The Perfect Girl (4 page)

I have to wake her, because I have to tell her about Maria and Zoe, yet no part of me wants to.

‘Tessa,’ I say. ‘Tess.’ There’s a thin sheet covering her, and its sculptural white folds describe the lines of her body so closely, it’s as if somebody had carefully laid it there, like the first damp bandages of a plaster cast.

She’s alert quickly, eyes wide open; she’s heard something in my voice.

‘What?’ she says, and it’s a whisper; she hasn’t moved yet.

I want to swallow the reason I’ve woken her up, never speak of it. I don’t want to do this to her.

‘I’m so sorry,’ I say, and the words make me feel terribly, throat-clearingly formal. They steal an intimacy from us.

And in the moment after I tell Tessa that her sister is dead, and she sits up, her eyes searching mine for confirmation of the truth of what I’ve said, I have the strange realisation that she resembles Maria more closely than I’d ever noticed before.

And after a time where I hold her tight while shock takes hold of her, and I experience what I can only describe as an ache in my heart, in spite of the clichéd awfulness of that phrase, I have to let her go.

And that heartache, that hard pinch of a feeling, is not something I can indulge. It’s a shallow, oil-slicked puddle of self-indulgent emotion compared to the oceans of grief that Tess’s family have been through, and will now go through again. Just to totally overkill the metaphor: their grief could fill the Mariana Trench.

I gather up Tess’s clothes for her and she dresses silently. When she’s finished, I ask: ‘Do you want to come with me? To see Zoe? And Richard?’

His name seems to me to hover bulkily in the air between us, but it’s the least of her worries at this moment.

‘I should go to the house first,’ Tess says. ‘I need to see… and the baby…’

She can’t finish her sentence; her words are choked with shock and incomprehension. We have very little information, just that Maria died at the house, but we don’t know how. I understand that it’s up to me to look after Zoe for now, whoever she’s with.

‘Shall I drop you there?’ I ask. I’m worried about her driving.

We’re standing on the communal landing in my building now. It’s a small, bright space, with floor-to-ceiling windows over the busy commuter road below, no lift, just a functional metal staircase that winds its way down to the ground floor and the car park, and it’s airless and stifling.

‘No,’ Tess says. ‘You need to go to Zoe. I’ll come later.’ And then she’s gone, sandals clattering on the steps.

Lucas’s Debussy piece lasts for fourteen minutes, and his Bach is nine minutes. If you add to that the time he’ll need to mix with the audience afterwards, and then the drive home, and assume that since Mum and I took the car, Aunt Tess will be bringing them in her VW bus, which doesn’t go above 36 mph without belching out black smoke, then I think Mum and me originally had about an hour and ten minutes to talk before Lucas and Chris arrive, minus the time it took discovering Katya and Barney on the sofa and the minute that Barney could stand to be in the room with me afterwards, leaving us about fifty-eight minutes.

I wait on the sofa, stretched out, while Mum is still upstairs with Grace. My hip aches painfully from the bang against the piano and I pull up my dress to examine it and see a dark bruise forming there already. It’s tender to the touch. The sight of it makes tears spring to my eyes and I shut them, and lie back down, and try to breathe, the way I’ve been told, to blank my thoughts, to focus just on the sensation of inhales and exhales instead.

It’s hot. Our Second Chance House is a big old Victorian pile and it usually feels damply cold to me, whatever the weather, but this summer’s been so hot for so long that the heat’s gradually built up and tonight feels like a culmination of that, as if the house has finally reached a rolling boil and the air inside is hot like jazz music bouncing off a dripping ceiling in a packed-full club, or like the picture of a red sun pulsating over shimmering orange ground in the portfolio-sized photo book about deserts that my dad gave me when I was little.

From upstairs I can hear the sound of the musical mobile that hangs above Grace’s cot being wound up, then its tinkly noises begin, repetitive and familiar; soul-destroyingly plinky.

Katya appears suddenly in the doorway and looks at me without saying anything.

‘He’s outside,’ I say.

‘I know. I just texted him. Your mother is settling Grace.’

‘I know.’

