The Perfect Girl (8 page)

I wash my face, and I’m careful not to get my hair wet. I reapply a little bit of make-up, then I brush my hair until it’s silky. I want to shower and change my clothes, to rid myself of the concert, and of Tom Barlow, of Katya and Barney and the message on my phone. I want to curl up in my bedroom, which is my refuge, my nest, my safe place, but I know I can’t.

In the mirror I look like I always do: white hair halo, blue eyes, skin like wax. ‘Like a princess,’ Jack Bell said, as he held my chin, and gently tilted my head up towards his. People always say I look like a princess. Lucas refuted that when I told him. He says it’s a white middle-class fantasy (sub genres: Northern European and North American) that princesses are small, blonde, pale creatures with barely formed features.

Jack Bell called me a princess at a party he had at his house, on the night of the accident. Then he pulled my hand to him, and put it on his stomach.

‘Zoe Guerin,’ he said. ‘Why’s your name French?’

‘My dad’s family was French about a hundred years ago,’ I said.

‘I bet you know the exact date, don’t you?’ He was mocking me because I always had my hand up to answer questions at school, but I didn’t mind.

I could feel under my palm that Jack Bell’s stomach was muscly. Even though it was so cold outside that the fields were beginning to glow white with a night frost, he was just wearing a T-shirt. I’d been watching him shed layers of clothing as he danced, waiting for the looks to come my way. And they did: a look, and then a smile, and now we’re close enough that my hand is on his stomach, my fingers splaying a bit wider.

I liked Jack Bell, even though he could be mean sometimes, like when he ignored me at school if he was in a group with his friends. In spite of that, I really liked him. If I’m honest I thought about him all the time.

Jack Bell played the male hero in every fantasy I had. In my mind, we were husband and wife, friends for life, we were a perfect cadence at the end of a piece of music: harmonious, satisfying, whole, meant to be.

I think that’s why it shocked me in a way the actual touching of him, because Jack Bell was so much in my mind then that the real feel of him was strange. His breath smelled of alcohol and his skin was sweaty, and I wasn’t sure I liked it but still my fingers widened on his abdomen.

‘Come with me,’ he whispered into my ear.

I looked for Gull. She was across the other side of the room, talking to one of Jack’s friends, laughing at something he’d said.

Jack took me into a room just down the corridor. It was a bedroom. He shut the door, and put his hands on my waist and then ran them up the side of me, crinkling the folds of my dress. It felt like hot water was pouring through me. The intensity of it made me push him away a little.

Jack Bell smiled and took me to the bed. ‘Sit with me,’ he said and so I did, and we were side by side on the extra-bouncy mattress. I tried it out, laughing as I bounced higher. ‘Come here,’ said Jack and we kissed for a minute all awkwardly because we were sitting next to each other. It was my first ever kiss. His hand touched one of my breasts and I jumped. Jack said, ‘Where’s your drink? Let me get you another drink.’

I’d had one spritzer already, and I knew I couldn’t have any more alcohol. That was essential because I wasn’t even used to it, and I shouldn’t have even been at the party because I had a piano competition the next afternoon so I said, ‘Just a Coke, please.’

‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like something stronger?’

‘Coke is good.’

‘Sure?’ That smile tempted me to say yes, but I didn’t.

‘Just a Coke.’

‘You always know what you want, don’t you, Zoe? Did you want me to notice your figure in that dress?’

A little thrill of guilt passed over me when he said that, because I did want him to notice me, but I also thought he was wrong in a way, because I was never
sure
what I wanted, never ever. I’m still not.

‘Will you check on Gull?’ I asked. ‘She might be wondering where I am.’

‘Yep,’ and he stared at me for just a moment before he left the room and the door shut softly behind him. I fell backwards on to the bed, and stared up at the ceiling and wondered why, if this was one of life’s moments, it felt bad and good all at the same time.

And just the memory of that moment still gives me a powerful sensation of falling, even now.

I’m pulled away from it though, all of a sudden, because I’m distracted by movement. Something has flown in through the open window of the bathroom.

