The Perfect Girl (10 page)

It’s Tom Barlow at the door. I hang back in the hallway, by the door of the coat cupboard, and watch Chris greet him cautiously.

Tom Barlow is highly agitated, just as he was in the church; face and neck red, emotions burning him up with the intensity of a forest fire. Chris stands in the doorway, blocking it mostly, and gently tells Tom Barlow to calm down and that he’s certainly made a mistake, and come to the wrong house. Chris’s voice is calm and measured; he’s very much in control.

I stay in the shadows, watching, and I sense Maria upstairs, trying to listen as she soothes the baby. I’m pressed up against Chris’s fishing rods and his winter work coats: great swathes of cashmere, smelling faintly in the heat despite being wrapped in dry cleaner’s plastic.

Chris remains patient even when Tom Barlow refuses to listen to what he’s being told. Chris doesn’t invite him inside, but asks him if he’d like to take a seat on a bench that is just beside the ornate front porch, overlooking the driveway.

‘Perhaps,’ Chris says to Tom Barlow in a tone that’s calm but which I think could be dangerously patronising, ‘I could fetch you a glass of iced water?’

Tom Barlow is having none of it.

‘She needs to answer for what she did,’ he shouts at Chris, and then, just like in the church, his phrases seem to circulate on a loop as if the energy that’s driving him to these desperate acts is taking so much out of him that he can do nothing more. He repeats it. ‘She needs to answer,’ he says, ‘she needs to answer for what she took from me.’

‘Who?’ says Chris. ‘To whom are you referring?’

And Mr Barlow rocks backward and forward on his feet, disbelief etched more deeply on his face every time I can catch a glimpse of him. He practically spits out his reply. He says, ‘Zoe Guerin, I’m referring to Zoe Guerin. Who the hell else would I be referring to?’

These two sentences seem to paralyse the air around Chris and Mr Barlow, and the two men remain standing face to face, speaking not at all. I imagine that Mr Barlow is watching a variety of emotions, and, most importantly, realisations work across Chris’s face, because right at this moment Chris must be coming to the conclusion that Mr Barlow has indeed come to the right house and that Maria has lied to him.

From upstairs there’s absolute silence. Maria has stopped shushing the baby, and I wonder if she’s heard what I’ve heard because if she has, then she’ll know that the game is up.

When Chris moves again his actions are swift. With both of his hands, he shoves Tom Barlow backwards violently and, as Tom Barlow staggers across the gravel, stones crunching, Chris says, ‘How dare you?’

I emerge from my nook then. I run down the hall towards them, and I step out on the front drive.

‘Hey,’ I say, as gently as possible. Tom Barlow has recovered physically and is standing and staring at Chris with intense hatred and not a little disbelief. I put a hand on Chris’s arm.

‘Hey,’ I say, ‘Chris, stop, it’s OK.’

Chris’s jaw is clenched and rigid and his arm is solid with poised muscle. Tom Barlow is breathing through his nose, nostrils flaring and jaw set, squaring up to this threat of violence, this added outrage, and he looks as if he might charge Chris. It’s scary, primitive stuff, dogs with hackles up; a hair’s breadth away from turning into a nasty fight. I step right between them, my back to Chris, and I say to Tom Barlow, ‘Would you like to talk?’

His eyes flick across my face and I think he recognises me.

Behind me, I feel Chris move forward and I put my arm out behind my back until my fingers make contact with him, telling him that I want him to stay there. ‘Talk to me?’ I say again to Tom Barlow, and I keep my voice soft.

For a moment longer he glares over my shoulder, chest heaving, unable to take his outraged eyes off Chris, but then a sort of collapse takes place within his eyes. Tears well, huge droplets that flatten on his cheeks, smearing them. ‘Come with me,’ I say, ‘we’ll talk about it.’

I take his arm, slowly, because dogs can still bite even after their hackles have gone down. I look at Chris. ‘Go inside,’ I say and I’m shocked at the anger that’s on his face, but my priority is to move Tom Barlow away, to prevent him from confronting Maria or Zoe, and from making things any worse than they are already.

Chris doesn’t move.

‘Go. Inside,’ I repeat.

