The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  ‘I’m not sure what the rules are on smoking e-cigarettes on school premises,’ said Mrs Arnold as the French teachers came into her line of vision. ‘Do you have a point of view, Ailsa?’ She headed off towards them.

  ‘Did you know her parents were Jehovah’s Witnesses?’ asked Matt. ‘Her younger sister died because they refused to allow a blood transfusion because it’s against the rules of their religion.’

  ‘It relates to a passage in Leviticus,’ said Ailsa.

  There was a horrible screech of feedback from the pair of huge speakers that stood like bookends either side of the disco. Mercifully the lights dimmed, then less mercifully Village People started booming out of an ancient sound system.

  ‘Apparently this is a ritual,’ Matt shouted over the music. ‘Begun by Phil the year he arrived. Which makes it more than twenty years old.’

  At least half of the members of staff lined up in the gym and began turning themselves into human letters for the chorus of ‘YMCA’. Phil stood in the middle at the front, so that people behind him could follow his moves. Shuffle sideways three steps, three taps with each toe, circle … His performance was heart-stopping. Every ounce of energy was invested in his routine. For a big man he was good on his feet. His face was already baby pink. Ailsa was mesmerized by the rapidly expanding circles of sweat underneath the arms of his shirt as he threw himself around the dance floor. She found it all hilarious and for reasons that she was less able to fathom strangely touching. She might not love school parties but she loved the people at this school.

  ‘Come on, you know you want to,’ Phil yelled at Mrs Arnold, who so obviously didn’t.

  The deputy head retreated to the edge of the gym. Ailsa felt almost sorry for her. Her isolation might be self-inflicted but its origins were probably in some childhood trauma. Ailsa was now left standing beside Matt. She was relieved by the distraction on the dance floor because it meant that they didn’t have to look at each other. Having spoken to Rachel earlier that day, she was reasonably confident that he hadn’t mentioned anything to her sister. Unlike Ailsa, Rachel was utterly incapable of duplicity.

  Over the past couple of days Ailsa’s conviction that she was right not to say anything to Harry and Luke had strengthened. The moments when she was obsessively turning over the issue in her mind were now punctuated by longer periods of calm. New issues emerged: could she find a children’s film course in Norwich for Ben during the Easter holidays? Should she tell her father that they were putting his house on the market so that he could get used to the idea or wait until a buyer had been found? Would she manage to find time to unpack the rest of the boxes sitting in Harry’s office?

  But Matt’s presence filled her with doubts again. A new worry bored its way into her mind. Having dismissed the relationship between Rachel and him as something meaningless which would be over before it had even begun, she was now possessed by the idea that they might stay together for ever. What if it wasn’t ephemeral and he became a permanent fixture in their family? Why hadn’t this thought occurred to her before? And if she hadn’t considered this possibility might there not be other eventualities that she had failed to explore?

  Ailsa swallowed a couple of times. Her face felt unpleasantly hot. She could taste the wine in the back of her throat, acid as bile.

  Sequences flashed through her mind like short films with inconclusive endings. Births, weddings and funerals. She imagined Matt at every major family event. There would always be this unwanted secret that they shared, and although he might never say anything, he would always know. He might subtly probe Rachel for clues about Luke’s father. If he asked any questions about Ailsa’s boyfriends before Harry, Billy’s name would inevitably come up. He might google him, just as Ailsa had done. The idea that people had been deceived might eat away at him. Didn’t they have a right to know the truth? Perhaps if she explained that her marriage had just survived one catastrophic event and that it might not be able to withstand another, he would understand. Ailsa remembered what he had told her about his own parents. He might even empathize.

  Ailsa had a brief moment of calm followed by a new wave of anxiety as it occurred to her that Matt would feel even guiltier about keeping this secret from Rachel. She would have already told him her views on the absolute need for honesty in relationships and explained how she had learned this from the burden of keeping Adam’s drinking a secret during their childhood.

