The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  Everything was so broken. I had lost Jay. I had lost Marnie. I had lost Dad. I had cried so much the past few days my eyes were already heavy-lidded, but still the tears came and once they had started they didn’t stop. Mum and Dad put their arms around me and we all cried together.

  ‘Did he force you to do this? Did he offer to buy you something or promise to be your boyfriend if you did this to him?’ Dad sobbed. ‘Was it his idea?’ I knew he wanted the answers to be yes, in part because it would let him off the hook, but also because if I had been forced to do this then I was a victim and people would feel sorry for me. I knew right away that while most people would consider Jay to be a player, I would for ever be a slut. That was the way of the Internet. That was the way of the world.

  The phone on Mum’s desk rang.

  ‘Don’t get it,’ Dad advised. ‘Leave it.’ Mum ignored him and picked up the handset. She turned her back and walked over to the window, where she had a terse conversation with the person on the other end of the line. She stared out of the window and I followed her sight line to the Biology classroom on the other side of the playground, where Mr Harvey was staring back at her.

  ‘Who was that?’ Dad asked.

  ‘Chair of the board of governors asking if I wanted to take some time off until this is all sorted out. He said Mrs Arnold had called him and suggested that I might appreciate some family time.’ Mum gave a hollow laugh.

  ‘So what did you say?’

  ‘I said that I thought I could manage the situation better from school.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘He said he was meeting the board of governors tonight to define their strategy. I told him that I would be there, and he said it would be better if I didn’t come and that Mrs Arnold could keep me posted on what was discussed.’

  I went to my locker to collect my schoolbooks. Mum offered to go with me but I refused so she sent for Becca. Becca said that the Biology class had disintegrated after I left and that Olivia Khan had explained about the video to her. She had even offered to show Becca a copy that she had downloaded onto her phone. Becca refused. I could tell that she felt let down. She had stuck her neck out for me over what had happened at the party and now there was this.

  ‘I can’t believe Jay has done this to me,’ I said.

  ‘If you had consulted me I would have told you it was a crap idea to make a sex tape,’ she said flatly.

  When I reached my locker I could see that someone had scrawled SLUT in big lipstick letters on the door. Marnie, I guessed. Then I remembered that she hadn’t come to school that week. I started to feel afraid.

  ‘Ignore it,’ whispered Becca, conscious that everyone was watching us. She looked around nervously. I could feel that she wanted me to leave as quickly as possible. I was a liability.

  ‘Attention whore,’ a girl I didn’t know whispered in my ear as I walked by.

  ‘Fuck off,’ Becca told her.

  ‘Relax, just jokes,’ the girl laughed.

  I decided to go through the gym to meet Mum and Dad in the car park because it meant I didn’t have to walk down the corridor past anyone else. On the way through I bumped into Mr Harvey coming the other way. I kept my eyes down, staring at my feet as I walked along the painted line that marked the boundary of the netball court.

  ‘Romy,’ he said, his voice echoing around the gym. I am a conformist person so I immediately stood stock-still. He fidgeted madly, putting his hands in and out of his pockets and fiddling with a biro, manically pressing the end in and out.

  ‘Sometimes when the worst thing that could happen to you happens, it makes you a stronger person.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, my voice a low whisper. ‘But what happens if it doesn’t?’

  I can’t recall much of the journey home. I remember leaning my forehead against the window and enjoying the sensation of the cold glass and the blurry outline of the hedgerows as we sped down country lanes. My phone kept buzzing with messages. Mum said she would take care of them and I gladly handed it over to her because I knew they would be venomous.

  Mum and Dad sat in the front of the car. They hardly spoke. At one point Dad turned towards Mum and I could see silent tears pouring down his cheeks. Over the past month since I had found his phone with the messages I had longed to hurt him so much that I made him cry, but this wasn’t the way I had wanted it to happen. I wanted him to cry for what he’d done, not what I’d done.

  ‘Please stop, Harry,’ Mum pleaded. ‘We need to work out what to do.’

