The Perfect Girl

by Gilly MacMillan

  It was a shocking charge for anybody to face, but for a fourteen-year-old, whose life had been stretching out lazily before them just hours earlier, still packed with potential, it was nothing short of horrific.

  ‘Has she been interviewed?’

  ‘Not yet. Social worker just arrived.’

  The police weren’t allowed to interview Zoe without an ‘appropriate adult’ present because of her age. If she’d refused to have her mother with her they would have had to wait until a social worker came on shift this morning.

  The custody sergeant wore a tight black police top with a high collar and short sleeves that gripped muscular arms, and literally talked down to me from his desk, which was on a raised platform. As he spoke, he tapped efficiently at his keyboard, eyes glued to the screen of his computer monitor.

  ‘I’ve just had handover so I’m acquainting myself with the details, but she was brought in at about four-thirty after a couple of hours at the hospital.’

  I pitied Zoe her hours in the cell. Even my clients who’d been to prison said that they hated being in police custody more than anything. There’s no routine, just four walls, a mattress on a shelf, a toilet that may or may not be properly screened, and a pair of eyes on you at all times, either directly or via the camera.

  ‘Why didn’t she want her mother?’ I asked him. I was wondering if this girl had been in care, or lived with her father, or was bereaved.

  ‘We’re not entirely sure. Best guess: ashamed.’

  ‘Ashamed?’

  He shrugged his shoulders and spreads his hands wide, palms upward. ‘Mum’s been sitting in reception since Zoe arrived.’

  There had been a lone woman sitting in reception on my arrival, with white-blonde hair and fine features. She was huddled in a corner, and shuddered when the electronic doors ushered in a cold draught with me, and met my eye with the clear gaze of somebody who’s waiting for nothing good at all to happen, and has had no sleep to speak of.

  It was a common expression in the waiting rooms I frequented: at police stations, in courtrooms, nobody’s looking forward to what’s going to happen.

  That nice-looking woman, who’d been shut firmly out of her daughter’s life at that moment, was my first clue that this case was going to be far from straightforward.

  I had no picture in my head of Zoe before I met her. I’d had enough experience by then to know that criminality takes all kinds so you could never predict what your clients would be like, though if I’d had to hazard a guess I might have told you that the girl I was about to meet would be a mature fourteen-year-old, probably a bit rough round the edges, probably a seasoned drinker, maybe a dabbler in the local drugs scene, definitely a party girl.

  The girl I met wasn’t like that. The police had taken her clothing at the hospital as evidence, so she was wearing an outfit that the A & E nurses must have had to cobble together for her: oversized grey sweatpants and a blue zipped-up fleece top. She had a dressed wound on one temple and long, white-blonde hair, a shade paler even than her mother’s, which sparkled with tiny, glittery fragments of glass from the accident.

  She sat in a moulded plastic chair that was bolted to the floor, her feet were drawn up and her arms were wrapped around her knees. She looked dishevelled and very small. Her cheekbones were fine, her eyes were a bright, clear blue and her skin was as pale as the frost outside. Her hands were tucked into the sleeves of the fleece, which looked grubby on the cuffs: stains from another life that the hospital laundry hadn’t been able to get rid of.

  Beside her sat a woman who wore the stoic expression of a seen-it-all social worker. She was middle-aged, with hair cropped short and sharp, and a face that was deeply grooved and greyish from what I would have guessed had been twenty cigarettes a day for twenty years. She had deposited a neat pile of gloves, hat and scarf on to the interview table.

  I introduced myself to Zoe and she surprised me by standing up and offering me a timid handshake. Unfolded, she revealed herself to be of medium height and very slight, totally swamped by the borrowed clothing. She looked exceptionally fragile.

  We sat down opposite one another.

  It wasn’t the beginning of her nightmare – that had happened hours earlier – but it was the moment when I had to begin the delicate process of trying to help her to understand precisely how grave her situation might be.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  The Concert

  TESSA

  I’m feeling pretty certain that the camera is actually filming when Zoe and Lucas start playing their duet because there’s a red light flashing on the bottom right-hand corner of its screen and a counter appears to be frenetically keeping track of the seconds and milliseconds that are passing.