  Of course Matt would confide in her. They were at that stage when they wanted a total state of unity. They would share every detail of their lives. Ailsa could imagine Rachel wide-eyed, emphatically promising him never to breathe a word. But Rachel still hadn’t forgiven Harry for his affair and Ailsa could easily imagine full disclosure during a moment of drunken vengefulness. Afterwards Rachel would argue that all secrets were corrosive. Unworkable. Ailsa used this word whenever she was trying to tell a member of staff that an idea wouldn’t fly. Her current plan was unworkable unless Matt was out of Rachel’s life.

  ‘I was wondering if you still have many friends locally from having grown up around here?’ he shouted over the music, so close she could feel his hot beer breath in her ear. ‘Do you keep bumping into familiar faces?’

  ‘No,’ said Ailsa cautiously. ‘We were brought up in a tiny village on the coast. It was quite an isolated existence. Just Rachel and me really. We were quite self-contained.’

  Already it had begun. Was he fishing for information or was it an innocent question? She glanced at him. The expression on his face was good-natured, as if he wanted to underline his intent to get their relationship back onto familiar ground, but she could see the wariness in his eyes. Rachel obviously hadn’t filled him in on the finer details of their childhood, because if she had he would know how they never brought friends home because there was no guarantee what state their father would be in.

  ‘My father could be quite tricky.’

  She had invited Billy back once, hoping the presence of a stranger, the son of a well-known jazz player no less, might restrain Adam. Instead the opposite had proved true. He drank even more and pretended that he was an expert on James Taylor. Ailsa stopped counting how many glasses of wine he had knocked back when he reached double digits. By dinner the skin on his cheeks sagged, his mouth hung open and the folds under his eyes had concertinaed until he resembled a bloodhound. Was it possible for someone’s face to melt? she had wondered from across the table.

  Adam told Billy that he used to play the clarinet and insisted Georgia should look for it even though they were in the middle of eating garlic chicken. Georgia found it in the chest of drawers in the hall. Adam removed it from the dusty case and tried to play, but in between the smoking and the drinking he didn’t have enough puff, and when he blew into the clarinet, a mixture of dust and garlic spit flew out the other end onto Billy’s plate and a blood vessel in Adam’s eye burst. Billy had seen the comedy. She had felt only the shame. She hadn’t thought about this for years. It was a couple of months after this that her father stopped drinking.

  ‘Are you OK?’

  Ailsa looked at her watch. It was almost eleven o’clock. She focused on her breathing, trying to remember what she had learned in classes when she was pregnant with Luke. But just thinking about Luke made her feel anxious again. Small beads of sweat slowly dripped down her forehead and beyond, towards the sides of her nose. She wiped her face with the sleeve of her jacket, which sent bits of potato flying onto the floor, and then took it off and tied it around her waist. Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth. Or is it the other way round? Was that what was making her light-headed? She wasn’t breathing out enough carbon dioxide. Romy would be able to explain this. On her out breath Ailsa tried to distract herself by imagining something wonderful like Romy dancing at Marley’s party. She saw Romy’s long blonde hair swaying in time to the music and remembered that she had cut it short that same morning. It struck her that there was a brutality in this action that Ailsa couldn’t fully f
athom and that somehow it was directed at Harry. Realizing this fuelled her angst all over again.

  There was a lull in the music. Ailsa watched Phil as he leaned over to speak to the DJ, who was wearing a lab coat and red plastic glasses and she now recognized as the technician from one of the science departments. They exchanged thumbs-up signals. ‘Night Fever’ started playing so loudly that Ailsa could feel the vibrations through the floor of the gym. She felt something bony nudge her arm and looked down to see it was Matt’s elbow.

  ‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ he shouted again over the music. ‘You don’t look so good.’

  ‘I think I need some air,’ she shouted back.

  As Matt held open the door at the back of the gym Ailsa glanced back. All eyes were on Phil as he swung his jacket around in the air and took off his tie to signal the beginning of his John Travolta routine, surrounded by an arc of applauding onlookers. When Matt followed her outside into the car park she didn’t try to stop him.

