The Perfect Girl (7 page)

‘Bruschetta?’ I ask Mum. This is a perfect example of why she’s insane to deal with sometimes. We all ate before we came out, so nobody will be hungry when they get back from the concert. I’m one hundred per cent sure that Key Worker Jason would say that making bruschetta at this moment is a classic example of displacement activity.

‘Yes, I think we will,’ she says. She’s not actually listening to me at all; she’s just answering herself. She crosses the kitchen, her shoes tapping on the stone floor. She’s still wearing her heels from the concert. She heaves open the door of our fridge. ‘Now let’s see…’ she says. ‘Have we got what we need?’

My mum has a very big fridge. It’s big enough that you could stuff a body inside it. Lucas says that. He once said, ‘Do you think if we put Grace in the fridge she would stop crying? Or at least we wouldn’t be able to hear her.’

I laughed really hard at that, partly because Lucas doesn’t often make a joke when we’re all together, so I thought it would be good to laugh, to encourage him, and partly because I pictured Grace in the fridge in a Tupperware box, just like my mum stores all the leftover food. And I don’t mean that in a morbid way – everybody always thinks I mean things morbidly – it was just funny.

‘Black humour,’ said Jason the Key Worker to me once, taking off his glasses and massaging his frown lines so deeply it was like he was looking for something lost in there, ‘can be a tool to deal with your emotions and you’ll hear it a lot while you’re in the Unit, but you have to be very, very careful, Zoe, about how you use it when you’re back in the outside world.’

Mum went white as a Mini Milk lollipop when Lucas said that, and even whiter when I laughed ultra loudly. At the time, Grace was so tiny that she just spent most of her time draped over Mum’s shoulder with slimy bubbles popping out of her mouth.

Chris went ballistic, which isn’t really a good description of him being cross. When my dad used to go ballistic he would shout, and his hands would fly everywhere, and once he threw a baked potato on the floor and it exploded everywhere, and him and Mum and me killed ourselves laughing.

Chris isn’t like that, he’s far too polite. His version of ballistic is that he just went a bit rigid and said to Lucas, ‘Could we have a little chat?’ and they left the room and I heard the sound of them talking on and on in Chris’s study down the hallway. In the kitchen my mum put on Radio 3 and said, ‘You didn’t need to laugh like that,’ and I felt ashamed. When Lucas and Chris came back in, Lucas said, ‘Sorry, Maria, what I said was inappropriate,’ and Mum said, ‘I understand it was only a joke, Lucas, but I appreciate the apology. It’s fine,’ and Chris pointed out that if he wasn’t mistaken that was Barenboim playing Beethoven on the radio so we all listened to that.

Mum has pulled a packet of small, plump tomatoes out of the fridge. They’re the size of big marbles. ‘Please can we talk about Mr Barlow?’ I say to her. She begins unwrapping the packet and pulling out the tomatoes; they’re blooming with redness and still attached to their stalk.

‘Yes! OK, yes!’ she says, but then, ‘I think these are small and sweet enough that we won’t have to skin them. Pass me some garlic will you, please? We’re going to need, let’s see, probably two large cloves or three small ones.’

In the pantry, I find the garlic, a chunky plait of fat papery bulbs, hanging from a shiny metal hook. It’s cooler than the kitchen in the pantry and I feel like staying there, resting my head on the marble surface where there’s a chocolate fudge cake in a tin. Quietly, I open the tin and stick my finger into the icing in the middle of the cake, where I won’t leave a trace. I scoop deeply and it’s productive. I suck the chocolate off my finger and then smooth the icing over so nobody will notice. Easy.

I try to think of ways to talk to Mum about Amelia Barlow’s dad.

When I come out of the larder I push the garlic cloves (two big ones) across the granite island towards her. It’s a large island, and the granite is a dense, polished black. Chris and Mum spent three weeks choosing it. Chris brought loads of samples home and he said it was her choice, but I know she would have preferred something lighter, like the one where the pattern looks like grains of sand, in beiges and whites, with just a sprinkle of black in there. She went for the ebony granite to please him, for sure, because they always try to outdo each other to see who can please the other one the most. Lucas says they’re probably eternally trapped in a cycle of mutual congratulation now, that they’ll be doing it until death does them part. He says it’s because they’re both afraid of being alone.

