The Perfect Girl

by Gilly MacMillan

  Richard hasn’t found that thing which will allow a slice of light to pierce the darkness in his head yet, and if I’m honest I’m not sure why the darkness ever fell so completely. He had disappointment at work, for sure. He was passed over for a prestigious appointment, which should have been his, because he was never good at playing the politics in his department, but others have survived that kind of thing without succumbing to such a complete breakdown.

  I sometimes wonder whether our childlessness has deprived him of what might have been a source of happiness. Would the Richard who worked so enthusiastically in his department, who loved to travel, who decorated our house, and so carefully planted up our garden in the early years, and dreamed of blooms and sunshine in the summer, have been saved by becoming a father? Would that have made the difference? Or would I have spent my time explaining to our confused offspring why Daddy wasn’t getting out of bed today, or hadn’t smiled even though it was Christmas.

  I’ll never know; it’s just something I wonder about when I’m looking for reasons. Alone, I’m not enough to anchor Richard in the present, and so of course I wonder if a family would have been.

  So many ‘what if’s. It’s something that must roll around Zoe’s head too. What if I hadn’t got in the car that night? What if I hadn’t gone to the party? When Zoe was in the legal process, surrounded by lawyers and court papers, and police reports, the thing that got to me was how her case bowed every head. Sam would talk about that too. How the police handled her with kid gloves, how everybody around her was sunk by the misfortune of her situation.

  Maria would have felt the ‘what if’ factor then too. What if I hadn’t tried to save face? What if I’d let her plead guilty in the first instance? What if…

  I park in the driveway of my house and, when I let myself in, I find that it’s completely quiet, though a light glows from the landing upstairs.

  Richard is in our bed, on his back. He’s asleep and his snoring is loud and persistent. The bedroom is clear of bottles, but I find one stuffed into the poky dark area at the bottom of his cupboard. The neck of the bottle is still damp and smells of fresh wine. My heart sinks because it probably means he stashed it there before passing out on the bed, and that probably means that his bladder is full but he’ll be too drunk to feel it. I sigh because it means I’m going to have to wake him.

  I spend a good ten minutes shaking him into a state resembling consciousness so that I can persuade him to pee. He manages it, unsteadily, lurching along the landing like the drunk he is, words slurring and sliding out of his mouth, as clumsy as his physical movements. When he’s done, he passes out on the bed again, exactly the same as before, and I’m left with aching arms and a pounding heart from supporting him down the corridor, from talking him through what he’s got to do, and from dodging the amorous advances that he always makes when he’s this far gone, but which we both know won’t amount to anything once he’s horizontal again.

  Down in the kitchen I clear up the mess he’s made heating and eating the lasagne and I lock the back door, which he’s left wide open to the stifling night air.

  Then I sit at the kitchen table, now scrubbed as clean as my surgery at work, and think about the conversation that he and I will have in the morning, an old conversation, where we both know our lines off by heart. It’s a conversation about going to rehab, and how I want him to, and how he doesn’t feel it’s necessary because he feels he can get better on his own, and when I think of that, and of Tom Barlow, and all the things Maria will be having to explain to Chris tonight, weariness and loneliness saturate me and make me cry, just for a moment or two. And suddenly I crave company, not sleep, so I do what I shouldn’t: I try to phone Sam.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  ZOE

  A short time after Tessa has gone, Lucas comes into the sitting room where I’m lying with my phone watching his PDF fail to download quickly. He tells me that we’re all going to talk in Chris’s study. He’s changed his clothes and his hair is wet.

  I start to say to him, How do you know about me?, but he puts a finger to his lips.

  He holds out a hand to pull me up and I get a frisson of electricity when I touch it. I wonder if this means he’s my friend now, or my boyfriend, or neither, but I don’t dare ask him and now isn’t the moment anyway.

  When I was in the Unit I made friends with people who I can’t tell my mum about; actually, I can’t tell anybody in the Second Chance Family. In the Unit, I sometimes felt like it was easier to make friends than at school. You have crime in common, after all, and I know that sounds stupid, and it doesn’t make things easy always, but it does ‘level the playing field’, as Jason the Key Worker used to say.

