The Perfect Girl (11 page)

Chris’s words have made me shake. I’m used to being called bad things, but not by him. I run upstairs to fetch my mum like he asked me to.

On the landing, I notice the butterfly again. It’s come out of the bathroom, and now it’s high up in a corner flapping uselessly against the walls. I don’t like it doing that, because I imagine the sparkling dust on its wings being dislodged every time it makes impact, a microscopic shower of iridescent powder falling like sand through an hourglass, weakening the butterfly little by little, until it won’t be able to fly any longer.

It makes me think of my life, and of the damage I’ve done, and I think that I’ve been lucky so far, because when things have gone wrong, and when the sand in my hourglass has run through and time has run out for me, I’ve been able to pick it up, turn it over, and start again. But I wonder if that’s ever going to be possible now. I wonder how many chances a person can get.

I ease open the door to Grace’s bedroom. My mum is lying on the bed that’s in there, on the other side of the room from Grace’s cot. Grace is lying with her. As I adjust to the darkness, I see that they’ve turned their heads towards me, that their eyes are darkly reflecting the light from the hallway.

‘Mum,’ I whisper. ‘Chris wants to talk to you. Shall I look after Grace?’

I don’t mention what he’s said to me because I don’t want anything else to go wrong for my mum today, especially not if it’s my fault.

Normally, Mum would leap up if I said that. She always goes quickly to Chris. She’s super-attentive to him. Chris gets first-class service, because the Second Chance Family is a First Class Operation, just like Chris’s business, and just like my and Lucas’s standard of performance. Chris and Mum set a lot of store in that.

Mum doesn’t leap up though. As I walk through the inky darkness of the room towards them, I see that she and Grace are lying together like a bear and its cub. My mum isn’t trying to get Grace to sleep; she’s playing with her. Mum runs the side of her finger down over Grace’s temple, and Grace reaches for Mum’s hand and holds it in front of her face. Mum uses a fingertip to dab Grace lightly on the nose and Grace giggles.

I approach them quietly because I want to be on the bed with them. There’s a little space just below where Grace is lying and I perch there cautiously. Mum is against the wall. Grace kicks me gently with her feet. The room’s hot and she’s just wearing a nappy and I feel her warm toes on my bare leg. I move them a little because that’s near where the piano bruised me earlier.

‘Chris wants you,’ I whisper to Mum.

‘Lie with us,’ she says.

My heart begins to beat so freaking loudly when she says that that I feel like I might hyperventilate. Mum shuffles over towards the wall and pulls Grace gently with her, leaving a thin sliver of space along the edge of the bed. I lie down, my head beside Grace’s, and she celebrates with some monster kicking, and then by taking a hank of my hair and giving it a pull. I don’t mind though, I’m used to it. Grace tries to sit up but my mum whispers, ‘Gracie-girl, lie with us, come on,’ and, miraculously, Grace does.

We lie for a minute and then Mum says, ‘My girls,’ in a voice that’s warm and sweet like hot chocolate, and she nestles her head into Grace and reaches across her to put a hand on my cheek and her thumb runs down my temple too, and for the first time in a gazillion years I forget all the things that have gone wrong, and I just relax and lie there and feel her hand on me and Grace’s wriggly body between us and if I couldn’t hear the butterfly still flapping on the landing, reminding me of my hourglass life, it would be just like heaven.

What are the odds that Tom Barlow would be living only a few miles from Chris and Maria’s new house? Long. Just as the odds are that Zoe would be playing a concert at the very church where Amelia is remembered.

But if you work in the business that I do, you know that long odds don’t always make any difference at all. Somebody always makes up that small percentage of people to whom unlikely or desperate things happen, and there’s actually nothing to say it can’t be you.

Tom Barlow doesn’t jog for long. He gets in a car around the corner from Chris and Maria’s house and when I realise that I still have my bag over my shoulder, and my keys are inside it – Maria’s hostess skills have failed her tonight, my bag wasn’t taken from me on arrival – I turn back swiftly and get my car, even though I fear that I’m going to lose him. But I don’t. When I trundle around the corner, his car is only just pulling out, as though he’s had to sit in there for a few minutes and pull himself together before leaving, or perhaps make a phone call.

We leave the wide, leafy, sedate lanes of Chris and Maria’s neighbourhood and drive further out into surburbia, retracing some of the route back from the concert. On a long street in Westbury, which seems to go on for ever, Tom Barlow pulls into the driveway of a modest semi-detached house that looks as though it was built in the sixties, and I’m able to park in a space opposite. I keep my head back so that he can’t see my face, but I have a view of his house.

