The Good Girl (7 page)

‘Let’s eat,’ said Wolf. He stood up and herded everyone into the kitchen. Ailsa obediently followed. She stared at the feast prepared by the Fairports, grateful for the distraction. At the centre of the table was a chicken cooked in a lemon and honey sauce, rice with onion, lentils and pistachio nuts, aubergine with pomegranate
seeds and a saffron-infused yogurt sauce, Loveday explained. There was roast pork belly with a pink relish identified as plum and rhubarb, and a salad and chickpeas and sweet potatoes. As she picked up a plate, it dawned on Ailsa with absolute clarity: Matt must be Rachel’s younger man.

Ailsa felt a sudden rage towards Rachel. Could she not see that starting a relationship with one of Ailsa’s teachers might be awkward for her? Matt hadn’t even finished his probation period. If other members of staff found out it would look completely unprofessional. They would watch her to see if she treated him more leniently or more harshly. Either way her authority would be undermined, especially after only one term on the job.

She unthinkingly spooned plum and rhubarb relish onto her plate until a sizeable mound had formed. Ailsa liked to compartmentalize her life. To keep her different worlds separate. Rachel knew this. She even teased her that she would make a good man. Rachel knew how much was riding on this clean break from the past. And yet she had come sniffing around Ailsa’s territory like a dog on heat and pissed all over her new beginning.

She put her plate on the table and began unloading the plum and rhubarb relish back onto the dish. Matt had betrayed nothing. His deceit bothered her too. She tried to remember her last encounter with him. They had discussed the possibility of additional funding for the after-school Biology Club to buy sixty finger pinprick tests. His enthusiasm and energy had reminded
her of when she first started out in the classroom and she had quickly agreed to all his requests. There was nothing to indicate that he was sleeping with her sister. Or about to sleep with her. Or that he even knew Rachel.

Ailsa was generally disapproving of relationships at work but now she wished he could have got involved with the art teacher. At least she was the same age. Because of course the absurd age gap was another source of embarrassment. The question wasn’t what Rachel was doing with him, it was what he was doing with her. Why would a twenty-seven-year-old man go out with a thirty-nine-year-old woman? Although of course Rachel looked good for her age. Not just good. Great, as Harry had recently observed after Rachel had spent a three-month fallow period between jobs going to the gym every day. Using her free time for self-improvement rather than helping out with Adam. Ailsa glanced down at her plate and realized that she had now transplanted all of the relish back onto it.

‘Are you OK?’ she saw Harry mouth from the other side of the table.

‘Fine,’ she said abruptly. She needed to separate the strands. Keep how she felt about Rachel away from how she felt about Harry. She forced herself to focus on Harry’s trifle, which Wolf was now holding aloft as though examining an ancient relic. Beside the feast prepared by the Fairports, it looked absurd. An inadequate afterthought transported through time from the darkest period in British cuisine. It would have been better to
have arrived empty-handed or made an ironic Angel Delight. She felt a sudden urge to laugh hysterically. The Fairports, however, professed delight. Wolf said he’d never seen a trifle before and examined the layers of pear, sponge and custard through the crystal bowl.

‘Beautiful,’ said Wolf. ‘I love the marbling effect and the way different layers of sediment have formed.’

‘It was the least I could do,’ said Harry, whose foray into family cooking was so recent that he considered an omelette a fantastic achievement.

‘Where are Jay and Romy?’ asked Loveday. ‘They need to come and eat.’

‘Upstairs. They never came outside with us,’ said Marley.

‘I’ll go and get them,’ said Ailsa, putting down her now-empty plate, relieved to have an excuse to leave the room.

Ailsa knew exactly where to find the toilet. She even knew how many stairs there were to the little half landing halfway up between the ground and first floor. She locked the door, leaned straight-armed over the tiny sink and stared at herself in the mirror. Why is it that people’s mouths turn down as they get older? Is it gravitational pull or because they smile less? Eventually would her mouth turn into an upside-down smile? She pulled the sides of her lips up because Harry had told her that even if you pulled a fake smile, it still released endorphins. It
was the same conversation where he explained that children laugh on average three hundred times a day and people over the age of forty just four. Harry liked facts. They gave him certainty.