  Zoe and Lucas look great on the podium, as ever: a sweet vision of teenage perfection. They are yin and yang, blonde and dark, an ice princess and her swarthy consort.

  I’m one of the first to notice Tom Barlow because the camera tripod and I are positioned just at the side of the aisle, quite near the entrance, so that I can stand up and tend to it without blocking anybody’s view.

  I don’t recognise him at first, and by the time I do it’s too late to do anything.

  Later, I wonder what might have happened differently if I’d acted at that moment, whether I could have stopped him, and changed the course of things, but it’s pointless speculation because, like the rest of the audience, I do nothing more than watch, open-mouthed, as he shouts, his spittle flecking the air in front of him.

  Zoe is the last person in the church to notice him and, when she does, fear jerks her limbs like a puppet on strings, and she scrambles to get off the stage. I don’t blame her. Tom Barlow looks like a man possessed, and he’s a big man.

  When Maria stands up and makes a feeble attempt to pacify him he’s having none of it. ‘You have your daughter,’ he says to her, and the words seem to strike her like blows. ‘Don’t tell me what to do. You have your daughter.’

  ‘I’m so sorry, Tom,’ she says, but he scythes her down with his reply: ‘It’s your fault,’ he says. ‘It was your fault.’

  And then there’s a muddle, as people begin to leave their seats and surround Mr Barlow, and he sinks to his knees and begins to sob, and it’s an awful, wrenching sound, a sound to make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.

  I know who he is, because I recognise him from the trial, of course. Zoe’s trial took place in a closed court, because of her age, so I never went inside the actual courtroom but I was still there every day, in the waiting room reserved for families of the accused, and I saw the families of the victims outside the courthouse in the street, day in, day out, huddled in groups.

  We kept our distance, to avoid any scenes, but I’m certain I recognise Tom Barlow because his face was in the local paper too. He and the other parents were pictured prominently, black clad and riddled with grief at the funerals of their children.

  In the mayhem at the concert, Maria follows Zoe off stage, though before she does there’s a tense exchange between her and her newish husband Chris, during which he seems to question her and she shakes her head vigorously. Maria meets my eye as she goes, she looks stricken, and I mouth, Do you want me to come? She signals that she doesn’t, so I sit down where I am. I’m keen not to draw attention to myself. Others are kneeling beside Tom Barlow, looking after him, so I don’t need to. Best if he doesn’t see me at this point. There’s a possibility that he might recognise me.

  I wonder how Tom Barlow knew Zoe was here tonight. Since leaving Devon, she’s changed her surname, broken links with the families, with everything. We all thought she’d left Amelia Barlow’s family a hundred miles away.

  If we’re unlucky enough that Tom Barlow and his wife and their remaining children have moved here too, it won’t be long before people make connections. Bristol, it seems, might not have been far enough away for my sister and Zoe to move to escape the tragedy, and Bristol is a place where news travels fast. Within certain circles, there ar
e often only a few degrees of separation between anybody in this city.

  Chris Kennedy doesn’t follow Maria and Zoe. Instead, he goes to stand beside Lucas who’s still sitting at the piano. Both of them watch the dying throes of Tom Barlow’s meltdown with shock and disbelief on their faces and I feel leaden as I think of all the stories that are now going to have to be told, all the truths uncovered, and I think sadly of the impossibility of my sister’s shiny, happy new life continuing as it is.

  Zoe, our dear Zoe, has caused domestic bliss to implode yet again.

