The Perfect Girl (9 page)

I can’t handle raw white meat. It’s to do with the accident, and the things I saw, and Mum knows this so she gets Lucas to bash the chicken breasts flat.

While he pounds them in a crashing slow-motion rhythm that I’m guessing would equate to about forty beats per minute on the metronome, I lay the outside table with Chris. He wipes it down and I set out shiny cutlery and wine glasses and spread Lucas’s tea lights out along the length of it so they look pretty.

There are also wide terracotta bowls on the table, containing yellow citronella-scented candle wax and Chris lights the thick wicks with a long, chunky match that flares in the darkness. The candles smoke blackly at first but then give off a scent that prickles my nostrils in a nearly nice way. Chris looks at me across the table and more or less repeats the question he asked earlier, only he says it slower, as if he wants to give his words more meaning.

‘Zoe, are you absolutely sure you didn’t you know that man?’ he asks me. ‘In the church?’

I look him in the eye; both of us lit by the flicker of the candles, and also by the aqueous blue sheen of the swimming pool lights, which somebody inside the house has just turned on.

‘No,’ I say. ‘I don’t think so.’ If I know anything, it’s that I must do as my mother says. She’s basically a human shield between the world and me. But I’m tempted to tell him the truth; I can’t deny it. There’s a part of me that wants Chris to know, but only if he could handle it. My real dad couldn’t.

‘Are you sure?’ Chris’s voice isn’t pressing, and there’s an encouraging elasticity to his tone of voice that almost coaxes the truthful answer out of me, but the impulse goes when he adds: ‘You reacted very strongly,’ and that sounds sharper.

‘I was afraid of him,’ I said. ‘He looked crazy.’

In the silence I can still hear the steady pounding of Lucas’s meat tenderising and I’m not sure if Chris’s breathing is actually audible, but I feel like I can hear it as loudly as if his lips were centimetres from my ear. For a moment he studies me like I’m the
Mona Lisa
or something.

‘You would tell me the truth, wouldn’t you, Zoe?’ he asks. ‘You know it’s important that we’re all honest in this family?’

‘Of course,’ I say, and I know I should keep my eyes on him, that’s the kind of thing you talk about in the Unit, how you should keep your eyes on people so they don’t think you’re being shifty, but I can’t help it, I let mine slide away a bit, because Chris’s voice is like caramel and sometimes I want to feel his arms around me in a hug, just like my dad used to do. The urge to tell can be strong.

But Chris turns and strides towards the kitchen. ‘Lucas!’ he calls out. ‘Isn’t that done yet? Are you trying to give me a migraine?’

‘How flat does it have to be?’ I hear Lucas ask my mother. Inside the kitchen, framed by the huge rectangular door opening, the scene looks like something out of an advent calendar window: people preparing food together, talking together. Lucas holds up a bit of roadkill flat chicken for my mother to inspect and she says, ‘That’s fine, darling. Perfect,’ and I have to look away.

I don’t like the pool lights being on at night, because it becomes a death trap for insects. I think of the butterfly I saw earlier and I wonder if it’s still on the mirror and why it didn’t fly towards the light like the moths out here are doing. They’re diving like kamikaze planes towards the candle flames and spinning in circles on the lit-up surface of the pool. There are midges out here too, I can feel them nipping at my arms, and making my scalp itch.

I slip off my shoes, and sit on the edge of the pool and let my feet hang into it.

I’m not happy about the lies I’ve told Chris, but they’re just the usual ones so they create a low-level unease that’s manageable because it’s nowhere near becoming what my mum would call ‘an incident’.

Around my shins ripples shoot off towards the pool edges, distorting the light and creating shadows and dancing shapes within the water. A small bird dives down and takes a mouthful of water right in front of me, or maybe it’s an insect that’s drowned. The bird is gone before it arrived; its flight is the most elegant thing to watch.

