The Perfect Girl

ZOE

I lay Grace down, cover her with the sunshade and tilt back her chair. After that it’s just a few turns around the patio and she’s out like a light. She puts her hands up above her head, a fist by each ear, and looks really sweet. Her tummy is bare and the whole of it goes up and down as she breathes.

Lucas and me walk her down to the end of the garden, pushing the buggy carefully over the bumpy bits and we park it in the shade underneath a leafy tree that’s grown tall beside Uncle Richard’s shed.

I beckon to Lucas to follow me into the shed. It feels boiling-point hot inside, and it smells of wood shavings and paint and glue. I shut the door behind us anyway.

There’s a workbench along one side with tools and stuff on it and above that is a shelf where Richard’s models are displayed. Mostly, they’re aeroplanes made out of balsa wood, but there are also Airfix models up there, painted really perfectly, and some complicated-looking Meccano type things with engines and wires. Some of the plane models are hanging from the ceiling on transparent threads and they turn a little after we come in.

Lucas doesn’t look at any of it, instead he sinks down so that he’s sitting on the floor and then looks up at me. ‘What do you want?’ he says. ‘Don’t you hate me?’

I kneel down, right up close to him. We don’t have much time before one of the busybody adults finds us and wants to know what we’re doing.

‘Lucas,’ I say, and I take his hands, one in each of mine and I squeeze them because I want to make him concentrate on me, completely and entirely. ‘This is really, really important.’

‘I’m ready to tell them everything.’ The sobbing begins again. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘No!’ I say. ‘No you mustn’t. Not yet.’

‘I have to,’ he says and his sobs are so choking that I shake his hands to try to make him snap him out of it, but nothing works, so eventually I slap him as hard as I can around his cheek. It really stings my hand, that slap, and it knocks his head from one side to the other.

‘Lucas,’ I say. ‘Listen to me. Stop crying.’

His eyes are bloodshot and there’s still dampness around his lips and under nose. He looks wrecked. His expression has so many things going on in it, but I’m super-focused and I block everything out except for the thing that I want to say to him.

‘Does your dad know what you did?’ I ask.

‘Yes.’

‘What does he say?’

‘He says we have to protect each other. We both have to say we were asleep, and we know nothing. Nobody can prove otherwise.’

‘Tell me exactly what happened.’

‘After we went to bed last night, I couldn’t sleep. I heard you come up, and then I was lying in my bed for ages, until I heard them arguing in their bedroom. It sounded like he was bullying her, and I was afraid he was so angry about the lies you both told him that he was going to hurt her, so I got out of bed and I went and opened their door because I wanted to tell him to stop. He had hold of her, but when he saw me he let go, but then he started coming for me, and he was very angry. I stepped back on to the landing to get away from him, but he caught me and he pushed me back against the wall, by the top of the stairs. And your mum… your mum came after him, and she caught him by surprise and managed to pull him off me just for a second. She was standing between him and me, but she turned her back to him, to check that I was OK. Behind her, I could see that he recovered really quickly and he was coming to get her, so I tried to push her right out of his way, on to the ground. But when I pushed her she hit the banister post at the top of the stairs, and she sort of bounced off it, and she fell down the stairs.’

I can see it all in my head; I can see her lying broken on the stairs.

‘There was blood,’ he says. ‘She hit her head when she fell, and there was blood.’

And all this while I lay in my bed sleeping, with Chopin playing on my iPod, and Grace in my arms. That thought almost stops me in my tracks completely, almost robs me of my courage.

‘He made me clean the blood up,’ Lucas says, and he retches at the memory. ‘He made me clean it up while he carried her outside. I didn’t know he was going to put her by the bins. I’m sorry. She deserved so much better than that.’

It takes me a while to find the words to ask my next question because it’s the hardest I’ve ever had to work to keep my emotions under control. But I do it for Mum.

‘Why did you want me to delete the script?’

‘Because Dad said we have to cover up for each other. He didn’t know about the script, but I thought it would make the police suspicious of him and then he might tell them that I did it. But I want to tell them everything because I can’t take it any more.’

I’m so close to Lucas that I examine his face almost forensically, wanting to understand every line and curve of it. I look at every pore, I see the arc of his damp, clotted eyelashes and I recognise that the smell of him is the same one that hung in the air of the Unit sometimes.

It’s the smell of fear.

‘He hurt your mum too.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did he kill her?’

‘No.’

‘But she died because of him?’

‘She killed herself because he made her feel useless.’

I know that feeling; it inhabits every cell in my body.

‘But she was dying anyway?’

‘She never fought the disease. She might have fought it if her life wasn’t so shit. She had no reason to want to live. I told you that.’

I put my finger to Lucas’s mouth. ‘Shh,’ I say.

I don’t say, ‘But she had you,’ because sometimes I understand that it’s best to keep things to yourself when they are a hundred per cent guaranteed to hurt others.

His breath smells sour, but it doesn’t gross me out. I realise that I love the way that only I can see into his soul. Lucas has been carrying a secret around with him, just like I have, and that’s a powerful thought. It makes my heart begin to beat a little faster.

I press my cheek against his where the wetness of his tears seals us together, and then I rest my head on his shoulder while he cries, and cries again, like his sadness is never going to end, and all the time my mind is working, and my thoughts are becoming very, very clear.

Then he says, ‘I filmed it on my phone. I filmed him hurting her when I opened the bedroom door, because I was going to show you what he’s like.’

‘Is it still on your phone?’

The police will find it there, surely, if it is.

‘I deleted it at the same time as the script.’

It might take them a little bit longer, but they’ll still find it. The thing is, I want to act quickly.

‘But I uploaded it,’ he adds, ‘before I deleted it. In case I had to prove that I was trying to help her, because Dad was hurting her.’

He describes the film to me and, as he does, my thoughts crystallise. Perfectly.

I take Lucas’s hands in mine, once again, and I take a deep breath.

Then I say to him, ‘I forgive you,’ because those are the words that I’ve always wanted to hear. I give them to him right here and now, because I know, even if he doesn’t yet, that they’re the greatest gift that I can give him, and I just hope that they’re enough.

For, you see, I’ve suddenly understood something even more important than knowing what Lucas did to my mother; I’ve understood that Lucas is my only chance of keeping Grace.

Because otherwise Chris will have her.

And he will hurt her.

I know it in my bones.