The Good Girl (28 page)

‘So what’s the plan?’ Jay whispered as the bus pulled up at our stop and we disentangled.

We started walking on the path beside the road and I told him about what I had discussed with Dad. Jay looked totally panicked. His face went shiny and he ran his hands through his fringe over and over again until it stood stiff as a meringue. ‘You told your dad about me?’ He stood stock-still for a moment and stared into my eyes without blinking, which made me blink even more. I put my hand on his arm. I could feel his arm muscles tense through his blazer.

‘Of course not. I said I was doing research for a Biology project at school. Which it sort of is. Except you are the project.’

‘If he knew, he wouldn’t let me near you. He would
probably want to kill me. If you were my daughter, I would kill me. People would think I’m a total sick freak.’

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. I put my arm through his to urge him to keep moving. ‘You can totally trust me. I am the keeper of everyone’s secrets.’ He didn’t say anything but he stopped running his hand through his hair. A thought occurred to me. ‘Do you regret telling me?’

‘Sometimes it’s a relief. I feel like I’ve finally met someone who understands me. And I really appreciate that you don’t think I’m a total wanker. Although of course that is literally what I am.’

Right use of literally
, I thought.

‘I feel a lot less lonely. But sometimes the fact that you know makes me feel more out of control, as though now I’ve got to think about what you’re thinking as well as what I’m thinking. And then I freeze. I worry that I might not be able to stop. That I might let you down. When it was just me and the porn it was easier. I mean I felt shit afterwards but the two of us had this really good routine going.’

‘The porn and me,’ I corrected him, trying to inject a bit of humour into the situation. Because I recognized the truth of what he was saying. He had definitely been more subdued since he had told me. But mostly because I was realizing that I was facing a powerful rival in our relationship. His pair bonding, as Dad called it, was definitely well off-kilter.

‘Sometimes sharing a secret makes it seem even bigger. More shameful,’ he said.

‘You need to create new healthy reward pathways in
your brain and close the old ones down,’ I said breezily. ‘Get your dopamine from other sources. It is possible. We need to rewrite your sexual brain map.’

‘You make it sound so simple, Romy. Like building new roads.’

As we got closer to his house, instead of going home I suggested to him that we head to the sweat lodge in the woods. The timing was perfect. Mum was stuck at a meeting at school and Dad would be dealing with Ben. Wolf and Loveday would be doing downward dog. No one would disturb us there.

‘To cleanse and purify?’ Jay joked. ‘I need some of that. Sounds a lot simpler and less painful than excavating new tracks in my brain.’

‘Actually. Yes,’ I said. He opened the gate into his front garden.

‘This was where I saw you for the first time,’ I told him, trying to make him less anxious. ‘We were watching from the sitting-room window.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘We could see you hiding.’

‘God, how embarrassing. What did you think?’

‘Dad said we should put on a show so that you’d freak out about your new New Age neighbours. We refused but Mum and Dad did their worst.’

‘You mean the bongos and the chanting?’

He nodded. ‘I knew as soon as I saw you,’ he said.

‘What did you know?’

‘That there was a connection. Marley caught me staring at you. That’s why he thumped me on the arm.’

‘What
did he say?’

‘That he was the oldest and had the right to first refusal.’

‘That’s like Luke getting the bedroom in the loft. Ridiculous,’ I said, trying not to give away that I was flattered, because Marley Fairport was properly hot although I found him a bit obvious.

We closed the gate behind us and headed past the kitchen window deep into the back garden. I checked whether the slats had been removed from the fence, and they hadn’t, which was good because it made it less likely that Ben was skulking around.

It was raining, silent rain, and the closer we got to the woods, the deeper my school shoes sank into the mud. Jay offered to give me a piggyback. I hitched up my skirt and jumped on his back, holding my shoes in one hand, and he cantered off with me clinging to his shoulders. My tights made me slippery as an eel and Jay had to keep hoiking me up so that I didn’t slide to the ground.

‘My lungs are on fire,’ he panted as the mud got deeper. He said that he felt like a medic carrying the wounded through the Somme during the First World War, and we discussed whether the dead weighed more than the living.

