The Good Girl (2 page)

The only person who didn’t seem to know anything was the girl. Ailsa had sent Mrs Arnold to call her out of class and positioned the venetian blinds so that she could see out of her office into the corridor outside but no one could see in. Romy was sitting on a narrow bench, leaning over so that her long hair covered her face like curtains. Ailsa could see her lips moving and at first wondered if she was rehearsing what to say but then realized that she was revising from a science textbook. Even though to her it was upside down, Ailsa could see she was looking at a cross section of a human heart. The girl had coloured each of the four chambers and blood vessels a different colour, transforming it into something beautiful. Right atrium, left atrium, inferior vena cava, superior vena cava. As she read each label, her finger drifted from one part of the diagram to the next, like a child learning to read for the first time.

It was such an innocent gesture. Ailsa felt her stomach heave and thought she might be sick. She swallowed a couple of times and took tiny sips from a glass of water. The girl wouldn’t be revising anatomy if she knew. She would be nervously flicking through the pages of one of the magazines strategically placed on the table beside her. Or biting her nails. Or crying. Most likely crying.

It didn’t surprise her that she was revising. In contrast to everything else that had happened, it was what she would have predicted. Ailsa skim-read the reports from staff for a second time to steady herself. Apart from a recent blip in a Biology exam, Romy was a straight-A student. She was taking four science A levels; she wanted to apply for medical school. ‘Both parents are professionals,’ the director of studies had noted, as though this gave her ambition credibility. Outside of class, there were no issues flagged. Her parents weren’t divorced; there was no recent history of alcoholism, sexual abuse or drug addiction in the family. No involvement in gangs; no history of bullying or being bullied; no symptoms of depression. She was what Ailsa called a blank canvas.

The only hint that something might be wrong came from Matt, who said that over the past few months Romy had spoken back to him a couple of times in class and been sent out once. Ailsa put this to the back of her mind. There was nothing here that came close to offering an easy explanation.

Ailsa glanced out of the window again. She was dis
composed to discover the girl was staring straight back at her, although of course she couldn’t see through the venetian blind. Romy wasn’t one of those girls coated in thick layers of foundation, lipstick and mascara. If Ailsa had been pressed to identify which girls might be vulnerable to this type of situation, Romy would have been close to the bottom of the list.

She was curious-looking. Pale-skinned and dark-eyed. Inherited from her father. Striking rather than beautiful. In her first term at the school a small group of children had mocked her for being albino. ‘Why would I want to look like you?’ Ailsa had heard her retort.

She looked nothing like her dark-haired older sibling, thought Ailsa. Ailsa’s stomach clenched as she realized that perhaps Romy’s older brother was already aware but didn’t know how to deal with the situation. In which case she had failed him too. He sometimes hung out with Stuart, the boy who had the video on his phone. Perhaps he should see Mrs Arnold? Ailsa wrote this down in a new notebook specially dedicated to the scandal and underlined it several times.

Stuart swaggered along the corridor. Ailsa didn’t know the name of every pupil in her school. She had decided early on that the effort of memorizing every student would be at the cost of something more strategically important. So she knew the names of the kids that came to her notice, either the clever ones or the naughty ones. Stuart fell into both categories.

He stopped beside Romy, which surprised Ailsa
because she couldn’t imagine they were friends. Romy looked up. He had a striking profile. A long aquiline nose and big dark eyes. He had gone from boy to adult without the awkward transition through spotty adolescence. His body was ridiculously muscular; his school uniform barely contained his thick thighs and overworked shoulders. Steroid abuse was to boys what anorexia was to girls, thought Ailsa, remembering something she had read in the paper.

Stuart smiled at Romy. The smile turned into a lip curl and then suddenly he stuck his middle finger in his mouth and simulated the motions of oral sex. Romy looked taken aback. She frowned and shook her head. Stuart threw back his head, laughed and slouched off. When he passed her window, his lip turned into a half smile and he blew Ailsa a kiss as though he realized that she was watching.