  When Mr Barlow has been cleared away, mopped up off the floor like a spilled drink, it’s decided that Lucas will continue to play alone. As the audience settles into this news I double-check that the video camera is still recording. In the screen, I can see Lucas, and I think I’ve framed him quite well. I can also see Chris Kennedy in profile and he sits completely still, staring front and forward. Only a small fold in his forehead and the utter stillness of his features betray the incomprehension that he must be feeling.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  ZOE

  The thorny, spiky, typical silence in the car as Mum drives me home means that I get a bit of a chance to pull myself together, because my mum doesn’t like crying. It’s the kind of silence that we often share, Mum and I. She grips the steering wheel with white knuckles while she drives. When I try to talk to her, she shushes me, and tells me that she needs to think.

  I stay quiet, but the silence is demolished when we pull up in the driveway, because the stone walls of our big, grand house are thumping with the kind of sounds that me and Lucas can pretty much only listen to surreptitiously on our iPods.

  It’s popular music, the kind that the kids in the Secure Unit listened to. Here, in this house, it’s usually a treat that’s severely rationed so that Lucas and I don’t break our diet of classical repertoire, which allows us to ‘develop our musicality’.

  Mum hurries into the house and I follow her. The volume of music means that Katya, the au pair, is oblivious to us and she doesn’t notice us until we’re in the sitting room, standing right behind her.

  She’s on our sofa, with my baby sister Grace on her knee, and right beside her, so close it looks as though he’s stuck to her, is a boy who I know from school, called Barney Scott. Grace is laughing loudly because Katya is holding her arms and bouncing her up and down, but when she sees us she reaches out to my mum, and Katya and Barney leap up off the sofa and they stroke down their rumpled clothing and make a totally impressive recovery.

  ‘Hello, Maria, hello, Zoe,’ Katya says, and hands over the baby.

  My mum is speechless at these blatant transgressions of the rules of the house: the music, the boyfriend, the baby downstairs after bedtime. She clutches Grace as if we’ve just heard that a landslide’s about to sweep the five of us and the descendants of all mankind into the ocean.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind me asking Barney here, but his dad is a doctor and Grace was very unsettled,’ Katya says. Her full-on Russian accent and her deadpan face, cheeks like slabs of limestone, both give the sentence instant gravitas.

  I look at my mum. Even she’s not insane enough to fall for the dad-as-doctor line but I can see that Katya has scored a big, fat bullseye with the ‘unsettled’ comment.

  Grace is the Second Chance Baby, the Miracle Baby; she is A Gift to Us All. She is half of Mum and half of Chris and therefore a product of what Lucas calls their Perfect Union. As Chris said at her naming ceremony, she has ‘a lovely, sunny disposition’ and is a ‘joy’, and she ‘helped us all to start again’.

  What this means is that Katya’s comment has adeptly manoeuvred my mum’s psyche down the path it most likes to travel, which is to exist in a state of fear for Grace’s health.

  So my mum ignores that fact that Grace looks ecstatic, and is shiny with a sheen of overstimulation, and she takes her immediately upstairs to settle her, with Katya in her wake, and I’m left in the room on my own with Barney Scott. It’s weird for me because we would never normally be alone together, absolutely no way. This is because, at my school, he’s a Popular Boy.

  Barney Scott scrunches his face up and I think that he’s trying to smile at me. It makes me wonder what he and Katya thought they were going to get up to because surely only guilt would make him do that.

  ‘Hey,’ he says.

  ‘Hey,’ I say back.

  ‘Back early then,’ he says.

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘Huh.’ He’s nodding his head like a plastic dog on a dashboard. ‘Did you… ah… did you play well?’

  Barney Scott is not interested in how I played, though I suppose I’m impressed that he’s making the effort to ask. He’s the type of boy who posts things online like ‘On the Downs. 8 p.m. BBQ, Booze and Bitches’ and thinks that’s hilarious, and he’s probably right because girls like Katya, or the Popular Girls at school, then actually turn up wearing microscopic shorts with the pocket patches hanging out over their foreign-holiday-tanned thighs so they can get drunk and be groped.

  ‘It was OK,’ I say. Barney Scott doesn’t need to know what happened, and I want him to go away.

  He obviously doesn’t want to be with me either. ‘I’ll wait outside,’ he says, waving at the door to the hallway like I don’t know where it is.