He takes one small step backwards, his gaze still locked on Tom Barlow, and he says, ‘I will phone the police if I see you on my property again.’ Even then Chris doesn’t go in. He stands, long arms by his sides, in the middle of the elegant circle of gravel that shapes his driveway and he’s framed by flowerbeds full of manicured topiary and shrubbery, beneath which the shady undergrowth hisses with a discreet watering system to ensure that nothing dries out.

Above him, in an upstairs window I see Maria, with Grace in her arms. She’s holding the blackout blind aside, and gazing down at us, but then, as her husband finally turns and enters the house, she drops the blind and is invisible to me again.

Lucas notices my shudder. His eyes pass over my bare shoulders.

‘Do you need a sweater?’ he says. ‘I can get you one.’

‘No thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It was just a little breeze.’

There’s a tiny bit of movement around us now, though it’s hot, velvety air that arrives from somewhere unseen in the darkness. It doesn’t refresh.

‘Someone walk over your grave?’ he asks.

‘Probably,’ I say, but that’s the kind of comment that I have to work hard to keep my composure in the face of.

I put my finger in the candle flame to distract myself, and because I want to do what he’s been doing, but it hurts immediately, and I pull it away. Lucas laughs and then we’re silent again and I think about how much I couldn’t bear it if he wasn’t in this house with us. My mum’s not warm any more, not since the accident, and Chris isn’t warm. Grace is warm but in a fuggy, baby way, so it’s only Lucas who feels truly personality-warm to me, who seems to see things a bit the same way I do, even if he doesn’t say much.

‘Lucas,’ I say, but he’s begun to talk at the same time as me.

‘Do you ever think of giving up piano?’ he says and that is such a totally, unbelievably, jaw-droppingly, incredible, unexpected, shocking thing for him to say that even I’m lost for words.

‘Why?’ I ask. I can’t conceive of giving up piano. Piano playing is like an addiction for me. It’s a path I have to walk down, water I have to drink, food I must consume, air I need to breathe. It’s the only thing that can take my head somewhere safe and everybody tells me it’s going to give me ‘a bright future’.

‘Don’t tell my dad I said that,’ he says. He sees my surprise and it’s made him nervous, but I’m a loyal person.

‘I won’t.’ I put those words out there quickly because I want Lucas to know that I’m on his side, but I have to ask again: ‘Why?’

‘I didn’t say I was doing it.’ He’s backtracking.

‘But why are you thinking about it?’

He tips back his chair. ‘Because it’s part of what’s not right.’

‘Piano?’

‘No.’

‘What’s not right?’

‘This. Any of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I can’t believe I’m hearing this, because Lucas practises longer and harder than me on the piano and he never complains.

He’s holding up his fingers now, making a rectangle shape and looking at me through it. I know what he’s doing; he’s framing me for a shot, because he’s obsessed with films. He does it a lot, and it really annoys Chris.

‘Is it because you want to do films?’ I ask. I know he does, we all know he does, but he doesn’t talk about it because Chris says it’s not a proper career.

He drops his hands. ‘I do want to make films; it’s not only that though. Sometimes piano feels like it’s just a cog in a machine. Like it doesn’t mean anything for itself, it’s just for appearances. I hate that. Don’t you hate that?’

And those words make me actually gasp, as though the air I’ve just breathed in is scorching hot, because they really, truly shock me. I would never give up piano. I just would never give up, because we have to move forward.

I have an urge to get up from the table and turn away from him, because I don’t want him to see my eyes go filmy with tears about this, so I stand up sort of awkwardly in the way you do when you’re rushing but your knees are a bit stuck under a table, and as I do that I manage to flip up the plate of bruschetta with my hand.

So it rains bruschetta. Gobbets of chopped tomato and basil and oil splatter the tablecloth and Lucas and the floor. It’s all over his black concert shirt and it’s on his face and hair. I couldn’t have done a more efficient job of spreading them everywhere if I’d used a spray gun. And because I don’t know what else to do, I laugh. I’m bad at laughing when bad things happen. It’s just a sort of reaction that I can’t help. It got me into trouble in the Secure Unit once, because that’s the kind of place you really don’t want to laugh at people. I won’t tell you what they put in my bed that night, and the night after.

