The Good Girl (27 page)

Ailsa stared at the pen revolving between his fingers. This was one of the things she liked about being a head teacher. The range of problems. The ability to make a difference in delicate situations. No two days were ever the same.

‘There’s a statistic of course,’ he continued. ‘Around 4 per cent of children are brought up by a father who is genetically unrelated to them. But there’s biological truth and there’s emotional truth, isn’t there? Your father is the person who brings you up.’

In
the seconds before she understood why he was telling her this Ailsa thought about everything she had to do. Put up a blind in Romy’s room, buy cat food, make a list of the furniture her father could take to the sheltered accommodation in Cromer if he agreed to stay, book Luke’s driving test.

‘So who is the child?’ Ailsa asked, because the conversation needed to be continued and Matt was clearly at a loss for words. But of course she knew already.

‘Luke,’ he said. ‘But if Luke is O, one of his parents has to be O too. And since it’s not you or Harry it would have to be another man. There could be a mistake. His blood sample could have been muddled up with someone else’s …’ He drifted off.

Ailsa sat completely still. Too many emotions were betrayed through gestures.

‘You’re right, there must be a mistake,’ said Ailsa.

‘I’ll mark Luke down as AB, shall I?’ he asked, nodding furiously, relieved that the problem had been resolved so swiftly.

‘Yes, please,’ said Ailsa, her voice taut. She wasn’t good at accepting kindness. ‘And if you could keep this to yourself I would obviously be very grateful. My sister doesn’t need to know.’

‘Absolutely,’ he said, getting up. ‘Absolutely.’

Things I have never done to impress a boy. Lesbian-kissed a girl. Sent a naked selfie. Worn a push-up bra. For the record, I have also never got so drunk that I was sick, or taken a legal high – or an illegal one for that matter. I say this because there has been a lot of speculation about my character, mostly by people who have never met me. I wasn’t trying to reinvent myself. Nor was I an unhappy, insecure attention-seeker. I didn’t see myself as a skank or a slut, although it seems a lot of other people do. I understand that people want to find reasons for what happened because they don’t want to think it could happen to their own child. I get that. It’s human nature.

‘I’m so relieved Marnie’s so sensible and talks to me about everything,’ her mother told Mum a couple of months after the scandal, when she finally decided I wasn’t a corrupting influence and allowed Marnie to come to my house again. ‘Without communication there is nothing.’ Sometimes Marnie’s mum reminded me of Aunt Rachel. She said exactly what was on her mind at all times. Emotional honesty was her religion. But no one dared say what they really thought to her. Marnie rolled her eyes apologetically.

Afterwards
I told Mum that Marnie most definitely hadn’t told her mum that a) she had taken the morning-after pill after sleeping with Stuart Tovey, b) that he had dumped her when she thought she was pregnant, and c) she had given him a blow job to persuade him to go out with her again.

I read my therapist’s notes. She left them on the desk when she went to close a blind and I took issue with the fact that I was ‘a female victim of the ever-pervasive male porn industry that permeates contemporary culture’, because if I was a victim then so was Jay. My real mistake was to believe in the possibility of change, which makes me nothing more reckless than an optimist. And optimism isn’t a gender issue, it’s a brain issue. Marnie and Becca agreed with me that the only issue open to gender analysis was perhaps the more female desire to save someone.

I’m not saying it wasn’t a total mistake. A big error of judgement. A catastrophic series of events that will, as so many people said to me, probably hang over me like a dark cloud for the rest of my life (there were a lot of clichés flung around). But it was done with love and in good faith. And it was my idea. That was one of the things that everyone found hardest to accept. Especially Mum.

Anyway, a few days after I discovered the phone in Dad’s office, I distracted myself by poring over the pages on addiction that he had photocopied from textbooks and a research paper that he had dug out, ‘Is there a
common molecular pathway for addiction?’ Unfortunately I didn’t get to the end of this one so I didn’t read the paragraph about how moderation is impossible for addicts and their only hope of recovery is total abstinence.

One afternoon not long after school had started, when Mum was still at work, I sat with Dad at the kitchen table and he asked me to run through any questions that I had for him. He was anxious to help and patient with my queries. I don’t know if this was because he had found the mutilated SIM card in his briefcase and was trying to forge some kind of messed-up alliance with me so that I wouldn’t say anything to Mum. Or if it reminded him of the good old days when we used to play Operation together.

