The Perfect Girl

ZOE

A short time after Tessa has gone, Lucas comes into the sitting room where I’m lying with my phone watching his PDF fail to download quickly. He tells me that we’re all going to talk in Chris’s study. He’s changed his clothes and his hair is wet.

I start to say to him, How do you know about me?, but he puts a finger to his lips.

He holds out a hand to pull me up and I get a frisson of electricity when I touch it. I wonder if this means he’s my friend now, or my boyfriend, or neither, but I don’t dare ask him and now isn’t the moment anyway.

When I was in the Unit I made friends with people who I can’t tell my mum about; actually, I can’t tell anybody in the Second Chance Family. In the Unit, I sometimes felt like it was easier to make friends than at school. You have crime in common, after all, and I know that sounds stupid, and it doesn’t make things easy always, but it does ‘level the playing field’, as Jason the Key Worker used to say.

My friends in the Unit were Connor (breaking and entering, repeatedly) and Ellie (common assault, three strikes and you’re out). They were what Jason called ‘Revolving Door Cases’.

‘You’re categorically not a Revolving Door Case, Zoe,’ he said. ‘Cat-e-gor-i-cal-ly not.’ He pronounced each syllable separately to make his point. Jason didn’t have much apart from verbal tricks to make his points. And laser eye contact. No PowerPoint presentations for him. Just me and him, in a room with a barred window to the outside, and a reinforced sheet of glass in the door, and a table and two chairs, which were bolted to the floor.

I would be wearing my lovely Unit attire of green tracksuit bottoms and top and Jason would be in jeans and a T-shirt. Unless it was winter, when a little line of snow rimmed even the barbed wire coils outside, until a sharp wind dispatched it into soft whorls, and then blew it into every crack and crevice in the building. Then Jason might wear a short-sleeved jumper over his T-shirt which, if I’m honest, made him look like a sad nineties pop star having a quiet night in.

‘Put the f*****g heating on,’ shouted Ellie from her cell, all night for the first night when it was got cold. ‘Turn up the f*****g heat you f*****g c***s I’m freezing my f*****g tits off in here.’ Her language was so bad it fully made me blush.

She banged her door too that night, an ear-splitting rhythmic pounding with a metallic edge that made me press my hands down hard on to my ears. You could make a good racket if you banged the door with a tin cup. The next day we got extra blankets, which had ‘HMP Dartmoor’ printed on them and were thin and grey and made me wonder who had slept under them before, and whether they were Revolving Door Cases who’d revolved all the way into an adult centre. You only have to be eighteen to go into an adult prison.

The reason I wasn’t a Revolving Door Case, according to Jason, was because of my family, which meant that I had a chance when I got out. My mum, he said, was determined to make a fresh start for me, determined to help me. I also had a talent, he said, with my music, my mum had told him all about it, and they had agreed that they couldn’t think of any better way to rehabilitate me. Revolving Door Cases had no chance. They would go back into lives of abuse, and deprivation and neglect, and they would be reoffending and back in court before they knew it, their families watching dully, looking drowned by the inevitability of it all, if they bothered to turn up at all.

Lucas’s PDF still hasn’t downloaded by the time we all troop into Chris’s study. It’s on sixty-five per cent with five minutes remaining. I’m thinking that because Chris’s study is where our WiFi hub is, that it might download a bit quicker once we’re in there, but I forget all about that as soon as we get into the room.

It’s not a room I normally go into. It’s Chris’s sanctuary; it’s where he talks to Lucas when they need to ‘chat’. Lucas never looks happy when he’s going in there. My mum goes in there sometimes, but usually only when she’s bearing a gift of some sort for Chris: a cup of tea, or coffee, or a Tom Collins if it’s after six o’clock. I’ve been in once or twice and when I do I usually look at the frame that’s on the wall behind Chris’s desk. It’s a black frame, about 12 inches square, and in the middle of it, mounted on a black background, is a single computer chip. Chris invented it and it’s the reason he’s minted. Chris was like Midas when he made that chip; it made everything turn to gold.

Not that you’d think that from the look of his study, because it’s really plain. My mum always wants to decorate it, and sometimes she brings swatches of things home: new fabrics for Chris’s sofa, or for curtains, but he always refuses. The sofa he keeps in there is one that he had in his office at work when he invented the chip back in the day. He says he’s ‘not a sentimental man’ but he ‘can’t let go of that sofa’. It’s a lucky sofa for him.

I get that, because I have a lucky hair ribbon that I wore at my first piano competition. I don’t wear it any more because my image has moved on, but I always have a little feel of it before a competition, or a concert. I touched it before the concert tonight, not that that helped me much. The ribbon is black, and velvety, it looks like nothing much and the ends are a little frayed now, but the feeling of it is a lucky thing for me.

Beside the rank sofa, Chris has two club chairs, which my mum did persuade him to buy, because she said he ought to be able to have meetings in the home office without it looking like an Ikea showroom. Opposite the rank sofa, against the wall of the room, Chris has a big long desk, which is surrounded by bookshelves where there are tons and tons of books about computer coding and stuff like that, including three books that he has written.

Chris is very, very clever, my mum told me when she came home after her first date with him, and a basic knowledge of genetics will tell you that that is probably why Lucas is too. Lucas once told me that his mum was clever too but she never got a chance to show it before she died, but I couldn’t really have that conversation with him because it made me think too much of Gull.

‘A student with exceptional potential,’ the prosecution said about her in their summing up, ‘a bloom cut down before it could flower,’ which I thought was a bit much, but that was definitely something I was not allowed to point out, though I think if Gull had heard it she would have snorted, definitely. She always snorted like a pony on a cold morning when she heard something blousy like that.

I sit first, on the sofa. The cushions tilt backwards so I have to perch on the very edge of them if I want to preserve any kind of what my mum would call ‘suitable decorum’. I’m careful to cross my legs at my ankles, not my knees, and I tug down the skirt of my dress so that it’s covering as much of me as possible. Unfortunately, that does make the top of my dress ride down a bit so I have to wriggle a little to cover myself up as best as I can, and I can tell that Chris’s eyes are on me under a frowning brow.

Lucas sits on one of the club chairs and, as he settles into it, I see a resemblance to Chris that I don’t always notice. Lucas’s looks mostly favour his mum, that’s obvious. There are no photographs of her anywhere in our house apart from Lucas’s room, but I’ve been in there and I could see how much they look like each other.

Chris is holding Grace’s intercom and, as he puts it down on his desk, he jogs the mouse of his computer and the huge screen comes to life. On it, frozen in super-high definition, is an image of Lucas and me, sitting at the piano, in the church. Lucas is looking towards the camera and I’m playing, bent over the piano, one of my hands poised over the next note, the tips of my hair brushing the keys.

In the foreground is Tom Barlow, or rather the back of him, and it’s him that Lucas is looking at.

It’s the moment it all started to happen and, as my mum comes into the room, she gasps at the sight of it.