The Perfect Girl

MONDAY
ZOE

I sit in a circle with the others in the sitting room of our Second Chance House and I feel as if I would break if somebody touched me. I feel as if my skin and hair are brittle, as if my teeth will never unclench.

There are some pieces of music I’ve played which got under my skin and made me feel this way, but that feeling went away after I lifted my fingers from the piano keys.

This feeling doesn’t. It sticks, and it reminds me of before.

‘Grief blooms,’ Jason said to me at the Unit in therapy sessions, when they were trying to make sure that I wouldn’t have Unresolved Grief over the three deaths I caused. And he was right, because the pain of losing Gull and the others did unfold like a new bud at first, and it took for ever before it began to wither.

I have names for all those feelings because Jason told them to me. Adults like to put a name on everything you feel, as if a name can neutralise it. They’re wrong though. Some things settle under your skin and don’t ever go away, no matter what you call them.

Today, what I’m feeling is even bigger than before. After my mum’s death, the grief doesn’t just bloom, it bursts out. It creates a mushroom cloud, instantly. It fills the sky that night and envelops us all; it’s towering and toxic. It’s off the Richter scale.

I feel it.

Chris feels it.

Lucas feels it.

Grace does not. Because she doesn’t understand what’s happened. She carries on being a baby and we all watch her, passing her from arms to arms, not able to explain to her.

We all sit in the sitting room of our house together like in an Agatha Christie novel.

We are four teenagers, one baby and Chris.

And a police officer sits with us, and stares at the floor, but she’s listening to everything we say. I know for sure that police officers always listen.

I want Tessa, and they want to contact her too, to tell her, to get her to come and be with us, but nobody can find her. She’s not answering her mobile and her landline rings and rings over and over again, and Uncle Richard doesn’t even pick up.

Outside, the drizzle has stopped and so have the flashing blue lights, though the police cars are still there, and we see them as the sun rises up in a hazy, too-bright dawn, which also coaxes our faces from the shadows and shows them sagged and doughy as if we’ve all been slapped senseless with the shock.

Yellow tape is stretched out across the entrance to our driveway and around the shed where my mum’s body still lies.

At first, one of the policemen asks us if it could have been an accident, whether my mum had been drinking.

‘I don’t know,’ says Chris. ‘I just don’t know. She’d had a bit of wine, but we’d all gone to bed. We were all asleep.’

Chris is upset and flustered, but he’s the first to accuse somebody else.

‘It was that man,’ he says. ‘Tom Barlow. You need to go and find a man called Thomas Barlow.’

The police officer encourages Chris to sit back down, tells him that he’ll pass the information on, and that Chris will be interviewed in due course, but for now, if it’s OK, they’d prefer it if we all stayed where we were.

Lucas begins to sob, and the sound of it is painful and loud. It makes Grace crawl over to him and put her hand on his leg and pull herself up, and he reaches down to stroke her small fingers and sobs some more. She watches his face with an open mouth until it makes her cry too, and then she thumps back on to her bottom on the floor and is full of despair of her own.

Barney Scott’s dad arrives and stands in the doorway and says, ‘I’m so sorry,’ and takes Barney away after a talk with the police.

Everybody is talking. I remember it from before. Always the talking, and the building of cages with words.

Katya is tear-streaked and squashed out of her arrogant shape and she sits by me and looks like she might want to hug me like you see on TV reports where women cling and wail, but I feel nothing for her and I’m used to feeling things on my own so I edge away to make sure that she doesn’t touch me at all.

Later, when dawn has just become proper morning, they ask us if we mind being moved to the police station. They say that the house has become a ‘scene’, and I’m straight away transported back to court where they kept repeating ‘scene of the accident’ over and over again. I look around instinctively to see if Mum has had the same thought and then I remember: she’s gone.

The police come upstairs with each of us in turn to pack what they fully pedantically specify as ‘a small overnight bag’. We all do except Grace who ends up with a bag busting with stuff, which I pack myself because I don’t want Katya to do it.

Standing on the gravel, waiting to leave, feeling the heat start to push back into the day as if nothing out of the ordinary has happened, as if there had been no blue dust rain, and no broken body, I concentrate on the feel of the sharp stones pushing at the soles of my Converse, to try to keep myself solid. But even doing that I can’t help myself glancing at the shed, and wondering if my mum is still in there, because the ambulance has gone. A policeman stands in front of the shed door and looks at his phone, and when I ask the question out loud, somebody else tells me that mum’s going to be moved very soon.

‘Doesn’t she need the ambulance?’ I ask, but nobody answers.

They use two cars to drive all of us away from the house but not before Chris has got angry when he tried to get Grace’s car seat out of Mum’s car and it got stuck. Normally, Mum moves the car seat. After he finally yanked it free, Chris cursed and threw the car seat on to the gravel and stones kicked up and hit the side of the police car, but nobody mentioned that. Instead, I picked up the seat, and put it in the car, and so now I’m holding Grace’s fingers tightly as we ride together in the back seat and Katya sits on the other side of me with the bag of Grace’s stuff on her knees.

In the car, the police driver tells me that they’ve finally managed to get in touch with Uncle Richard, Tessa’s husband, and he’ll meet us at the police station.

As we drive away from the house another policeman lifts the tape at the end of our road and somebody standing on the pavement with their dog stares at us, and my stomach is carved out with the feeling that the only thing I want is Mum, and my head is collapsing round an imploding feeling that my life is shattering again, and I begin to cry. Katya doesn’t see because she’s looking out of the other window with a face like an Easter Island statue and Grace is fully occupied playing with a piece of gravel which she must have picked up when we were at our house.

And, on top of everything, and through my tears, I feel guilty about that because I think Mum would have noticed it long before Grace might have had a chance to put the stone in her mouth, and I quickly take it away from her before she does.

And alongside that thought, which my mixed-up head is giving space to, my fear is beginning to unfold as quickly as my grief did.

Two questions are pushing to the front of my mind and they’re frightening me to the point where I start to shake.

One: what if my mum’s death was revenge for what I did and they’re going to come after me too?

Two: what if the police think I did it?

I’m a convicted killer, after all.