The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  Harry turned to Ailsa. ‘I love him like my own son, Ailsa,’ he said, anticipating her thought before it had even fully formed.

  Luke shoved the stick as hard as he could and the cover flipped off. The reaction was dramatic and immediate. Ailsa’s recall of the exact sequence of events was hazy. There was an explosion and the hiss and lick of flames hitting the roof of the sweat lodge to consume the plastic sheeting. Luke disappeared through the gaping hole that appeared as if he had been gobbled up by the lodge. Ailsa felt as though she were sacrificing her children to assuage an angry Aztec god.

  ‘I’m in,’ shouted Harry, rolling up the canvas door until it was wide enough for Romy to crawl inside. Ailsa followed.

  Inside it was dark in spite of the hole where the roof had been. Ailsa looked up and saw branches swaying in the gentle evening breeze. After its initial burst of furious anger the fire had lost its energy like a toddler after a tantrum. The stones glowed red but were no longer threatening. Ailsa picked her way across the floor. It was covered with debris: burned plastic, wooden joists from the roof, and smouldering sheepskin rugs that smelled of barbecued meat.

  Romy had already reached Ben and was cradling him in her arms, picking out flakes of ash and burned plastic from his hair and his burning-red cheeks. His eyes flickered and he coughed and spluttered. Luke was lying on his side close to them. His breathing was shallow.

  ‘What the fuck,’ groaned Luke. He rolled slowly onto his back and sat up. His left arm flopped by his side like a broken wing. It took him a few seconds to realize that he couldn’t move it. His shirt was torn and Ailsa could see a reddish bruise spreading over his shoulder. His clavicle stuck out at an awkward angle. Ailsa winced.

  ‘You’ve broken your collarbone,’ she said. ‘Try to keep still.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Luke asked, his voice weak.

  ‘Granny did the same once.’

  ‘I did something bad. I needed to be reborn,’ said Ben. He coughed again.

  ‘Don’t try to speak, Grub,’ said Romy.

  ‘Am I reborn good, Romy?’ he asked more insistently.

  ‘You nearly died so you must be reborn,’ said Romy.

  ‘It’s all my fault,’ whispered Ben. ‘I didn’t realize. I’m sorry. I wanted to make Sweat Lodge II.’

  We all have darkness and light within us and are in control of neither, thought Ailsa as she gathered her children to her. She remembered the evening her mother tried to get her father to stop drinking by pouring every bottle of alcohol down the sink, even the cooking wine, and their tussle over a bottle of whisky that Adam refused to relinquish. Ailsa and Rachel had come into the room just as their father shoved Georgia to the kitchen floor. Ailsa could recall the exact noise of her mother’s collarbone breaking as it hit the hard stone floor and the smell of the pool of whisky where she lay. She remembered the expression of horrified awe on Rachel’s face when the ambulance man asked Ailsa what had happened and she explained that their mother had slipped over. He didn’t believe her but she was adamant. It was the last time Adam drank until Georgia died. When Rachel asked Ailsa later that night why she had lied, she explained that she was protecting their future, without really understanding what exactly it was that she wanted to protect. Now finally she understood.

  20

  Mum has given me the last word. I appreciate that. I think after six months she’s beginning to trust my judgement again. And she gets that after so much has been said about me it’s important I find my own voice. To define myself in relation to what has happened, if you like. Because how other people see me has an impact on how I see myself. I am not the person that I was before all this happened. As the therapist has pointed out, I have to ‘reconstruct and reinforce the foundations of self to deflect the glare of other people’s judgement’. She likes analogies from the construction industry.

  I told her that I think therapy reinforces the ego and that perhaps what everyone needs to do is see the world from other people’s perspective a bit more. Get away from the L’Oreal ‘because I’m worth it’ point of view. She said my opinion was refreshing. But I knew she didn’t agree. After all she was being paid to promote the ego. Mine specifically. And she had a Twitter account. I explained to her how self-disclosure activates the mesolimbic dopamine pathway in the brain, the same part that gets hijacked by addiction, but she just nodded and gave one of her Sphinx-like smiles.

  I know lots of people were worried that I was a suicide risk. Do you ever consider harming yourself? the therapist asked one month into my treatment. Are you asking if I have visions of suicidal ideation? I responded. She looked a little taken aback. Absolutely not, I lied. Truth be told, I did consider that option as the simplest way out of the mess that I had created, but I wasn’t about to share this with her because she would turn it over in such relentless detail that she actually might provoke me to slit my wrists. She was like a dog with a bone if you threw her something like that. She had an overwhelming urge to make connections where there were none. That’s the problem with the instinctive approach.

  She was obsessed with the way I had appropriated the words from one of the messages sent by Dad’s girlfriend to him, for example. If you mention Oedipus I will leave the room and never come back, I warned her. I might have some kooky sexual fantasies now and again but none of them involve my dad. I explained that it was my way of getting back at him. The only person I possibly wanted to have sex with back then was Jay. Then Marley. Especially Marley. Still Marley.