It has a large picture window to the front and through it I can see the sitting room. There are two sofas and a TV, plus some gaming equipment. The walls are painted a plain magnolia. There’s not much else, apart from a poster-sized family photograph on the wall, where the kids are small, and Amelia is sandwiched between her little brothers, who appear to be twins. The sparse furnishings make the room look more functional than loved.

Tom Barlow stays sitting in his car for a good few minutes before he gets out. In fact, he stays there for so long that a woman, who I recognise as his wife, opens the door and looks out enquiringly.

He gets out of the car and holds her in a long, tight hug.

‘I thought that was you. Are you all right?’ I hear her say. ‘What’s wrong?’

I can’t hear his reply, but he shakes his head as if to say ‘nothing’s wrong’ and then she pushes him away from her so that she’s holding him by the shoulders, and she smiles at him. ‘I love you too,’ she says. From the doorway, one of their boys watches, bare-chested, wearing just pyjama bottoms. Tom Barlow puts his arm around his son on the way into the house and, as the door shuts, the child starts an explanation about how it was too hot to sleep.

On my way there, I thought I would ring on the doorbell and try to speak to the family, to convince them that Zoe should be allowed a chance to rebuild, that she and Maria are entitled to their privacy, and entitled to move on. But I can’t do that now because I’m pretty certain that nobody else in his house knows what Tom Barlow has been doing that evening. Not yet, anyway, and I don’t want to be the one to tell them.

The light that’s been gently creeping into Grace’s bedroom from the hallway suddenly disappears. Mum and me turn our heads towards the door to see why. A man-sized silhouette blocks the doorway and at first it’s hard to tell whether it’s Lucas or Chris. He steps away after a small pause, without saying anything, but it’s enough to rouse my mum. She lets out what I think is a quiet moan, and then eases herself up off the bed. Gracie-girl doesn’t want Mum to go. She gives a bit of a whimper herself, but I distract her by making my fingers flutter right in front of her face and she grabs for them.

You never know when Grace is going to accept me as a Mum-substitute. Sometimes she’s happy to, other times she just yells blue murder until she gets Mum back. It’s the same with Lucas. And even with Chris. Mum is definitely Grace’s favourite. Oh, and Katya. But, to be honest, I’d rather gloss over that because it massively annoys me.

When Mum has left the room, she pulls the door softly behind her so that it’s almost completely shut but not quite, as if she wants to keep us both just the way she left us. Grace is sort of sleepy now. She turns her body to me and I put my arm around her so that her head can nestle into the side of me, and I sing to her, a little tune that my dad used to sing to me when I was little.

I think about my dad a lot. He’s a farmer. He couldn’t cope after the accident, because he said it was Mum’s fault, that she pushed me too hard with the music, that it had turned me into somebody I should never have been trying to be. He said that I should never have gone for a music scholarship in the first place, because it wasn’t for people like us. I should have stayed at the local school and grown up just the way he did: safely, at the farm, at the heart of the community.

‘But you
love
listening to Zoe play,’ my mum said in the last reintegration meeting at the Unit that Dad ever attended. ‘You always said I was right to push her.’

‘Not at this cost,’ he’d replied, and he put on his coat and said, ‘I’m sorry, Zoe,’ and then he left, even though Jason asked him not to and talked to him in the corridor outside for ages.

I didn’t see my dad for nine months after that, the time it takes to make a whole new human being. I went back to see him at the farm when I got out of the Unit, but only once. We had an OK day and Granny Guerin came round with some scones, but Dad was mostly sad and awkward, and when he went out to see to the cattle Granny Guerin said he never did know how to put a feeling into words and that was just the way he was, but she knew for sure that he loved me and he always would.

I wanted to tell him that I was still the same girl as before the accident, I was still his girl. I wanted to say that I wasn’t a bad person, I’d just done a bad thing, by accident, but on that day his silence meant that I found it hard to put anything into words too. Perhaps it’s catching.

Granny Guerin saw that I had a lot of words stored up in me, and she said, ‘I know your mother thinks I’ve abandoned you both, but he’s my child and I must protect him. I’m just doing the same as what your mother’s doing for you. Know that he loves you, Zoe, I can’t promise anything more than that now, so I won’t, because I don’t like to raise expectations. But time can heal things, my darling.’

But on the train on the way back to Bristol I also thought about how time destroyed everything on the farm, how part of my dad’s life was just keeping things fixed that time had broken. And I imagined Dad, with his red farmer’s cheeks and furrowed brow, and I thought how everything about him looked more or less exactly the same as it did before the accident, except that now the farmhouse didn’t feel cosy like it used to, and his eyes were full of sadness. If I was going to be über-dramatic (vampire-romance-fans: be alert! This is your moment!), I would say that his eyes were wells of tears.

