The Good Girl (33 page)

There was a lull in the music. Ailsa watched Phil as he leaned over to speak to the DJ, who was wearing a lab coat and red plastic glasses and she now recognized as the technician from one of the science departments. They exchanged thumbs-up signals. ‘Night Fever’ started playing so loudly that Ailsa could feel the vibrations through the floor of the gym. She felt something bony nudge her arm and looked down to see it was Matt’s elbow.

‘Are you sure you’re OK?’ he shouted again over the music. ‘You don’t look so good.’

‘I
think I need some air,’ she shouted back.

As Matt held open the door at the back of the gym Ailsa glanced back. All eyes were on Phil as he swung his jacket around in the air and took off his tie to signal the beginning of his John Travolta routine, surrounded by an arc of applauding onlookers. When Matt followed her outside into the car park she didn’t try to stop him.

Her colleagues had ignored the usual etiquette and cars were stationed in random huddles at untidy angles. One was even parked diagonally across the space usually reserved for Ailsa. Bizarrely this tiny demonstration of independent spirit made her feel slightly better about herself. She zigzagged through the narrow gullies between the cars away from the school buildings towards the grassy bank that marked the boundary between the school buildings and the football pitches. As long as she kept moving she would be all right.

‘You know, I didn’t marry Harry because I was pregnant,’ she said when they had gone far enough to talk without shouting over the music. She kept walking, remembering a psychologist on a course once explaining how research showed that wherever possible you should tackle difficult issues with men and boys while doing something physical at the same time. ‘I want you to know that. We were already getting married. We were completely in love.’

‘You don’t owe me any explanations, Ailsa. Really.’ He
sounded out of breath. Ailsa slowed her pace until he had caught up with her.

‘So I’m not quite as awful as you think I am. Although it did happen the night before our wedding, which obviously doesn’t put me in a good light.’

‘I don’t think you’re awful. Everyone messes up. You’d be inhuman if you didn’t.’

They bumped elbows and pulled away from each other.

‘But mostly they get away with it.’

‘It’s like that Bertolt Brecht quote; you know, the one about getting things wrong and dusting yourself down.’

‘ “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” ’

‘That’s the one.’

‘It was Beckett actually. Not Brecht.’

‘I always learn something new in your presence,’ said Matt, a hint of sarcasm in his tone. They had now crossed the car park and reached the grassy bank. She waited for him to suggest they turn back to the gym but instead he scrambled up the bank and down the other side. Ailsa followed, wincing as a stinging nettle licked the side of her calf as she sidestepped onto the grass beside him. He was still talking. ‘I used to think that you enjoyed wrong-footing people, but then I realized that you’re just anal. I’ve noticed how you do that thing where you line up your pens either parallel or horizontal to the edge of the desk.’

Anal. Interesting use of adjective
, thought Ailsa fleetingly.
According to Rachel, a lot of men expected it these days. They were now both obscured from view by the bank. In front of them was a football pitch and on the far right a tall hawthorn hedge that ran parallel to the main road. Matt pointed towards the road and they continued walking, shielded from the night breeze by the bank.

‘I assumed you were one of those awful people who make normal people like me feel like we can never quite live up to your very high standards. You know, Ailsa, it’s so fucking good to discover that you are as flawed as the rest of us.’

‘I’m not sure whether any part of that is a compliment,’ she said, her feet already soaked from the longer grass. She tried to remember the last time a man had weighed up her character in this way. She was flattered by the attention and grateful to him for trying to make her feel better.

‘All of it and none of it,’ he joked. He was good company. She would give him that. He would have fitted well into their family.

‘Full moon,’ observed Ailsa, looking up at the sky and finding the North Star.

‘Do you know why Polaris never moves?’ He didn’t wait for her to answer, no doubt relieved that she was no longer talking about Luke’s conception. ‘It’s on a direct axis of the earth’s rotation above the north celestial pole so all the other stars appear to travel around it. The distance changes slightly each year according to the equinox. At the moment the earth moves slightly closer to it each
year, which is why it appears so big. From 2078 it will start to move away again.’

‘I always learn something new in your company,’ said Ailsa, imitating him.

‘I deserved that,’ he said.

Ailsa stared at the sky and thought of her mother. Georgia was the only one who had known that she was meeting Billy for a drink that night. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ Georgia had said when Ailsa arrived home in the early hours of the morning. Nothing more. The words reverberated in her head as if she were hearing them for the first time.

‘I do,’ said Ailsa.

‘You do what?’ asked Matt. She must have spoken out loud.

