The Perfect Girl

ZOE

The light that’s been gently creeping into Grace’s bedroom from the hallway suddenly disappears. Mum and me turn our heads towards the door to see why. A man-sized silhouette blocks the doorway and at first it’s hard to tell whether it’s Lucas or Chris. He steps away after a small pause, without saying anything, but it’s enough to rouse my mum. She lets out what I think is a quiet moan, and then eases herself up off the bed. Gracie-girl doesn’t want Mum to go. She gives a bit of a whimper herself, but I distract her by making my fingers flutter right in front of her face and she grabs for them.

You never know when Grace is going to accept me as a Mum-substitute. Sometimes she’s happy to, other times she just yells blue murder until she gets Mum back. It’s the same with Lucas. And even with Chris. Mum is definitely Grace’s favourite. Oh, and Katya. But, to be honest, I’d rather gloss over that because it massively annoys me.

When Mum has left the room, she pulls the door softly behind her so that it’s almost completely shut but not quite, as if she wants to keep us both just the way she left us. Grace is sort of sleepy now. She turns her body to me and I put my arm around her so that her head can nestle into the side of me, and I sing to her, a little tune that my dad used to sing to me when I was little.

I think about my dad a lot. He’s a farmer. He couldn’t cope after the accident, because he said it was Mum’s fault, that she pushed me too hard with the music, that it had turned me into somebody I should never have been trying to be. He said that I should never have gone for a music scholarship in the first place, because it wasn’t for people like us. I should have stayed at the local school and grown up just the way he did: safely, at the farm, at the heart of the community.

‘But you love listening to Zoe play,’ my mum said in the last reintegration meeting at the Unit that Dad ever attended. ‘You always said I was right to push her.’

‘Not at this cost,’ he’d replied, and he put on his coat and said, ‘I’m sorry, Zoe,’ and then he left, even though Jason asked him not to and talked to him in the corridor outside for ages.

I didn’t see my dad for nine months after that, the time it takes to make a whole new human being. I went back to see him at the farm when I got out of the Unit, but only once. We had an OK day and Granny Guerin came round with some scones, but Dad was mostly sad and awkward, and when he went out to see to the cattle Granny Guerin said he never did know how to put a feeling into words and that was just the way he was, but she knew for sure that he loved me and he always would.

I wanted to tell him that I was still the same girl as before the accident, I was still his girl. I wanted to say that I wasn’t a bad person, I’d just done a bad thing, by accident, but on that day his silence meant that I found it hard to put anything into words too. Perhaps it’s catching.

Granny Guerin saw that I had a lot of words stored up in me, and she said, ‘I know your mother thinks I’ve abandoned you both, but he’s my child and I must protect him. I’m just doing the same as what your mother’s doing for you. Know that he loves you, Zoe, I can’t promise anything more than that now, so I won’t, because I don’t like to raise expectations. But time can heal things, my darling.’

But on the train on the way back to Bristol I also thought about how time destroyed everything on the farm, how part of my dad’s life was just keeping things fixed that time had broken. And I imagined Dad, with his red farmer’s cheeks and furrowed brow, and I thought how everything about him looked more or less exactly the same as it did before the accident, except that now the farmhouse didn’t feel cosy like it used to, and his eyes were full of sadness. If I was going to be über-dramatic (vampire-romance-fans: be alert! This is your moment!), I would say that his eyes were wells of tears.

I don’t know exactly what happened to my parents when I was in the Unit. I only know that they found it too difficult to go on together. Jason said that a traumatic event within a family can make it very difficult for a marriage to continue, and that was something I might just have to accept. Cracks in a marriage, he said, can become chasms if they’re shaken by trauma. I told him he was almost sounding like a poet. He told me it would benefit me if I could learn to take things seriously.

By the time I came out, Mum had moved all our stuff from the farm and found a flat in Bristol, and started a job that my Aunt Tessa got for her through her wunderkind husband Richard the Rocket Scientist, who’s fond of a tipple.

We weren’t going to dwell on the past, Mum told me, we were going to look forward, to try to start something fresh. My dad would be OK, she said, I could go and stay with him in the holidays. But she cried every night, and she was crying when she woke up some mornings too, until she met Chris.