She ran the tap. The water was ice-cold. She splashed her face until it stung and then checked herself in the mirror again. Her usually pale cheeks were comically rosy, as though Ben had daubed blusher on them. Ailsa traced a line across a cheekbone. Her face was thinner than it had been at any point since her early twenties. It was the stress of changing job and moving house.

There was a joss stick burning on a wicker shelf beside the sink. It had a sweet sickly smell that made Ailsa feel nauseous so she held it under the tap until it had gone out. Then she pulled down the loo seat and sat down to collect her thoughts.

The toilet wall reminded Ailsa of an attention-seeking toddler, a jumble of apparently random objects all clamouring to be noticed. She was grateful for the distraction. There was a small carved wooden Swiss chalet for predicting the weather, except it was all wrong because the woman in the sun bonnet was outside rather than the man dressed for the cold. Beside it hung a framed poster of a Nirvana concert signed by Kurt Cobain and the original artwork for a Talking Heads album. Ailsa remembered Wolf mentioning downstairs that his father had been a record producer. To the left was a series of what looked like original prints from Chinese pillow
books demonstrating different sexual positions. ‘Mule in the springtime’. ‘Posture of the bee stirring the honey’.

Her gaze lingered on a photograph of Wolf and Loveday that must have been taken in their twenties. They were standing on a beach. Had they got the future they had imagined for themselves back then? she wondered. She moved quickly on to a map showing the reduction in Native American land in the southern states of America.
Good subject for a school project
, she thought.

To her right was another wicker shelf with small piles of books and magazines. There was the
I Ching, The Tibetan Book of the Dead
and a well-thumbed copy of
The Prophet
by Khahil Gibran. She picked up a magazine and started to read a piece about Transcendental Meditation. She couldn’t get beyond the first two paragraphs about the importance of the out breath. It dawned on Ailsa as she breathed in through her mouth and out through her nose that she had stopped buying magazines and hadn’t finished reading a novel for almost a year. She carefully slid the magazine back in exactly the same place and pulled out another one. It opened on a dog-eared page in the middle. There was a double-page spread of Wolf and Loveday and their children sitting in a jeep outside their home in Ibiza. Ailsa flicked to the next page. Loveday was sitting at a bar beside a swimming pool. Wolf was standing beside her. He was wearing a pair of shorts. Loveday was in a bikini top and denim miniskirt. His arm was casually draped around her shoulder, his fingers entwined in her bikini strap. There was a cheeky hint of
dark aureole through the white bikini top. Both were barefoot and yet they still managed to exude a glamour that made Ailsa simultaneously envious and fearful. There were pictures of a vivid pink shower room with his and hers showers beside each other, a wall covered with vintage skateboards and teal-coloured lacquered furniture.

She quickly decided that the magazine had been strategically placed precisely so that people would find it. She turned the page. It was a question-and-answer format. She began skim-reading. All thoughts of yogic breathing disappeared. The first question was about how long Wolf and Loveday had been running sexual healing workshops. Twenty years. Probably since the photo on the wall was taken, decided Ailsa. The second was about the most important lesson couples should learn. Wolf gave a one-word answer: the clitoris. He talked about it with the kind of precision that another man might describe the engine of a BMW. It was ten centimetres long. It stretched deep into the vagina. It could swell up to three times its original size. He recommended their DVD as the best method of learning about deep vaginal massage. Loveday was asked about celebrity clients. She said she couldn’t possibly comment but didn’t deny any of the names put to her. Wolf said that violent pornography was the biggest threat to human sexuality because it undermined the concept of female pleasure. There was a website address at the bottom of the page.

At
the end the magazine asked them lifestyle questions. What’s your favourite holiday drink? Caipirinha. What music do you wake up to in the morning? Miles Davis. Ailsa snapped shut the magazine and carefully placed it back in the pile, carefully repositioning the dog-ear. Two thoughts struck her almost simultaneously: one, their intentions were honourable, and two, she really didn’t want to spend any more time with Wolf and Loveday than strictly necessary. Another good example of cognitive dissonance.

