The Perfect Girl

by Gilly MacMillan

  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.

  RICHARD

  Once Chris has decided to stay for a bit longer while he waits for Grace to finish her nap, he asks to borrow my computer. ‘I just need to tie one or two things up for work so they don’t bother us for the next few days,’ he says. His face is grim and stressed.

  ‘Be my guest,’ I tell him.

  I take him upstairs and show him the set-up in my office.

  Could he have done something? I wonder again as I leave him to it. I have to resist the temptation to peer over his shoulder. Tessa has her suspicions, clearly, but that could just be guilt talking, because she is somehow convinced that she could have saved Maria if she’d made more effort to remain close to her after the marriage.

  I notice as I cross the landing that we all left the bathroom in a somewhat destroyed state in the wake of Grace’s bath, and I decide that I’ll tidy it up, to make it nice for Tessa. I mop up the spilled water with the already wet bedspread, and then put it out in the hallway with the idea of hanging it up to dry in the garden, and I wash the dried-out bubbles from the inside of the bath.

  As I scrub, I begin to feel confused about something I thought I overheard when Grace was having her bath. I thought I heard Lucas say something about Maria’s death, but I’m sure I must be wrong, or Zoe would have reacted differently when I spoke to her immediately afterwards.

  I wonder if I’ll be able to persuade Chris to let Grace stay here for her tea. He’ll struggle to organise that in a hotel. I wonder if she eats soup. I wonder when she’s going to start missing her mother.

  It appears that Grace has played with every plastic bottle that was gathered neatly around the edges of our bath, and so I begin to retrieve them from all corners of the room and stand them up in their allotted places. We’re not used to things moving around, Tess and I. Ours is a quiet life.

  I’m kneeling on the floor to reach a shampoo bottle that has somehow got stuck behind the stand that the basin sits on when the craving hits me. First, a wave of exhaustion, then a rush of all the emotions that I cannot bear.

  Beside me, built into the cladding that surrounds the bath, is a small door. If I push it, it’ll open, and behind it there’s a hidden bottle of vodka. Cheap, nasty vodka. Beautiful, anaesthetising vodka. Just one push of my fingers and I can have it.

  But I try to be good. I sit there, on my knees, in our nice little bathroom, and think of that beautiful baby, and Tessa’s broken family, and of our shambles of a marriage, and although it takes me every ounce of strength, I manage to leave the room without touching the bottle.

  Walking away is so hard. There’s some pay-off though, I can’t deny it, because as I make my way slowly downstairs I force myself to acknowledge that resisting the bottle is also a triumph of sorts, however grim I feel.

  TESSA

  I’m pacing downstairs. The detectives have vacated the dining room for now and I walk around it as if it can give me some clues, or help me to think.

  I’m too restless to stay there for long though and, as I go back into the hallway, I almost collide with Zoe.

  It shocks her, and she gives a little scream. She seems pent-up and extremely agitated, and she won’t meet my eye properly, which is unusual for her. She tells me in a nervous voice, as if she’s finding it hard to breathe properly, that she wants to gather everybody together in the sitting room.

  She wakes up her dad, and she calls Richard in from outside, where he’s been checking on the baby. She gets Chris down from the upstairs bedroom, and she asks us all to sit down, though she saves a seat in the middle of the sofa, beside Chris, which she insists the Liaison Officer takes.

  Lucas is there too, and he’s doing something with the TV. He’s turned it on and holds the two remote controls and he’s navigating through a series of screens that look unfamiliar to me.

  Once Richard arrives in the room he of course asks Lucas what he’s trying to do, and to offer help and expertise, but the boy brushes him off a bit brusquely. It’s clear to me that he more than seems to know what he’s doing, though undeniably he’s giving off nerves in exactly the same way as Zoe is.

  As everyone’s getting seated, Zoe stands beside my chair and I rub her slender wrist. ‘What’s happening, Butterfly?’ I ask her.

  She doesn’t look at me, and she doesn’t reply; she’s fixated on what Lucas is doing.