‘Did you see that?’ I say, because I can hear somebody coming out of the house, and yet more lights come on, this time a string of bulbs that hang over the pergola that our table is under. They cast a soft white glow into the leaves that cluster above it, and show up the delicate yellow roses that my mum insists on pruning herself twice a year. She’s pleased with them this year because they’re managing to repeat flower after what Chris called ‘a truly fabulous display’ in June, and I think of them as trying very hard to please.

It’s my mum who’s coming now and she’s carrying a plate of bruschetta and a pile of napkins.

‘Paper napkins, I think, for a garden supper,’ she says. She hasn’t heard what I said and I don’t repeat myself.

We sit around the table and Chris pours wine: a full glass for him and Mum, but just a half for Lucas and me. Tessa covers the top of her glass. ‘Water for me now I think,’ she says. ‘It’s so hot.’

You’d think I’d steer of alcohol, wouldn’t you, but you see Chris insists that Lucas and I get use to ‘being around alcohol in a civilised way’, so for us to be offered half a glass of something fine that he’s selected is not unusual. Only half, mind you, because anything more would be ‘excessive’. Not something he has to spell out for me, but he doesn’t know that.

‘Tuck in,’ says my mum and all our hands reach out towards the bruschetta apart from Chris’s.

‘To you, darling,’ says Chris, raising his glass to Mum, ‘the only woman I know who can whip up a feast like this on a Sunday night. What a treat.’ He’s sitting at the head of the table so all of our heads turn towards him as he speaks.

‘Thank you,’ she says. ‘Won’t you have a bruschetta?’

‘I’m saving myself for the chicken,’ he says. ‘As I said, I’m still full from the concert.’

‘Of course,’ says my mum and she breaks a tiny bit off her bruschetta and nibbles at it. She raises her own glass. ‘Can I just say how lucky I feel that we can all be here together tonight. It’s very special.’

We all drink. Nobody speaks. Beside my mum on the table is Grace’s baby monitor, the green light steady like a snake’s eye.

‘So,’ says Aunt Tess in the silence that briefly follows, ‘guess which animal I treated for the very first time this week,’ and she’s about to elaborate on this, but she’s interrupted by the doorbell.

Only it’s not just the doorbell, there’s also a pounding on the door, as if Lucas were still bashing the chicken breasts, and then the bell rings again urgently. All of this noise registers on Grace’s baby monitor; it sends the lights shooting off the scale and back down again, and then we can hear the unmistakable sound of her snuffling.

‘Who the hell can that be?’ says Chris. His chair squeaks as it drags across the pressure-washed flagstones. ‘I’ll get it.’

Mum is up too. ‘I’ll get it,’ she says, ‘you relax,’ but she’s too slow off the mark because Chris is already marching into the house and the hissy intercom is telling us that Grace is revving up for a full-blown yell and he says to Mum, ‘See to the baby.’

Right after the car accident, Zoe remained on bail for a couple of weeks, while the police gathered evidence. I met with her and her parents during this time to discuss strategy for what might happen next. I hadn’t yet had sight of any of the papers that the Crown Prosecution Service were preparing, but it was important to get Zoe’s story complete.

The family came to my office in Bideford one morning, dressed smartly. Sometimes families hold hands with one another when they arrive; sometimes husbands pull chairs out for their wives or children to sit down on. Zoe and her parents weren’t distant with each other exactly, but nor did they seem close in that way.

It was my first meeting with Mr Guerin, Zoe’s dad, and he was clearly very uncomfortable. I imagined that he was more used to being out on the fields than in an office, dogs and livestock his usual companions. He looked older than his wife, though perhaps that was because he was weathered.

‘We were away that night,’ he said. ‘We went to my sister’s house near Exeter because her husband was just back from a tour in Afghanistan, and they were having a party. Zoe told us she wanted to stay with Gull for a sleepover, for Gull’s birthday treat, you see. That’s all we knew of it. First we heard was the phone call from the police when they got her in the hospital. We didn’t know Gull’s parents were away, see, and they didn’t know we were. The girls lied to us.’

Zoe’s head hung down as he spoke, though I noticed that she snuck one or two glances at me, watching my reaction to her father’s words.

