip, and he ran his fingers down the side of my arm, over the sleeve of my sweatshirt, and across my cuff until they reached my wrist. They made contact with my skin there, and I held my breath as they burrowed up an inch or two under my sleeve. The pad of his little finger rested lightly on my wrist bone and I wished my bone would dissolve away, because it was a sickening feeling.

‘You’re so beautiful, and so talented,’ he said, and his voice sounded as if his tongue had grown thick. ‘You don’t belong here.’

His hand travelled up from my wrist to my cheek then, and it moved slowly and brushed against the side of my breast on the way there. I forced my head back even further and felt my face quiver when he ran a finger across my cheek.

His breathing was loud and unsteady.

‘I’ll scream,’ I said.

‘My word against yours, Zoe. Who do you think will win?’

There was no reply I could make, because I knew the answer to that. It would be him.

He brought his head towards mine and his lips grazed my neck and then he said, ‘Your life will be like that from now on, and you need to remember it.’

He stepped away from me suddenly then, and swiped the door with his pass and held it open for me to walk through into the bright white lights of the communal area as if nothing had happened. I walked slowly because I felt as though I might stagger, and I hardly registered that Jason was saying hello to Gemma who was on duty, and asking to see his next person, because I was feeling as though I needed to gasp for every breath.

I went to my room and curled up on my bed as tightly as possible. I felt cold, and I was shaking, and the only thing that stopped me from ripping up the sheet and wrapping it around my neck was the thought that I only had two more days in that place before my mum came to get me, and then I would never see Jason again and I would be able to have another life, a Second Chance Life.

I remember pretty much every single thing that Jason told me when I was in the Unit, because I have excellent recall, but it was that final message that he delivered in that camera-less space that lodged itself most deeply in my mind.

I already knew that life was unfair, and that structures society puts in place to protect you don’t always work, but what Jason taught me there and then is that what happened to me had marked me permanently, turned me into somebody who could be pushed and pulled around, like a toy for other people to play with, somebody without a voice, and without the right to a normal life.

Unless.

Unless I’m brave enough to take control.

In the baking heat of my uncle’s shed, a perfect idea has formed in my head: I want to save Grace from Chris, and keep her with me, so I can make her into the girl that Mum wanted her to be able to be.

I look at Lucas and I try to assess whether I can make the idea work. It’ll be a challenge, I know, because he’s like a whipped dog so much of the time, and especially now. The thing I’m thinking of can’t happen without him though, so I desperately need him to be brave as well, and that’s because I need him to lie about what happened.

I whisper it to him, the idea that I’ve had, but, as I feared, when I’ve finished telling him what we need to do he says, ‘I can’t.’

‘You can.’

‘No.’

‘If you tell the truth, they’ll lock you up, Lucas, like they did me. You don’t know what it’s like in there. And then your dad will take Grace, and he’ll hurt her. And I might never see you again. Ever.’

I try to stand as tall as I can. I put my shoulders back and shake my hair down the back of my neck. I stand the way my mum stood when Chris and Lucas got back from the concert. I stand the way she stood every day during my trial, when she was strong. I stand the way I want Grace to stand when she’s older, no matter what’s happening to her.

The problem is that however strong I am, the fear in Lucas’s eyes looks as if it has run deep for a very long time, and I’m sure that it has. I also understand that right now he probably feels the same as I did just after the accident: like a trapped animal, full of panic and pain and shock about what’s just happened, but I have to make him snap out of it, and see as clearly as I do that we need to do this.

‘Do you want Grace to have a life like yours?’ I ask him. ‘Living in fear of your dad?’

He shakes his head, but he says, ‘What you’re asking me to do is wrong.’

‘It’s not wrong if it ends up being right. Think about it.’

I’m starting to feel desperate now, because if he doesn’t agree to do as I ask we’ll lose everything we have left, both of us will. I think of the script and I know he must feel the same kind of anger deep down that I do.

‘Anger can be a release,’ Jason told me once, though he was simultaneously advising me not to display it quite as much as I did then.

In desperation, I snatch one of Richard’s models from the shelf beside us and I hold it out to Lucas and say, ‘Wreck it,’ because it’s the only way I can think to tap into the rageful feelings he must have inside him, and that might be the only way I can make him agree to my plan, right here and now.

‘What? No!’

‘Come on!’ I shove it towards him, but he bats it back roughly, and in that gesture I think I can sense his anger starting to fizz, and I wonder if he has ever once let it out before. It’s enough to convince me that my tactic is a good one.

‘I’ll do it then,’ I say. ‘I’m not afraid to.’

Right in front of his face, I hold the wing of the plane and bend it slowly, the tension in it ratcheting up incrementally beneath my fingers.

The model is intricate, and lovely. It must have taken hours and days to make.

‘Don’t!’ Lucas says. He makes to snatch it out of my hands and I just give it up.

‘Break it,’ I say.

‘No!’ He’s holding it as if it’s fine porcelain, but his hands are shaking.

‘It represents your life with your dad,’ I say. ‘Break it, and you’ll be free of him. Break it for your mum. Break it, and we can do what we have to do to get justice for her and for my mum.’

‘Why are you doing this to me? I tried to warn you, didn’t I? I sent you the script.’

‘You sent it too late!’

He looks down at the plane in his hands.

I think of what Jason said to me with his hot breath buffeting my face – ‘My word against yours, Zoe. Who do you think they’ll believe?’ – and I know that if Lucas doesn’t agree to do this with me then I can’t do it on my own.

‘They’ll believe us; I know they will. This is the only way now,’ I tell him.

‘But what about the
panop
messages I sent you? The police will find them on your phone.’

‘They know about my past, Lucas, they won’t care if you know too. Think about it. That’s all the
panop
messages prove.’

The clarity I’m feeling is incredibly pure and I’m getting increasingly frustrated that he can’t feel it too. It’s like there’s mud in his brain, and he’s thinking about all the wrong things. ‘They won’t bother looking at our phones any more anyway,’ I say, ‘if we do this right.’

He says, ‘Maria didn’t deserve my dad. And nor did my mum. Nobody does.’

‘Grace doesn’t deserve him either.’

He moves the aeroplane around in his hands so that he’s holding it by its wing like I did, and then, just as I think he’s going to put it down and leave the shed and I’ll have failed in this as well as everything else, he starts to bend it. I hold my breath as the tension in the wood builds and it begins to split.

Lucas gasps, and I say, ‘Don’t give up now,’ and it’s like that comment is a sort of release for him, as if all his rage has suddenly boiled over.

He snaps off the wing of the plane, and then its tail, and I have to step backwards because he starts to bash the aeroplane against the walls of the shed until it splinters and shatters into smithereens and still he keeps on bashing it until I’m afraid that he’s going to break his hand and he’s saying, ‘I hate you. I fucking hate you,’ and we both know he’s not saying that to me, he’s saying it to his dad.

When he’s finally finished, he looks at the few shards that remain in his hand as if he’s not sure how they got there, and I say, ‘Will you do it?’ and he says, ‘OK,’ and my heart flips in relief.