  It reminds me of how she used to be at the time of the trial. It broke my heart, because she always seemed to be somewhere else in her head, as if the core of her had curled up in fear, and, though perhaps it shouldn’t have, that did make her somehow untouchable to the rest of us.

  ‘Zoe?’ I ask again, because her behaviour is scaring me a little, but Lucas says, at the same time, ‘It’s ready,’ and then, as if she’s taking a cue from him, as if it’s something they’ve rehearsed, she turns to everybody, and delivers a short speech in a voice so laconic it sends a chill running through me.

  ‘Lucas and me were afraid. But now we’ve decided to tell you what we know. This is a film from last night.’

  We all turn to face the TV.

  Lucas seems to have got it to link to the internet, and it’s displaying a video site. I wonder if it’s the film from the concert that he’s about to play, but it doesn’t look as if it is.

  The picture that suddenly appears on the screen looks just like the inside of Chris and Maria’s house.

  LUCAS

  I filmed this on my phone, in secret, last night. I held the phone down by my leg and my dad didn’t notice.

  As we watch the footage in front of my dad, and all of the other people in Tessa’s sitting room, the only way I can force myself to stay there and watch it again, and go through with what me and Zoe agreed, is to think about how, if I was going to shoot this scene for an actual film, I would do it differently.

  The secret way I had to film, before I dropped the camera and all it showed was the ceiling, means that the footage has a kind of Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity feel to it. It’s a kind of indie low-budget terror look, which might work. But I’d like it to be more stylised, so I’d do it like this:

  First shot would follow me along the landing, a tracking shot probably, using a hand-held camera, and looking over my shoulder from behind me, so you could see that I was approaching my parents’ bedroom door and you could see it from my point of view.

  As I walk down the corridor, the soundtrack would be a long, low note – low strings maybe – like a drone. The muffled sounds of an argument would be audible through the closed bedroom door.

  As I stop outside the door, and listen, the camera would swing around, to show my face, so you could see how I’m trying to be brave.

  Cut to a close-up of my hand opening the bedroom door. The door swings open.

  The drone of the music is mounting, but not too much yet.

  We see into the room. It’s lit up by a small bedside lamp only, so there are powerful long shadows reaching across the space, and they make my dad look terrifying, like the evil guy on the front of a comic book.

  My dad is standing over Maria. He’s holding her by her hair and he’s pushed her head back against the wall so you can see the smooth stretch of her neck.

  Then there would be close-up shots: the back of my dad’s hand, Maria’s hair poking out between his fingers, the skin stretched across his knuckles and then her face, her jaw tense with pain and fear.

  The drone of the soundtrack builds, adding more strings, higher pitched and clashing, so that it sounds discordant now.

  I would be happy with that opening, it would show everything exactly as it happened.

  When he works out what he’s watching, as we all sit there in Tessa’s sitting room, my dad starts to make a lunge for the TV before all the people can hear what he’s going to say on film. But Zoe’s dad
is sitting beside him, and so is the police lady, and Zoe’s dad grabs my dad by the arm and tells him to sit down in a voice that is deadly polite. Zoe’s dad has a wrecked face, but he’s big and strong and my dad is no match for him.

  We’re reaching the bit in the film where everything happens very fast. All the people in the room are totally fixated on it.

  The footage gets more wobbly here, because I was frightened, but again I imagine it in my reshoot:

  Dad turns to me, sees me at the door. ‘Get out,’ he says, and I would be sure you could see the vein that’s bulged red and angry on his temple.

  I might show my face on camera then, the way that I’m feeling even more fear, but I’m trying not to let it drive me out of the room as it’s done so many times before, so I stay where I am because I want him to stop what he’s doing.

  A close-up of Maria’s face, as she tries to turn her head to see me, even though Dad’s still holding her hair. Her eyes are full of messages that I can’t read because I don’t know her as well as I knew my mum. They fall shut as Dad lets go of her hair and she drops to the floor like a rag doll.