Lucas looks me right in the eye, and the super-serious expression he had a few seconds earlier stays there for just an instant before it dissolves into a nicer one and he laughs. So I laugh again too, really loudly, like ‘that’s hilarious’ sort of laughing, which means that when Chris speaks from the doorway it’s the most massive shock ever because I didn’t hear him coming, and it makes me scream, short and sharp.

‘What are you both doing?’ he says. He’s using a voice that I’ve never heard before. It’s icy cold.

Lucas says, ‘Sorry,’ and I say, ‘It was my fault. I’m really sorry,’ and I have one of those moments again where one minute you’re all standing there laughing in your dress, and you feel good because you’re having a nice time with somebody and the next minute it’s all back down to earth because you’re still just you and you’re worthless, and probably worse too.

Chris sees it.

Chris, who’s never said a bad word to me, though I suppose he’s never really said much.

To Lucas, Chris says: ‘Get yourself cleaned up.’

To me, he says: ‘Stop behaving like a slut in front of my son. Don’t think I don’t see you doing it.’

The silence that follows those words makes my skin crawl in cold, fluid patches, as if somebody was moving around me and blowing on it, because I don’t know what to do. I stay really still and I focus on the slap, slap of the water in the pool against the filters, and I crunch the skin on the back of my lips between my teeth. My nose tingles with the early warning signal that tears are coming and once again I fight that urge, as silently and as discreetly as possible.

Chris looks as though he’s expecting me to answer, but I can’t think of a single thing to say, because my brain is confused by the uncertainty of it all. I didn’t know I was behaving like a slut, or perhaps I did know, and I’ve therefore purposely done something shameful, but if that’s true then I wonder, should I admit to it?

I feel like I’m naked. Chris’s words remind me of the
panop
messages I used to get, they remind me of the girls who used to bait me, and they remind me of the Unit. Those words don’t belong in this house. I say, ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I didn’t mean to. Truly, I didn’t.’

‘You’re on thin ice, young lady,’ he says. ‘Go and look after the baby and ask your mother to come down. I need to speak to her.’

I walk past him and Lucas without looking them in the eye at all, and I try to keep my head straight up and make sure that my walk isn’t at all like a slut’s walk, and when I’m inside the house I start to run and I don’t stop until I’ve pounded all the way up the stairs and I’m standing on the landing outside Grace’s room, where I stop.

‘I know you,’ Tom Barlow says. ‘Don’t I?’

‘I’m Zoe’s aunt. Tessa Downing.’

‘You were at the court.’ He recognises me, even all these years on.

I nod.

‘I’m so sorry for your loss,’ I say. The words are hollow with my inability to make things right for him. My only hope is that he can hear my intention.

We’re standing on the street outside Maria’s house, but I want to move him further away. It would be too easy for him to walk back into the house from here, or to go around the back and find Zoe in the garden. Now that the secret’s out, I think my greatest fear is that he could do her some harm. It’s an exercise in damage limitation at this stage.

‘Would you like to talk?’ I ask him. ‘We could sit in my car? Or walk?’

I’m trying to remember what I know about this man, to separate the descriptions I read of him in the newspapers from the other families. As far as I remember, Tom Barlow is, or was, in property. In fact, his profile wasn’t all that different from Chris’s. He was a self-made businessman, and proud of it. If Chris and Tom Barlow had met under other circumstances they might have got on well. Amelia, who died in the accident, was not the Barlow family’s only child but she was their only daughter. I remember photographs of two young boys, the image of their sister, clutching the hands of their parents in the photographs of the funeral.

‘I need a smoke,’ he says, and he sinks down on to the stone wall that borders the front of Chris and Maria’s garden, containing the dense foliage at their boundary. It’s not as good as moving away from the property, but at least if we sit we won’t be visible from the house.

He pulls a cigarette from a packet and offers me one, but I shake my head.

‘Do you mind?’ he asks me, and the question, in the midst of all this, almost makes me laugh. How is it that manners are so strong that they pervade all situations? I’ve lost count of the times that people have apologised to me for crying when I’ve just euthanised their pet.

‘Not at all,’ I say. ‘Of course not.’

Tom Barlow leans forward and hangs his head. His hands clench between his knees and his cigarette dangles from between his knuckles, the rising smoke making him turn his head a little to the side, away from me.

