The Perfect Girl

ZOE

Lucas notices my shudder. His eyes pass over my bare shoulders.

‘Do you need a sweater?’ he says. ‘I can get you one.’

‘No thank you.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘It was just a little breeze.’

There’s a tiny bit of movement around us now, though it’s hot, velvety air that arrives from somewhere unseen in the darkness. It doesn’t refresh.

‘Someone walk over your grave?’ he asks.

‘Probably,’ I say, but that’s the kind of comment that I have to work hard to keep my composure in the face of.

I put my finger in the candle flame to distract myself, and because I want to do what he’s been doing, but it hurts immediately, and I pull it away. Lucas laughs and then we’re silent again and I think about how much I couldn’t bear it if he wasn’t in this house with us. My mum’s not warm any more, not since the accident, and Chris isn’t warm. Grace is warm but in a fuggy, baby way, so it’s only Lucas who feels truly personality-warm to me, who seems to see things a bit the same way I do, even if he doesn’t say much.

‘Lucas,’ I say, but he’s begun to talk at the same time as me.

‘Do you ever think of giving up piano?’ he says and that is such a totally, unbelievably, jaw-droppingly, incredible, unexpected, shocking thing for him to say that even I’m lost for words.

‘Why?’ I ask. I can’t conceive of giving up piano. Piano playing is like an addiction for me. It’s a path I have to walk down, water I have to drink, food I must consume, air I need to breathe. It’s the only thing that can take my head somewhere safe and everybody tells me it’s going to give me ‘a bright future’.

‘Don’t tell my dad I said that,’ he says. He sees my surprise and it’s made him nervous, but I’m a loyal person.

‘I won’t.’ I put those words out there quickly because I want Lucas to know that I’m on his side, but I have to ask again: ‘Why?’

‘I didn’t say I was doing it.’ He’s backtracking.

‘But why are you thinking about it?’

He tips back his chair. ‘Because it’s part of what’s not right.’

‘Piano?’

‘No.’

‘What’s not right?’

‘This. Any of it.’

‘What do you mean?’ I can’t believe I’m hearing this, because Lucas practises longer and harder than me on the piano and he never complains.

He’s holding up his fingers now, making a rectangle shape and looking at me through it. I know what he’s doing; he’s framing me for a shot, because he’s obsessed with films. He does it a lot, and it really annoys Chris.

‘Is it because you want to do films?’ I ask. I know he does, we all know he does, but he doesn’t talk about it because Chris says it’s not a proper career.

He drops his hands. ‘I do want to make films; it’s not only that though. Sometimes piano feels like it’s just a cog in a machine. Like it doesn’t mean anything for itself, it’s just for appearances. I hate that. Don’t you hate that?’

And those words make me actually gasp, as though the air I’ve just breathed in is scorching hot, because they really, truly shock me. I would never give up piano. I just would never give up, because we have to move forward.

I have an urge to get up from the table and turn away from him, because I don’t want him to see my eyes go filmy with tears about this, so I stand up sort of awkwardly in the way you do when you’re rushing but your knees are a bit stuck under a table, and as I do that I manage to flip up the plate of bruschetta with my hand.

So it rains bruschetta. Gobbets of chopped tomato and basil and oil splatter the tablecloth and Lucas and the floor. It’s all over his black concert shirt and it’s on his face and hair. I couldn’t have done a more efficient job of spreading them everywhere if I’d used a spray gun. And because I don’t know what else to do, I laugh. I’m bad at laughing when bad things happen. It’s just a sort of reaction that I can’t help. It got me into trouble in the Secure Unit once, because that’s the kind of place you really don’t want to laugh at people. I won’t tell you what they put in my bed that night, and the night after.

Lucas looks me right in the eye, and the super-serious expression he had a few seconds earlier stays there for just an instant before it dissolves into a nicer one and he laughs. So I laugh again too, really loudly, like ‘that’s hilarious’ sort of laughing, which means that when Chris speaks from the doorway it’s the most massive shock ever because I didn’t hear him coming, and it makes me scream, short and sharp.

‘What are you both doing?’ he says. He’s using a voice that I’ve never heard before. It’s icy cold.

Lucas says, ‘Sorry,’ and I say, ‘It was my fault. I’m really sorry,’ and I have one of those moments again where one minute you’re all standing there laughing in your dress, and you feel good because you’re having a nice time with somebody and the next minute it’s all back down to earth because you’re still just you and you’re worthless, and probably worse too.

Chris sees it.

Chris, who’s never said a bad word to me, though I suppose he’s never really said much.

To Lucas, Chris says: ‘Get yourself cleaned up.’

To me, he says: ‘Stop behaving like a slut in front of my son. Don’t think I don’t see you doing it.’

The silence that follows those words makes my skin crawl in cold, fluid patches, as if somebody was moving around me and blowing on it, because I don’t know what to do. I stay really still and I focus on the slap, slap of the water in the pool against the filters, and I crunch the skin on the back of my lips between my teeth. My nose tingles with the early warning signal that tears are coming and once again I fight that urge, as silently and as discreetly as possible.

Chris looks as though he’s expecting me to answer, but I can’t think of a single thing to say, because my brain is confused by the uncertainty of it all. I didn’t know I was behaving like a slut, or perhaps I did know, and I’ve therefore purposely done something shameful, but if that’s true then I wonder, should I admit to it?

I feel like I’m naked. Chris’s words remind me of the panop messages I used to get, they remind me of the girls who used to bait me, and they remind me of the Unit. Those words don’t belong in this house. I say, ‘I’m sorry, Chris. I didn’t mean to. Truly, I didn’t.’

‘You’re on thin ice, young lady,’ he says. ‘Go and look after the baby and ask your mother to come down. I need to speak to her.’

I walk past him and Lucas without looking them in the eye at all, and I try to keep my head straight up and make sure that my walk isn’t at all like a slut’s walk, and when I’m inside the house I start to run and I don’t stop until I’ve pounded all the way up the stairs and I’m standing on the landing outside Grace’s room, where I stop.