Katya stands in the doorway for longer than I’m comfortable with and I lie there silently willing her to go away.

‘I tried to be your friend,’ she says and I just don’t, utterly don’t have time for this right now. She has no idea.

‘Thanks, Katya,’ I say. ‘
Spasiba
.’ I say that because it really annoys her when I try to speak Russian. I get out my phone and scroll around it and try to look like I’m actually expecting to get a message from a real person.

‘Zoe, you are your own worst enemy.’

‘Original,’ I say.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I saw what you were doing.’ I suddenly feel vulnerable in my prostrate position – it’s funny how one moment you can feel glamorously hot and worn out like a panting diva in an old film and the next you realise you probably just look stupid – so I sit up and look properly at her over the back of the sofa. ‘With Barney. I saw where his hand was.’

She makes an expression that mixes disgust and sadness at my amoeba-level of existence.

‘Inappropriate,’ she says. ‘Totally. Ugh.’ She has a habit of using Americanisms, which makes her sound like she’s hosting the Eurovision Song Contest.

And I’m about to say how I’m not the one who’s inappropriate and what she did was inappropriate, and has my mum even said that she’s allowed to go out with Barney tonight anyway, but her phone pings and we’re both trained to be silent when a phone pings – this is a Major Characteristic of our Generation my Aunt Tessa says: the veneration of the ping of the phone – and so we’re both silent while she reads the text.

‘Barney’s waiting,’ she says, and she turns so fast that the wispy ends of her hair fly out in a fan shape and she’s disappeared before I can organise my riposte.

I lie back down. I’m happy she’s gone. From upstairs the circus mobile is still crunching out its tune and I know what my mother will be doing. She’ll be sitting on the floor beside Grace’s cot, being as still as possible, and stroking the baby’s forehead. She can do that for ages, and tonight it makes me feel super tense because I feel like the time we have left before Lucas and Chris get home is on one of those kitchen timers that click madly like a bomb that’s going to detonate until they make a screechy buzz that Lucas says sounds like a small bird being strangled.

And then I notice a thing. I notice that my phone browsing, which I basically did for show when Katya was looking at me, has actually turned something up. I have a notification and the sight of it makes my stomach ball up prickly and tight like a hedgehog, because there it sits, just like it used to: a number one, in a red circle, on the corner of the
panop
app.

It’s an app I shouldn’t even have on my phone. It’s forbidden, because, it was, according to Jason, my key worker at the Unit, and I did have to agree with him, definitely part of my downfall, because Eva Bell and Amelia Barlow and their cronies used it to torment me.

So I should have stayed away from it, but when I came out of the Unit, I couldn’t resist downloading it, just to have a look, because I was curious about what happened to the people I used to know. I left one life when I went into the Unit, and when I came out I had another life completely, in another place, and nobody would talk about the old one, and
panop
was my only way back there. So I downloaded the app, and sometimes I sneak a look to see what people are doing. It’s anonymous you see, if you want it to be.

Grace has gone quiet upstairs, but I estimate it’ll be another ten minutes at least before my mum appears. With my heart pounding, I click on the app. A question fills the screen:

At the end of the concert, the crowd has an edge to it, an atmosphere, like a kind of low-level static. Lucas’s performance hasn’t succeeded in washing away the unease caused by Tom Barlow’s scene.

As Lucas takes his bow I check my phone and I have two texts:

I reply to neither of them. I’ll do as Maria says, she knows I will, and Richard can wait. I imagine he’ll have made it out of his shed and back into our house, and suddenly worked out that he’s alone.

When I look up, Chris is by my side.

He’s brusque: ‘Maria’s taken the car and I want to get home, but I think I need to stay for at least a few minutes. People will be expecting me to.’

He’s probably right so I say, ‘I’ll wait. I’ll give you a lift whenever you’re ready.’

He makes no direct reference to Tom Barlow’s outburst.

We don’t know each other very well, Chris Kennedy and I, because Maria has always kept him to herself, like a piece of treasure that she’d found, and no wonder really, because she’d been through hell.

