The Perfect Girl

ZOE

I don’t want to be near Chris after what I’ve read.

I don’t want him near me, and I don’t want him near Lucas and I never want him near Grace again.

I wish he’d never, ever been near my mum, because I have a horrible feeling creeping over me that he might have killed her with his violence.

I’m struggling really hard to stay calm with that thought filling up my head. I desperately want to talk to Lucas about the script, to tell him that I understand now why he wanted me to read it so badly, and to say how I’m so sorry about what happened to him and his mum. But Lucas won’t even look at me right now. All he’s doing is sitting, and staring at his fingers and picking at the red skin around his bitten nails.

I also want to tell somebody else, I’m desperate to, so they know what Chris is really like, but I don’t know who to choose, because I don’t know if they’ll believe me. Right now, I’m not one hundred per cent sure that Lucas would want me to share the script, because I can see that Chris can be very bad, but he’s also Lucas’s dad.

While I’m trying to think about it, we’re all sitting together on the sofas: me and Lucas and Chris and Tess and the Liaison Officer who’s eating a sandwich that stinks of fish, and nobody is speaking. Richard’s feeding Grace in the kitchen. My dad’s gone back out into the garden with his phone. When I came down and gave his phone back to him I tried to tell him about what I’d read in the script but he said, ‘Not now, Zoe.’

The detectives have gone for now, but they said they’d be back later to ‘have a bit more of a chat’. Katya has just gone too; she was collected by a lady from her agency. I’m sad and also not sad about that. I don’t like her, obviously, but her going made everything feel even more real, and even more final. It made it all squeeze around me just that little bit tighter.

That panicky feeling is rising now, making me want to scream out what I know, and to flee from the room so I don’t have to sit near Chris, so I’m looping a bit of advice from Jason in my head: ‘Don’t always react to everything the instant it happens, Zoe. Think before you speak.’

The problem is that I’m afraid I might not be able to hold any of it in any longer, so I go for the person I think is safest to tell.

‘Aunt Tessa…’ I start to say, because I want to ask her to come out of the room with me, so I can tell her about it in private, because I think she’s the best person, the one I trust most. I feel like I blurt out her name when I say it, but my voice must have actually been quiet because Tessa just turns to look at me as if to say, Did you saysomething? and, before I can explain, I’m interrupted by Chris, who says: ‘Can I use your phone, Tessa? I think it’s probably sensible if I book a hotel room for us tonight.’

‘Us?’ she asks him.

Chris frowns, as if that’s a stupid question, and then says, ‘For Lucas and Grace and I.’

‘You’re welcome to stay here,’ she says.

‘It might be easier if we got out of your hair.’

‘It’s fine, really.’

‘No, I won’t hear of it. You’ve done enough already letting the police in here, and having us all.’

‘Well, do you want to leave Grace here?’

‘She’s my daughter.’

‘But it might not be easy looking after her in a hotel room. Very cramped. We’re happy to keep her here for now, with the garden, and Richard is enjoying looking after her, I know he won’t mind.’

‘I plan to book a suite. We’ll be fine, thank you.’

It’s a pretty final statement.

‘May I use your phone?’

She waves her hand towards the kitchen. ‘Go ahead.’

She looks as gutted as I feel, and I wonder if her heart is pumping as fast as mine is and I think that if it’s not now it definitely will be when I tell her what I know about Chris.

I don’t get to talk to her about it though because Richard appears in the doorway just as Chris is about to leave the room. He’s holding Grace and she’s covered in orange purée. It’s on her face, her clothes, her hands and in her hair. It’s on a lot of Richard too.

‘Bit of a catastrophe,’ Richard says.

Chris looks at Grace. She shows him the palm of one of her hands, which has food all over it, and then she squeezes it into a fist, demonstrating how the orange goo squishes out between her fingers. She’s delighted. Grace loves mess.

Chris makes no move to take her from Richard, but I get there in two strides from the sofa.

‘I’ll take her for a bath,’ I say. I look at Chris. ‘You can’t take her like this.’

Because he mustn’t have her.

‘Take her where?’ I hear Richard asking, but I don’t hear the answer because I carry sticky Grace up the stairs and into the bathroom as fast as I can, and I lock the door so it’s just me and her, and I turn on the taps of the bath and I let her help me squeeze some bubble mixture in. When that’s done we sit on the mat on the floor together and I say, ‘Grace, you are so gross,’ and I imagine that my mum would have laughed if she could have heard me say it.

And I wonder how long I can keep us locked in here so that Chris can’t take her away.