The Perfect Girl (16 page)

The judge didn’t accept Zoe’s Special Reasons plea.

He found against Zoe, he stated, because he simply didn’t believe that she would have been monitoring what she drank that night. No matter that we’d explained that she was a conscientious person, a good student, that she’d had a piano competition the following day. We might not have convinced him anyway, but Eva Bell and her friend’s testimony, which so strongly contradicted Zoe’s claim that Jack Bell had spiked her drink, certainly put the knife in Zoe’s back, and twisted it too.

Zoe stood up in the courtroom as the judge spoke to her.

‘I find,’ he said, looking at her over a pair of reading glasses, ‘that as you were only fourteen years old on the night of the party, there was no reason for you to monitor closely how much alcohol you were able to drink before driving, because you were not legally able to drive a motor vehicle. I find that you did drink freely during the course of that evening and that you don’t actually know how much you had to drink. Therefore, regrettably, I find that whilst you might not have known exactly how much you had to drink, you knew you were too drunk to drive that car.’

He sentenced her to an eighteen-month detention and training order. It meant that she would serve nine months. I felt that wasn’t too bad in the circumstances, but her family would never get the satisfaction of proving that Zoe had only done what she did because she was unwittingly drunk. She met nobody’s eye as they took her down.

My goodbye to her mother was muted and painful. Tessa was there too, because I remember them standing together outside court looking desolate. Zoe had no other supporters with her that day.

It took me a while to get the trial out of my system. I felt a sense of failure in some ways, because I wondered whether I should have insisted more on a simple Guilty plea at the first hearing. It could have resulted in a more lenient sentence. In the end, we took a legal gamble and lost, and Zoe paid the price. I wondered if she took any satisfaction afterwards from knowing that she did, at least, tell the truth, or whether it was a regret or, worse, something to resent.

It wasn’t until two years later, after I’d moved to Bristol to broaden my criminal practice experience, that I ran into Tessa by chance. We recognised each other immediately, and met for coffee the following week. Things developed from there. Until we reached last night.

Now, as I watch Tessa ease her VW into the Monday morning traffic outside my apartment, on her way to find out how and why her sister is dead, it’s clear to me that things might just become very complicated indeed.

It goes weirdly well. You wouldn’t think it, looking at Lucas, who’s got a face on through the whole thing like he’s about to have a medical emergency on a TV daytime drama.

Once my mum has got over seeing Tom Barlow, and me and Lucas, frozen on the screen, she takes control in a way that I think is totally impressive, considering.

She isn’t wearing her normal Second Chance Family clothes when she comes down. She’s in a pair of leggings and a loose T-shirt. Maybe that’s what makes me relax a bit, because she’s dressed more like she used to dress, before it happened and when we still lived with my dad: still pretty, still nice, but way more casual. She’s taken the make-up off her face and tied her hair back. The short, soft sleeves of the T-shirt make her arms look fragile and thin, and without foundation the dark circles under her eyes resemble small bruises. My mum, I realise, is very tired.

As she stands in the doorway, Chris gestures towards the chairs and the rank sofa. I think she’s going to sit down beside me, but she doesn’t. She takes the club chair opposite Lucas and Chris is left with the spare sofa seat. When he sits down, the weight of him makes the sofa cushions sag heavily and I become even more extra self-conscious about my bare knees and shoulders.

‘Sit up, Zoe,’ is the first thing my mum says as she looks at me with eyes that are red-rimmed and empty of everything except the bottomless look she had permanently for a long time after the accident. ‘You’re hunching.’

I notice that Lucas adjusts his posture too, when she says that, but my mum’s oblivious. She focuses her whole being on Chris, like he’s the last animal of his kind on earth.

‘Thank you for listening,’ she says. ‘Zoe and I do have some proper explaining to do, we owe that to you both and I’m grateful to you for listening…’ Mum does a bitter-looking swallow then, and tears begin to slip from her eyes, though she doesn’t pay any attention to them. It makes me want to cry myself and I have to work very hard not to.

Mum doesn’t notice that though. She’s sitting ramrod straight in the chair and she fixes Chris with her eyes, which I once heard him tell her were beautiful.

