The Perfect Girl

ZOE

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.

Who do you think you are?

Are you sick you filthy bitch?

Crying yourself to sleep yet?

How does it feel when everybody hatehatehatehatehates you?

Do gay bitches cry gay tears?

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.