At first I think it’s a moth, and I turn off the mirror light quickly, because I don’t want it to bombard the light, and flap around me, but as my eyes adjust to the darkness I see that it’s a butterfly, and it seems to like the darkness because it settles on the edge of the mirror and closes its wings.

The reflection of the butterfly in the mirror transfixes me. Its ragged-edged wings look as if they’re made of striated layers of dark iridescent powder, which reflect and absorb the light from the chandelier in the hall in uncountable numbers of tiny, unreliable glimmers. It’s like a living shadow.

I stand very still and it rewards me by opening its wings wide, just for a second, revealing brilliant colour – a flash of deep red and patches of blue, black and yellow – and I know at once it’s a peacock butterfly. When I was little my dad and me would watch out for butterflies in our fields, and we would name them all. We had a book, so if we didn’t know what one was we would try to remember it and look it up when we got home. I was obsessed with them, I thought they were the most beautiful creatures in the world, and it’s why my nickname is ‘Butterfly’ though Mum doesn’t call me that any longer.

After the butterfly closes its wings again, I stand and watch it for a few moments more, hoping it’ll give me another glimpse of colour, but it doesn’t. Sounds drift up through the open window, from the garden, and remind me that I need to leave the butterfly, and the mirror, and the room, because I need to rejoin my Second Chance Family.

A final check in the mirror shows me that my eyes now look dark as pools of oil, and again the shoulder strap of my dress has slipped. I pull it up and I make my way back downstairs.

The chalk-cool tiles in the hallway feel lovely again, but I need to put on shoes because bruschetta usually goes with other Italian dishes and sitting down at the table, and Chris prefers that we’re not barefoot at dinner.

What would he have thought of my dad, I wonder, but I never dare to ask Mum, what would Chris have thought of my real dad, who couldn’t have cared less about formality; who sat on rugs with his back against the sofa and watched TV with me, fish and chips on our laps; who made us toasted sandwiches so we could eat them over the Monopoly board, who never cared what you wore on your feet when you ate. ‘Her father never had any boundaries,’ my mum said in a family reintegration meeting at the Secure Unit, ‘and look where that got us.’ Her mouth was drawn tight but uncertain like zigzag patterns on a line graph, and I wanted to say, ‘But you never minded that,’ but I didn’t dare.

When I get down the stairs, I find that everybody’s in the kitchen. My heart has begun to pound again, and I don’t have the courage to go any further than the doorway of the room. Everybody has their back to me apart from Mum.

‘Zoe!’ she says and she reminds me of the open-winged butterfly, twinkling bright, sharp and pretty. ‘Could you toast the bread?’

She’s holding a crystal glass tumbler, which is Chris’s Tom Collins tumbler, and there’s ice in it, which chinks against the sides, and an inch of clear liquid, which I know is gin. My mum adds club soda and it fizzes. A Tom Collins is what Chris always drinks before supper at the weekend.

‘Hi, sweetie,’ says Tess, as she turns round, and she gives me one of her huge hugs and while she’s doing that she whispers into my ear, ‘It’ll be OK.’

Over Tess’s shoulder I can see Lucas is at the table. He mouths some words at me and I think he’s saying:
Did you read the email?
I kind of shake my head, because obviously I didn’t finish it, and I don’t know why he’s so obsessed with it all of a sudden.

I look at Chris last, but he’s busy opening the bi-fold doors so that one wall of our kitchen is thrown open to the garden, and he’s putting on the garden lights.

They throw up great yellow beams from the base of the trees that are out there. There’s a young silver birch that he and my mum planted – a crane had to lift it into the garden – but my favourite is a big old cedar tree whose trunk is huge and grey and forms chunks of dry bark like scabs which you can pick off.

My mother pours olive oil into a small, white round dish. The green-gold ooze reminds me of petrol. She hands me a brush.

‘Just on one side,’ she says. ‘Not too much, not too little.’

I’m concentrating so much on the movement of the brush, the initial resistance of the bread, then the soaking in of the oil, that it makes me jump when Chris puts a hand on my shoulder.