  She brought up the subject of Dad’s infidelity every couple of weeks. I tried to tell her that the thing with Jay had already started when I found out about Dad and the other woman. But this was an inconvenient truth that didn’t fit with the narrative in her head. She didn’t accuse me of confabulation but I knew that was what she was thinking. I acknowledged that sex and food are natural rewards for human beings and Dad had his needs. I regretted he hadn’t been able to resist the itch, because it caused so much pain to Mum and was humiliating for them both. Moreover I thought that the text exchanges between Dad and that woman were pathological. No one wants to think about the mechanics of their parents having sex with each other, let alone other people, I said, adding that I hoped we could move on from this. Mum told me that she knew about the texts but not that Dad had kept them.

  ‘Why would he do that?’ I asked. ‘Why would he give up his job, move house and leave London as a sign of his commitment to you but keep the messages?’

  ‘Sometimes people find it difficult to let go of the past,’ she said carefully. ‘Relationships are complicated.’

  The only lie I consciously told the therapist was about the self-harm issue. I admit I did find some online discussion groups on how to commit suicide but they were full of people who were way unhappier than me, including a lot of goths, and their empirical evidence was questionable. I mean, you can’t ask someone who has killed themselves if their methodology is the best, can you? My heart wasn’t in it. I couldn’t do it to my family. Call it ego, but I just didn’t feel they would be better off without me. I knew that as long as I was around, Mum and Dad couldn’t split up. They had to stay together to mend me.

  It was Ben who really put a brake on my plan. I absolutely couldn’t abandon him. Ben blamed himself for what had happened more than anyone else. He had gone to the sweat lodge the morning after the party and cried when he saw the floor he had helped to build so scratched and stained. He had found Jay’s phone on top of the secret Coca-Cola stash in the lining of the sweat lodge, where Jay had hidden it when he was dancing. The phone wasn’t even locked. Ben watched the beginning of the video, and when he recognized the sweat lodge he uploaded it onto Wolf and Loveday’s website because he thought it was a good way of promoting their healing retreats. There was a strange logic to his thinking. The rest is history, except of course there is no such thing as history on the Internet.

  Mum wanted Ben to see the therapist. Dad and I talked her out of it. Ben hadn’t even watched it
to the end. What everyone needed to do was move on.

  The week after the sweat lodge burned down Ben took all his electronic games and Mum’s old iPod Touch into the garden and smashed them with a hammer. ‘James Bond never leaves any trace of himself,’ he told me afterwards. He had gone back to his world of espionage, which we all saw as a positive sign. Ben might truly be one of the few children in the world to grow up without a digital footprint.

  Things between Luke and me are still a little awkward. I understand. He got a lot of shit from his friends, and that was stressful to deal with. He’s left home now and gone to university to do English and Film Studies. When he comes home he no longer calls me Romeo and doesn’t want to wrestle any more. Last time he came back he brought home a girlfriend, and I could tell from the way she looked at me that she knew. I had to accept that this would always define me.

  Sometimes I think what has really been lost is my closeness with Luke. The distance seems unbridgeable.

  Every generation thinks it is the first one to have sex. This is what Wolf said to break the silence that followed Jay’s account of what had happened, the day the sweat lodge burned down. Sex began in 1963 and all that, Mum chipped in. Philip Larkin, she added when Wolf and Loveday looked baffled. She was always good at finding a quote to illustrate a point. Wolf tried to sum up his position. Their son, he said, putting one hand in Loveday’s and the other on Jay’s shoulder, was engaged in a classic rebellion against his parents’ view of the world. Jay shook his head and said he had a problem that was way bigger than any of them and that he needed help. After all, his father had addiction issues too. He acknowledged that I had helped him reach this conclusion. No one was grateful for my input. Least of all Mum and Dad.

  The week following the scandal Mum and Dad were grief-stricken. They talked about loss so much that at one point I wondered if I had died. But in Wolf and Loveday’s sitting room that day I felt their anger for the first time. Reckless. Naïve. Arrogant. Stupid. These were some of the adjectives aimed at me specifically. I realized that it had been easier for them to see me as a victim with Jay playing the role of aggressor than it was to see me as the protagonist of my downfall. I pointed out this contradiction to them.

  I said that despite the chapter in Dad’s book arguing that there is little gender difference when it comes to desire, they still bought into the idea that female sexuality was something that needed to be constrained. ‘You didn’t look like a woman celebrating her own sexuality,’ said Mum when I tried to explain this. She said that our sexuality had been subverted by Internet porn and that far from liberating women it had subjugated female desire and made men focus only on their own pleasure. It had actually pushed men and women apart. For the first time she conceded that Wolf and Loveday’s sex therapy might have a point. Dad said that it was an unprecedented social experiment on a massive scale and that he had some ideas for a couple of research projects.