When Zoe was convicted Maria’s marriage fell apart and she was left on her own to pick up the pieces. Zoe spent eighteen months in jail and in that time Maria had to cope with the transition from farmer’s wife with a talented, beautiful child, a musical prodigy no less, to single mother with a teenage child with a criminal record.

She moved from Devon to be near me in Bristol, settling into a rented flat in the only area of the city she could afford, and starting work as a secretary at the university, a job that Richard got her, and that she could barely hold down at first, so powerful was her depression.

It was the piano that changed everything, as it always had done throughout Zoe’s life.

Zoe’s father would have none of it; he blamed her piano playing for much of what had happened before. He said it had led to her being different, being above herself, and that had in turn led to the bullying, and the accident.

The rest of us took a different view: that piano could help Zoe rediscover herself, repair her self-esteem and provide her with a path for the future. Her talent was so ferociously strong that none of us could bear to let it rest, and, after all, what else did she have left apart from that and her intellect?

On advice from Zoe’s therapist at the Unit, we encouraged Zoe to start playing again when she came home, and after a couple of months of practice on a keyboard that Richard bought for her, and the shlonky pianos at her new school, and with the help of some lessons from a teacher that Richard found and I paid for, Maria entered her tentatively into a low-key, local competition to help her recover her form.

It was a repertoire class that Zoe entered. It was non-competitive, and there were only two entrants. The other was Lucas.

Zoe played brilliantly that day, considering. She rose to the occasion.

I sat with Maria and Chris Kennedy sat just a seat away from us. We were the only people watching, apart from the adjudicator, who would not declare a winner, but would give feedback to the players.

After Zoe’s performance, Chris leaned over to us and asked who Zoe’s teacher was. Maria answered him, and it wasn’t long before I felt like a lemon and took Zoe to find a cup of tea while they chatted intensely in the corridor outside the performance hall, and Lucas skulked around the perimeter.

Chris and Maria exchanged phone numbers that day, ostensibly to share information about Lucas’s piano teacher, who Chris declared to be ‘the best in the south-west, and the only teacher for a talent like Zoe’, and they met up soon afterwards.

It became apparent very quickly that Chris was extremely good for Maria. She began to dress better, and to take care of herself. She smiled. She moved Zoe to the new teacher, who cost Richard and I twice as much, but we were happy to pay. When Maria finally declared that they were in a proper relationship, it felt a little bit as if Chris had saved her.

However, in spite of all that, and even though I’ve met him on numerous occasions for social events, Chris still feels like a bit of a stranger to me. The only semi-intimate conversation I can claim to ever have had with him was when we met on the train to London once, by accident. It was just after Grace was born because I remember the way he seemed to glow when he spoke about her.

Chris was on his way to be the key speaker at a backslapping networking lunch for successful entrepreneurs, millionaires who want to be gazillionaires. His description, not mine, and delivered with a healthy dose of irony. I was on my way to a conference about feline hyperthyroidism.

After we met on the platform at Bristol Temple Meads, he kindly bumped me up to first class where he laid his business tools out lavishly across the table that was between us:
Financial Times
, BlackBerry, iPhone, laptop, speech notes.

While he made a business call where he stared out of the window and said things like, ‘Well, as soon as it gets to market it’s a matter of how I judge that,’ and, ‘Yup, yeah sure, indeed. This all plays back to… yes, well, it’ll raise hairs, won’t it, but it is the fact we’ve got to get into it,’ I sat in front of him feeling intimidated and not daring to eat the flaky sausage roll I’d bought for breakfast, or to get out my
Hello!
magazine.

Still, I didn’t need the magazine, because after the call Chris and I chatted all the way, about my work, about his, and about baby Grace, who’d just been born. ‘Maria is such a natural mother,’ he said. ‘I’m a lucky man, after everything.’ And I’d felt happy for my sister, because who would have believed that she could have had this turn of fortune after Zoe’s trial.

‘Do you know what I loved about your sister, when I first met her?’ he asked.

I shook my head. When Chris first met Maria she’d been a shadow of the girl who boys trailed around after when we were at school.