‘She’d never even been to a party that we knew,’ he continued. He was warming up, almost as if he couldn’t stop speaking now, as if he’d been waiting to unburden himself of this story. Beside him, his wife and daughter sat silent as his words filled the space between us all. ‘She had trouble making friends at the new school, some girls weren’t very nice to her, internet bullying that’s what she’s told us. She was bullied, Mr Locke, and we want to know if that can be a defence against what she’s done.’

So this was what he’d been working up to, a spark of hope that the family thought they’d discovered, and which they were sheltering and nurturing with cupped hands.

‘They sent her messages through an app, called
panop
, they bombarded her with awful, vitriolic stuff,’ said Maria Guerin. She sounded instantly more articulate than her husband, and I could tell she wasn’t born and raised round here. I wondered how hard it had been for her to manage as a farmer’s wife, because the rural community can be a difficult one to find acceptance within if you’re an outsider.

‘We didn’t know about it.’ Mr Guerin added this.

‘What kind of messages?’ I asked Zoe.

She looked at me, holding something back.

‘Give him your phone, Zo,’ said her dad. ‘You can see it all on her phone.’

She pressed a button or two on her phone and pushed it across the table. It was such a typical young teenage girl’s phone: metallic pink, with stickers on the back of it, musical notes.

On the screen I could see the messages that Zoe had received. The content of them jolted me. They were nasty, taunting, shocking messages. They oozed with clever, calculated malice, and targeted every aspect of her figure and her personality. They left me momentarily speechless.

When I looked up, Zoe had her eyes on me, but she dropped them and a flush crept up and over her cheeks.

‘Who sent these?’ I asked.

‘They’re anonymous,’ Maria answered me.

‘Do you know, Zoe?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You must have some idea,’ said her dad. I could tell this wasn’t the first time he’d said this to her.

Maria put her hand on his. ‘Don’t shout. There’s no need to shout. Not here.’

He pulled his hand out from under hers and ran it through his hair in frustration. He had proud aquiline features, which lent dignity to his weather-beaten skin. Maria withdrew her hand to her lap.

I wondered what Zoe would tell me if it were just she and I in the room. I wondered what she hid from her parents.

‘Do you feel that these messages affected your behaviour on the night of the accident?’ I asked her. This was important, because it could lead to a possible coercion defence.

‘I didn’t get any that night.’

‘Which tells me,’ her father raised his voice again, ‘that somebody there that night was sending them. It’s not rocket science. I might not have degrees coming out of my ears but it’s common sense, isn’t it? Common bloody sense. They lured her there, and they bullied her into doing something she wouldn’t have done otherwise.’

‘They didn’t.’ Zoe’s voice was soft and quiet.

‘What?’ he said to her.

‘They didn’t bully me into it! I decided to drive. I chose to drive. You taught me, Dad, you taught me yourself. I decided to drive but I didn’t know I was drunk. I swear it.’

Both of Zoe’s parents were about to speak, but I raised my hand to silence them. I had to intervene because we needed to make rational, careful decisions; the law doesn’t legislate for feelings.

‘Tell me about that, Zoe,’ I said. ‘Talk to me about that, because that can be a valid defence.’

It’s just me and Lucas at the table after everybody else has gone; we’re sitting opposite each other, candle flames and a pile of bruschetta between us. There’s a scratchy noise still coming through the baby monitor so I turn off the sound.

‘Did you read the script?’ says Lucas.

‘I read a bit of it, but I only had time to look at the beginning. It was sad.’

I think of my phone tucked under the sofa cushions, and I wonder if I can expect more
panop
questions when I retrieve it. Before, when things were at their worst, the messages used to come through all the time, question after question, sometimes I could get ten in five minutes, each one shovelling away at my foundations in a different way.

Actually that one really didn’t make sense given that the basis of what they were accusing me of was prostituting myself to Jack Bell, but it was miserable to read anyway. And ironically, because I’ve got what Jason the Key Worker called a ‘finely honed sense of irony’, it was the
panop
messages that made me so keen to go
that
party: the one where I became a princess for just a moment or two in the hands of Jack Bell.

