The Perfect Girl

ZOE

Lucas’s Debussy piece lasts for fourteen minutes, and his Bach is nine minutes. If you add to that the time he’ll need to mix with the audience afterwards, and then the drive home, and assume that since Mum and I took the car, Aunt Tess will be bringing them in her VW bus, which doesn’t go above 36 mph without belching out black smoke, then I think Mum and me originally had about an hour and ten minutes to talk before Lucas and Chris arrive, minus the time it took discovering Katya and Barney on the sofa and the minute that Barney could stand to be in the room with me afterwards, leaving us about fifty-eight minutes.

I wait on the sofa, stretched out, while Mum is still upstairs with Grace. My hip aches painfully from the bang against the piano and I pull up my dress to examine it and see a dark bruise forming there already. It’s tender to the touch. The sight of it makes tears spring to my eyes and I shut them, and lie back down, and try to breathe, the way I’ve been told, to blank my thoughts, to focus just on the sensation of inhales and exhales instead.

It’s hot. Our Second Chance House is a big old Victorian pile and it usually feels damply cold to me, whatever the weather, but this summer’s been so hot for so long that the heat’s gradually built up and tonight feels like a culmination of that, as if the house has finally reached a rolling boil and the air inside is hot like jazz music bouncing off a dripping ceiling in a packed-full club, or like the picture of a red sun pulsating over shimmering orange ground in the portfolio-sized photo book about deserts that my dad gave me when I was little.

From upstairs I can hear the sound of the musical mobile that hangs above Grace’s cot being wound up, then its tinkly noises begin, repetitive and familiar; soul-destroyingly plinky.

Katya appears suddenly in the doorway and looks at me without saying anything.

‘He’s outside,’ I say.

‘I know. I just texted him. Your mother is settling Grace.’

‘I know.’

Katya stands in the doorway for longer than I’m comfortable with and I lie there silently willing her to go away.

‘I tried to be your friend,’ she says and I just don’t, utterly don’t have time for this right now. She has no idea.

‘Thanks, Katya,’ I say. ‘Spasiba.’ I say that because it really annoys her when I try to speak Russian. I get out my phone and scroll around it and try to look like I’m actually expecting to get a message from a real person.

‘Zoe, you are your own worst enemy.’

‘Original,’ I say.

‘Excuse me?’

‘I saw what you were doing.’ I suddenly feel vulnerable in my prostrate position – it’s funny how one moment you can feel glamorously hot and worn out like a panting diva in an old film and the next you realise you probably just look stupid – so I sit up and look properly at her over the back of the sofa. ‘With Barney. I saw where his hand was.’

She makes an expression that mixes disgust and sadness at my amoeba-level of existence.

‘Inappropriate,’ she says. ‘Totally. Ugh.’ She has a habit of using Americanisms, which makes her sound like she’s hosting the Eurovision Song Contest.

And I’m about to say how I’m not the one who’s inappropriate and what she did was inappropriate, and has my mum even said that she’s allowed to go out with Barney tonight anyway, but her phone pings and we’re both trained to be silent when a phone pings – this is a Major Characteristic of our Generation my Aunt Tessa says: the veneration of the ping of the phone – and so we’re both silent while she reads the text.

‘Barney’s waiting,’ she says, and she turns so fast that the wispy ends of her hair fly out in a fan shape and she’s disappeared before I can organise my riposte.

I lie back down. I’m happy she’s gone. From upstairs the circus mobile is still crunching out its tune and I know what my mother will be doing. She’ll be sitting on the floor beside Grace’s cot, being as still as possible, and stroking the baby’s forehead. She can do that for ages, and tonight it makes me feel super tense because I feel like the time we have left before Lucas and Chris get home is on one of those kitchen timers that click madly like a bomb that’s going to detonate until they make a screechy buzz that Lucas says sounds like a small bird being strangled.

And then I notice a thing. I notice that my phone browsing, which I basically did for show when Katya was looking at me, has actually turned something up. I have a notification and the sight of it makes my stomach ball up prickly and tight like a hedgehog, because there it sits, just like it used to: a number one, in a red circle, on the corner of the panop app.

It’s an app I shouldn’t even have on my phone. It’s forbidden, because, it was, according to Jason, my key worker at the Unit, and I did have to agree with him, definitely part of my downfall, because Eva Bell and Amelia Barlow and their cronies used it to torment me.

So I should have stayed away from it, but when I came out of the Unit, I couldn’t resist downloading it, just to have a look, because I was curious about what happened to the people I used to know. I left one life when I went into the Unit, and when I came out I had another life completely, in another place, and nobody would talk about the old one, and panop was my only way back there. So I downloaded the app, and sometimes I sneak a look to see what people are doing. It’s anonymous you see, if you want it to be.

Grace has gone quiet upstairs, but I estimate it’ll be another ten minutes at least before my mum appears. With my heart pounding, I click on the app. A question fills the screen:

Did you think you could stay hidden for ever?