  Another tracking shot, still with a hand-held camera, to show Dad walking towards me. I stay where I am.

  Maria says, ‘Don’t touch him!’

  ‘Shut up,’ Dad says.

  ‘It’s over if you hurt him,’ she says.

  The music stops here too. A sudden silence would be effective, I think.

  He stops, and then he turns to face Maria and laughs. We see her raise her chin defiantly, but she looks small and fragile in comparison to him, the same way my mum used to.

  ‘Are you trying to threaten me?’ he asks her. ‘Is that what you’re doing?’

  I want her to keep staring him out, but she drops her gaze.

  ‘And if it’s over,’ he says, ‘where do you think you’re going to go? Another city? Another filthy little flat? Are you ready to be on your own with your daughter again? With not a penny to your name? Or will you crawl back to Devon and live amongst those people whose children she murdered? You’ll never cope, Maria. You’re not capable of doing it on your own.’

  A close-up of her face would show that she’s realising something.

  ‘You wouldn’t,’ she says.

  It’s then that I understand what she’s understood, which is that Dad is implying that he would take Grace from her.

  ‘What I wouldn’t do is let my daughter be raised in a home with just you and her,’ he says. He looks at Maria in the same way he used to look at my mum, as if she was worthless, and could never be anything else in his eyes.

  Then he turns back to me, and this time his face is so full of rage that I step backwards on to the landing. One, two, three steps.

  On the TV in front of us, we see how the phone camera wobbles, and it shows the back of my leg as I hide it, and then we see only scraps of action, but everybody watching who knows our house can easily tell that I’m walking backwards towards the top of the staircase.

  I don’t want to be backing away from him, I want to be standing my ground, and to be shouting at him, shouting all the things that I see in my films. I want to tell him who he is and what he is and ask him why he is a monster and why did such a monster ever want a child? Two children? I want him to dance while I shoot bullets at his feet. I want him to sweat with fear when he understands that I’m not here to do a deal with him, I’m here to kill him, but he’s like Colonel Kurtz in all his glory, a towering maniac, a power-riddled Goliath. He haunts my dreams with his violence, and my days with his softly spoken words that are full of menace.

  But I’m afraid, and my courage has trickled away. And he has me now; his hand’s on my chest, pushing me against the wall right at the top of the stairs.

  Behind him, Maria begins to stand, though she has to drag herself up as if she feels mostly weariness, and there’s only the faintest spark of defiance left to propel her. Dad doesn’t notice. My eyes are on his eyes, and I can see that his other hand is balled up into a fist.

  I don’t know which to look at, his eyes or his fist, because I’m not sure if he’s going to strike, because you see he never has struck me. Yet. He’s pinched, and pushed, but mostly he’s just used words to keep me subjugated.

  What disgusts me most is that I’ve let him do it to me all my life, and I let him do it to my mum. He never left bruises visible on her though. Never. My dad was too clever for that. That’s why none of the doctors who treated my mum ever got suspicious.

  The guilt and anger at myself that I never stopped him hurting her is the thing that fills my mind all day and every day, the thing I hear when I play piano, the thing that echoes in my head when I watch films, and when I’m in school, the thing that never leaves me. Nothing makes it go away, except maybe Zoe. Because she is like me: she has bad secrets too.

  I saw a counsellor at school. Nobody knew that I did that. The problem was, when I got to the meeting, I couldn’t actually say what I wanted to, so I talked a load of crap about being stressed about exams. The counsellor gave me a ton of leaflets, which were useless, but she did say one good thing. She said, ‘Why don’t you write about what makes you anxious? As a diary maybe? It can help.’ I told her I didn’t want to write a diary, so she said, ‘What about a song?’ and I asked her, ‘What do I look like, a boy band wannabe or something?’ She said, ‘Well what do you like?’ and so I said, ‘Film.’

  ‘Well, why don’t you try writing a script then?’