Ailsa gripped the edge of her desk. Her hands were shaking. It was ten past three in the afternoon. She couldn’t wait any longer for Romy’s father to appear. It wasn’t fair on the girl. Her anger towards Stuart transferred to him. Knowing what was at stake, how could he be late? She would have to be careful not to betray her feelings in front of the girl. One of the most important issues, Mrs Arnold had flagged, was to present a strategy that made Romy feel as though the adults around her were in control of the situation. They all had to present a united front.

She knew Romy would be feeling nervous about
being called from class. Since as far as she knew she wasn’t in any trouble, she might be worried that something had happened to her family. Ailsa phoned her assistant to send Romy into the office.

‘Everything is fine at home,’ said Ailsa abruptly, as soon as the girl breezed through the door. She had spoken a little too quickly and Romy looked puzzled, as though unsettled at the possibility that something might be wrong. She left the door open. It was the best evidence yet that she had no idea what had happened.

Ailsa was overwhelmed with a desire to protect her. Perhaps Stuart was the only person in school who had seen the video clip? Perhaps she need never know? And then just as quickly she abandoned the idea because the file was like a forest fire. Matt had kept her updated through the afternoon on websites where it had appeared and what action had been taken to get it removed.

And besides, as Ailsa was fond of telling troubled students, everything that went wrong should be used as an experience to learn from. It was a way of encouraging children to believe in the possibility of renewal. People could evolve. Reputations could be rebuilt. Except in this case she wasn’t sure she really believed her own rhetoric. She vaguely remembered the story of a girl in south London who threw herself off a building when a boy refused to delete sexual images of her from his phone. She felt a sudden venomous rage towards the boy in the video. He had obviously forced her to do this. She needed to confirm his identity as quickly as possible.
She would press the girl for details. After that she would have to speak to his parents. He would be expelled. The police would be called. He would be prosecuted. But none of this would make the girl feel any better. In fact it could make her feel worse.

Ailsa got up from her desk and slowly walked over to close the door. She wanted to delay the moment for as long as possible. She looked at the girl’s face, knowing that in the next minute her world would tip on its axis.

‘Is there something wrong?’

‘How is your work going?’

‘I was in a Biology exam.’

‘Were you doing a practice paper?’

‘Yes.’

‘How was it?’

‘Fine. I think. Now I’ll never know, because I was only halfway through and it won’t be a true result.’

‘Medical school is very competitive.’ Would this affect the girl’s application? Ailsa wondered. A new worry rippled through her body. She had to accept that she had no control over the situation, Mrs Arnold had advised, barely able to disguise her excitement at this latest drama. Matt had said something similar, then he had contradicted himself by insisting that he would personally take charge of checking which websites were showing the film.

Even if they got to the bottom of how this had all started, there was no telling where it might end. She thought of the draft she had written for her next assem
bly. She wanted to warn the pupils about how in the digital age one badly thought-out decision could end up defining you for the rest of your life. She swallowed a couple of times.

‘There’s something you need to see, Romy,’ said Ailsa.

‘What are you talking about?’ asked the girl.

Ailsa opened the file in the corner of her computer screen.

‘I’ll sit on the sofa while you watch. I’ve seen it already.’

‘Is it something to help with my university application?’ Romy asked as she pressed play.

Ailsa couldn’t bear to watch again. She couldn’t decide whether she was being cowardly or sensitive. She sat down on the yellow sofa. When Romy replayed this scene in her head, as surely she would, periodically, for the rest of her life, would it be worse for her to watch it alone or with someone else? Ailsa, usually so decisive, didn’t know the right answer. She pressed her fingers into her temples until she could feel the blood vessel pulsing beneath. And then it was too late. Romy’s face froze. Her usually pale complexion flushed until even the tips of her ears were red. Her lips turned down until she looked like the mask of the goddess of tragedy that hung above the door of the school theatre. It was as if her face was separating from her body. For a moment it was a perfect mask. Ailsa knew she was about to cry. Her life as she knew it had ended.

It was too late for anger, yet part of Ailsa wanted to shake Romy and demand why she had allowed this
to happen. The other part wanted to hold her in her arms like a small child and protect her. She knew from experience that this was the moment when she had to ask the question. Children would always tell the truth when there was nothing left to lose.