  ‘It’s the loss of innocence in our relationship,’ Dad kept saying. I realized he saw a causal effect between my discovery of his phone with the disgusting messages and the video. ‘I can’t bear it.’

  17

  Ailsa spent the next couple of days in Harry’s office compulsively watching the video over and over again. She slowed it down, sped it up, and examined it frame by frame. She even played it in black and white. It was the scabby knee that got her every time: its childish innocence juxtaposed with the very adult scene taking place centre stage. She touched Romy’s knee on screen and cried as she remembered the times she had stuck a plaster on similar injuries when Romy was little, feeling an overwhelming sense of impotence in the face of this current crisis.

  Not that there wasn’t a lot of activity. People called all the time. A friend from London phoned to say that she thought Ailsa should know her son had spotted it online. Rachel’s ex-boyfriend Budgie did the same. She was touched by their kindness. Mrs Arnold phoned at least twice a day. She briefed Ailsa on a conversation with Marnie and Becca. Apparently (long emphasis on apparently), Romy and Jay had had a fight at the party. ‘I know,’ Ailsa lied. Her deputy warned Ailsa that Romy might be a suicide risk and it sounded like a rebuke. Then she said she had called an assembly to warn that any student caught with the film on their phone would face immediate expulsion. ‘In future, please can you consult me before making a decision like this,’ Ailsa had asked. Mrs Arnold said that the head of the board of governors had endorsed the idea.

  Matt updated her on his efforts to track down where the video was being shown and who had agreed to take it down. Did he have her permission to use a credit card to access pay-to-view websites? he asked in an email. Yes, she emailed back. Among the long list of missed calls on her phone at least a dozen were from him.

  Am I condemned to voicemail? he asked in a text.

  Yes. It’s better that way, Ailsa responded, and deleted the text.

  Organizations that Ailsa never imagined she would be personally involved with swung into action: the Child Exploitation and Online Protection Agency, Internet Watch, Stop Bullying UK. Apparently it helped that they could prove that Romy was under eighteen. If not, websites weren’t obliged to do anything. Matt explained that if sites showing the video were registered in the EU it was easier to get them to take it down than those registered in Vietnam. Vietnam, Harry had repeated over and over again, until Ailsa begged him to stop. The scale and speed of its spread was terrifying. It was like a sci-fi film where the main character was a virus, Rachel had said when Ailsa had called her to explain what had happened.

  Ailsa walked towards the glass door that led into the garden and stared up at the vast expanse of sky overhead and for the first time in her life found it oppressive. The video was out there. It was in the earth’s atmosphere. It was uncontainable. She went back to the computer, pressed play, and began a forensic sweep of the background. It was frustratingly sparse: just a few candles on a shelf and a pile of rubbish on a rough wooden floor. At this point Harry came into the basement to plead with her to stop and come upstairs to see Luke and Ben. But she couldn’t. He tried a new tack.

  ‘You need to go and see your father. He keeps calling to ask where you are.’

  ‘Call Rach.’

  ‘Why are you doing this? How is it going to help?’ He leaned over her shoulder and angrily pressed the pause button before she could stop him.

  ‘I’m looking for clues.’
r />   ‘Clues to what?’

  ‘I want to piece everything together. So that I can understand.’ She spoke slowly, her tone deliberately calm so that he would leave her alone.

  ‘You’re punishing yourself. It’s torture enough without watching it on a loop.’

  ‘I deserve to be punished,’ said Ailsa.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘For not protecting her. For not knowing what she was up to. For being distracted by other things. A few weeks ago … I think she tried to start a conversation …’

  Harry kneeled down on one knee and kneaded Ailsa’s hands with his fingers.

  ‘Look at me, Ailsa. It’s not your fault. How could you warn her about something you didn’t know about? And if you think you’ll develop immunity by watching it on a loop, I can tell you that’s not the way that it works.’

  Harry warned her that there was evidence to suggest moving images were stored in a different part of the brain from photographs and were more difficult to forget. He began a lengthy explanation of the structure of the hypothalamus and its role in visual memory, using horror films as an example of visual sequences that can stay with you for ever.

