The Perfect Girl

ZOE

I’m hardly asleep when I’m awake again and I hear screaming and for a moment, in my confusion, I think it’s me.

But it’s not.

The sound is coming from the front of the house and it’s high-pitched, and frightening.

There’s shouting too, and then commotion in the house. Feet pounding.

With Grace in my arms, I run on to a deserted landing, where all the bedroom doors are open and the lights are on, and down the stairs. The front door’s wide open too, and I go out and then run-walk across the gravel, feeling the slippery sharp stones digging into the soles of my feet. Katya and Barney Scott stand beside the wooden shed that houses our rubbish bins and they’re both drenched with rain, sopping with it, their clothes sticking to them like cling film.

They’re looking at the door of the shed, where I can see that Chris is standing in boxer shorts and a T-shirt and has his hand over his mouth.

‘Call an ambulance,’ he shouts. He turns to Katya and Barney. ‘Give me your phone,’ he says to them. ‘We need to call an ambulance.’

Grace begins to grizzle in my arms because it’s dark and wet and there’s shouting and she doesn’t know why she’s awake. She uses her fists to try to brush away rain that’s getting into her eyes but grinds it in instead.

‘Keep the baby away,’ Chris says to me, but he’s fumbling with Barney’s phone so he can’t stop me when I walk past him and look into the shed.

On the floor of the shed, lying as motionless as the grave mounds at the church, blood soaking the side of her pale angel hair, is my mother. Her eyes are open wide and they stare at nothing at all.

I am still on my knees beside her when the emergency services arrive. They’ve taken Grace from me long ago, but they couldn’t move me from my mother’s side. I have sunk my face on to her neck, her chest; I have taken in the living smell of her for the last time. I have stroked the soft, soft skin on her temple, just like she did to Grace and me. I have whispered things into her ear that I want to tell her. And while I did all that her eyes still didn’t move.

When one of the paramedics leads me out of the shed, and away from my mum’s body, I see Chris, and Barney, and Lucas standing there. Katya is in the doorway of the house, holding Grace.

I see an ambulance in the driveway, its back doors wide open, and I see a police car whose lights are slowly flashing. I see that the rain has eased so the droplets of water look like nothing more than fine dust motes in the air, swirling and shimmering, lit up blue against the black night.

I try to run back to my mother’s body, to be with her a while longer, because I’m not ready to let her go, but they don’t let me do that.