  Her colleagues had ignored the usual etiquette and cars were stationed in random huddles at untidy angles. One was even parked diagonally across the space usually reserved for Ailsa. Bizarrely this tiny demonstration of independent spirit made her feel slightly better about herself. She zigzagged through the narrow gullies between the cars away from the school buildings towards the grassy bank that marked the boundary between the school buildings and the football pitches. As long as she kept moving she would be all right.

  ‘You know, I didn’t marry Harry because I was pregnant,’ she said when they had gone far enough to talk without shouting over the music. She kept walking, remembering a psychologist on a course once explaining how research showed that wherever possible you should tackle difficult issues with men and boys while doing something physical at the same time. ‘I want you to know that. We were already getting married. We were completely in love.’

  ‘You don’t owe me any explanations, Ailsa. Really.’ He sounded out of breath. Ailsa slowed her pace until he had caught up with her.

  ‘So I’m not quite as awful as you think I am. Although it did happen the night before our wedding, which obviously doesn’t put me in a good light.’

  ‘I don’t think you’re awful. Everyone messes up. You’d be inhuman if you didn’t.’

  They bumped elbows and pulled away from each other.

  ‘But mostly they get away with it.’

  ‘It’s like that Bertolt Brecht quote; you know, the one about getting things wrong and dusting yourself down.’

  ‘ “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” ’

  ‘That’s the one.’

  ‘It was Beckett actually. Not Brecht.’

  ‘I always learn something new in your presence,’ said Matt, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. They had now crossed the car park and reached the grassy bank. She waited for him to suggest they turn back to the gym but instead he scrambled up the bank and down the other side. Ailsa followed, wincing as a stinging nettle licked the side of her calf as she sidestepped onto the grass beside him. He was still talking. ‘I used to think that you enjoyed wrong-footing people, but then I realized that you’re just anal. I’ve noticed how you do that thing where you line up your pens either parallel or horizontal to the edge of the desk.’

  Anal. Interesting use of adjective, thought Ailsa fleetingly. According to Rachel, a lot of men expected it these days. They were now both obscured from view by the bank. In front of them was a football pitch and on the far right a tall hawthorn hedge that ran parallel to the main road. Matt pointed towards the road and they continued walking, shielded from the night breeze by the bank.

  ‘I assumed you were one of those awful people who make normal people like me feel like we can never quite live up to your very high standards. You know, Ailsa, it’s so fucking good to discover that you are as flawed as the rest of us.’

  ‘I’m not sure whether any part of that is a compliment,’ she said, her feet already soaked from the longer grass. She tried to remember the last time a man had weighed up her character in this way. She was flattered by the attention and grateful to him for trying to make her feel better.

  ‘All of it and none of it,’ he joked. He was good company. She would give him that. He would have fitted well into their family.

  ‘Full moon,’ observed Ailsa, looking up at the sky and finding the North Star.

  ‘Do you know why Polaris never moves?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer, no doubt relieved that she was no longer talking about Luke’s conception. ‘It’s on a direct axis of the earth’s rotation above the north celestial pole so all the other stars appear to travel around it. The distance changes slightly each year according to the equinox. At the moment the earth moves slightly closer to it each year, which is why it appears so big. From 2078 it will start to move away again.’

  ‘I always learn something new in your company,’ said Ailsa, imitating him.

  ‘I deserved that,’ he said.

  Ailsa stared at the sky and thought of her mother. Georgia was the only one who had known that she was meeting Billy for a drink that night. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Georgia had said when Ailsa arrived home in the early hours of the morning. Nothing more. The words reverberated in her head as if she were hearing them for the first time.

  ‘I do,’ said Ailsa.

  ‘You do what?’ asked Matt. She must have spoken out loud.

  ‘He wasn’t a total stranger either.’

  ‘You’re beginning to lose me.’