‘Zoe,’ he says, and his voice sounds extravagantly rich and wrap-around as if we were shut together in a confessional, he behind the screen in robes, me about to unplug the so-long-repressed words to purge my disgrace. I sense his body behind mine, and I feel myself straighten up. I don’t think Chris has ever touched me before. He’s careful, careful around me like he’s read a how-to manual on being a non-creepy stepfather. ‘Now tell me,’ he says, ‘are you all right?’ His hand falls away practically before it’s landed.

Across the island, over the sea of stripped basil, I meet my mother’s eye, but she looks away. Her earring swings from her lobe – finest pieces of gold interlinked. From behind her, Lucas is staring at us. In front of him, in a row, are little tea-light holders that I suppose he’s meant to be filling, and a bag of candles. Aunt Tessa isn’t meeting my eye; she’s busy adding oil and balsamic vinegar to a bowl where the chopped tomatoes and pummelled basil wait damply.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Did you know that man in the church?’ Chris asks me.

‘No,’ I say to the baguette slices.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘No,’ I say it more loudly. I shake my head.

‘Did you know him, Maria?’ Chris asks my mother.

She turns on her heel and gives Chris full, bright eye contact, just like she did with Jason the Key Worker when she had to explain to him why my dad wasn’t coming to family reintegration meetings any more. My mum is a brilliant actress. She could give Meryl Streep a run for her money.

‘I thought I knew him, darling, but I don’t think I did,’ she says. ‘I must have made a mistake. Would you like one of these? They’re from the deli.’ She puts a small plate of shiny green olives on the island.

‘I’m not hungry,’ says Chris. ‘I have no idea why you’re cooking at this time of night.’

‘I’m hungry,’ says Tessa, who’s using Mum’s femur-sized pepper grinder to season the bowl of tomatoes. ‘Starving actually.’

‘But you called that man by his name,’ Chris says to Mum and I feel as if his words somehow have substance in the heat, that they’re glutinous like the dregs of the oil in my bowl. I keep my head down and I finish brushing the oil, in slow strokes, and then I start to place the bread on the oven tray.

‘I thought he was somebody I knew.’ My mother has turned away; she’s getting another wine glass down, pouring some for Tess. ‘But, on reflection, I think I was wrong.’

She glances at me. ‘Olive oil side down,’ she says, and I start to turn the bread slices over, one by one, so they look untouched again, as though there’s not a drop of oil on them.

The glass of wine that Maria pours me is tiny, because she knows I’m driving. I’m grateful she’s remembered, in spite of what’s going on, because it’s not the sort of thing you can easily bring up in front of Zoe. I take the glass from her and reach for one of the olives.

‘It would be lovely to eat.’

I am hungry actually, but I’d be saying it even if it wasn’t true. I don’t know what Maria’s playing at exactly, but she’s definitely buying time.

Chris, for the first time in my experience, looks lost. Their kitchen is vast, cavernous compared to the small space that Richard and I share at home, and he stands in the middle of it, glass in hand, lit up as brightly as our surgical theatre at work by the halogens, and somehow wrong-footed by Maria’s unexpected assertiveness.

Light glances off every surface in this room, all of them shined or polished or brushed, and I understand why my sister always looks so put together. There’s nowhere in here where you won’t see some version of yourself reflected back at you, nowhere where others will be able to watch you in any way other than forensically.

When I look at Chris, who I’ve always thought of as a benign king of his castle, I can clearly see that he’s wrestling with a dilemma.

I recognise this easily because I see it frequently in the owners of pets I treat. The biggest and trickiest dilemma that many of them face is whether to continue prolonging the life of their animal, or to end its suffering. Some people want me to make the decision for them, though I can’t do that. Some break down, others wrestle silently with it, faces contorted by the effort of not showing emotion in public, knuckles white around a limp dog lead, or on the handle of a cage, objects that might soon just be mementos, and this is what Chris looks like.

Chris’s dilemma is this: to assert himself, or to back down for now, to play a longer game. He has this dilemma because I don’t think he believes Maria.

