The Perfect Girl

by Gilly MacMillan

  She’s speaking urgently now, time is running out. We hear the back door open.

  CHRIS

  Hello? Julia?

  JULIA

  (whispering)

  What do you need to remember to do?

  LUCAS

  Put my story CD on.

  JULIA

  Good! And what else?

  LUCAS

  Lock my door.

  JULIA

  Well done, darling. You’re a clever boy.

  When JULIA is sure he’s gone upstairs and she’s heard the lock of his door sliding into place and the beginning of a story CD playing, she straightens her outfit and her hair and goes back to the kitchen.

  JULIA (CONT’D)

  Hello, darling. How are you?

  CHRIS

  Where were you?

  She shuts the kitchen door behind her.

  INT. KITCHEN IN THE KENNEDY HOUSE. NIGHT.

  It’s just an hour later and there’s carnage in the room. Food and glasses have been overturned and it’s clear that something violent has occurred.

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  But even as things escalated, after every act of violence, Chris was sorry.

  CHRIS and JULIA sit on the floor, both in disarray. JULIA’s blouse is ripped, her cheeks are flushed high with panic and her hair is very tousled, but she and CHRIS cradle each other, though he grips her more tightly than she does him.

  CHRIS

  I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I love you so much. I don’t know what I’d do without you.

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  And every time, I forgave him because, if I’m honest, I could see no way to leave him. I was afraid of what he might do to us if I did. And I felt shame. Oh, the shame I felt. Shame kept my lips sealed.

  Unseen by CHRIS, we see the desperation on JULIA’s face as he strokes her hair.

  INT. PRIVATE HOSPITAL, CONSULTANT’S ROOM. DAY.

  JULIA and CHRIS sit together on one side of a desk, and a DOCTOR on the other.

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  The problem is, that a life lived in fear takes its toll on you, so by the time I had a diagnosis of a brain tumour, five years later, all my confidence, and most of my strength had sapped away.

  CHRIS

  Is there anything that can be done?

  DOCTOR

  We can try to treat the tumour, to control it, but we can’t cure it, and surgery is far too risky.

  CHRIS

  How long would she have, with treatment?

  DOCTOR

  It’s hard to be precise. Treatment could extend life by one month, or maybe even as much as three. But, and it’s a significant but, treatment can have some extreme side effects.

  There’s a beat while CHRIS and JULIA absorb what this means.

  JULIA

  So it’s a quality of life issue.

  DOCTOR

  Yes.

  JULIA

  Be treated and be very sick for more months and then die anyway, or turn down treatment and die more quickly but more comfortably.

  DOCTOR

  That’s probably what it boils down to.

  CHRIS

  Is it worth getting another opinion? Are you sure?

  DOCTOR

  You’re most welcome to get another opinion but I will put my reputation on the line here, and tell you that I’ll be absolutely staggered if you’re told anything different.

  EXT. A HOSPITAL CAR PARK. DAY.

  CHRIS and JULIA get into the car, each in their own world.

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  We got another opinion anyway, it wasn’t as though Chris couldn’t afford it, and, as the first doctor predicted, it was identical to his. Chris didn’t take the news well.

  We see CHRIS thump the steering wheel of the car, and we see him turn on JULIA. He grabs her hair in what looks like a familiar routine, and goes to smash her head against the passenger window, but stops just before it makes impact, and holds it there, less than an inch from the glass.

  CHRIS

  What am I going to do?

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  And, for the first time in my life, I stood up to him.

  JULIA

  Just this once you are going to let go of my hair, and you are going to drive us home and we are going to break the news to Lucas together.

  We see surprise on CHRIS’s face, and then we see that he is hugely tempted to bash her head against the window even harder than at first, but he lets go and the hard expression on his face cracks. He starts the ignition.

  Camera stays on JULIA’s face as they drive away, the car lurching too quickly as CHRIS reverses and then speeds out of the hospital gates.

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  I don’t know why it worked when I stood up to him for the first and only time that day. He drove too fast, as usual, because he knew I hated speed, and he continued to bully me in small ways. But he never touched me again. Maybe it was because he feared that the medical staff would work out what was happening now that they had ownership of my body.

  We see JULIA sneak a glance at CHRIS, searching the desperate expression on his face for clues.

  DYING JULIA (V.O.)

  But, you know, in the end, I think it was a fear of death, of death’s power. Death was going to take me so he couldn’t have me any more, so perhaps that meant I wasn’t worth bullying. Or maybe it was fear that if he touched me again I might somehow infect him, bring him into death’s orbit. I didn’t dwell on it though, because the bigger question was this: in a family like ours, how could I ever leave Lucas?

  As CHRIS and JULIA arrive home they see LUCAS, looking out of a front window. He’s obviously been waiting for them.

  ZOE

  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 piec
e 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.

  TESSA

  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 d
uty 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.