  ‘OK,’ I say, but, as I watch him go, what I’m desperate to say to him is that I kind-of-sort-of-maybe had a Popular Boy in love with me once, or at least in lust, so I’m not as stupid or pointless as they all think I am, I’m not.

  My very own Popular Boy was called Jack Bell and he acted like he liked me. A lot. Unfortunately, there were obstacles to us going out, and the biggest one was Jack’s twin sister, Eva, who was the Most Popular of All the Girls at school. Eva lost no time making it clear to me that her brother was not ‘in love’ but was ‘playing the field’ instead. The girl he really liked, the one he wanted instead of me, Eva said, was her best friend Amelia Barlow.

  And even though the word of Eva Bell was God for most of the people around me at that school, I didn’t believe her, because I saw the way Jack Bell looked at me and even now, when I think of that, I get a dissolving feeling inside me. I might be socially awkward, I know I am, but I’m not stupid.

  But what I have to do is to shut that dissolving feeling down quickly, because Jack Bell, like Amelia Barlow, is buried now too, and the ache of that is too sharp for me to bear.

  The sitting room window has been thrown open but the heat inside is still stifling. I hear Barney Scott crunching on the gravel outside and see him leaning against our front gate, waiting for Katya.

  I want my mum to come down, but I don’t want to disturb her while she settles Grace. I’m starting to feel sick with fear thinking about what will happen when Chris and Lucas get here, because they’re going to want to know what the hell Mr Barlow, back there in the church, was shouting about, and if nothing is to ruin the Second Chance Family then me and Mum need to work out what we’re going to say.

  MONDAY MORNING

  SAM

  I have to wake her, because I have to tell her about Maria and Zoe, yet no part of me wants to.

  ‘Tessa,’ I say. ‘Tess.’ There’s a thin sheet covering her, and its sculptural white folds describe the lines of her body so closely, it’s as if somebody had carefully laid it there, like the first damp bandages of a plaster cast.

  She’s alert quickly, eyes wide open; she’s heard something in my voice.

  ‘What?’ she says, and it’s a whisper; she hasn’t moved yet.

  I want to swallow the reason I’ve woken her up, never speak of it. I don’t want to do this to her.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, and the words make me feel terribly, throat-clearingly formal. They steal an intimacy from us.

  And in the moment after I tell Tessa that her sister is dead, and she sits up, her eyes searching mine for confirmation of the truth of what I’ve said, I have the strange realisation that she
resembles Maria more closely than I’d ever noticed before.

  And after a time where I hold her tight while shock takes hold of her, and I experience what I can only describe as an ache in my heart, in spite of the clichéd awfulness of that phrase, I have to let her go.

  And that heartache, that hard pinch of a feeling, is not something I can indulge. It’s a shallow, oil-slicked puddle of self-indulgent emotion compared to the oceans of grief that Tess’s family have been through, and will now go through again. Just to totally overkill the metaphor: their grief could fill the Mariana Trench.

  I gather up Tess’s clothes for her and she dresses silently. When she’s finished, I ask: ‘Do you want to come with me? To see Zoe? And Richard?’

  His name seems to me to hover bulkily in the air between us, but it’s the least of her worries at this moment.

  ‘I should go to the house first,’ Tess says. ‘I need to see… and the baby…’

  She can’t finish her sentence; her words are choked with shock and incomprehension. We have very little information, just that Maria died at the house, but we don’t know how. I understand that it’s up to me to look after Zoe for now, whoever she’s with.

  ‘Shall I drop you there?’ I ask. I’m worried about her driving.

  We’re standing on the communal landing in my building now. It’s a small, bright space, with floor-to-ceiling windows over the busy commuter road below, no lift, just a functional metal staircase that winds its way down to the ground floor and the car park, and it’s airless and stifling.

  ‘No,’ Tess says. ‘You need to go to Zoe. I’ll come later.’ And then she’s gone, sandals clattering on the steps.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  ZOE