When I went to Gull’s grave it was black granite too, but it had silver shreds speckling it. I think Gull would have liked that; she loved a bit of bling, and definitely not in an ironic way. The churchyard had a view of the sea. Gull’s grave was black sparkling granite against the so-green fields and the freezing grey ocean, which, on the afternoon we went to visit, was churning out huge, violent waves like a warning, and the wind was so strong we had to turn our backs to it.

The headstone would have cost a fortune my mum said. More than Gull’s family had, because she was a scholarship girl at Hartwood House School like me. The only difference was that she won her scholarship because she was good at sport. We bonded over it. It meant we could be Social Pond Life together.

I wanted to spend more time at Gull’s grave, but it was important that we mustn’t be seen, because people would have been angry. I had to wear a beanie hat to cover up my ice-maiden hair. I had to wrap a scarf high up around my neck.

Mum is holding a large knife and she’s sawing at a baguette with it now with precise, quick diagonal cuts. I’m looking for an opening in her activity so I can say something but I don’t think I’m going to get one so I just say, ‘Mum.’

‘This is yesterday’s,’ she says, ‘so it’s a bit stale, but that’s fine.’

‘Mum.’

‘It’s probably better actually. For bruschetta.’ She says it the Italian way:
brusketta
. Chris would like that. He took her to Italy for two weeks before Grace was born and when they came back Mum pronounced everything the correct Italian way. She had lots of time to read the phrase book, she said, and improve her Italian, which was the silver lining of twisting her ankle on her fourth day there. My mum puts a lot of store in silver linings. Go figure.

I estimate that there will be three more noisy crumb-scratchy slices to cut until she’s finished. Then she’ll have to acknowledge me. The sawing sound is relentless but finally the knife goes down on to the granite with a clatter and the serrated edge catches the light as it falls. There are crumbs everywhere and a neat, stacked pile of bread, cut on the diagonal like in the magazines.

‘Mummy,’ I say again. I know I’m too old to call her mummy, I know that, but she’s not listening to me. ‘Mummy. What will we tell them?’

She swallows, and does multiple blinks, which is a sign of tension for her, and begins to brush the crumbs off the granite, cupping one hand at the edge and sweeping the crumbs into it with the other. Her movements are fast, but not as efficient as usual. She’s being hasty, and crumbs are falling on the floor. I notice she’s drunk two-thirds of her glass of wine already; she must have had a good slug when I was in the pantry. The glass is sweating so much it looks thirsty itself.

‘We’re going to tell them it was a mistake,’ she says brightly. ‘That we don’t know the man and that he made a mistake!’ I can see small patches of damp under each armpit and a single lock of hair that’s fallen on to her forehead, and looks greasy, from the heat. She’d hate that, if she could see it.

‘But you said his name.’

‘Don’t argue with me, Zoe. Just! Don’t! I need to
think
!’ Her voice is shockingly shrill and it makes my spine snap straight.

She blows at the greasy bit of hair, she can feel it, and it rises, and then falls back on to her forehead, right where it was before.

‘God, it’s hot!’ she says, and she gets a fresh tea towel out of the drawer where they all sit perfectly clean and pressed and folded, and she dabs her forehead with it. Her hands are definitely shaking, and I’m suddenly suffused with the loneliness that’s been my real punishment since the accident. I’m riddled with it. It eats me up like a cancer; it spreads into my brain and makes me feel as though I’m going mad. I’m lonely because I’m never allowed to talk about it in the Second Chance Family, even though it happened, and it’s a part of me, and I can’t change that. I’m so freaking lonely, it’s even worse than it was before it happened. But on the subject of loneliness it’s best to be absolutely silent.

So I sit on a stool on the other side of the kitchen island from my mum, and watch while she starts on the tomatoes, chopping them into tiny, tiny little pieces, minuscule pieces that she heaps up into a moist fleshy mountain on the edge of the cutting board, and then she grabs handfuls of basil from the plants she has in pots in the middle of the island, and she starts to rip them up, and the little shredded pieces tumble into a white bowl.

‘You see, you always
rip
basil, Zoe. You never cut it, because that crushes its edges. Tear it to let the flavour out gently,’ she says. But the tearing she’s doing is not gentle, it’s rough, and I can see that the torn little leaves are bruised.