Ailsa came out of the toilet and heard noises coming from the floor above. She remembered the purpose of her foray upstairs and followed a trail of laughter that led her directly to a room with a bright red door and a poster of London Grammar Blu-tacked to the surface. It was closed. She listened outside and recognized Romy. It was the kind of hilarity that made your stomach ache and squeezed fat tears from your eyes. A belly laugh, as Ben would say. She hadn’t heard Romy laugh like this since they moved to Luckmore. It was such a good sound it made her smile. She knocked on the door three times and thought she heard someone yell back. She noisily turned the handle before opening the door.

But of course they didn’t hear. They were too wrapped up in each other. Later, Ailsa thought many times about what she saw when she came into Jay’s bedroom. The image was frozen in her mind like one of those Dutch paintings where every object contained hidden symbolism. She tried different interpretations of the same scene.
She viewed it from the perspective of other people who were in the house at the same time, wondering if they would have got it so wrong. She envisaged how she might have seen it if she had come at it from a different angle, say from the window overlooking the garden. She considered how she might have reacted had she bothered to imagine in advance what she might encounter. But she had been both overly distracted and influenced by her discovery about Rachel and what she had just read in the magazine.

The room was as Ben had described. Blood red. The poster of the ridiculous pop star on her hands and knees, bum in the air, breasts pouring out of her crop top. A side lamp draped with a purple scarf so the bed was cast in a half shadow. The duvet crumpled at the foot of the bed. A pair of underpants lying on the floor. On the bed parallel to the door there were two figures. Jay was straddling Romy, pinning her arms above her head. Her T-shirt had ridden up so that Ailsa could see her belly button. The top button of her skirt was undone, revealing her knickers. His zip was down. Beside them was a laptop.

‘What the hell is going on here?’ said Ailsa. ‘Downstairs now.’

Mum calls Ben the Punctilio because he pays such close attention to detail and routines. Takes one to know one, I say. So it was no surprise that he was the first one to notice there was something wrong with her. Some time early last year, when we were still living in London and had no idea of what lay ahead, Ben came into my room way after his bedtime to show me one of his notebooks.

This in itself wasn’t strange. Ben was Mum and Dad’s beautiful mistake, born after they had been told they wouldn’t be able to have any more children. Back then we all probably indulged him more than we should, especially Mum. We’d pretend to take great interest in his secret life as an international spy and his accounts of survival techniques.

I was usually patient with him. Still am really. But it was the weekend before my mock GCSEs and I needed to get on top of variation and classification to hit the targets on the Biology revision timetable hanging on the wall above my desk. It was the only topic without a neat red line sliced through the middle. I was trying to focus on genetic variation in blood groups. Mum, who had almost exploded with pleasure when I told her I was
thinking about studying medicine, had recently told me that she was B negative and Dad was AB negative. This meant our family belonged to one of the rarest blood groups in the world. At the time this seemed a wondrous revelation. Finally, something that made us a little more interesting. Everyone wants a life less ordinary, don’t they?

‘Not now, Ben, I’m revising,’ I said as he came into the bedroom and sat down on the bed right beside my desk. ‘Show me tomorrow.’

I tapped the revision timetable with my finger because he got schedules and I noticed that at the bottom, written in the same red pen in small letters so Mum wouldn’t notice, were the words
FUCKING NERD
, a contribution from Luke, who had what Mum called a free-range approach to exams that basically involved drinking four cans of Red Bull the evening before they started and pulling an all-nighter. Revision definitely isn’t genetic.

Ben pulled out one of his small notebooks from the pocket of his favourite Dalek pyjamas. ‘You’re not working, you’re looking at Instagram,’ he said, peering over my shoulder at my mobile.

‘I’m taking a break,’ I replied more sharply than I intended.

‘If you don’t let me tell you this now then I’ll tell Mum,’ he said.

‘She won’t mind,’ I said. ‘Mum trusts me.’

‘This is more important than exams,’ he said. There was a hint of desperation in his voice. ‘Please, Romy.’
I turned towards him. His eyes were saucer wide. I held his chin in my hand. His hamster cheeks glowed red.

‘Have you done something you shouldn’t have done, Grub?’ I asked, using my pet name for him.

‘It’s nothing I’ve done.’

‘Then can’t it wait until tomorrow?’

‘But it does affect me.’

He gripped my upper arm tightly and leaned forward so close to me that I could feel hot little breaths of recently brushed teeth on my face.

‘There’s something wrong with Mum.’

‘What do you mean?’