‘Who is the boy?’

There was a knock at the door. Her father came in before Romy could respond.

‘Sorry,’ Harry said without offering any explanation. Ailsa’s anxiety spiked again at his bad timing. ‘I got a call about giving a lecture in Cambridge.’ He went over to his daughter and put his arms around her. Ailsa didn’t say anything. The girl didn’t need to ask how her mother would react. She knew already.

‘Oh, Mum,’ said Romy, getting up from the chair and looking at Ailsa for the first time. Ailsa walked over to her daughter, arms outstretched, like she did when her daughter first learned to walk. For a moment all three of them stood in a silent embrace. Ailsa looked up at Harry.

‘How has this happened to us?’

Ailsa woke up lying on her front, trying to piece together fragments of a dream that had already scattered. She allowed her hand to drift beneath the duvet until it reached the man in bed beside her. Good. He was still asleep. Keeping her eyes closed, she gently pressed a small circle of Harry’s flesh with her fingertip and tried to guess which part of him she was touching, remembering a game they used to play when they first met.

Except it was instantly recognizable as the cleft above his left hip bone. Nineteen years together might have softened the angles but Ailsa was now more familiar with Harry’s topography than her own. She could navigate his body like a blind person reading Braille. She wished for a moment that she could go back to the first time, to recapture that excitement of mutual discovery. Passion was commensurate with the amount of insecurity you could tolerate, Ailsa had recently read somewhere, probably in a magazine she had confiscated from a pupil at school. And after almost twenty years she and Harry should be very secure together.

His skin was hot to the touch. Its warmth made her
hesitate but if she curled herself around him to soak up his heat then he might wake up and misread the gesture as a desire for sex. The mechanics of early-morning arousal were as predictable as a metronome. The old post-coital euphoria had been replaced by the less glorious sensation of a job well done.

Outside it was snowing again. Ailsa could tell because the usual sounds of early morning were muffled as if someone had thrown a blanket over the house. It wasn’t an illusion that snow created stillness and tranquillity, Romy had explained to her little brother, Ben, last night, during a family dinner characterized by a shortfall of both qualities. ‘Snow is porous so it absorbs noise.’ Nine-year-old Ben had stared at her in awe. ‘Perfect conditions for a trainee spy who needs to pass on information, Grub,’ she added. He nodded so vigorously that Harry outlined the results of a recent study showing that headbanging caused long-term brain damage.

‘Granny once hit her head and came round speaking French,’ said Ailsa’s father wistfully. ‘Do you remember, Ailsa?’

‘Vaguely.’

The thought of her father strengthened her resolve. He was desperate to get back home to visit her mother’s grave. It was six days since he had last been and he had started to fret that it might be covered with weeds; that the winter-flowering viburnum hastily hacked from a neighbour’s shrub and left in a vase might have died; that the vase might have been stolen. Ailsa pointed out
that all were most likely covered in a thick layer of snow but Adam was unconvinced.

‘I need to see her,’ he said firmly. ‘Viburnum was one of her favourite flowers and I never bought her any when she was alive.’ This became his excuse for opening another bottle of wine. And with the alcohol came the tears. ‘I need to check that Georgia’s all right. That she’s not lonely.’

Romy had held his hand and tried to persuade him that Granny was fine. Ailsa’s younger sister, Rachel, insisted viburnum was almost impossible to find in flower shops. Harry promised to plant a shrub in Adam’s garden so that he had a ready supply throughout the season. Finally he was soothed.

If they left now, Ailsa would have time to drop him home and visit her mother’s grave to check everything was all right before Adam went. She wanted to be there alone, to remember her mother without having to negotiate anyone else’s grief. It was decided. If she didn’t go now, the car would get stuck or it would be too icy to drive him home. She stealthily edged away from Harry, slowly relinquishing the duvet so that he wouldn’t be woken up by a sudden blast of cold air.

She found last night’s clothes in a pile and pulled on a jumper and pair of jeans, cursing Harry for his stinginess about switching the heating off at night. There was a time when they would have done anything for each other. No longer. Even the temperature of the house was up for negotiation. Ailsa zipped up the jeans. Underwear could wait until later.