  ‘I’m not interested in your science any more, Harry,’ said Ailsa sharply, pulling her hands away from his. ‘It doesn’t help me feel anything differently and it won’t resolve anything.’ Then she felt bad because Harry was as broken as she was. It was just that their coping mechanisms were incompatible. She wanted to face it full on. He wanted to retreat into academia. There was little comfort in the familiarity of this dynamic.

  Harry shook his head, unable to speak. They were both exhausted. For three nights they had hardly slept. Ben, always sensitive to changes in mood, had started climbing into bed with them in the early hours of the morning. He asked why Ailsa wasn’t eating anything and anxiously reminded her that in the book Fattypuffs and Thinifers the Thinifers were always more miserable.

  When they managed to drift off, there was always that lurch between sleep and wakefulness when they remembered what had happened. ‘No one has died,’ Harry had whispered to Ailsa over Ben’s sleeping body, as they tried to console each other.

  It felt like death, Ailsa had said. The shock, the sense of loss, the phone calls offering commiseration when there was none. It was the death of innocence. The Internet has added to our knowledge but taken away our innocence.

  Hoping Harry would leave her alone, Ailsa explained that she was looking for evidence to prove that the boy was Jay. She showed him a sequence where the chewed end of a scrawny school tie fluttered past Romy’s open mouth. Conclusive evidence it was another Highfield student, Ailsa insisted, although she remained convinced it hadn’t been filmed on school grounds.

  She would call the head of the board of governors to tell him. He would be pleased because it let the school off the hook. He was beginning to bypass Ailsa and rely too heavily on Mrs Arnold. ‘How could websites post a film of children in school uniform?’ she questioned Harry.

  ‘They’re not big on morality.’ His irony irritated her because it was a defence mechanism. Harry pointed out that school uniform was a big theme in porn culture. And that this very detail might account for the terrifying speed at which the video had spread from Luckmore around the globe. The first journalists had called asking about a sex scandal at the school only minutes before Romy came into Ailsa’s office.

  ‘If she admits it’s him, we can do something about it. He can be punished.’

  ‘You really think that would help the situation?’

  ‘It would take the spotlight off her. And it would send a strong message to other boys who are tempted to post images of their girlfriends.’

  ‘It won’t get rid of it,’ said Harry. ‘It’s out there.’ He sounded defeated.

  ‘Why should Romy’s life be in tatters and he get away with it scot-free?’ asked Ailsa, frightened by his lack of fight.

  ‘I’m with you, I’m with you,’ said Harry, trying to soothe her. ‘I can’t understand why he did this to her. I thought he was a pretty good kid. A bit flaky. But not vindictive.’

  ‘That family … they’re bad news,’ said Ailsa. ‘No moral compass. I tried to warn you …’

  ‘You don’t know for sure that it’s him in the video.’ Neither of them called Jay by his name any more.

  ‘Who else could it be?’

  ‘His brother?’

  ‘Remember Stuart Tovey was behind the Facebook bullying. He has the technical expertise.’

  ‘It doesn’t look like him but maybe he was involved.’

  There were so many unanswered questions. They had tried to talk to Romy but she didn’t want to discuss anything and wouldn’t confirm the boy’s identity. She had spent the best part of two days upstairs in her bedroom, refusing to go to school, get dressed or come down for meals. She claimed to be studying, but when Ailsa had gone up earlier to collect the plate of lamb tagine that Harry had lovingly made, her Biology textbook was open on the same page and the food untouched. Romy had shut down.

  Ben had gone up to see her as soon as he got home from school earlier that evening and had come back down to the kitchen to report that she was in the same position as when he had left her in the morning, lying on her side on the bed, hugging a pillow to her chest. He had opened the curtains when he said goodbye before school and they were closed when he came home so Romy must have got up at least once, he said hopefully. He wondered why she couldn’t speak.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he had asked Ailsa. ‘Is Romy ill? Is she in trouble?’