‘Maybe if it’s a decomposed body and the bacteria have multiplied,’ I suggested.

‘I’ve never met anyone who thinks the way you think, Romy,’ he laughed as we finally reached the sweat lodge. ‘You are so original.’

It
took a bit of time for him to untie the rope that had been threaded through the eyelets on the plastic door to keep it shut. I looked back to our house and wondered if Dad was in his office discovering that he had been outed.
Would he guess it was me?
Probably. Ben wouldn’t understand what was going on. Luke avoided his office. It had bad karma for him because it was where he went when he and Dad had one of their man-to-man chats about his lack of a future.

Dad would feel sick. He wouldn’t be able to breathe. Or stand up. I suddenly got worried that he might have a heart attack, like Granny. That someone else might discover the phone and put two and two together, and Mum would find out without ever having the opportunity to be reconciled with him and would have to carry the bitterness to her grave.

Jay bent down to crawl through the half-open door and I followed him inside. I watched as he sewed it up again. In the half-light I saw him go over to a table and pull out a box of matches from the drawer. He lit candles on a wooden shelf that ran around the edge of the sweat lodge and it slowly emerged from the shadows, allowing me to absorb each new detail as it appeared. Low wooden beds with animal skins on top; stools made from tree trunks circling the fire; antlers; beautiful old rocks in the hole in the centre. It was really lovely. Wolf was right about circular spaces being more inviting. It smelled of woods, childhood and freedom. I inhaled deeply.

‘It’s eucalyptus,’ Jay explained. ‘Sometimes they use
this resin from Guatemala called
copal
but it’s difficult to source in Norfolk.’

Jay pulled back a plastic flap and took out a couple of bottles of Coca-Cola. ‘That’s not very spiritual,’ I observed. ‘Or organic.’ He removed the tops using a pair of scissors, and I took a couple of gulps even though I hate fizzy drinks. Something else that marks me out as a weirdo, Luke always claimed.

‘Dad hides them here. Mum doesn’t like him drinking Coke. Even though she’s fine with him smoking dope. Because she thinks it’s more natural. Doesn’t make sense, does it?’

‘Nothing does with parents.’

I don’t know why but I hadn’t told Jay about finding the phone. Perhaps it was some residue of loyalty towards my dad. Or the fact that I didn’t want Jay to think my family was a bunch of freaks. Although, given his own parents, that was unlikely. Most probably it was because I thought it might make him refuse to participate in my plan to save him. We lay down on the sheepskin rugs, limbs entwined, and kissed again, and my worries began to dissolve.

‘So, Doctor. Give me your expert opinion,’ said Jay, nuzzling the side of my neck with his mouth while his hand began to undo the buttons of my school shirt.

‘I have a hypothesis. I have no evidence that it will work,’ I said as he put his hand inside my bra and I curled towards him.

‘Will
it get written up in medical journals? Will you be able to roll it out as a global service? Will you give a TED Talk on the subject? Because I believe that you’re capable of great things, Romy Field.’

‘We don’t have a control group,’ I whispered. ‘Although there are a lot of people out there in the same situation.’

‘How do you know?’

‘On reddit. I found this forum on the Net.’ He didn’t ask any questions. I couldn’t work out whether knowing there were other people like him out there diminished or heightened the scale of his problem.

‘I want you to want me sexually and no one else,’ I said. ‘You need to stop looking at what you find on the Internet and have as much interaction as possible with real girls,’ I said, pulling away to do up the buttons of my shirt again.

‘That’s what I’m trying to do,’ he said breathlessly, pulling me back towards him. ‘I totally want interaction with you.’

‘You need to release pheromones. You need to have real sex. You need to empty your head of all those other images.’

‘How do I do that?’ he asked. ‘I can’t wipe my memory.’

‘We’re going to make a film. With your phone. Then when we’re not together you can look at us instead of all the porn.’

He looked at me, his eyes wide open, questioning and
yet not wanting to question because the idea was too irresistible to reject.

‘God, Romy, are you sure?’

‘I did lots of research. If we do this, it will gradually replace the images you have running in your head. It will create the necessary novelty, and the reward system in your brain will signal its approval. You’ll strengthen the networks relating to me. We can have sex. And you will be cured.’