He opened up the notebook somewhere in the middle and I saw several pages of his strange sloping handwriting. This was going to be a long one.

‘She’s doing things differently,’ he said.

‘Are you worried she’s ill?’ I asked.

‘Mum’s changed,’ he said simply. ‘She’s stopped doing stuff.’

‘What do you mean, stuff?’

‘It’s all here.’

I can’t remember the exact details. But some time after the beginning of the year Mum’s habits changed. It was the small things Ben noticed first. She stopped coming into his room every night to check whether his light was out at eight thirty. Some nights she didn’t even say goodnight. Others she lay on the bed beside him with the light on until she fell asleep. She forgot to water the plants in the containers in the back garden and didn’t
seem to care when they wilted and died. Even the rare African lily Dad had given her for her birthday.

Everything was half finished. Novels were started and abandoned by the side of her bed. Spine down, which Mum usually said was a crime against books. Meals were barely touched. She left half-finished mugs of tea lying around until mould grew on the dregs in rooms where she spent hours in hushed phone conversations with ‘persons unknown’. Ben had underlined this phrase because it was something that needed following up. His attention to detail made me smile. I pulled him onto my knee and rested my chin on top of his head.

Considered individually, none of these would have been significant. But I agreed with Ben, when added together a pattern formed. A memory bubbled to the surface. A couple of weeks into February on the bus on the way back from school, I had seen Mum’s car stopped by the side of the road a few streets away from our old house. She was staring out of the windscreen, hands gripping the steering wheel, even though the car was parked. This was the first time that I noticed she had lost weight. Her face had a constant taut expression as though the skin was pulled too tightly over her skull. Beside her on the front seat sat a pile of papers that I guessed were from her A-level English class. The bus stopped in traffic right beside the car, so close that I could see a copy of
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
on top of the essays.

I
was with my friends and generally tried to ignore Mum at school, so I didn’t wave or knock to catch her attention. Instead I turned away and pressed my back against the window to block their view to avoid any embarrassment. When the bus pulled away I turned back and saw Mum in exactly the same position. She looked as though she was in a trance. I called her phone. She didn’t answer. Unless she was teaching she always took my calls. I didn’t tell Ben any of this.

‘What do you think it means, Romy?’ asked Ben, getting into my bed and pulling the duvet up to his chin. ‘She’s here but she’s not here.’

‘She’s probably feeling stressed,’ I said. This was the simplest explanation for any irrational behaviour with parents. ‘Exams are coming up, so she’s got lots of essays to mark and she’s probably worried about Grandpa.’

‘Why Grandpa?’

‘Because he’s worrying about Granny feeling tired all the time,’ I said, one eye on the revision timetable as I tried to calculate whether I could afford to delay blood groups until the following morning.

‘Why is she worrying about Grandpa when Granny is the one who is tired?’

‘Because Grandpa is more high maintenance,’ I said, repeating a phrase I had heard Aunt Rachel use to describe him.

‘Is Dad worrying about Mum?’ asked Ben. ‘Because he should be.’ It was a good question.

‘I
have no idea.’

A couple of months later Mum had applied for a new job, Dad had resigned from his university post and they were both trying to convince us all that leaving London, our friends and the home we’d grown up in was the best thing that had ever happened. Then my grandmother died and suddenly they were telling everyone who cared to ask that they needed to move to be close to my grandfather. None of it made any sense.

‘What do you think?’ I asked Jay. He had listened to me without interrupting once. We were sitting on his desk by the bedroom window, sharing a cigarette. When we moved to Luckmore, Mum and Dad had emphasized the importance of trying new things so I took up smoking the same week that Mum introduced the school uniform policy. Blazers were good for hiding the paraphernalia of cigarettes and I had sewn a pocket into the lining to keep mine hidden. But my heart wasn’t really in it.

The storm outside had entered a different phase. The wind had picked up and changed direction. Its low moan overwhelmed Justin Chancellor’s bass guitar riff, which Jay had announced was the top in his best bass riff list. I had argued in favour of ‘Good Times’ by Chic, but although he had a poster of Nile Rodgers on the wall, he stuck with Justin Chancellor.

The light in the centre of the room kept flickering. We sat with the hoods of our coats pulled up before the
open window and I noticed how the tree where Ben had created his opening was now doubled over as if exhausted by this new weather event. My calves were still burning from the snow during the walk here and my boots were soaked. But I didn’t move away from the window in case Jay suggested we go back downstairs.