  My friends in the Unit were Connor (breaking and entering, repeatedly) and Ellie (common assault, three strikes and you’re out). They were what Jason called ‘Revolving Door Cases’.

  ‘You’re categorically not a Revolving Door Case, Zoe,’ he said. ‘Cat-e-gor-i-cal-ly not.’ He pronounced each syllable separately to make his point. Jason didn’t have much apart from verbal tricks to make his points. And laser eye contact. No PowerPoint presentations for him. Just me and him, in a room with a barred window to the outside, and a reinforced sheet of glass in the door, and a table and two chairs, which were bolted to the floor.

  I would be wearing my lovely Unit attire of green tracksuit bottoms and top and Jason would be in jeans and a T-shirt. Unless it was winter, when a little line of snow rimmed even the barbed wire coils outside, until a sharp wind dispatched it into soft whorls, and then blew it into every crack and crevice in the building. Then Jason might wear a short-sleeved jumper over his T-shirt which, if I’m honest, made him look like a sad nineties pop star having a quiet night in.

  ‘Put the f*****g heating on,’ shouted Ellie from her cell, all night for the first night when it was got cold. ‘Turn up the f*****g heat you f*****g c***s I’m freezing my f*****g tits off in here.’ Her language was so bad it fully made me blush.

  She banged her door too that night, an ear-splitting rhythmic pounding with a metallic edge that made me press my hands down hard on to my ears. You could make a good racket if you banged the door with a tin cup. The next day we got extra blankets, which had ‘HMP Dartmoor’ printed on them and were thin and grey and made me wonder who had slept under them before, and whether they were Revolving Door Cases who’d revolved all the way into an adult centre. You only have to be eighteen to go into an adult prison.

  The reason I wasn’t a Revolving Door Case, according to Jason, was because of my family, which meant that I had a chance when I got out. My mum, he said, was determined to make a fresh start for me, determined to help me. I also had a talent, he said, with my music, my mum had told him all about it, and they had agreed that they couldn’t think of any better way to rehabilitate me. Revolving Door Cases had no chance. They would go back into lives of abuse, and deprivation and neglect, and they would be reoffending and back in court before they knew it, their families watching dully, looking drowned by the inevitability of it all, if they bothered to turn up at all.

  Lucas’s PDF still hasn’t downloaded by the time we all troop into Chris’s study. It’s on sixty-five per cent with five minutes remaining. I’m thinking that because Chris’s study is where our WiFi hub is, that it might download a bit quicker once we’re in there, but I forget all about that as soon as we get into the room.

  It’s not a room I normally go into. It’s Chris’s sanctuary; it’s where he talks to Lucas when they need to ‘chat’. Lucas never looks happy when he’s going in there. My mum goes in there sometimes, but usually only when she’s bearing a gift of some sort for Chris: a cup of tea, or coffee, or a Tom Collins if it’s after six o’clock. I’ve been in once or twice and when I do I usually look at the frame that’s on the wall behind Chris’s desk. It’s a black frame, about 12 inches square, and in the middle of it, mounted on a black background, is a single computer chip. Chris invented it
and it’s the reason he’s minted. Chris was like Midas when he made that chip; it made everything turn to gold.

  Not that you’d think that from the look of his study, because it’s really plain. My mum always wants to decorate it, and sometimes she brings swatches of things home: new fabrics for Chris’s sofa, or for curtains, but he always refuses. The sofa he keeps in there is one that he had in his office at work when he invented the chip back in the day. He says he’s ‘not a sentimental man’ but he ‘can’t let go of that sofa’. It’s a lucky sofa for him.

  I get that, because I have a lucky hair ribbon that I wore at my first piano competition. I don’t wear it any more because my image has moved on, but I always have a little feel of it before a competition, or a concert. I touched it before the concert tonight, not that that helped me much. The ribbon is black, and velvety, it looks like nothing much and the ends are a little frayed now, but the feeling of it is a lucky thing for me.