‘More than anything I want a happy ending,’ said Jay.

It all seemed so simple. We put the phone on the shelf and tried out a few angles.

I got him to stand up. I asked him to tell me what he wanted me to do to him and how he wanted me to do it. And then I did it. So you see Jay didn’t force me to make the video. I didn’t make it to impress him. I made it to save him. It was my idea. Our truth. It didn’t belong to anyone else. No one else was ever meant to see it.

‘So what did you do last night, Romy?’

It was a throwaway question. Ailsa was looking for some uncontroversial diversion over breakfast. She had stayed up half the night surfing medical websites for information about blood groups that might prove Matt’s theory wrong. When she found none she made an anonymous post on Mumsnet, asking for advice about her dilemma. Within a couple of hours she had thirty-eight contradictory responses, including four from women in an identical situation.
Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive
, one wrote back.
No one sums up a problem better than Shakespeare
. Common mistake. It was Walter Scott, but Ailsa didn’t feel she was in a position to correct her. Two hours later, she deleted her post in a fit of nerve-jangling paranoia that someone might recognize her.

‘Went to Marnie’s. Watched
Gossip Girl
. Borrowed a dress for a party,’ Romy said without missing a beat. Her mouth was full of muesli.

‘Oh,’ said Ailsa. ‘That’s nice of her. What party?’

Romy sidled around the kitchen, languid as the cat, bowl in one hand, trying to locate her Chemistry textbook beneath the piles of papers that had taken up
permanent residence on the sideboard. Lucifer threaded himself in and out of her legs, doing figures of eight. Ailsa had given up years ago trying to get Romy to sit down for breakfast at the table, conceding that where she ate was less important than the fact that she ate at all.

‘For Marley’s birthday party. Remember. The theme is Professor Green meets
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.’

‘Sounds very intellectual,’ said Harry as he put the first chapters of his book in numerical order. ‘Or is Professor Green a Cluedo reference?’

After six months in the countryside, Harry looked more youthful than he had for years. His hair was long and wild and his face wind-burned from all the time he spent outside. Exercise had given him a more angular outline. The tension of the previous year had finally dissipated. Ailsa cursed Matt for his overzealous research project just at the point when it looked as though their marriage was back on course and then berated herself for giving someone with so little experience such a free rein.

‘That’s Professor Plum,’ Luke laughed. ‘Professor Green is a rapper, Dad.’

It knocked Ailsa off course hearing Luke call Harry ‘Dad’. She turned towards the window and closed her eyes for a moment. All she could see was Billy, with his lazy smile and sun-bleached hair. She touched her ear, remembering how he had introduced himself to her in assembly his first day at school by flicking her earlobe
from the row behind and asking what Ailsa was doing at the end of the day. It had been as simple as that. Harry was right. Love at first sight is pure biology.

‘Mum, are you listening? What do you think?’ Romy pulled out a couple of diaphanous dresses from her school bag and held them up against herself.

Ailsa turned round. Marnie was at least half a foot shorter so she simply selected the longer dress. ‘I prefer the teal colour,’ she said with a quick smile. Even if her advice was ignored she was grateful to be consulted. ‘It goes better with your eyes.’

‘I’ll wear the other one,’ joked Luke, grabbing the dress from Romy and draping it across his torso with one hand while holding his arm above his head to take a selfie with the other. He jutted out his hip and stuck his chin in the air.
Just like Billy
, thought Ailsa, startled by the clarity of this thought. Luke laughed. Ailsa looked away. She had spent so many years searching for similarities between Harry and Luke, and now all she could see were their differences. Luke lifted the dress to his nose.

‘Smells of roses. Like Marnie.’

‘How do you know what Marnie smells like?’ asked Romy suspiciously.

‘She’s been hanging out with us a bit, since you and Jay got together.’

‘Marley?’ asked Romy hopefully.

Luke shook his head. ‘Stuart.’

‘For
real?’ she said with disbelief. ‘That’s messed up.’

‘I don’t get it either, Romeo.’

They noticed their parents listening and stopped.

‘So when is this great event?’ Harry squinted from over the top of his book.