The messages were supposed to put me off going near him, but they didn’t, because I’m also what Jason described as ‘stubborn’ and ‘driven’. You don’t win piano competitions at the level I play at unless you’re both of those things.

So when Jack asked me to his house party just a few weeks before Christmas, and grudgingly invited Gull too because I said I couldn’t come without her, especially because it was her birthday the next day, there was a part of me that thought, Suck on that Eva Bell and Amelia Barlow. Because I was pretty sure they were sending the messages, them and their minions.

I take a sip of my wine and say to Lucas, ‘Shall we top up, while they’re not here?’ It feels like a daring thing to say, and I should know better, of course I should, but I say it because I want to jolt Lucas out of his flatness, and get him to joke around with me a bit. I want to do something that’ll make the memory of the church go away.

Lucas gets the bottle and refills our glasses, but no higher than Chris originally poured them.

‘Will you read the rest of the script?’ he says.

He dips his index finger into his mouth and then begins to run it around the rim of his wine glass. A note, high and pure and piercing, sings out from it. I do the same to my finger and my glass.

‘I will,’ I say, so he doesn’t feel bad.

The sound from the glasses has momentum now. Our fingers scoot round and round. He’s chewing his lip, and he doesn’t answer right away, and I don’t want him to cry or anything like that because the script makes him think about his mum.

‘Does this count as a repetitive noise?’ I ask him. Repetitive noises are irritating to other people, I’m told, if my foot gets the urge to tap up and down on the stone floor of the kitchen, or if I click my fingers in time to some music that only I can hear in my head.

‘Nah,’ Lucas says. ‘It’s C sharp.’

I have perfect pitch so I know that his glass is making C natural and mine is making E flat, but I don’t correct him because nobody likes a smarty-pants.

‘What’s in the rest of the script then?’ I ask him.

‘It’s just… You need to read it.’

‘It was quite hard to read on my phone.’

He stops with the glass abruptly then, and the whining note dies away slowly. I stop mine too and clamp my hand on top of my glass, to stop the vibrations instantly. Then the sound of the greedy, flapping filters in the swimming pool becomes our soundtrack. Lucas is passing his finger through one of the candle flames now, and I can see the edge of it blackening.

‘Can you show me on your iPad? After supper?’ I ask him.

Lucas’s eyes look artificially twinkly because the fairy lights are being reflected in his dark pupils. Usually they’re flatly dark; unknowable vats of Lucas thought.

‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘But you could just read it on your phone, it’s not that hard.’

It’s a bit weird to be here with Lucas, with wine, just us two, because there are rules about us in this house.

We first moved into this house right before Grace was born. Mum and me lived in a scuzzy flat before then, where she survived mostly on Prozac, and Lucas and Chris lived in a different big house. We could have all fitted into their old house but then it wouldn’t have been ‘a fresh start’.

What I’m remembering now, though, is the talk that Lucas and me had to have with our parents when we all moved in together, which was unbelievably excruciating. The gist of it was – can you guess? – that me and Lucas were not under any circumstances ever to consider starting a relationship with each other because above all we had to ‘respect the new family’. The only practical result of this was that we had to agree not to go into each other’s bedroom unless an adult was present. I had a fully hollow internal laugh when they said that because it was so like the Secure Unit it wasn’t even true.

Afterwards, when we were alone, Lucas said they were hypocrites, and controlling, and didn’t trust us. Then he asked me if I’d ever thought about him in that way and I said I had, and he stared at me like he wasn’t expecting that answer at all. So I added to my answer, I said Only Once. He never told me if he’d ever felt the same, maybe because I was too nervous to ask. He just went to do his practice and, while I listened to it, I thought about how some people could rape you with their eyes in the Unit, even if they never touched you at all.

‘I sent it to your mum too,’ Lucas says. ‘The email.’

‘Why don’t you just tell me what’s in it?’

‘I don’t know how to; it’s best if you read it.’

When he says this, his voice is so unexpectedly strange and serious that it makes a shudder run through me, deep and cold.