It gave me the opportunity to observe without him feeling my scrutiny. I stared into his dark eyes and decided they weren’t the windows of the soul because his were empty. I considered how his eyes were also my eyes and whether this meant that I had no soul either.

I thought about asking him how he could have betrayed Mum like that. But instead I heard myself ask whether all addictions are the same. He started explaining how addiction studies show reduced cellular activity in the orbitofrontal cortex, a brain area responsible for judgement and control. He got very excited about research into cocaine addiction and overeating that showed the volume of that part of the brain actually shrank.

‘Addiction
causes anatomical changes to the brain. It hijacks the normal pleasure reward pathways by blunting the brain’s response to dopamine.’

I wondered if he had applied this theory to himself. There were thousands of text messages on that phone.

‘Do you think it’s possible for someone to become addicted to watching Internet porn?’ I asked. To his credit, he didn’t look startled by the question.

‘Actually the
American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
has just added hypersexual disorder to its list, and that includes compulsive pornography use. But it will be addictive for some but not everyone. You have to take into account environmental stressors, personality, age of onset, genetic inheritance. If it blunts the response to normal sexual stimuli and affects someone’s normal hierarchy of sexual needs then it’s a problem and will affect pair bonding.’ He had gone into lecture mode.

He started explaining how all addicts compulsively seek out their addiction despite the negative consequences, so they need higher and higher levels of stimulation to feel satisfied. ‘If they can’t consummate the addictive act, they suffer from withdrawal.’

He talked about the recent discovery of a protein over-expressed in the brain of all addicts from compulsive eaters to alcoholics, druggies and long-distance runners. And how teenage addicts produce higher quantities of it and this is what makes adolescents more vulnerable to addictions. ‘Delta FosB, Romy. Doesn’t it
sound like a character from
Dr Who
?’ He was so excited. He was never happier than when talking about his work. And I admit I longed for that time just three days earlier when I was just as happy discussing it with him.

More than anything, I wondered how it was possible to live alongside someone like Dad for so many years without ever really knowing him. I wondered whether he had been so immersed in researching adolescence that he had regressed and become a teenager again. Like that
Benjamin Button
film, where the Brad Pitt character gets younger and younger instead of older. I was still shocked by the language Dad had used in his texts to the woman. It sounds incredible but I had never heard him really swear. He recently took away Luke’s mobile phone for a week when Mr Harvey overheard him call someone a wanker. His hypocrisy about everything disgusted me. When he touched me on the arm to check I was still listening, I shrank back. He looked hurt but didn’t say anything.

‘This will all really help with your application to medical school.’ He smiled.
I hate you. I hate you. I hate you.
It wasn’t original but there was conviction in my feelings. ‘They love it when you can show off a personal interest in something esoteric.’ Then I hated him even more for not noticing there was anything wrong with me.

‘I’ve decided not to apply. Didn’t Mum tell you?’ I responded, knowing that this was the most hurtful thing I could say to him. The most hurtful thing I could
do
to
him occurred to me later. I watched his face and took pleasure in the way it crumpled.

‘Why? You seemed so certain. You’ve worked so hard to get this far.’

‘Change of heart.’ I shrugged.

‘So what are you going to do instead?’ His tone was almost pleading. He bowed his head and took a deep breath. I could see his bald patch, and what he’d done seemed even more pathetic.

‘Take a year out. Go travelling. Maybe move to Ibiza with Jay for a while so I can work things out.’ For a science student I was proving surprisingly imaginative.

‘So things are serious between you two, are they?’ he asked without losing his cool.

‘Very. He’s great. A good person.’

‘What does he want to do with his life? Because I don’t sense much drive there. I know we live in the age of gender equality but you don’t want to end up carrying the weight of someone else’s inadequacy. It never works.’

‘He’s really good at music,’ I said defensively. ‘And he’s a really good person. He’d never do anything to hurt another human being. Especially someone he loves. He’s honest and trustworthy. There’s a lot to be said for that.’

‘Another thing I should tell you about adolescent boys, Romy: they think about sex ninety times a day and almost every time it’s with a different woman. They are literally drowning in testosterone.’