Romy ignored him.

‘In two weeks,’ said Luke. ‘The night after mocks finish.’

The same night as the teachers’ party, Ailsa noted. She was about to ask about parental supervision, surely an oxymoron where Wolf and Loveday were concerned, when Ben wandered into the kitchen still dressed in his pyjamas. Ailsa glanced at the clock. He was seriously behind schedule.

‘Morning, Grub,’ said Romy, ruffling his hair with her hand. Drops of milk dripped from her teaspoon into his thick curls.

‘Why aren’t you dressed for school?’ Ailsa asked. She turned to Harry. ‘You’ll have to take him.’

‘Because I’m not going,’ said Ben. He crossed his arms defiantly.

‘What’s up?’ asked Harry, putting down his papers and pulling him onto his knee. Ben resisted. He tried to summon up anger but Ailsa could tell that he was about to cry.

‘Someone’s taken my film off Wolf and Loveday’s website,’ he said, wobbly-voiced. ‘It’s disappeared. I’ve looked for it everywhere.’

‘There was an anonymous complaint to the council,’
Harry explained. ‘So Wolf and Loveday can’t start their business at the moment. They’ve probably removed it temporarily. Until everything is sorted.’

‘Don’t worry, Grub. Nothing on the Internet ever really disappears,’ said Romy.

‘That’s why you don’t want to put some video of yourself pissed and upchucking on Facebook,’ said Luke.

‘Luke, I’ll have to rewrite my job description. You’re beginning to sound like a responsible adult,’ said Harry, pretending he was about to pass out.

‘I’ll help you load the video on YouTube if you like,’ offered Luke.

‘It won’t get the same traffic,’ said Ben. ‘Why would anyone complain about Wolf and Loveday when all they want to do is help people?’

‘People aren’t allowed to construct buildings and set up businesses without official permission,’ explained Ailsa, annoyed with herself for not anticipating his reaction. Ben had spent hours filming Wolf building the circular roof frame. He had even helped to lay the wooden floor and wheel heavy barrows of mud from the centre where the fire pit would be. She hadn’t taken on board his emotional attachment to the whole project. ‘Especially if it involves something where someone could get hurt. People who offer expensive cures without any qualifications can be very dangerous.’

‘How could anyone get hurt in my sweat lodge?’ Ben asked. ‘It’s where people go to get better.’

‘I
don’t know,’ said Harry, stroking his head.

‘There was an accident in a sweat lodge in America where three people died. The guy who ran it is in prison. You don’t want Wolf to go to prison, do you?’ Ailsa asked.

Harry’s brow furrowed with disapproval. Ailsa met his gaze. ‘You,’ he mouthed. She nodded and he shook his head regretfully.

‘I’d had over ten thousand hits,’ said Ben. ‘Rachel said it could be the start of my career as a film director.’

‘It’s an unpredictable industry,’ said Romy, trying to comfort him. ‘But that’s a lot of hits for your first film. You should feel proud of yourself.’

Romy suggested he should revert to being a spy. Adam said that he could come and visit him the following week during his trial period at the flat in Cromer. Harry said he would try and find out who had complained and convince them they were wrong. He shot Ailsa a pointed look. Ben was inconsolable.

‘Now my friends won’t believe that I ever made a film. They’ll think I’m a total loser,’ said Ben with a deep sigh. ‘Life is full of disappointments. I don’t think I can take any more.’

‘What else has gone wrong?’ Ailsa asked, worried that she had missed other cues. Ben was finding it difficult to make friends at his new school and had taken to hiding food in his room again, always a sign that he was feeling anxious.

‘Grandpa’s
moving out –’

‘Only for a trial period,’ interrupted Adam.

Ben continued: ‘You won’t let me join Facebook. And I thought when we moved out of London we’d move into a house like the Cluedo board.’

‘What are you talking about?’ asked Harry.

‘I thought there’d be a billiard room, a conservatory and secret passages. There aren’t even any doors in this house. I hate it here. I want to go home.’

Ailsa smiled. Ben’s problems always seemed sweetly innocent beside those of his older siblings, their eccentricity injecting a distracting layer of humour into domestic life. She was forgetting that Ben might not see it this way.