She never did this kind of cookery instruction before we lived with Chris, but she never seems to stop doing it now. I think it’s because he loves it when she does it. He says it’s ‘part of a proper upbringing’ and he can’t wait for Mum to teach Grace the ‘alchemy of cooking’ and he says that Lucas should listen when Mum is sharing her knowledge.

But I don’t want my mum to talk to me like this when it’s just me and her and so I can’t help it, as she gets started on the garlic, unwrapping the nubbly cloves, starting to chop them in half, I get tearful again, and then I have to breathe deeply because I know she won’t want me to cry because that’s against the rule of Preferably No Crying (sub genre: especially when Chris might be on his way home), but I’m overwhelmed with it and I have to start breathing through my nose to try to stop it but that doesn’t work so I’m silently convulsing with it when I hear the knife stop after just a couple of firm chops. The smell of the garlic is pungent.

‘Sweetheart,’ she says and for the first time since we crouched together in the room at the back of the church I think I might be able to hear a bit of warmth in her voice again, and I look at her, and her face is worn out, the way mine feels, but then we hear two little beeps from a car horn, which is what Aunt Tessa always does when she arrives at our house, and I see in Mum’s eyes that she’s as aware as I am that time has just run out, because they’re back.

‘Leave it with me,’ she says. ‘Just don’t admit to anything.
Nothing at all
. Promise me?’

Her chin goes up and I can tell she wants to go and meet them at the door, but she’s waiting for me to agree.

I nod and then I say, ‘Wait!’ and she turns back to me. I come towards her, where she’s hovering at the entrance to the hall, and I tend to the front of her hair so that the little greasy strand is hidden, and she looks smooth and lovely, just like Chris will want her to.

‘Thank you,’ she says, and she adjusts the strap of my dress on my shoulder, tucks my hair behind my ears and I reckon we might, maybe, just still have a second or two to talk, but then she says, ‘Go and wash your face. Quick as you can. And when you come down, you can oil and toast the bread slices.’

I park on the street outside Chris and Maria’s house. There are so many beautifully manicured shrubs in their driveway that I always avoid parking on it because I’m afraid my VW bus will cause them fatal damage if I have to perform any sort of reversing manoeuvre when it’s time to leave. There are also two stone pillars to avoid, which grandly frame the entrance to the drive, chipped and old in golden stone, and I don’t want to be the one to topple them.

The gravel crunches as we walk across it, three abreast, and Maria opens the door as we get there. She shares Zoe’s ice-maiden looks only her hair’s much shorter than Zoe’s, cropped into a bob. Considering everything, she looks reasonably composed.

She focuses her attention on Chris, stepping towards him in a light movement.

‘Hello, darling,’ she says and she places the palm of her hand on one of his cheeks and plants a kiss on the other, which he offers with a practised motion, though it looks, tonight, as if it might need a little oiling. Maria and Chris are always dancing around each other like this, their actions reminding me of choreographed mime. They’re somehow able to fit an appropriately socially smooth movement to almost any situation. If I tried to kiss Richard like that one of us would somehow be in the wrong place and there would be an awkwardness of some description. Sam might be a different matter, though I can’t know that because our relationship has never been for public consumption; we’ve never had to present a face to the world because anything to do with us is an entirely secret, private thing.

I wouldn’t have got out of my car at all, except that I thought Maria might need some solidarity tonight. Normally, I would have just dropped the boys off and legged it.

Chris says nothing, once he’s taken receipt of his kiss, but he looks at her carefully.

‘How was the concert?’ she asks, as if nothing untoward had happened at all.

Chris looks at Lucas who clearly has to scrabble around mentally for an answer, because his mind is elsewhere.

‘Fine,’ is all he comes up with.

‘Bit of work needed on the Scarlatti, I think, but otherwise not too bad,’ says Chris, and Maria says, ‘Well, I’m sure you did brilliantly,’ and when she turns to go into the house Chris steps forward quickly and follows her with his hand on her lower back, as if guiding her in.

Lucas gives me a ‘ladies first’ gesture, but I hate that kind of formality. Instead, I link my arm in his and I say, ‘Help an old lady in would you?’ and he doesn’t smile but nor does he protest, and I hope he doesn’t notice the deep breath I’m taking as we cross the threshold and the heavily glossed door clicks shut behind us.

Ahead of us, Chris is saying to Maria, ‘Darling, could we have a quick word?’ but she’s ready for that.

‘Can it wait?’ she says. ‘I’m afraid I’ve got to see to the bruschetta.’