Chris doesn’t do poetic description – ‘I’m just a computer scientist!’ he sometimes says, when Mum is asking him to make a decorating choice. ‘You’re the creative one!’ – so ‘beautiful’ was probably an adjectival stretch for him. I could add to that description. Mum’s eyes are pellucid, arctic blue. The blue is washed pale inside the eyes with a darker rim around the edge and, if you look closely, a fleck of hazel lies within one of her irises, like an intruder.

She tells Chris and Lucas the full blow-by-blow story of the accident, of my fall from grace, the way we told it at the trial. It’s the version of the story where I’m as much of a good person as a bad one; it’s the version where I think I’m doing the right thing when I decide to drive the car. It’s the true version.

Chris stands up when she’s finished. He hasn’t said a word while she talked. On his computer screen the image from the church is still freeze-framed, like Munch’s silent scream. She tries to reach for his hand as he walks away from her but she’s too slow. Mum doesn’t look at me, she just folds her hands into her lap after that and waits, and so I copy her.

I look at the lights that are on in the room, because it’s dark everywhere else now. Chris’s desk lamp is dumping a tired circle of yellow on to the surface of his desk, and the glass wall lights that are sculpted to look like flaming torches are glowing, as is the bulb that shows off Chris’s famous, framed computer chip. Between them, there’s gloom.

‘Maria,’ Chris says, ‘I’m glad that you’ve told me. Thank you.’

Mum’s lips disappear inside her mouth. The tears roll down her face faster now. Chris doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t look at Mum. He’s looking at the computer monitor, as if he’s mesmerised by it. He leans forward and uses the mouse to click on the play button, and the film begins to move.

‘Travesty!’ Tom Barlow shouts. ‘It’s a travesty.’

On the screen, in the movie of myself, I finally notice Tom Barlow. I stare at him, then I get up, and I bang my leg against the piano, as I run out of the frame. I look like a fairy tale girl, fleeing from a wolf. Lucas just stays staring, and then my mum is standing up at the front, turning, and she says, ‘Mr Barlow, Tom…’ and Chris clicks pause.

‘I’m just finding,’ says Chris, ‘the fact that you lied to me
twice
difficult to accept.’

That’s therapy-speak, that ‘difficult to accept’ stuff. I’ve had enough therapy to know it when I hear it. ‘It’s better to describe your emotions than display them,’ Jason would repeat patiently at our Monday meeting when I’d raged or sobbed my way through the weekends at the Unit, ‘then people can help you manage them instead of feeling as if they’re bearing the brunt of them.’

Chris keeps talking and I think that if his voice were a cat then it would be padding quietly and unstoppably towards my mother with unblinking eyes.

‘You lied to me about Zoe’s history, and I suppose I can understand it, I think I can. What Zoe and you have experienced is obviously… well, I’m at a loss for words to describe it just now. You should have told me, but I understand why you didn’t, it was a lie by omission. What I cannot understand, what feels like a slap in the face, is why you lied to me earlier, when you denied knowing that man. That was an out and out lie and you know how I feel about lying, and I’m finding that very difficult to accept.’

‘I’m sorry,’ my mum says. She stands and walks towards him.

‘He came to my house!’ Chris says. ‘He’s unstable. He needs managing, and he came to this house!’

‘I never wanted to lie to you,’ Mum says.

‘You know how I feel about lying. You know it must not happen in my house.’

‘Our house,’ I say. I don’t know why. It just slips out, because twice he’s said ‘my’ house, but I should have kept it in my head.

‘You! Stay out of it.’ He doesn’t look at me because he’s watching Mum, but his arm shoots out and he points a finger at me while his gaze is locked on to hers.

Mum goes right up to him. She looks smaller than usual against him because she has bare feet. She slides her arms around his waist and rests her head on his chest. He’s too angry to return the hug so his arms stay in mid-air, actively keeping distance between him and her. She looks up at him, like some kind of supplicant, trying to bathe her face in the light of him. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘I panicked. I should have trusted you. I was very stupid, I was insecure.’

