The Perfect Girl

ZOE

It goes weirdly well. You wouldn’t think it, looking at Lucas, who’s got a face on through the whole thing like he’s about to have a medical emergency on a TV daytime drama.

Once my mum has got over seeing Tom Barlow, and me and Lucas, frozen on the screen, she takes control in a way that I think is totally impressive, considering.

She isn’t wearing her normal Second Chance Family clothes when she comes down. She’s in a pair of leggings and a loose T-shirt. Maybe that’s what makes me relax a bit, because she’s dressed more like she used to dress, before it happened and when we still lived with my dad: still pretty, still nice, but way more casual. She’s taken the make-up off her face and tied her hair back. The short, soft sleeves of the T-shirt make her arms look fragile and thin, and without foundation the dark circles under her eyes resemble small bruises. My mum, I realise, is very tired.

As she stands in the doorway, Chris gestures towards the chairs and the rank sofa. I think she’s going to sit down beside me, but she doesn’t. She takes the club chair opposite Lucas and Chris is left with the spare sofa seat. When he sits down, the weight of him makes the sofa cushions sag heavily and I become even more extra self-conscious about my bare knees and shoulders.

‘Sit up, Zoe,’ is the first thing my mum says as she looks at me with eyes that are red-rimmed and empty of everything except the bottomless look she had permanently for a long time after the accident. ‘You’re hunching.’

I notice that Lucas adjusts his posture too, when she says that, but my mum’s oblivious. She focuses her whole being on Chris, like he’s the last animal of his kind on earth.

‘Thank you for listening,’ she says. ‘Zoe and I do have some proper explaining to do, we owe that to you both and I’m grateful to you for listening…’ Mum does a bitter-looking swallow then, and tears begin to slip from her eyes, though she doesn’t pay any attention to them. It makes me want to cry myself and I have to work very hard not to.

Mum doesn’t notice that though. She’s sitting ramrod straight in the chair and she fixes Chris with her eyes, which I once heard him tell her were beautiful.

Chris doesn’t do poetic description – ‘I’m just a computer scientist!’ he sometimes says, when Mum is asking him to make a decorating choice. ‘You’re the creative one!’ – so ‘beautiful’ was probably an adjectival stretch for him. I could add to that description. Mum’s eyes are pellucid, arctic blue. The blue is washed pale inside the eyes with a darker rim around the edge and, if you look closely, a fleck of hazel lies within one of her irises, like an intruder.

She tells Chris and Lucas the full blow-by-blow story of the accident, of my fall from grace, the way we told it at the trial. It’s the version of the story where I’m as much of a good person as a bad one; it’s the version where I think I’m doing the right thing when I decide to drive the car. It’s the true version.

Chris stands up when she’s finished. He hasn’t said a word while she talked. On his computer screen the image from the church is still freeze-framed, like Munch’s silent scream. She tries to reach for his hand as he walks away from her but she’s too slow. Mum doesn’t look at me, she just folds her hands into her lap after that and waits, and so I copy her.

I look at the lights that are on in the room, because it’s dark everywhere else now. Chris’s desk lamp is dumping a tired circle of yellow on to the surface of his desk, and the glass wall lights that are sculpted to look like flaming torches are glowing, as is the bulb that shows off Chris’s famous, framed computer chip. Between them, there’s gloom.

‘Maria,’ Chris says, ‘I’m glad that you’ve told me. Thank you.’

Mum’s lips disappear inside her mouth. The tears roll down her face faster now. Chris doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t look at Mum. He’s looking at the computer monitor, as if he’s mesmerised by it. He leans forward and uses the mouse to click on the play button, and the film begins to move.

‘Travesty!’ Tom Barlow shouts. ‘It’s a travesty.’

On the screen, in the movie of myself, I finally notice Tom Barlow. I stare at him, then I get up, and I bang my leg against the piano, as I run out of the frame. I look like a fairy tale girl, fleeing from a wolf. Lucas just stays staring, and then my mum is standing up at the front, turning, and she says, ‘Mr Barlow, Tom…’ and Chris clicks pause.

‘I’m just finding,’ says Chris, ‘the fact that you lied to me twice difficult to accept.’

That’s therapy-speak, that ‘difficult to accept’ stuff. I’ve had enough therapy to know it when I hear it. ‘It’s better to describe your emotions than display them,’ Jason would repeat patiently at our Monday meeting when I’d raged or sobbed my way through the weekends at the Unit, ‘then people can help you manage them instead of feeling as if they’re bearing the brunt of them.’

Chris keeps talking and I think that if his voice were a cat then it would be padding quietly and unstoppably towards my mother with unblinking eyes.

‘You lied to me about Zoe’s history, and I suppose I can understand it, I think I can. What Zoe and you have experienced is obviously… well, I’m at a loss for words to describe it just now. You should have told me, but I understand why you didn’t, it was a lie by omission. What I cannot understand, what feels like a slap in the face, is why you lied to me earlier, when you denied knowing that man. That was an out and out lie and you know how I feel about lying, and I’m finding that very difficult to accept.’

‘I’m sorry,’ my mum says. She stands and walks towards him.

‘He came to my house!’ Chris says. ‘He’s unstable. He needs managing, and he came to this house!’

‘I never wanted to lie to you,’ Mum says.

‘You know how I feel about lying. You know it must not happen in my house.’

‘Our house,’ I say. I don’t know why. It just slips out, because twice he’s said ‘my’ house, but I should have kept it in my head.

‘You! Stay out of it.’ He doesn’t look at me because he’s watching Mum, but his arm shoots out and he points a finger at me while his gaze is locked on to hers.

Mum goes right up to him. She looks smaller than usual against him because she has bare feet. She slides her arms around his waist and rests her head on his chest. He’s too angry to return the hug so his arms stay in mid-air, actively keeping distance between him and her. She looks up at him, like some kind of supplicant, trying to bathe her face in the light of him. ‘I’m so, so sorry,’ she says. ‘I panicked. I should have trusted you. I was very stupid, I was insecure.’

Mum’s arms snake further round Chris until her hands are linked and I can see his body soften a little at her touch. I marvel a bit at that. Beside me, Lucas is staring at them too but he feels my eyes turn to him and he looks back at me briefly, and I wonder if I have that power, with him, or if he’s in charge.

Chris unpeels my mum’s arms from his body and holds her hands in his, between them, as if they might pray together.

‘It’s going to rain,’ he says, and he’s right because I’m suddenly aware of a sharp, cool breeze that makes the open window rattle and we can hear the foliage shifting outside. ‘Let’s clear up and go to bed.’

‘Chris.’ There’s a desperate note in Mum’s voice that makes my heart tear, because I can tell that she still doesn’t know which way this is going.

He hears her desperation too. ‘We’ll talk more,’ he says, ‘upstairs.’ He tucks her hair behind her ear.

‘Let’s talk here,’ says Lucas, ‘all together.’

Chris looks at him. ‘This is probably something Maria and I need to discuss alone at this point.’

I agree with him, although I know Lucas doesn’t want us to leave them, but I don’t understand that, and I want Mum to have a chance, so I say, ‘I’ll clear up,’ and, as rain begins to smatter on to the windowpane, I stand up.

‘I’ll do it, you go to bed,’ I say.

When I reach the doorway I turn and I look for a moment at them both standing there and I say, ‘I’m sorry, Mummy and Chris.’