I wouldn’t.

While he cogitates, Maria takes the lifeline I’ve thrown her.

‘How hungry are you?’ she says.

‘Absolutely bloody starving,’ I say. ‘I could eat a horse.’ This is the kind of joke we unashamedly make at the clinic. Amongst the vets and support staff we have a competition to use as many animal-related sayings as possible.

Chris takes a long sip of his drink and walks over to gaze out at the garden. It looks magnificent. It’s a huge plot for the location, with a couple of fabulous mature large specimen trees and a view from the end of it across the city.

‘I’ll lay the table out here shall I then?’ he asks Maria.

‘That would be lovely. We could use the new lights.’

Chris says to me, ‘Would you like to phone Richard? See if he can join us? That would be nice.’

I’m surprised by this because Chris is well aware of Richard’s proclivity for drink. It’s an open secret in the family. His question gets Maria’s attention too. She looks at him, and then she says, words crisply clear: ‘Richard’s got summer flu. Best let him sleep it off. I don’t want Grace to catch anything.’

Chris’s eyes narrow because all three of us know that the chances of Richard having summer flu are very, very small. I’m sure I’m not the only one amongst us who is imagining Richard right now, passed out somewhere, stinking of booze, and depression; catatonic with it.

‘What about me?’ We all turn to look at Lucas because it’s not often that he addresses a room full of people. Lucas is a one-on-one person. He’s only usually comfortable with an audience if he’s sitting at a piano, insulated by his performance.

‘Doesn’t it matter if I get flu? Or Zoe?’ He says it really deadpan. He has a surprisingly deep voice.

Maria’s eyebrows raise and she exhales sharply.

‘That’s very rude!’ Chris snaps.

‘No, no, it’s OK. It’s a reasonable question,’ Maria says, her hands up, palms outwards. ‘I thought it would go without saying that we don’t want either of you to get sick. Of course we don’t.’

‘Apologise!’ Chris crosses to the table where Lucas sits and leans over it, head hovering closer to his son than it needs to. In the civilised confines of this room, with the smell of oil-brushed baguette toasting and the drifting scent of somebody else’s barbecue through the open doors, this stands out as a gesture of aggression. Lucas’s head jerks back. He reads it the same way I do. There’s surprise on his face.

‘I’m sorry, Maria,’ Lucas says it to her nicely enough but drops his gaze quickly afterwards, and turns his head away from his father a little, and begins to insert candles into their holders, each one making a small sound as it lands. I’ll admit, I’m shocked. Zoe has her back to them at the grill; she doesn’t see it. Maria has been watching with eyes that look blank.

‘Sweetheart,’ Maria says to Lucas, and for the first time I see her composure wobble. Her voice rattles like pebbles in a jar. ‘It’s fine, really. Could you possibly pop those out on the garden table for me when you’re done? It might need a wipe first. And if you’re starving, Tess, I could whip up some chicken Parmigiana? If you’d like that?’

Two things strike me. Firstly, nobody whips up chicken Parmigiana. It’s a beast of a recipe, involving breadcrumbs and eggs and dunking and bashing of meat and then sauces and grilling and baking. It’s a labour of love, to be prepared starting at five in the evening, not late on a Sunday evening. I wonder if my sister can really be trying to cook herself out of this situation, because it’s surely a doomed effort; she can’t keep cooking for ever. My second thought is, it’s my favourite dish, and Maria knows that.

‘That would be amazing,’ I say and she gives a small nod.

‘Great! I hoped you’d want some! We can have an impromptu supper in the garden!’

It’s strange, because I’m not normally the focus of her hostess-charm. It’s a new skill, which she’s developed since being with Chris, and usually I watch her from the sidelines, exempt from being its target myself. The pre-accident Maria ran her household as a ‘take-us-as-you-find-us’ affair, with a shoe-strewn hallway and a kitchen where you’d have to shift the Sunday supplements to find a space to sit. It was relaxed and informal.

It was everything that Chris, bless him, isn’t.