‘He wasn’t a total stranger either.’

‘You’re beginning to lose me.’

‘Luke’s father. He was my first boyfriend. It was big love.’ She stretched out her arms to demonstrate and hit Matt’s cheek with the back of her hand. ‘Sorry. I’m really sorry,’ Ailsa said.

‘God,’ he groaned, rubbing the side of his face. ‘What did I do to deserve that?’

‘He left without saying goodbye and I hadn’t seen him for six years. He appeared the day before my wedding. We went out for a drink and he tried to persuade me to call off the whole thing and move to San Francisco with him. I needed to do it to see how I felt afterwards. To prove to myself I was making the right decision.’

‘And
how did you feel?’

‘I stepped away from him on the beach and left him behind. He was the past and Harry was the present and the future.’

They both stopped.

‘Aren’t you cold?’ he asked, noticing her bare arms and the jacket tied around her waist.

‘I don’t feel the cold. I’m completely cold-blooded, as you have discovered.’

‘Don’t be so hard on yourself. Lucky the person who strolls through life without having any shit thrown at them.’

‘You are the only person in the world who knows this about me,’ Ailsa said, ‘and that is a burden for you and a burden for me.’

‘Then the only option is to kill me,’ said Matt, deadpan. ‘My death is the price you have to pay for your peace of mind.’ She couldn’t see his face but she could tell he was smiling. ‘I was wondering why you had lured me away from the party to an isolated corner on the outer boundary of the school grounds where a man’s body could be hidden for years without anyone finding it. Except I can’t see where you’ve concealed a weapon.’

‘I wasn’t luring you away from the party. You were leading
me
,’ said Ailsa, pretending to be affronted. He stopped walking and turned to face her.

‘You’re good at keeping secrets,’ he said.

He stood completely still. His arms hung awkwardly beside his hips, fingers flexed as if he was willing his
hands to stay in that position. His eyes betrayed his intent. They narrowed and roamed slowly across her body, taking in the shape of her breasts, the swell of her hips beneath the jacket around her waist and the bare shoulder blade where the sleeve of her dress had slipped down one arm. No ambiguity there. Ailsa shifted from one foot to the other and his gaze slowly returned to her face.
This is all wonky
, she thought, recognizing the new note through the fug of alcohol. She turned around to walk away and felt his hand catch her own. She thought about Rachel. Then she thought about Luke. There was a hierarchy of needs in all families.

When he was certain that she wasn’t going to pull away, he moved his fingers along her hand and traced exquisite circles on the inside of her wrist. Was this what she intended? It was too late for logic. She stood completely still. It would all be fine as long as she didn’t turn around. She closed her eyes. Every cell of her body was alert to his touch and her head was finally empty of thoughts. God, it felt so good to be with someone else after years with the same man. And when he pressed himself against her she didn’t flinch.

They didn’t speak as they retraced their steps to the gym. But there were no words that could make good what had just happened. Ailsa knew that after a respectable amount of time (it turned out to be five months) Matt would quietly resign from Highfield. Eventually he would forgive himself just as she had.

They
had come further than she remembered. The cool night breeze and physical activity meant that by the time they reached the car park, the effects of the alcohol had worn off.

Her car was the only one left in the car park and Matt’s bike was chained to the railings in front of the school. She looked at her watch and was spooked to see that it was almost one in the morning. Where had all that time gone?

‘They’ll assume you called a cab,’ said Matt. ‘Rachel and I … it’s probably run its course.’
Rachel and me
. She should do an assembly on the ten most common grammatical mistakes. She cried on the way home in the car without really knowing what she was crying for except that it had something to do with loss. For the father that Luke would never know. For Rachel, who would never understand what had gone wrong with her relationship with Matt. For Matt, because he would leave too. For her mother, whom she would never see again. For her father playing bingo with a room full of strangers in Cromer.

She climbed into bed and slid towards Harry. His bedside light was still on, and she carefully leaned over him to switch it off. He was wrapped in the duvet and she drew comfort from the solidity of the mound lying beside her.

‘You’re late,’ he said, his voice muffled by all the goose feathers. Ailsa froze and anticipated his reprimand, like he gave Luke or Romy when they were late. He normally never waited up for her.

‘It’s
like being the captain of a sinking ship. The head teacher can’t leave until the last person has gone home,’ Ailsa whispered, relieved that he couldn’t see her red, puffy eyes. Her arm was uncomfortably arched over his body.

‘Who was the last person?’