She
headed downstairs, deliberately ignoring the domestic rubble that she passed along the way, although unable to resist the temptation to apportion blame: chocolate reindeer wrapper. Ben. Empty Coke can. Ben. That was easy. Overturned glass on the landing table. Undoubtedly Adam. Teddy bear wearing new collar intended for Lucifer the cat. Possibly Luke.
The Real Spy’s Guide to Becoming a Spy
. Ben. Box set of
True Detective.
Rachel. A book about growing your own vegetables. Harry. Did boys who read books about survival in the wilderness really grow into men who dreamed of allotments? Dustpan and brush. And beside it pieces of broken glass carefully wrapped in old Christmas paper. Also Harry. Only Romy hadn’t left a trace.

Much later Ailsa remembered this detail. Or lack of detail. Because only then did its metaphorical significance resonate. In the sixteen years since her uncomplicated birth, Romy had been the least demanding member of the family.

The most placid of babies, even as a newborn Romy had only cried when she was hungry or tired and was unfussed when passed around from one person to the next. There was no separation anxiety. Luke had been completely different. The first time he played hide and seek, he had sobbed big fat tears when he put his hands over his eyes because he couldn’t see his mother. Ben had issues around feeding. Rejected the breast. Cried for milk in the night. And refused solids until he was almost one.

But Ailsa should have known from growing up beside
the sea that a mirror-calm surface was often an illusion. Her mother had always warned that the most treacherous currents were invisible to the naked eye, a phrase that had always reduced her and Rachel to hopeless giggles. Ailsa smiled at the memory, already anticipating the sharp stab of loss that followed. The rapturous pain of memory, Rachel called it.

She didn’t bother with the kitchen, shutting the door on Lucifer and last night’s mess to avoid being sidetracked. One of the reasons she was determined her father should leave before lunch was that it would encourage Rachel to go at the same time. Seven nights with them both was enough. They hadn’t spent time together so intensively since they were children. That’s what a parent’s death did to you. It sent you hurtling back through time.

Ailsa grabbed the car key from the hook by the back door, pulled on Romy’s boots and a huge khaki jacket with fake fur around the hood that belonged to Luke. She zipped it up until only the top of her face was visible and headed outside. She breathed in deeply until the cold burned her lungs and squinted at the snow-bleached landscape. It was completely still. Every stem and leaf was covered in a glassy fleece of frozen snow. She stared up at the vast anaemic sky and felt a familiar surge of joy at the way it swallowed her up. Some instinct drew her gaze to the second-floor window of the house next door. She glanced over and saw a curtain move.

It wasn’t until she had crunched her way down the
driveway to the road that Ailsa realized just how much snow had fallen in the night. Using the sleeve of Luke’s coat, she wiped a circle of snow from the windscreen, climbed inside the car and slammed the door. It was like being inside an igloo. The only sign of the world outside was through the small porthole in the windscreen.

The car was a mess. The leather seats were peeling, the grille had come off the ventilation system so that you couldn’t direct the jet of air, and the internal lights no longer worked. But the engine started as soon as Ailsa turned the key and the heating was immediately responsive. She jumped as the radio came on at full volume. The children had left it on Kiss FM. A rap song assaulted her senses, something about a girl sucking a man’s dick and her sister being stabbed with an ice pick. Gruesome. Ailsa quickly switched to Radio 4, but the news was all about more changes to the exam system so she switched back. Perhaps if standards in English were raised, lyrics would improve. Although he could have gone for toothpick rather than ice pick. Rappers lacked irony.

Ailsa put the car into first gear and pressed the accelerator. When it didn’t move, she pushed a little harder and heard the tyres spin. She should go and get a spade. But outside it had begun to snow again. She pressed her hand to the windscreen and watched as the tiny snowflakes melted. It occurred to her that the heat from the engine might do the same and then she could try again.

