The Perfect Girl

ZOE

I feel safe in the police car in a sort of way because if Tom Barlow hurt my mum then he can’t get me here, but I also feel afraid, because being in the police car feels like it did before.

It’s not cold, or dark, and I’m not in my party clothes with shards of glass in my hair and cuts on my face, and I’m not over the limit, but it is a police car and I am being transported.

That’s when I get the idea that I need Sam.

I know he’s in Bristol now because Tessa told Mum once that she’d run into him and that he lives here now too, like us.

‘That’s a funny coincidence, don’t you think?’ she said to Mum, but of course Mum didn’t want to talk about it so Tess had to keep her little smile at the coincidence just for herself.

The only person who can take me to see Sam is Uncle Richard, but I can’t mention it to him at first, because when he meets us at the police station he gives me a too tight hug, but then all he does is try to tell the police that Aunt Tessa didn’t come home last night. Nobody listens to him at first, but after he’s told them like a thousand times eventually one of them asks him if Richard has any reason to fear for her safety, or if he thinks Tess might have had a reason to have argued with her sister.

‘No!’ Richard shouts in a too dry voice that lurches up an octave. ‘No she bloody hasn’t. How dare you?’ Uncle Richard is always fierce about Tess and my mum says that’s because he loves her so much.

I want Sam, because of what I did before. I need him and his advice because I’m scared people will put the blame on me.

I hold my head together enough to put my plan into action because I’m able to put my grief in a box and put my thinking cap on. Jason at the Unit taught me how to do that. ‘Imagine your grief as a flower that has bloomed,’ he said in one of our sessions and I was like, ‘You already said grief blooms.’

‘Bear with me,’ he said. ‘Imagine it.’

So I shut my eyes and did; I made my grief into a peony, big and blowsy.

‘Now convert that flower into something made of paper.’

I opened my eyes when he said that. ‘What?’

‘Hang in there. Do you know what origami is?’

‘Of course. Japanese. “Ori” means “folding” and “kami” means “paper”. First clear reference to paper models is in a 1680 poem by Ihara Saikaku.’

Jason leaned back and looked at me. ‘Zoe-pedia,’ he said and this encouraged me to say: ‘The poem is about butterflies, in a dream, and they are made from origami. Traditionally, they would be used in wedding ceremonies.’

I drew breath because there was more I could have said. I thought that I could probably tell him the line of the poem in Japanese because I read it phonetically once, but Jason interrupted me:

‘So imagine an origami flower.’

In my head, the peony I pictured morphed from a mass of bloomy petals so soft that they could suffocate you, into something made of sharp folds and symmetry.

‘Now, fold that flower up tight. Fold the blooms back in.’

I saw it in my mind. The collapsing of the flower, the neatness of the package I could make it into. It un-bloomed.

‘Now imagine that you’re going to stow that folded-up flower in a box. You’ll take it out later, and you’ll let it open out again, but for now we’re going to fold it away and keep it safe, and see what happens when it’s gone for a little while.’

It didn’t happen right away, but once I’d practised these thoughts, and finally believed Jason when he said it was OK sometimes to step away from the grief, and the guilt, I discovered that I got my concentration brain back. That’s the brain that lets me memorise anything that I see, the brain that connects with the music. It’s the brain that Granny Guerin said was like our family’s laundry basket: always packed to the brim, always overflowing, you could never keep everything stuffed into it and close the lid.

So on the morning after my mum dies I’m using Jason’s advice, and putting my grief for her in a box. I know it can’t stay there for long, because it’s too big, but I also know that it’s essential to do it, and to have my wits about me. I ask Richard to take me to Sam; I tell him we have to because of what happened to me before. I tell him that Sam knows Tessa from back then so he might be able to help us find her.

Richard looks at me and says, ‘Well, he can’t be any more useless than they are here, come on then, let’s give it a go.’

Uncle Richard finds Sam’s office address really quickly on the internet on his phone and when they don’t answer his call he says it’s probably because it’s a bit too early and it’s best just to go there.

At first, we have a bit of a problem persuading the police to let us go, because they act like they don’t know what to think about it, and Chris and Lucas and Katya just stare at us like they’re in shock that we’re abandoning them. But Richard is clever, and he knows that the police can’t keep us at the station because we’re not actually arrested, so they can’t stop us leaving, especially if it’s just for a little while. He tells them that Sam is a family friend as well as a solicitor and it would be a great comfort to me if I could see him.

The policeman obviously doesn’t like it, but when it seems like he’s made all the objections he can and Richard has answered them, all confident, he just asks Richard if he thinks he should be driving. Richard makes a nervous look at me like people always do when drink driving is brought up, and then assures the policeman that he’s going to call us a taxi which is how he arrived at the police station in the first place. I can tell the question hurts his pride, but he’s trying not to be too indignant or cross, because he wants them to let us go.

When we arrive at Sam’s office there are people just opening up, but we have to wait for a while because it’s Sam’s day off, which I didn’t think of, and some of the people stare at us a bit as they walk past in their smart business suit clothing while Sam’s secretary phones him.

‘He’s on his way,’ she says after she’s spoken to him. ‘You’re lucky I could get hold of him.’

Once Sam arrives it’s much better because we can be private in his office and I feel a surge of relief because Sam is somebody who knows every detail about what I did. With him, there’s nothing to hide, and I don’t have to pretend to be somebody else.

Sometimes, I think I’m more happy when I’m with people who know about it. In the Unit, all of us were there because we’d done something bad so it didn’t make me different from anybody else, and that was relaxing in a way, it truly was. And with Sam, I feel like he doesn’t judge me, he just helps me. I can say anything to him. With the Second Chance Family it wasn’t like that. There was so much that I couldn’t say, so much that I had to be ashamed of, even though the verdict at the trial was unfair to me and the idea of that twists and turns inside me every single day.

Sam sits, and we sit too, and in his hot, dark office with a scratchy carpet and framed certificates wonky behind his desk, I know I’m ready to tell him everything that’s happened.