‘Phil. Turns out he’s an amazing dancer. Stuck in a 1980s time warp, but completely compelling all the same. You couldn’t believe how such a big man could be so graceful. It almost made me cry.’

Harry laughed and slowly manoeuvred from his side onto his back as if it required a massive effort. He pulled back the duvet so that Ailsa could put her head on his shoulder and drew her towards him with an arm around her.

‘You don’t sound drunk. I love the way you always manage to keep a clear head when everyone around is losing theirs. Requires a lot of self-discipline.’

‘Shall we talk about it tomorrow? I’m exhausted.’

‘Sure.’ He paused. ‘So was it a good party?’

‘Interesting.’

‘Give me the headlines.’

‘I discovered that Mrs Arnold probably wants my job. That Ali Khan’s wife doesn’t know that he smokes. That at least half of my staff could audition for
Strictly Come Dancing
and that warm wine from cartons is the devil’s work.’

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘Shoot.’ She sounded like someone from an American TV series. She never used words like that.

‘Have you moved anything in my office?’

Ailsa
groaned. Harry always blamed other people when he lost anything, but invariably it was his fault when papers went missing. She usually located them in the toilet. She drew comfort from the predictability of this scenario, as if order was being restored.

‘I’ll look tomorrow morning. I mean later this morning.’ She now felt genuinely sleepy. ‘Is it one of your chapters?’

‘I haven’t lost anything. It’s just someone has been moving around some of my stuff. I wondered if you had taken anything out of the briefcase that sits under my desk? There’s a wooden cigar box at the bottom. The lid is missing.’

‘Not guilty. How did the party go next door?’

‘It finished early. There was a drama. Apparently Marnie fell out of a tree and ended up going to hospital, so Wolf and Loveday sent everyone home.’

‘Romy?’

‘Asleep.’

‘Luke?’

‘I think he smuggled a girl in. Which means at least they kept the noise down.’

‘So business as usual.’

‘Business as usual.’

Ailsa switched off the light.

I had no idea what was going on when Mrs Arnold pulled me out of my Biology class later the next week and melodramatically informed Mr Harvey in front of everyone that the head teacher wanted to see me. It took me a moment to register that she was talking about Mum.
This better be good
, I thought, all eyes turned towards me in the back row as I packed up my bag.

It was almost the last lesson of the day and I was in the middle of a Biology past paper, labelling a diagram demonstrating the direction of blood flow in the human heart. Mr Harvey didn’t believe in letting us off lightly after exams. At the beginning of the lesson he had taken me aside to warn that I had missed the grade I needed for medical school in my mocks by two points and suggested this test was the perfect opportunity to prove to him that I could raise my game. As I pushed my stool under the table I noticed Mrs Arnold exchange a knowing look with Mr Harvey and I understood, whatever it was, he was in on it too.

‘Head teacher? Does she mean your mum?’ Becca asked me in confusion. Becca had remained loyal since the party. She was one of the few people who didn’t assume that I was a double-crossing scheming cow
(polite condensed version of the chat online). I gave an embarrassed shrug and walked to the front of the classroom, head held high, everyone staring.

Jay looked down when I walked past him in the front row, pointedly turning his entire body away from me. He had moved next to Stuart at the beginning of the week in a very public demonstration of the new alliances formed since the party. We hadn’t spoken since, and he hadn’t responded to any of my messages. I understood why he didn’t want to tell anyone the truth. Even from a distance I could feel his shame.

Stuart aggressively stuck out his tongue at me. I assumed he either blamed me for the humiliating end to his relationship with Marnie or was gloating because for the first time that year he had beaten me to the top of the class.

‘Head down, Stuart,’ shouted Mr Harvey.

‘Maybe Romy could give some tips on that.’ He smirked. Other students laughed, including some I wouldn’t have expected to, like Ali Harn, a bespectacled nerd who was the only other person applying to medical school from my year, and Olivia Khan, the daughter of one of the teachers.

‘Right. You’re not having your phone back till the end of next week,’ yelled Mr Harvey, who had confiscated Stuart’s mobile earlier in the day after he caught him using it in class. Everyone was shocked into silence because Mr Harvey never lost it.

I wordlessly followed Mrs Arnold to Mum’s office.
She was a parasite on other people’s misery, and I didn’t want to give her any pleasure by asking what was going on. She told me to wait on the bench outside.

‘If you need to talk to me about anything. Absolutely anything, Romy, you know where to find me,’ she said, putting her hand on my shoulder. She was big on using full stops to increase drama. She had what Mum called her lemon-sucking expression, both pained and bitter at the same time. I wanted to tell her that no sane person would ever come to her with a problem. ‘You can speak to me in complete confidence.’