‘Why don’t we go and talk to Wolf and see what’s going on? I’ll take you to school after that,’ said Harry.

Ben gave a sad nod.

‘Thanks,’ said Ailsa. She hugged Harry for a little too long. He was so good at dealing with Ben.

‘Come on, Romeo, let’s go. Juliet’s waiting for you by the front gate to go and catch the bus,’ said Luke.

‘Shut up, Luke,’ said Romy happily, checking her face in the mirror.

‘Don’t forget your Biology project,’ Ailsa reminded her.

‘I’ve got it, thanks,’ she said, patting her rucksack. ‘All ready to hand in.’

‘Hope I get a mention in the acknowledgements at least,’ said Harry, almost bashfully.

‘Not
specifically,’ said Romy, giving him a long hard look. ‘Although you definitely inspired the conclusion.’

What’s Romy up to?
Ailsa wondered as she got in the car to drive to school. Why would she do so much work for a project that didn’t exist? She was obviously interested in the subject of teenagers and addiction. According to Harry, her questions to him had demonstrated a real depth of understanding. But when Ailsa asked if he had actually seen anything Romy had written, the answer was no. And she wasn’t doing it for her university application because Harry had told her last night that Romy was having doubts about studying medicine.

If Ailsa hadn’t been so distracted by her discovery about Luke she might have taken this argument to its logical conclusion and realized that if Romy wasn’t doing the research for herself then it was probably for someone else. She might have asked her what was going on and Romy might have told her. Could have, would have, should have.
Never live life in the conditional tense
, she used to tell her English students. It was too full of regret.

Instead Ailsa found herself behind the school bus at the crossroads at the top of the road thinking about Billy. She caught sight of herself in the mirror and massaged the faint line that was beginning to appear between her eyebrows. There were blue bags of exhaustion under her eyes. What would he think of her now? She stared out of the windscreen and thought how the tiny blurred
spots of dead insects smeared on its surface looked a little like the red blood cells that Matt Harvey had found on Google Images yesterday evening as he tried to explain in the simplest terms the inheritance of blood type.

When she looked up she saw Romy waving her away through the rear window of the bus. It must have looked as though Ailsa was keeping tabs on her and Jay. Ailsa hung back to let the bus get ahead, remembering Matt’s diagram showing the possible outcomes for a child whose parents had A and AB blood.

After his revelation about Luke, Matt had apologized for embarking on a project that could throw up potentially explosive results. He questioned his ability to be a teacher and wondered if he was really suited to the job. He explained that he hadn’t thought through the repercussions of an anomaly. Except of course it wasn’t an anomaly. Ailsa tried to reassure him by insisting that it was better it involved her rather than another family. Because this was the kind of issue that could get the board of governors really worked up.

Instead they could forget about it. It was probably a mix-up. Happened all the time. They both expressed relief at finding a satisfactory way out and exchanged a nervous smile. He tore up the piece of paper until it resembled confetti and threw the bits into Ailsa’s wastepaper bin. She tried to disguise her anxiety. She didn’t want him to feel bad. But, more selfishly, she
understood that her calm was more likely to guarantee his silence.

‘Would you rather I didn’t come to your house with Rachel tomorrow night?’ he had asked. Ailsa had totally forgotten that she had invited them over.

‘It’s fine,’ said Ailsa. ‘We’re fine.’

She put the car into gear and edged towards the crossroads and stopped again. Her head was boiling over with memories of Billy, a man she had thought about for the past seventeen years only in the most impressionistic terms. She couldn’t go into school and deliver an assembly on the importance of punctuality, especially now that she was going to be late. She opened the car window to get some air and switched off the engine.
Compose yourself
, she ordered the panicked woman in the mirror.

Ailsa liked to deal in facts. Facts were soothing. And the facts were these: Luke’s father, Billy Weston, had joined the upper sixth of Ailsa’s secondary school when he was seventeen, one term into the new school year. He arrived tanned from a summer spent in the Mediterranean. He had a surfboard, wore his hair long and grew his own marijuana from seed, and was impossibly exotic for Norfolk in the late 1980s.