I almost laughed. At the peak of Jay’s porn affliction,
as I preferred to call it, he estimated that he had seen more than 500 vaginas before he even got out of bed in the morning. Because the browsing part of the endeavour took longer and longer as he tried to find something new. Dad knew nothing. He was nothing.

‘Romy, I understand you don’t want to take advice from me, but one thing I’ve learned is that if the wind is blowing in your direction you should always take advantage. It’s very competitive to get into medical school and they’re looking for 100 per cent commitment.’

‘And mine is running at about 60 per cent,’ I told him.

‘Don’t let that boy get in the way of your future,’ he warned.

Like the way you let that girl in the way of ours
, I thought to myself bitterly.

Of course I had thought about telling Mum about my discovery. I had gone downstairs once since that afternoon to check that the phone was in its box, hoping that I had imagined the whole thing. I took it out, turned it over in my hand a couple of times but didn’t switch it on. It would have taken less than a couple of minutes to bring it upstairs and hand it over to Mum. But I couldn’t do it to her. It would break her heart. She had been through so much the previous year and had put so much effort into keeping our family together. I understood this now. I remembered overhearing her tell Rachel that staying married requires a lot more courage than getting divorced, and for the first time it made sense.

And if I’m completely honest, there was a more
selfish reason too. This phone and the messages it contained would surely end her marriage to Dad. They would get divorced, sell the house, and I wouldn’t be able to live next door to Jay any more. We would probably end up in my grandparents’ house on the coast, where there were more boats than cars.

What happened next was my idea. Jay didn’t make me do it. I can’t say that enough times. That same week we caught the bus back to Luckmore together. It must have been the end of February because there were daffodils poking through the hedges and it was no longer dark when we walked home.

Something Dad said had stuck in my mind. It was about how the reward system in the brain worked in the same way for healthy human functions, like reproduction and eating, as it did for unhealthy ones. Jay’s brain needed to find a new way of getting the same high.

I thought of Loveday’s explanation of the homeopathic principle of treating like with like. And the principle of vaccination, where you gave a tiny dose of disease to create immunity. I was his cure. It was a light-bulb moment.

‘I have a plan.’

‘That sounds good. I like your plans. Please elaborate.’

‘It’s more of an idea really.’

‘I like your ideas. I love everything about you.’

‘Even my forehead?’

‘Especially your forehead.’ He ran three fingers back and forth from one temple to the other and I closed my
eyes in pleasure. He leaned towards me and kissed me on the lips. His tongue pressed against my mouth. It was the first time that he had ever kissed me in public and I could hear Stuart and Marley and other people from school whistling and shouting from the back of the bus. I didn’t care. I wanted everyone to know that we were together because it somehow ironed out the kinks a little and I wanted to let a little light in on the darkness. Because to be honest I was getting worried about the pathways that might be forming in my own brain.
Neurons that fire together wire together
. I couldn’t get Dad’s favourite statement out of my head. Maybe I would never be able to have straightforward sex. Maybe I had caught his disease. Maybe I was going to turn into my dad. Everything whirred around my head so fast that I could almost hear it buzzing. I felt completely out of my depth. I pulled away from him.

This was the only time that I really considered telling Mum what was going on. I had texted her at school to see when she was coming home, but she said something had come up with one of the teachers. I thought about describing the situation as though it was someone else’s problem. Marnie, for example. She was the obvious candidate. Her relationship dilemmas were legend in our family. This was exactly the sort of situation she might find herself in. For a moment I felt elated. Then I realized that Mum already knew that Marnie had the hots for Marley, and the trail would lead back to the Fairports when I needed it to lead away from them. I even
considered calling up Aunt Rachel. Because she was a bit left of centre herself. Although, as I was learning, it wasn’t telling someone the truth that was problematic but what they did with the information. That was the bit you couldn’t control.

There was a big part of me that wished I had never found the phone. Because it had also begun to dawn on me that Rachel wasn’t necessarily right about Mum being an ostrich. She was the one who had made all the decisions about moving here. It was more about Aunt Rachel being a rhinoceros, barging through life without considering who she might be trampling on. Sometimes discretion was the better part of valour. Although it sounds unbelievable in light of what happened later, I could see the value of caution.