  I agreed with all this. I argued that women were given the impression that we were sexually empowered and presented with a world of unlimited sexual boundaries, but if we crossed them we got slated. I pointed out how even in novels women were punished for sexual subversion: Hester Prynne, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary.

  They both agreed with me. Finally we had reached consensus. But, as Mum said, understanding the complexity of the situation gave no clues to its resolution.

  I took the decision to go back to school the week after the fire. Although the fact that Jay hadn’t betrayed me made things more difficult for my parents, it definitely made things better for me and helped to rouse me from my slump.

  I had to face the world again. Mum was against the idea. I think she wanted me to stay cocooned at home for ever to protect me. I reminded her of her own belief in the inviolability of routine and structure, and she gave a hollow laugh. After everything that had happened she didn’t really trust her own laughter.

  The school took a hard line on the online bullying, especially the slut-shaming element. In Mum’s temporary absence Mrs Arnold had done me a big favour by declaring that anyone caught with the video on their phone or posting comments online would face immediate suspension. I stopped using all social media so I couldn’t see what was being said. Becca joked that I was becoming Amish.

  Jay and I took the decision to go into school together and to hang out with each other to present a united front. Mum couldn’t understand this. Her urge was still to blame him for what had happened. She accused him of deviancy. I pointed out that the adults who were so quick to judge the situation needed to take some responsibility for wilfully ignoring the fact that a generation of sexually inexperienced teenagers was using the Internet as their main source of sex education, only for the adults to berate them when it all went wrong. It was difficult for Mum. No one wants their child to be the one who forces change because of a bad experience. It involves too much suffering. Parents are essentially conservative.

  Dad still tries to argue that our brain defines who we are. But now I know Dad is only partly right. What really defines who I am is my digital profile. Because it won’t surprise you to know the video didn’t go away. It popped up over and over again like Whack-a-Mole. Every time it was taken down from one website it appeared on another. Mr Harvey made it his personal mission to keep it at bay and helped me with my application to medical school, even though by then he was no longer at Highfield.

  When people ask me what I have learned from my experience I tell them that it is a lie that the truth sets you free. What really sets you free is other people not knowing your shit. No one tells you the value of privacy, because everyone is interested in knowing your business. Our data is a valuable commodity. But everyone needs a place to retreat to when the going gets rough.

  I fired the therapist this week. She wanted to talk about early-attachment issues with my mother and whether the fact that she hadn’t breastfed me might have triggered an oral fixation. I know that everyone has to earn a living and she was trying to do her job, but I was getting fed up with the way she kept trying to blame my parents for what had happened.

  I told her that my genetic inheritance and early environment undoubtedly had an effect on my brain development and contributed to my decision-making process on the day I decided to make the film for Jay. But that was the extent to which Mum and Dad were involved.

  I said that Mum said the least but understood the most. The therapist looked interested, so I explained how Mum compared relationships to the reactivity series and said that some combinations were simply more destructive than others and I would learn when to look away.

  I explained to the therapist about research that Dad had done showing how several seconds before we consciously make a decision in the brain the outcome can be predicted from its unconscious activity. And how my decision was down to the cumulative build-up of firing neurons which tipped the balance towards my fatally flawed choice.

  It seemed to me that taking responsibility for what had happened was the only way I could move forward. Because one thing we all agreed on was the possibility of renewal.

  Acknowledgements

  I am very grateful to my editor Maxine Hitchcock for her impeccable editorial advice, and to the rest of the team at Penguin for their encouragement and ideas, especially Sarah Arratoon, Francesca Russell and Lydia Good. I would like to say a big thank you to Jonny Geller for his wise counsel and excellent observations and also to Kirsten Foster at Curtis Brown.

  A number of people helped with research. I am very grateful to Professor Sarah-Jayne Blakemore at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, Dr Bettina Hohnen, John Woods at London’s Portman Clinic, Kelly Alleyne at CEOP, and the head teachers who gave up their time to speak to me.

  Thanks to Helen Bairamian, Phil Robertson, Helen Townshend and Henry Tricks for reading the first draft and for being there at the difficult moments. Big debt of gratitude to Rachel and Eve Anthony, Alfie Hardman and Michelle Glover for all their comments.

&n
bsp; To gain insight into the world of neuroscience I read the following excellent books: We Are Our Brains: From the Womb to Alzheimer’s by Dick Swaab, The Brain That Changes Itself by Norman Doidge and Neuroscience: Exploring the Brain by Mark F. Bear and Barry W. Connors.

  As always, thanks to Ed and our children for simultaneously enduring and encouraging.

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  MICHAEL JOSEPH

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  Michael Joseph is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.

  First published 2015

  Copyright © Fiona Neill, 2015

  Cover images: girl © Mark Owen/Trevillion Images; background © Terry Bridgood/Trevillion images

  The moral right of the author has been asserted

  ISBN: 978-0-141-96785-1