  The script is what I sent to Zoe, and Maria. I put my heart and soul into it, I pieced it together from things my mum remembered, I pictured the scenes in my head based on stuff my mum told me about when she and Dad got together, and old photos, and I sent it to them because I wanted Maria to know that I knew what he was like, so she didn’t feel alone.

  I wanted to warn Zoe too, because my mum couldn’t stand up to him alone, or even with me; you need more people than that and I thought Zoe could help me help Maria.

  But Zoe was right: I sent it too late.

  I don’t look at Dad while the film is playing on the TV. I do stop thinking of ways I would have shot it and I look instead at the faces of everybody except him and I see the horror there, as they witness what I have witnessed all my life.

  On the TV we suddenly lose the moving images. I dropped my phone right after Dad slammed my back against the wall, which was the moment just before Maria caught him by surprise and managed to pull him away.

  All you can see on the film when that’s happening is the ceiling of our landing, the chandelier glinting with dim reflected light from the bedroom.

  But you can hear the scuffle as she pulls him away, and then she says, ‘Are you OK?’ to me, which is hard to hear because as soon as Dad has recovered himself, which only takes a second or two, he says, ‘You little bitch,’ and then there’s the sound of movement from when I tried to push her out of the way, and you hear Maria gasp, and then there’s the sound of her hitting the banister post, and then the fall.

  I started to scream then but Dad put his hand over my mouth before I could make much of a noise, and we both watched the blood seeping out of the back of her head and pooling on to the varnished wood on the stairs.

  Just a few moments after that, the film stops. I picked up the phone and stopped it recording while Dad clattered down the stairs to see if he could save her.

  The really important thing is that you can’t see that it was me pushing Maria out of the way of Dad that sends her falling down the stairs. To listen to the footage, it’s exactly as if he has done it. It’s the inevitable result of his violence.

  To make that extra clear, just like Zoe told me to, I turn to the room and I look the Family Liaison Officer in the eye and I say, ‘He pushed her.’

  Then, for the second time in twelve hours, Dad advances on me with his hand clenched into a fist.

  I put my hands up to protect my face and curl up in my seat.

  He never hits me though, because Philip stops him in ti
me.

  ‘Don’t you dare,’ Philip says. ‘Don’t you dare!’ He pushes Dad back down on to the sofa, and holds him there.

  ‘Are you really going to do this?’ Dad asks me. ‘Lucas? Have you thought this through? Do you think you’d like to tell the truth?’

  I have to look away from him then, and to force myself to do it, to keep myself strong. It’s so incredibly hard not to reply, but I mustn’t. Zoe said all we have to do is to stick to our story, and I will.

  Zoe does her bit then, she says, ‘I saw it. I came out of my bedroom when I heard Chris shouting. My mum was trying to protect Lucas, and Chris pushed her down the stairs. He pushed her so hard, and he hurt me too,’ she says. She pulls down the side of her trousers to show the Family Liaison Officer a large welt on her hip. ‘He pushed me too.’

  The Liaison Officer separates me and Zoe from my dad then. She stays with him, and so does Philip, and we leave the room, and tell our story again, to Tess and Richard. They believe us, both of them do, and the relief is incredible.

  When the detectives have arrived, and talked to Dad, which seems like only minutes after the Liaison Officer has called for backup, I’ll admit that my stomach lurches when I see them lead him away.

  I run to the open front door as they take him to the police car. I can’t help myself.

  ‘Dad!’ I shout, but he doesn’t turn around, or look at me at all, not once, until he’s sitting in the back of the car and it’s backing out of the drive, and then his eyes lock on to mine as he’s driven away.

  SAM

  It’s late when I finally phone Tessa back. I try her mobile but it goes straight to voicemail again, and I’m loath to phone the landline in case her husband answers.

  Outside the windows of my flat, I can see that the evening crowd has turned out. They’re on their way to the pubs on the riverside, or wandering home from work.

  I sit on a chair on my balcony with a beer in my hand, but back from the edge, in the shade, where I can feel concealed but also watch the people below.