God, it must be bad
, I thought as I pulled my Biology textbook out of my bag and began checking the diagram of the human heart to see whether I had answered the question correctly. ‘Right atrium, left atrium, inferior vena cava, superior vena cava,’ I whispered. All correct. The words soothed me. I noticed that Mum’s blinds were drawn. This also seemed a bad omen.

My stomach cramped. What was going on? I needed the toilet but didn’t want to walk past Mrs Arnold’s window. I ran through the possibilities. My grandfather had suddenly been taken ill. Ben kept saying that old people gave up when they went into homes. Except as Mum kept explaining, it wasn’t a care home. Grandpa had his own flat and friends his own age to keep him company. ‘Dying is contagious,’ Ben said, unconvinced by her argument. But if Grandpa were ill wouldn’t Luke also be sitting here beside me? And surely Mum would have gone home? I remembered the phone and the mutilated
SIM card in Dad’s briefcase and wondered if he had told Mum that someone had found it. But they wouldn’t deal with this at school. Mum would sooner die than reveal Dad’s dirty little secret to Mrs Arnold.

It had to be something related to what had happened at the party. Perhaps Loveday and Wolf had spoken to Mum about the fight or a snoopy parent had read someone’s Facebook page and informed the school. It wouldn’t be surprising. All anyone could talk about was how I had kissed my boyfriend’s older brother, causing my best friend, who was in love with the same boy, to break her ankle falling out of a tree and Marley and Jay to have a fight, although Loveday was the only one who got hurt – her feet had been shredded by the glass.

Even Luke and Becca had raised an eyebrow when I told them my version of events the afternoon after the party. We were in Luke’s bedroom. Me on the floor, Luke on his bed and Becca cross-legged on the desk by his window. The girl from the night before was still asleep in his bed. There was a trail of her clothes leading from the door to the bed. I felt a stab of jealousy at the ease of Luke’s relationship with her. It was all I had wanted for myself. Instead I had ended up with something way beyond my amateur dealings with boys.

‘So talk me through what happened one more time in case I missed something,’ Luke instructed. He picked up a weight from the floor and did some bicep curls.

‘I went into Jay’s room and got really upset because
I realized that he wasn’t in love with me and our relationship was over. Marley came in and found me crying. He tried to comfort me but we accidentally kissed each other.’

‘How exactly do you accidentally kiss someone?’ asked Becca sarcastically. ‘Did you trip and suddenly find yourself with your mouth pressed against his? Because that happens to me a lot.’

‘More his mouth pressed against mine,’ I rambled. ‘I can’t really remember the details. We were both out of it.’

‘You seemed very in control when you went to get the first-aid kit and bandaged Marnie’s ankle and kept going on about tibulas and fibulas,’ commented Luke. ‘And when you called for the ambulance and described to them exactly how to get here.’

‘Were you trying to make Marley feel sorry for you to get close to him because secretly you always fancied him, not Jay? Because that’s what Marnie thinks,’ asked Becca, trying a different approach.

‘I was upset because I realized Jay wasn’t in love with me.’

‘I don’t believe you, Romy,’ Luke said, swapping the weight from one hand to the other as he shone his bedside light onto my face. ‘You’re saying exactly the same thing over and over again. I watched this film once about the Stasi in East Germany and it said that if people are telling the truth, there are subtle changes in their story. You’re saying the same thing over and over again. You sound too rehearsed.’

Luke was like a sniffer dog when he got the scent of a lie. I put up my hand to shield my eyes from the light.

‘Come on, Romeo. Tell me what happened. You know you want to.’

If I’d been alone with Luke, this was the moment when I would have capitulated. He was a surprisingly good listener and he would have good insights into Jay’s problem. Because although he never talked about it, I was pretty sure Luke was not immune to the lure of PornHub. But Becca was there.

‘I saw you and Jay dancing together at the party. You looked really happy,’ said Becca. ‘Actually I saw you kissing him too. I don’t get why you suddenly thought he wasn’t in love with you any more. I mean it’s not like a tap that you can turn on and off.’

I had promised Jay that I would never betray his secret, and the best I could do was a partial truth, but with hindsight a total lie would probably have been better.

‘Doesn’t add up, does it?’ Luke asked Becca.

‘He was comforting me.’

‘Come back to bed, Luke,’ said a muffled voice from beneath the duvet. ‘Please.’