  ‘Someone at school has done something bad to her,’ said Harry, fumbling for the right words.

  ‘So why is she the one not going to school?’

  ‘The bit at the end, where she turns to the camera and speaks … where you see for the first time that it really is Romy …’ Ailsa’s voice broke. She had frozen the screen on this frame. Harry put up his hand and fixed his gaze on the photographs on the wall. She noticed his hand was shaking. He found this part too disturbing. ‘Do you think she’s been watching porn? Apparently some girls do that nowadays, you know. Or do you think he told her to say that? It doesn’t sound like Romy.’

  The colour drained from Harry’s face until he was almost grey. His reaction reminded her too much of the moment when he had first admitted to having an affair. Ailsa looked away and found herself staring at the same montage of photos in the frame on the wall behind the computer. In the bottom corner she noticed that Harry had been excised from one of her favourite photos of him and Romy, playing Operation in the sitting room of their old house in London. Ailsa frowned.

  ‘Why would she do this, Harry?’

  ‘Throughout history teenagers have always fucked up,’ he said.

  ‘Please. Not the line about Ferrari engines and crap brakes,’ Ailsa said wearily. She needed more from him.

  ‘Hear me out. What I’m trying to say is they used to be able to fuck up in private, and in time their mistakes were forgotten and everyone moved on. That’s the big difference. Haven’t you made mistakes and got away with them? Haven’t we both?’

  ‘We were worrying about the wrong child,’ said Ailsa quietly. They both gazed at the computer screen in silence. ‘I always thought it would be Luke who would do something like this. Not Romy.’

  ‘Thanks for that vote of confidence,’ said Luke, who had come into the office without them noticing and was now standing behind the swivel chair. He glanced at the frozen image of Romy’s face turned towards the camera and quickly turned away.

  ‘Do you understand what’s happened, Luke?’ Ailsa asked him, suddenly aware that she hadn’t really taken him into account since the scandal broke. She felt a hot new stab of guilt as she realized they hadn’t considered Luke’s feelings or the fact that as the only remaining member of the family at Highfield he would be absorbing all the heat of other people’s scrutiny.

  ‘Of course I do,’ he said angrily. ‘It’s a pretty hot subject. Which you would apprecia
te if you went in to work.’

  ‘I’m not allowed to go in,’ she said flatly.

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘The head of the board of governors.’

  ‘Ignore him,’ Luke said angrily. ‘You need to fight this.’

  ‘How is it? Being at school. Is it all right for you, Luke?’ Harry asked. It was the right question. Harry was good at finding the right words.

  ‘Well, thanks for asking, Dad, because actually it’s shit listening to a bunch of wankers calling your sister a whore and offering you money for an introduction. It’s pretty much out of control. I hope you’ve taken away her phone because some arsehole has posted her number at the end of the video and it’s got thousands of hits. Probably a million by now.’

  Ailsa and Harry were too appalled to speak.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ Harry asked finally, flicking the screen.

  ‘Why the fuck would I want to watch my sister give some bell end a blow job?’ Luke asked. ‘That would be sick.’ Ailsa was grateful for his uncomplicated honesty. ‘You know, it could be worse, Mum,’ said Luke.

  ‘How exactly?’ said Harry, impatient because this was Luke’s stock response to any problem and one that Ben had adopted.

  ‘It could have been something less vanilla …’

  ‘How so?’ asked Harry, looking at Luke to enlighten him.

  ‘You know,’ said Luke, shifting uncomfortably from one foot to another, staring at the floor. ‘Other sexual acts.’

  ‘For example?’

  ‘Oral sex is pretty mainstream compared to most of what you see on the Internet.’

  ‘Do you know who the boy is?’ Ailsa asked, feeling completely out of her depth.

  Luke shook his head in disbelief. ‘Are you for real?’

  He leaned towards the computer screen and contemptuously tapped the bottom right-hand corner with his index finger. ‘Don’t you recognize the location? Those stones in the background are the ones Ben says are his ancestors.’