Mum’s arms snake further round Chris until her hands are linked and I can see his body soften a little at her touch. I marvel a bit at that. Beside me, Lucas is staring at them too but he feels my eyes turn to him and he looks back at me briefly, and I wonder if I have that power, with him, or if he’s in charge.

Chris unpeels my mum’s arms from his body and holds her hands in his, between them, as if they might pray together.

‘It’s going to rain,’ he says, and he’s right because I’m suddenly aware of a sharp, cool breeze that makes the open window rattle and we can hear the foliage shifting outside. ‘Let’s clear up and go to bed.’

‘Chris.’ There’s a desperate note in Mum’s voice that makes my heart tear, because I can tell that she still doesn’t know which way this is going.

He hears her desperation too. ‘We’ll talk more,’ he says, ‘upstairs.’ He tucks her hair behind her ear.

‘Let’s talk here,’ says Lucas, ‘all together.’

Chris looks at him. ‘This is probably something Maria and I need to discuss alone at this point.’

I agree with him, although I know Lucas doesn’t want us to leave them, but I don’t understand that, and I want Mum to have a chance, so I say, ‘I’ll clear up,’ and, as rain begins to smatter on to the windowpane, I stand up.

‘I’ll do it, you go to bed,’ I say.

When I reach the doorway I turn and I look for a moment at them both standing there and I say, ‘I’m sorry, Mummy and Chris.’

One of the tube lights under my kitchen cabinets is flickering silently. It needs replacing.

Sam doesn’t answer his phone so I leave a message to ask if I can come over, although I wonder if he’s asleep. I apologise for potentially disturbing him. We’re very polite to one another, Sam and I, though it’s not formality. I think it’s fear that we’ll lose each other.

I put my phone down on the kitchen table and watch as the screen dims to black. I roll my shoulders back to ease the tension that’s grabbed them in a pincer grip.

The room is stuffy and the smell of Richard’s lasagne still lingers; it’s cloying and it feels as though it will make the back of my throat catch. I get a glass and turn on the tap at the sink, waiting for the warm water to run through until it’s cold before I fill it, and then I drink it all in one go. I look out into the darkness of our garden, and see the shape of Richard’s shed at the end of it, and remember how I found him there earlier in the day.

And even though I know that the homes and the streets of Bristol will be full of people having normal, comfortable Sunday evenings, I feel as though I’m the last person on earth.

And suddenly I can’t stand to be in my house any longer. I grab my bag and leave. I’ll just take my chances and go and turn up at Sam’s flat, because there’s nowhere else I can bear to be.

I’m halfway there, and about to pull over and try to phone him again to give him some warning, when I remember that I’ve left my phone at home, on the kitchen table, and I just can’t face going back to collect it, not now that I’m nearly at Sam’s.

No matter, I think. It won’t do Richard any harm to not be able to contact me for a while, to understand how it feels to have a spouse who is utterly unavailable for support. It won’t do him any harm to feel frightened in the morning because he has to cope with the unreliable actions of the person he’s supposed to be sharing his life with. If I go straight to work in the morning I can manage without it, and Richard can always phone there to track me down. I’ll tell him I stayed at Maria’s, or with a friend.

I surprise myself a little with these sharp feelings of spite towards him, but the thing is, you need energy to cope with an alcoholic spouse, and I have none tonight, so the malice creeps in.

Rain begins to fall as I drive. It’s not heavy, but it’s persistent and my windscreen wipers creak noisily across the glass.

The city centre is empty and I find a parking space easily near Sam’s apartment building.

Before I go up to Sam’s flat I sit in the car for a moment and I wonder whether I should go back to Maria’s house and check on them, before I remind myself that she’s an adult and I mustn’t interfere.

I wonder what Tom Barlow is doing, or thinking. I wonder if he’s lying awake beside his wife and stewing, or whether he’s online, searching for more information about Zoe, and her new family.

Raindrops spatter on the roof of the bus with a tinny persistence, like a fusillade of toy guns. My thoughts have become exhausting enough that I decide I’ve had enough of sitting in the car. I step out and run across the wide pavement that separates the road from Sam’s building and I don’t stop until I’m safely under the partial cover of the meanly proportioned porch, and I press the buzzer for his apartment.