Stuart swaggered down the corridor and stopped right beside me. I focused on the diagram of the heart until the words began to blur. I waited for him to say something and when he didn’t I looked up. He put his middle finger slowly in and out of his mouth, laughing at my
shocked expression, and turned to blow a kiss in the direction of Mum’s office. Even then I didn’t realize what was going on. Shortly afterwards Mum’s assistant indicated that I should go in. Mum’s face had that pinched grey look that I hadn’t seen since we left London. Her lips had shrunk and her eyes were sunken.

‘Come in, Romy,’ she said formally, as if she was pretending I wasn’t really her daughter.

‘Everything is fine at home,’ she said quickly as I followed her in. When I left the door open she went back to shut it, all the time asking me questions. What were we doing in the Biology class? Could I catch up another time? Did I realize how competitive it is to study medicine? None of it made much sense and I could tell she wasn’t really listening to any of my answers.

‘There’s something you need to see, Romy,’ said Mum suddenly. Her voice was all fragmented. The way she kept saying my name made me feel uncomfortable. It didn’t sound like her speaking. It gradually dawned on me that she was in a state of shock.

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked.

Mum went over to her computer and tapped the keyboard.

‘I’ll sit on the sofa while you watch. I’ve seen it already.’ She went over to the canary-yellow sofa beneath the window and sat with her arms crossed, staring at me. She was breathing out through her mouth and in through her nose like someone doing yoga in reverse.

‘Is it something to help with my university application?’
I asked as I sat down in her seat. She shook her head and pointed at her computer. In the centre of the screen on her desktop was a file called Romy. I pressed play and within a couple of seconds was watching the video that Jay and I had made together. I had only seen it once before on the tiny screen on his phone in the dim light of the sweat lodge, when we first filmed it.

Now it was blown up there were details that I hadn’t noticed first time round. The slightly long preamble where the camera was focused on Jay’s crotch as his dick rose in the air from his underpants and slapped against his stomach; the way I shuffled forward on my knees to meet it, mouth half open, eyes half shut, and the huge scab on my knee from slipping on the netball court. I couldn’t believe that Mum had watched this when it was so obviously something private between Jay and myself. It was as though she had read my diary or intercepted my Instagram. I felt a brief moment of blind fury. Why did she always want to be so involved in my life? It was sick.

‘How did you get this?’ I asked angrily. ‘You have no right to violate my private life like this.’

‘Mr Harvey found it on Stuart’s phone earlier today. We don’t know how Stuart got it. Presumably someone else sent it to him. We’re trying to trace back the trail.’ Her voice got quieter and quieter. ‘Your private life is very public.’

Afterwards Becca asked me how I felt at that moment. Pure terror is probably the only way to describe it. My
entire body went cold until I couldn’t feel anything. I couldn’t move my fingers. My mouth was dry. Everything was completely numb. I remember thinking that I was paralysed. Just as I had got used to this idea I started to get so hot that within seconds I was soaked with sweat. My hands were bright red and the computer mouse slid through my fingers so I couldn’t stop the film. My face was burning and my heart was beating so fast that when I looked down I could see it pulsing through my chest. I wondered if this was how my grandmother felt before she died and realized that living suddenly seemed a lot scarier than death. This was, I told Becca, the instant when I stopped being a child.

‘Who is the boy?’ Mum asked.

There was a loud thumping on the door of Mum’s office. Dad burst through the door. For the first time in a while I was relieved to see him. He apologized to Mum for being late, came straight over to her desk, arms outstretched, and put them around me, one eye on the computer screen.

‘Oh, my little girl, my little girl,’ he said, as the film continued, ‘what have you done?’

He pulled away from me and tried to shield my eyes from the screen with his hand like he used to when we were little and something inappropriate came on television. Except he was trying to protect me from myself. I knew what was coming next. I couldn’t look at him. I put my fingers in my ears but I couldn’t block it out completely.

‘Oh, Mum,’ I said. Mum looked up at Dad.

‘How has this happened to us?’ she asked.

‘I love love love it when you come in my face,’ I heard myself say in a breathless whisper on screen. The words resonated with Dad straight away because of course he was their inspiration.

‘It was you, wasn’t it?’ His voice cracked.

I nodded without looking at him. At that moment I didn’t think that I could ever look anyone in the eye again.

‘Oh God,’ said Dad, rocking backwards and forwards, holding me in his arms. I pulled away, desperate to get rid of the images on screen. ‘It’s all my fault.’

‘Harry, we can’t fall apart,’ Mum said, her voice breaking. ‘We need to be strong for Romy.’