  Beside the rank sofa, Chris has two club chairs, which my mum did persuade him to buy, because she said he ought to be able to have meetings in the home office without it looking like an Ikea showroom. Opposite the rank sofa, against the wall of the room, Chris has a big long desk, which is surrounded by bookshelves where there are tons and tons of books about computer coding and stuff like that, including three books that he has written.

  Chris is very, very clever, my mum told me when she came home after her first date with him, and a basic knowledge of genetics will tell you that that is probably why Lucas is too. Lucas once told me that his mum was clever too but she never got a chance to show it before she died, but I couldn’t really have that conversation with him because it made me think too much of Gull.

  ‘A student with exceptional potential,’ the prosecution said about her in their summing up, ‘a bloom cut down before it could flower,’ which I thought was a bit much, but that was definitely something I was not allowed to point out, though I think if Gull had heard it she would have snorted, definitely. She always snorted like a pony on a cold morning when she heard something blousy like that.

  I sit first, on the sofa. The cushions tilt backwards so I have to perch on the very edge of them if I want to preserve any kind of what my mum would call ‘suitable decorum’. I’m careful to cross my legs at my ankles, not my knees, and I tug down the skirt of my dress so that it’s covering as much of me as possible. Unfortunately, that does make the top of my dress ride down a bit so I have to wriggle a little to cover myself up as best as I can, and I can tell that Chris’s eyes are on me under a frowning brow.

  Lucas sits on one of the club chairs and, as he settles into it, I see a resemblance to Chris that I don’t always notice. Lucas’s looks mostly favour his mum, that’s obvious. There are no photographs of her anywhere in our house apart from Lucas’s room, but I’ve been in there and I could see how much they look like each other.

  Chris is holding Grace’s intercom and, as he puts it down on his desk, he jogs the mouse of his computer and the huge screen comes to life. On it, frozen in super-high definition, is an image of Lucas and me, sitting at the piano, in the church. Lucas is looking towards the camera and I’m playing, bent over the piano, one of my hands poised over the next note, the tips of my hair brushing the keys.

  In the foreground is Tom Barlow, or rather the back of him, and it’s him that Lucas is looking at.

  It’s the moment it all started to happen and, as my mum comes into the room, she gasps at the sight of it.

  MONDAY MORNING

  SAM

  The judge didn’t accept Zoe’s Special Reasons plea.

  He found against Zoe, he stated, because he simply didn’t believe that she would have been monitoring what she drank that night. No matter that we’d explained that she was a conscientious person, a good student, that she’d had a piano competition the following day. We might not have convinced him anyway, but Eva Bell and her friend’s testimony, which so strongly contradicted Zoe’s claim that Jack Bell had spiked her drink, certainly put the knife in Zoe’s back, and twisted it too.

  Zoe stood up in the courtroom as the judge spoke to her.

  ‘I find,’ he said, looking at her over a pair of reading glasses, ‘that as you were only fourteen years old on the night of the party, there was no reason for you to monitor closely how much alcohol you were able to drink before driving, because you were not legally able to drive a motor vehicle. I find that you did drink freely during the course of that evening and that you don’t actually know how much you had to drink. Therefore, regrettably, I find that whilst you might not have known exactly how much you had to drink, you knew you were too drunk to drive that car.’

  He sentenced her to an eighteen-month detention and training order. It meant that she would serve nine months. I felt that wasn’t too bad in the circumstances, but her family would never get the satisfaction of proving that Zoe had only done what she did because she was unwittingly drunk. She met nobody’s eye as they took her down.

  My goodbye to her mother was muted and painful. Tessa was there too, because I remember them standing together outside court looking desolate. Zoe had no other supporters with her that day.

