The Perfect Girl

ZOE

The thorny, spiky, typical silence in the car as Mum drives me home means that I get a bit of a chance to pull myself together, because my mum doesn’t like crying. It’s the kind of silence that we often share, Mum and I. She grips the steering wheel with white knuckles while she drives. When I try to talk to her, she shushes me, and tells me that she needs to think.

I stay quiet, but the silence is demolished when we pull up in the driveway, because the stone walls of our big, grand house are thumping with the kind of sounds that me and Lucas can pretty much only listen to surreptitiously on our iPods.

It’s popular music, the kind that the kids in the Secure Unit listened to. Here, in this house, it’s usually a treat that’s severely rationed so that Lucas and I don’t break our diet of classical repertoire, which allows us to ‘develop our musicality’.

Mum hurries into the house and I follow her. The volume of music means that Katya, the au pair, is oblivious to us and she doesn’t notice us until we’re in the sitting room, standing right behind her.

She’s on our sofa, with my baby sister Grace on her knee, and right beside her, so close it looks as though he’s stuck to her, is a boy who I know from school, called Barney Scott. Grace is laughing loudly because Katya is holding her arms and bouncing her up and down, but when she sees us she reaches out to my mum, and Katya and Barney leap up off the sofa and they stroke down their rumpled clothing and make a totally impressive recovery.

‘Hello, Maria, hello, Zoe,’ Katya says, and hands over the baby.

My mum is speechless at these blatant transgressions of the rules of the house: the music, the boyfriend, the baby downstairs after bedtime. She clutches Grace as if we’ve just heard that a landslide’s about to sweep the five of us and the descendants of all mankind into the ocean.

‘I hope you don’t mind me asking Barney here, but his dad is a doctor and Grace was very unsettled,’ Katya says. Her full-on Russian accent and her deadpan face, cheeks like slabs of limestone, both give the sentence instant gravitas.

I look at my mum. Even she’s not insane enough to fall for the dad-as-doctor line but I can see that Katya has scored a big, fat bullseye with the ‘unsettled’ comment.

Grace is the Second Chance Baby, the Miracle Baby; she is A Gift to Us All. She is half of Mum and half of Chris and therefore a product of what Lucas calls their Perfect Union. As Chris said at her naming ceremony, she has ‘a lovely, sunny disposition’ and is a ‘joy’, and she ‘helped us all to start again’.

What this means is that Katya’s comment has adeptly manoeuvred my mum’s psyche down the path it most likes to travel, which is to exist in a state of fear for Grace’s health.

So my mum ignores that fact that Grace looks ecstatic, and is shiny with a sheen of overstimulation, and she takes her immediately upstairs to settle her, with Katya in her wake, and I’m left in the room on my own with Barney Scott. It’s weird for me because we would never normally be alone together, absolutely no way. This is because, at my school, he’s a Popular Boy.

Barney Scott scrunches his face up and I think that he’s trying to smile at me. It makes me wonder what he and Katya thought they were going to get up to because surely only guilt would make him do that.

‘Hey,’ he says.

‘Hey,’ I say back.

‘Back early then,’ he says.

‘Obviously.’

‘Huh.’ He’s nodding his head like a plastic dog on a dashboard. ‘Did you… ah… did you play well?’

Barney Scott is not interested in how I played, though I suppose I’m impressed that he’s making the effort to ask. He’s the type of boy who posts things online like ‘On the Downs. 8 p.m. BBQ, Booze and Bitches’ and thinks that’s hilarious, and he’s probably right because girls like Katya, or the Popular Girls at school, then actually turn up wearing microscopic shorts with the pocket patches hanging out over their foreign-holiday-tanned thighs so they can get drunk and be groped.

‘It was OK,’ I say. Barney Scott doesn’t need to know what happened, and I want him to go away.

He obviously doesn’t want to be with me either. ‘I’ll wait outside,’ he says, waving at the door to the hallway like I don’t know where it is.

‘OK,’ I say, but, as I watch him go, what I’m desperate to say to him is that I kind-of-sort-of-maybe had a Popular Boy in love with me once, or at least in lust, so I’m not as stupid or pointless as they all think I am, I’m not.

My very own Popular Boy was called Jack Bell and he acted like he liked me. A lot. Unfortunately, there were obstacles to us going out, and the biggest one was Jack’s twin sister, Eva, who was the Most Popular of All the Girls at school. Eva lost no time making it clear to me that her brother was not ‘in love’ but was ‘playing the field’ instead. The girl he really liked, the one he wanted instead of me, Eva said, was her best friend Amelia Barlow.

And even though the word of Eva Bell was God for most of the people around me at that school, I didn’t believe her, because I saw the way Jack Bell looked at me and even now, when I think of that, I get a dissolving feeling inside me. I might be socially awkward, I know I am, but I’m not stupid.

But what I have to do is to shut that dissolving feeling down quickly, because Jack Bell, like Amelia Barlow, is buried now too, and the ache of that is too sharp for me to bear.

The sitting room window has been thrown open but the heat inside is still stifling. I hear Barney Scott crunching on the gravel outside and see him leaning against our front gate, waiting for Katya.

I want my mum to come down, but I don’t want to disturb her while she settles Grace. I’m starting to feel sick with fear thinking about what will happen when Chris and Lucas get here, because they’re going to want to know what the hell Mr Barlow, back there in the church, was shouting about, and if nothing is to ruin the Second Chance Family then me and Mum need to work out what we’re going to say.