‘Has your mum ever behaved like that before?’ Jay asked, staring at me as he took a deep toke on the cigarette before passing it back. ‘It’s always useful to spot patterns.’

I thought about Jay’s question for a moment. His curly fringe bobbed up and down when he talked. When I caught a glimpse of his blue eyes beneath the fringe, they were so pale that I had to blink to stop my own from watering.

‘Like what?’ I said, flicking ash out of the window.

‘If my dad takes even a sip of alcohol, Mum stops having sex with him.’

‘How do you know that?’

‘They’re hippies. They talk about everything with everyone. And he gets really fucking grumpy.’

‘And you don’t talk about everything?’

‘I think a lot of shit is best unsaid. There’s too much information out there. And I’m choosy about who I tell stuff too.’

Actually, although it seems incredible now, my biggest criticism of Mum used to be how boring her life was. Living by lists, timetables, planning ahead all the time. Totally oppressive. I used to think that endlessly doing things was
a way for her to avoid actually thinking about things. But when she stopped doing things our life fell apart. Routine is only comforting when you don’t have it any more.

‘She’s never done anything like this before,’ I said, leaning forward to blow the smoke out of the window. ‘She used to be a very steady person.’

‘Elaborate.’ This, I quickly learned, was one of Jay’s favourite words.

‘When she painted the sitting room in our old house she tested twenty-three samples until she had found the exact shade of blue she wanted. She did the Christmas shopping in October. Booked dentist’s appointments six months ahead.’

Jay had begun eating a chocolate reindeer that Ben had given him in exchange for another can of Coke. He ate it as though it was an ice cream, with slow licks. And I tried to stay focused on the cigarette because I didn’t want him to catch me watching how his tongue curled around the reindeer and wondering how it might feel if he did the same to me.

‘Did it definitely start before your grandmother died?’ he asked. I nodded, appreciating his forensic approach to the problem. ‘If you think too much about the past you don’t focus on the present,’ which, I was soon to learn, was his stock answer when anything went wrong. ‘And she never mentioned that she was unhappy with her old job?’ Jay continued.

‘She loved it. She was deputy head of a really good school.’

‘You
know, people who say they are moving to make a new life are generally trying to escape something they don’t like about their old one,’ he said.

‘So what do you think she was trying to escape?’

‘I think that you need to think about whether you really want to know the answer to that question,’ he said. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know stuff. But in my experience if you really want to know what’s going on in someone’s life, you should look in their bathroom cabinet.’

I laughed because after all his analysis this seemed so unscientific. He smiled back. Unoffended.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Mum and Dad eat organic and refuse to use antibiotics but there’s a big stash of Viagra hidden in a tin of Bach Rescue Remedy at the back of theirs. Not very tantric.’

I looked at the clock on his bedside table. It was ten minutes to ten on New Year’s Eve and I already knew that Jay Fairport was one of the best things that had ever happened to me. We had already covered a lot of ground: why Stuart Tovey took his brother’s Ritalin to help him revise for science tests; how dogs and wolves share almost 99 per cent of the same genes; why waves in the Pacific were better for surfing than those in the Atlantic; how my recently acquired best friend at school, Marnie Hall, fancied his brother, Marley; whether it was better to be a good person who has done a bad thing or a bad person who has done a good thing.

I
had been in his bedroom for one hour and forty-seven minutes but it seemed like five minutes, and yet it felt as though we had known each other for years. I understood why physicists argue that time doesn’t exist. I thought about how we might have missed this moment if I hadn’t been freezing in my skirt and boots because Luke had thrown snowballs at me on the way through their garden. If I had gone outside with the others for a snowball fight instead of accepting Jay’s offer to go and watch series two of
Breaking Bad
we might never have got to know each other.

‘Life is really random,’ he said, and I wondered if he could actually read my mind.

Even a couple of weeks later, I could almost make myself cry thinking about the possibility that our paths might never have crossed. I regretted the six weeks that we had been living next door to each other, travelling on the same bus to school and getting on and off at the same stop without talking to each other. I tried to calculate the lost hours. I wondered why we had never spoken before when the pull towards each other was so irresistible.