‘She’s a beautiful woman, obviously,’ he said, ‘but what I noticed most of all were extraordinary qualities of sweetness and poise, as if she just knew who she was. She was like a fine piece of porcelain; I couldn’t believe my luck.’

I smiled at the fondness in his words and the emotion, but my first thought at that moment was that Chris didn’t know Maria very well; that he’d met a version of her that was coshed by antidepressants and shock and he’d mistaken those qualities for frailty and composure.

Obviously, I kept that thought to myself at the time, but it did make me wonder whether Maria had since concealed what I thought of as her true personality traits. Had Chris ever got a full, no-holds-barred view of her robustness, her intelligence, or her humour, the qualities that were innate to her, that would surely reappear even a little bit once she and Zoe began to recover? Or had she kept those under wraps purposefully, not wanting to spoil the dynamics of this relationship, or the good fortune of this second chance?

I was brave then. I asked Chris about his first wife. Pure nosiness, but who isn’t curious about the uncommon circumstances of a man bringing up his son alone? I’d asked Maria about it, of course, but she was either badly informed on the subject or incredibly discreet because she said very little except that Lucas’s mum had died from illness when he was ten and that it had shattered him and his father. Chris had apparently not had a significant relationship between Julia’s death and meeting Maria.

In the train, emboldened by a surfeit of caffeine on an empty stomach, I said, ‘Has it helped Lucas get over his loss, to be part of this new family?’

‘Very much so.’ Chris’s answer was swift and sure.

‘How did his mother die?’

‘She had a terminal brain tumour, a particularly savage one.’ He spoke in quite a clinical tone, but his hand twitched on the table and he began to turn his BlackBerry over and over in his palm.

‘Oh. I’m so sorry.’ And I was. I felt a blush creeping up my neck and across my cheeks. ‘I shouldn’t have asked.’

‘I don’t mind. Lucas was devoted to her of course but it wasn’t easy towards the end. She wasn’t very stable. I, we, Lucas and I are so very grateful that Maria agreed to marry me. She’s a wonderful woman, your sister. I’m a lucky man.’

That day on the train I wondered if Maria had done the right thing keeping Zoe’s past from Chris. Surely, I thought, that can’t last. I resolved to advise her to tell him, when the moment was right, when he would surely understand. But the conversation never worked like that, because when I brought it up Maria was appalled. I was not, ever, ever to consider interfering in her and Zoe’s life like that, she told me. She had found her soul mate and she was going to do everything she could to make it work for her and for Zoe. I was to keep quiet about their past and keep my nose out of their business.

And so I did, but in the concert hall on this stifling night I wonder again if that decision isn’t destined to bite us all.

I dismantle the camera and tripod set-up clumsily, and when I join everybody who’s enjoying a post-concert drink I notice that the atmosphere still isn’t quite the usual one of satisfaction, where the audience appears to bask in the pleasure of exchanging opinions about what they’ve just heard. Tonight it seems more conspiratorial. People are huddling, and some are discussing Lucas’s performance, but most, I can tell, are talking about the outburst.

I strip the cling film from two plates of food that have been laid out on a trestle table at the side of the room. Each has a selection of little snacks on them, which Maria made herself.

Lucas appears beside me, and he looks white. ‘Well done,’ I tell him. ‘You played beautifully.’ I say this even though it isn’t entirely what I believe, and I touch his arm lightly because he’s a nice kid and I always seem to have this urge to reassure him even though he’s incredibly composed; maybe because he’s incredibly composed.

‘Is Zoe all right?’ he says.

‘I think so. She’s with her mum. I’ll call them in a minute.’

‘Should we go home?’

‘I’ll drive you and your dad back very soon.’

‘Do you…?’ He wants to ask me about what happened, I can see that written all over his face, but I say, ‘Let’s talk about it later, OK?’

He looks at me, and now he’s wearing that inscrutable gaze of his again, and after only a fraction of a pause he begins to help me.

Chris peels away from the crowd discreetly after about twenty minutes, and we find Lucas sitting in a pew in the church, doing something on his sleek little tablet, which he hastily slips into his music bag.

In my VW bus, they both seem huge: all knees and hunched shoulders.

We travel mostly in silence.