  It took me a while to get the trial out of my system. I felt a sense of failure in some ways, because I wondered whether I should have insisted more on a simple Guilty plea at the first hearing. It could have resulted in a more lenient sentence. In the end, we took a legal gamble and lost, and Zoe paid the price. I wondered if she took any satisfaction afterwards from knowing that she did, at least, tell the truth, or whether it was a regret or, worse, something to resent.

  It wasn’t until two years later, after I’d moved to Bristol to broaden my criminal practice experience, that I ran into Tessa by chance. We recognised each other immediately, and met for coffee the following week. Things developed from there. Until we reached last night.

  Now, as I watch Tessa ease her VW into the Monday morning traffic outside my apartment, on her way to find out how and why her sister is dead, it’s clear to me that things might just become very complicated indeed.

  SUNDAY NIGHT

  After the Concert

  ZOE

  It goes weirdly well. You wouldn’t think it, looking at Lucas, who’s got a face on through the whole thing like he’s about to have a medical emergency on a TV daytime drama.

  Once my mum has got over seeing Tom Barlow, and me and Lucas, frozen on the screen, she takes control in a way that I think is totally impressive, considering.

  She isn’t wearing her normal Second Chance Family clothes when she comes down. She’s in a pair of leggings and a loose T-shirt. Maybe that’s what makes me relax a bit, because she’s dressed more like she used to dress, before it happened and when we still lived with my dad: still pretty, still nice, but way more casual. She’s taken the make-up off her face and tied her hair back. The short, soft sleeves of the T-shirt make her arms look fragile and thin, and without foundation the dark circles under her eyes resemble small bruises. My mum, I realise, is very tired.

  As she stands in the doorway, Chris gestures towards the chairs and the rank sofa. I think she’s going to sit down beside me, but she doesn’t. She takes the club chair opposite Lucas and Chris is left with the spare sofa seat. When he sits down, the weight of him makes the sofa cushions sag heavily and I become even more extra self-conscious about my bare knees and shoulders.

  ‘Sit up, Zoe,’ is the first thing my mum says as she looks at me with eyes that are red-rimmed and empty of everything except the bottomless look she had permanently for a long time after the accident. ‘You’re hunching.’

  I notice that Lucas adjusts his posture too, when she says that, but my mum’s oblivious. She focuses her whole being on Chris, like he’s the last animal of his kind on earth.

  ‘Thank you for listening,’ she says. ‘Zoe and I do have some proper explaining to do, we owe that to you both and I’m grateful to you for listening…’ Mum does a bitter-looking swallow then, and tears
begin to slip from her eyes, though she doesn’t pay any attention to them. It makes me want to cry myself and I have to work very hard not to.

  Mum doesn’t notice that though. She’s sitting ramrod straight in the chair and she fixes Chris with her eyes, which I once heard him tell her were beautiful.

  Chris doesn’t do poetic description – ‘I’m just a computer scientist!’ he sometimes says, when Mum is asking him to make a decorating choice. ‘You’re the creative one!’ – so ‘beautiful’ was probably an adjectival stretch for him. I could add to that description. Mum’s eyes are pellucid, arctic blue. The blue is washed pale inside the eyes with a darker rim around the edge and, if you look closely, a fleck of hazel lies within one of her irises, like an intruder.

  She tells Chris and Lucas the full blow-by-blow story of the accident, of my fall from grace, the way we told it at the trial. It’s the version of the story where I’m as much of a good person as a bad one; it’s the version where I think I’m doing the right thing when I decide to drive the car. It’s the true version.

  Chris stands up when she’s finished. He hasn’t said a word while she talked. On his computer screen the image from the church is still freeze-framed, like Munch’s silent scream. She tries to reach for his hand as he walks away from her but she’s too slow. Mum doesn’t look at me, she just folds her hands into her lap after that and waits, and so I copy her.

  I look at the lights that are on in the room, because it’s dark everywhere else now. Chris’s desk lamp is dumping a tired circle of yellow on to the surface of his desk, and the glass wall lights that are sculpted to look like flaming torches are glowing, as is the bulb that shows off Chris’s famous, framed computer chip. Between them, there’s gloom.