The Perfect Girl

ZOE

Me and Dad sit in the garden. There’s a bench there which my mum would have had pressure-washed because it’s got lichen and bird mess on it, but we ignore that and we sit on it anyway.

Dad is wiping his eyes because tears are leaking out of them slowly and oozily, the way tar used to seep out of the old railway sleepers we had in the yard at the farm. I know he’s crying because of Mum, but I’m also used to the sight of it because it’s what used to happen after the accident when he sat for long hours at the window of our farmhouse and looked out towards the fold in the landscape that allowed you a small glimpse of the ocean.

Nobody spoke to us, you see, in the village after the accident. Even though some of them had known Dad since he was a baby. We were shut out of all the communal arrangements too. Nobody bought our produce, shared costs for oil, or anything like that any more. That’s what really broke my dad, Granny Guerin said. Not what I did but how other people treated him after it. It tore the soul out of him.

‘I can’t believe it,’ he says. ‘Out of the two of us, I never thought she’d be the one to go first.’

He’s thinking about Mum, but I don’t know what to say to that because it feels irrelevant to now, to the problem of now, which is who killed her and how scared I feel.

‘Amelia Barlow’s dad came to the concert,’ I tell him. ‘We didn’t know there was a stone for her in the churchyard.’

‘I know what he did last night but that man’s not a killer,’ my dad says.

‘How do you know that?’

‘Because I know his family.’

‘How does that tell you anything?’

‘He’s from good stock, Zoe.’

‘Why? Because he’s from Devon? What difference does that make to anything? Reality check, Dad, I’m from Devon and I killed people, but you never stand up for me!’

I’ve snapped. It doesn’t happen often but when it does I feel like I’m exploding with anger at all the people who won’t accept that what I did was just an accident, and I should never have gone to jail, and I get frustrated that people who are supposed to love me can’t keep up with all the things in my head, and I get angry too with the ideas themselves, the strength of them, the way that they race around and multiply and keep me up at night.

When I’m angry I am, according to Jason and my mum, my own worst enemy.

I’m standing up and facing Dad now and I know I must look ugly because I can feel that my face has contorted out of shape. If my mum were here now she’d hold my shoulders and look into my eyes and tell me to calm down, and tell me to count to ten with her and try to access my techniques for keeping in control of my emotions.

My dad just buries his face in his hands and I can’t stand it so I start to hit him. I don’t hit him hard, but my hands slap at his shoulders and the top of his head, and they keep slapping until he stands up and catches my wrists and bellows: ‘Enough! Zoe! Enough!’

And I feel my knees crumple until I’m down on the brittle grass on Tess’s lawn and it’s spiking into my shins and my forehead and my hands, and pieces of it get into my mouth.

I don’t want my dad with his leaking eyes and his permanent look of disappointment and defeat that I know I caused. I want my mum.

Out of the corner of my eye, I can see the twin trunks of Dad’s legs as he just stands uselessly over me, and then I hear the voice of the Family Liaison Officer saying, ‘Is everything all right, Mr Guerin?’ and my dad says, ‘No, it’s not, I don’t know what to do with her,’ and then they both help me up, but I keep my body as floppy as possible at first, because sometimes that’s the only way you can keep protesting how you feel when people have resorted to manhandling you.