I notice that he has a monk-like area of thinning hair on the crown of his head that he’s tried to disguise with careful use of hair product of some sort. It tells me that he didn’t start his day thinking about Zoe, that what happened has probably been as much of a shock to him as it has been to us. You almost certainly don’t take time with hair product if you’re consumed with rage and indignation.

We sit in silence because I don’t want to inflame him again by saying the wrong thing, and after a few minutes, when the cigarette is half smoked, he reaches into the pocket of his shorts and hands me a crumpled piece of paper.

It’s a flyer, advertising Zoe’s concert.

‘Through my door,’ he says. ‘This morning. Through my front door, on to my doormat, in my house. In my own home. I only came because I couldn’t believe it actually would be her.’

I hold the flyer in my hands. I have no idea who distributed it, but my best guess is that it was one of the busybody organisers from the church.

‘If we had known,’ I say carefully, ‘we would never, ever have let this happen. Please believe me.’

‘We came here to escape from it,’ he says. ‘We sold everything, we moved the boys, we lost money, we started again. It hasn’t been easy.’

His voice cracks and I think how the same words could describe Zoe and Maria’s flight from Devon to Bristol, but of course I don’t say that.

I want to put my hand on his back to comfort him but I’m not sure that’s a good idea, so instead I say, ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

‘We buried her in Hartland,’ he says, and I think again of the newspaper pictures, where the backdrop to the black-clad processional figures was the tiered grey stone spire of Hartland Church, built toweringly tall to act as a landmark for sailors, to save lives centuries before the lighthouse at the Point ever existed. ‘So we couldn’t bring her with us when we moved, but we had a plaque laid, at the church in Westbury. We chose a plaque with the boys.’

And so I understand the awfulness of it now. Zoe has played a concert at a church where one of the victims of the accident she caused has a memorial plaque. Zoe has tried to rebuild her life on the site of her victim’s memorial.

‘Mr Barlow —’ I say. I try to choose the words I’m going to say next extremely carefully, but he cuts me off.

‘Who is that man?’ he says. ‘That’s not her dad.’

‘No. Maria’s remarried. That’s Zoe’s stepdad.’

‘Does he know? Does he know what she’s done? What she is? Does he know that and still treat me like shit on his shoe?’

He studies me as I try to word my answer, try to work out what is the least incendiary thing I can say, but I’m too slow and he sees the truth.

‘He doesn’t know, does he?’

‘I think —’ I begin, but he interrupts me.

‘I feel sorry for your family,’ he says. ‘Living with a murderer.’

He stands up and I do too. I feel things slipping out of my control again. ‘Please know that we are truly, truly sorry,’ I say.

‘People should know. She needs to pay.’

‘She has paid for what she did,’ I tell him. ‘She’s a changed person.’

‘What? Twelve months in a cushy detention centre somewhere doing her GCSEs? How does that make up for what she’s done?’

He gestures his hand at Chris and Maria’s house, at its immaculate grandeur, and disbelief at the injustice of it all runs rampant in his expression.

‘We have nothing!’ he says. ‘And she has all of this. She shows off with her piano still and she lives in a mansion like nothing ever happened.’

‘That’s not true,’ I say. ‘She’s been punished. This destroyed her life too. Be fair…’

But that was the wrong thing to say. ‘Be fair?’ he asks, and he snatches the programme from my hand and reads from it: ‘“You won’t want to miss these two precociously talented teenagers making their Bristol debut – this promises to be a very special evening.”’

There’s nothing but disgust in his tone.

‘People need to know,’ he says, ‘and I’m going to make sure they do.’

‘Is it so wrong for her to have a future?’ I ask. I’m desperate now. My ability to remain calm is slipping through my fingers.

‘Why should she have one, when we don’t?’

He screws the paper up and hurls it at my feet and then he turns away and begins to walk down the street, away from the house, shoulders slack and head bowed, towards the street light that’s making the top of the postbox at the end of the road shine a slippery red.

‘What are you doing?’ I call after him. ‘What are you going to do?’

He disappears around the corner.

I look at the house, and I wonder what’s happening in there, and I look at the corner that Tom Barlow has just disappeared around, and I decide to follow him.