  ‘Luke’s father. He was my first boyfriend. It was big love.’ She stretched out her arms to demonstrate and hit Matt’s cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Sorry. I’m really sorry,’ Ailsa said.

  ‘God,’ he groaned, rubbing the side of his face. ‘What did I do to deserve that?’

  ‘He left without saying goodbye and I hadn’t seen him for six years. He appeared the day before my wedding. We went out for a drink and he tried to persuade me to call off the whole thing and move to San Francisco with him. I needed to do it to see how I felt afterwards. To prove to myself I was making the right decision.’

  ‘And how did you feel?’

  ‘I stepped away from him on the beach and left him behind. He was the past and Harry was the present and the future.’

  They both stopped.

  ‘Aren’t you cold?’ he asked, noticing her bare arms and the jacket tied around her waist.

  ‘I don’t feel the cold. I’m completely cold-blooded, as you have discovered.’

  ‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Lucky the person who strolls through life without having any shit thrown at them.’

  ‘You are the only person in the world who knows this about me,’ Ailsa said, ‘and that is a burden for you and a burden for me.’

  ‘Then the only option is to kill me,’ said Matt, deadpan. ‘My death is the price you have to pay for your peace of mind.’ She couldn’t see his face but she could tell he was smiling. ‘I was wondering why you had lured me away from the party to an isolated corner on the outer boundary of the school grounds where a man’s body could be hidden for years without anyone finding it. Except I can’t see where you’ve concealed a weapon.’

  ‘I wasn’t luring you away from the party. You were leading me,’ said Ailsa, pretending to be affronted. He stopped walking and turned to face her.

  ‘You’re good at keeping secrets,’ he said.

  He stood completely still. His arms hung awkwardly beside his hips, fingers flexed as if he was willing his hands to stay in that position. His eyes betrayed his intent. They narrowed and roamed slowly across her body, taking in the shape of her breasts, the swell of her hips beneath the jacket around her waist and the bare shoulder blade where the sleeve of her dress had slipped down one arm. No ambiguity there. Ailsa shifted from one foot to the other and his gaze slowly returned to her face. This is all wonky, she thought, recognizing the new note through the fug of alcohol. She turned around to walk away and felt
his hand catch her own. She thought about Rachel. Then she thought about Luke. There was a hierarchy of needs in all families.

  When he was certain that she wasn’t going to pull away, he moved his fingers along her hand and traced exquisite circles on the inside of her wrist. Was this what she intended? It was too late for logic. She stood completely still. It would all be fine as long as she didn’t turn around. She closed her eyes. Every cell of her body was alert to his touch and her head was finally empty of thoughts. God, it felt so good to be with someone else after years with the same man. And when he pressed himself against her she didn’t flinch.

  They didn’t speak as they retraced their steps to the gym. But there were no words that could make good what had just happened. Ailsa knew that after a respectable amount of time (it turned out to be five months) Matt would quietly resign from Highfield. Eventually he would forgive himself just as she had.

  They had come further than she remembered. The cool night breeze and physical activity meant that by the time they reached the car park, the effects of the alcohol had worn off.

  Her car was the only one left in the car park and Matt’s bike was chained to the railings in front of the school. She looked at her watch and was spooked to see that it was almost one in the morning. Where had all that time gone?

  ‘They’ll assume you called a cab,’ said Matt. ‘Rachel and I … it’s probably run its course.’ Rachel and me. She should do an assembly on the ten most common grammatical mistakes. She cried on the way home in the car without really knowing what she was crying for except that it had something to do with loss. For the father that Luke would never know. For Rachel, who would never understand what had gone wrong with her relationship with Matt. For Matt, because he would leave too. For her mother, whom she would never see again. For her father playing bingo with a room full of strangers in Cromer.

  She climbed into bed and slid towards Harry. His bedside light was still on, and she carefully leaned over him to switch it off. He was wrapped in the duvet and she drew comfort from the solidity of the mound lying beside her.