I don’t know exactly what happened to my parents when I was in the Unit. I only know that they found it too difficult to go on together. Jason said that a traumatic event within a family can make it very difficult for a marriage to continue, and that was something I might just have to accept. Cracks in a marriage, he said, can become chasms if they’re shaken by trauma. I told him he was almost sounding like a poet. He told me it would benefit me if I could learn to take things seriously.

By the time I came out, Mum had moved all our stuff from the farm and found a flat in Bristol, and started a job that my Aunt Tessa got for her through her wunderkind husband Richard the Rocket Scientist, who’s fond of a tipple.

We weren’t going to dwell on the past, Mum told me, we were going to look forward, to try to start something fresh. My dad would be OK, she said, I could go and stay with him in the holidays. But she cried every night, and she was crying when she woke up some mornings too, until she met Chris.

When the door has shut behind Tom Barlow and his wife, I don’t hang around for long. I put the bus into gear and trundle off down their road, but I park again when I’m round the corner, out of their sight, because I want to think.

Once I’ve turned the headlights off, I notice that the darkness is musky and thick with humidity. I can smell barbecue smells from somebody’s garden, and a cyclist whizzes past me on a road bike, making me jump.

My phone’s in my back pocket and I squirm to get it out. Richard has tried to ring me again so I phone him back. He takes about half a second to answer.

‘Tess!’ He knows it’s me because nobody else phones our landline.

‘Hi.’

‘Where are you?’

I try to judge the level of his intoxication from the extent to which he’s slurring his words. I figure that he’s close to being blotto, and he’s clearly feeling paranoid.

‘I was at Zoe’s concert,’ I tell him. ‘And then I went back to Maria’s house. I had to give Chris and Lucas a lift.’

I don’t tell him anything more about the evening. Richard’s not good at absorbing other people’s problems when his own have swelled up enough to fill his mind entirely. His response to what I’ve said will tell me precisely what his mood is like.

Richard is either a self-hating drunk or an overambitious drunk, but I’m never sure which I’m going to get when he hits the bottle. Neither option thrills me. The self-hating is profoundly tedious because it’s a circular, defeatist state of mind, but then the overambitious is bad because it’s simply delusional, consisting as it usually does of a series of promises that Richard will never keep.

‘I’ve let you down again,’ he says, and I get my answer right there: tonight, Richard is suffering from a drunken case of self-hatred, and he would like me to shore him up in this.

‘It’s all I ever do,’ he says. ‘Why don’t you leave me, Tessa? Just leave me.’

It’s a good question, that, and it’s one I’ve asked myself on numerous occasions, and in fact Sam has asked me that question too. ‘Why don’t you leave him?’

The answer is that I like Richard, even now. We’ve been together for many, many years, and I loved the man I married.

We first met when I was doing my large animal placement as part of my training, and Richard was doing his PhD at the university Engineering Department. It was the gentlest, easiest start to a relationship you could imagine. We just got on as if we’d always been friends. We laughed together; we discovered we liked doing the same things. I loved his gentle intelligence, the way he thought before he spoke and was never mocking or snobbish.

We moved in together into a tiny attic flat, which nearly had a view of the Clifton Suspension Bridge, only four months after meeting, and we both studied like mad and made each other cups of instant coffee and lived on vats of chilli con carne and baked potatoes that we took it in turns to make.

Our flat was an unfurnished place, and we slept together on a cramped futon and sat on deckchairs to watch TV because we didn’t have enough money to buy a sofa. It was good practice for the travelling we did after we’d finished studying. Richard and I went around the world with backpacks for a year, and then lived for a time in Kenya, where we both managed to get work.

We married when we got back to the UK, and had our reception in the Clifton Pavilion at Bristol Zoo. It was still a happy time for us then, because it wasn’t until a few years after that, after we’d got ourselves properly established back in Bristol, with new jobs and a new house, that things began to slip and slide, almost imperceptibly slowly, into something much less than what we had dreamed of.

So now we find ourselves a somewhat sourer version of the couple we imagined we would become. Richard has no work, and we have no children, and the resulting bitter disappointment has mostly turned him into a depressed, drunken, foolish version of my beloved bridegroom. However, there are hours, days, weeks, when the man that I loved re-emerges, and I find that these are enough to keep me with him. To part would be to acknowledge that alcohol has managed to destroy us, and I’m just not ready to do that yet.

To Sam, I just say, ‘I can’t, not yet,’ and as I say it I feel like a clichéd cheating spouse. But it’s not to do with wanting to keep the status quo; it’s to do with not being able to let go of what Richard and I had, the perfect idea of us, even though our reality has fallen so far from that.

To Richard, on the phone, I muster all my reserves in an effort not to lose my temper, and I just say, ‘Did you find the lasagne? Because you should eat. I’ll be back later.’ Then, before he can suck me further into his misery, I hang up and start the engine.