Leaving the engine running, she pulled out her mobile phone and dialled her mother’s number. She had kept
paying for her mother’s phone just so she could listen to her message. No one else knew. Not even Rachel. ‘It’s Georgia here. Although obviously I’m not here at the moment because otherwise I would have answered this wretched phone, so please leave a message and I will get back to you.’ For a couple of seconds her mother came back to life. Ailsa saw her in the kitchen of their family home, hair wet from swimming in the sea, excitedly describing how a seal had joined her in the water. Then just as quickly the memory dissolved.

Ailsa closed her eyes to trap the tears behind her lids, breathed in deeply and thought about their first Christmas without her. Her chest hurt. It was the hole left when Georgia had died. When she was sure she wouldn’t cry she opened her eyes. On balance it had gone better than expected. They had survived. Ailsa jumped as the back door of the car suddenly opened.

‘Thought you might want some company,’ Rachel said, slamming the door behind her.

‘Why didn’t you get in the front?’ asked Ailsa. It was typical of Rachel, who always complained that Ailsa treated her as a child, to behave like a child. Ailsa waited to see if she would put on her seatbelt without being told and then felt perversely irritated when Rachel clicked it into place.

‘Because Dad will want to go in the front, won’t he? Is he coming down?’

Ailsa ignored her questions and instead revved the car again.

‘Careful
or you’ll flood it,’ warned Rachel. ‘You need to wait a minute and press the clutch up and down to get everything flowing.’

Ailsa glanced at Rachel in the mirror. She had a stripy scarf wrapped around her face and was wearing an oversized bobble hat that belonged to Luke. Her unruly brown curly hair poked out wherever it could. Apart from a few crow’s feet, as fine as lace, Rachel barely had a line on her face. And these just highlighted her startling grey-green eyes. Even her imperfections were beguiling: the tiny chip on her front tooth, the rabble of freckles on her slightly too wide nose and the gap across the outside edge of her right eyebrow, the legacy of stitches from a childhood accident. Her hands were deep in the pockets of the coat that Ailsa used for work. She winked at her older sister. Her eyes were their mother’s.

‘Are you wearing any of your own clothes?’ asked Ailsa.

‘I’m here. Isn’t that enough?’ asked Rachel. ‘And I’ve just fed Lucifer.’

‘I’m glad you’ve finally helped get a meal on the table,’ Ailsa teased.

‘You’re a much better cook than me, Ails. Always was.’

Rachel always turned criticism of her into a compliment to Ailsa.

‘Harry does all the cooking now.’

She put the car into gear again and tentatively pressed the accelerator. The wheels spun beneath her, digging
even deeper trenches, sending a new spray of snow over the windows. She pressed harder and the wheels wheezed disapproval.

‘You should have dug around the tyres,’ suggested Rachel.

‘That wouldn’t work. I’m going to sit here with the engine running for a bit longer so the heat from the chassis melts the snow,’ said Ailsa. She put Radio 4 on again. There was a severe weather warning for the south-east of England. Advice to stick to main roads. Essential journeys only. Freezing fog. Thundersnow. Not even the BBC spoke in proper sentences any more.
Stop noticing this shit
, Ailsa chided herself. It was so ageing.

‘We’ll be spending another week here if it goes on like this,’ said Rachel, echoing Ailsa’s worst fears. She felt guilty straight away. She loved her sister. And everyone said that grief was easier if you shared the different stages together. But they weren’t synchronized. While Rachel had been poleaxed by their mother’s death and had spent the funeral in a Valium haze, Ailsa had organized everything. By the time Ailsa gave in to the grief, Rachel had entered the angry phase.

‘Did I tell you the last time I went to see Dad, just before Christmas, I couldn’t find him when I went in the house?’ said Ailsa over the noise of the engine and the radio.

‘Who?’

‘Dad. The front door was open. I went upstairs. His
bed was broken. It was at a thirty-degree angle. His head was hanging over the edge like he’d been decapitated.’ Rachel didn’t say anything. ‘He could have had a stroke because of all the blood pooling in his head.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘Didn’t what?’ asked Ailsa.

‘Didn’t have a stroke.’

‘He’d laid the table for lunch. There was a place set for Mum with those biscuits that she used to love. That’s all he’d been eating. He could have starved. Or got scurvy.’

‘KitKats?’

‘No, the Scottish ones she used to have as a child.’