The Good Girl (37 page)

‘What’s that noise?’ Rachel asked, turning towards my bedroom window. I heard the sound of raised voices. Someone was shouting. Rachel stood up and opened the curtains. At first I thought it was Mum and Dad rowing. I knew that what had happened to me would open up all the old wounds in their relationship. They would probably get divorced and it would all be my fault.

‘Holy shit,’ muttered Rachel.

Another voice I didn’t recognize joined in. Then lots of people were shrieking and shouting all at once, like an opera. I got out of bed and went over to open the window. I couldn’t resist glancing over to Jay’s bedroom. His curtains were shut tight. The noise was coming from
one of the rooms downstairs at the Fairports’ house. There were a few more dull thuds followed by silence.

I headed out of the room before Rachel could talk me out of it. By the time I reached the back door of the Fairports’ house the row had started again. No one noticed me open the front door or my staccato breathing as I stood at the half-open door into the sitting room. Wolf was yelling at someone.

‘Slow down, cowboy, slow down, cowboy,’ he kept saying, over and over again in a tone that was meant to be appeasing but ended up the wrong side of patronizing.

It took a moment for me to realize that Dad was the cowboy. But then Wolf was an Indian. Sacred Warrior Coming Down was his Lakota name. Absurd, but not as absurd as Dad being referred to as a cowboy. Dad couldn’t even change a spare tyre. He was more cowgirl than cowboy. Actually in our family Mum had always been the cowboy. I thought about the messages on the phone in the briefcase in Dad’s office and the way he spent hours peeling the skins off tomatoes to make pasta sauce and got competitive over card games, even Snap. I tried to fit all the different pieces of him together and found that I couldn’t. Maybe all of us were enigmas even to ourselves.

I jumped as I heard more thuds followed by music.

I felt someone’s breath on my bare shoulder, and when I turned Jay was standing beside me, as close as you could be without actually touching.

‘They’re talking about us,’ he whispered.

‘Everyone is talking about us. Everyone.’

I don’t know why we were whispering because no one could hear us above the commotion in the sitting room. I was about to ask him why he had done it but I was aware of Mum’s voice. She sounded surprisingly calm as she threatened to call the police. It was an empty threat.
The fight will be over long before the police get here
, I thought to myself.

Through the gap in the door I saw Dad give Wolf a half-hearted shove as if he had been miscast as the baddie in a pantomime. People wearing reading glasses don’t push people, I remember thinking as Dad’s glasses wobbled on the end of his nose. It was the kind of niggling one-handed older-brother type shove that Luke might give me. But Dad caught Wolf off balance, and because he was wearing socks that slipped on the wooden floor he skidded into the bookshelf, which took the full impact of his weight. One by one the tiny hand-painted glass eggs fell to the floor and smashed.

Wolf crab-walked towards Dad, crunching the broken glass. He lunged and half-heartedly tried to hit him, but missed. Dad gave Wolf a shove. He fell back against the music system and Bob Dylan started playing.

Loveday followed in Wolf’s wake. I noticed she was wearing a long purple dress and her hair was loose. She was screaming but over the noise of the music I could only catch odd words –
performance
,
pleasuring
,
context
. She
shuffled in her bandaged feet towards Mum, who I now realized was standing in the corner by the door. I pushed my way into the room just in time to see Loveday raise her hand in front of Mum’s face.

‘Which service do you want?’ a voice kept asking from Mum’s phone.

‘Stop it! Stop right now!’ I ordered, insinuating myself between Mum and Loveday. I had never felt more part of my family than at that moment.

The voices fell silent but the music played on. I realized that Jay had followed me into the room and was standing behind me, slightly to one side, using me to protect him from Dad. I had never seen Dad look so angry. Even the tips of his ears were alert with tension. He was still wearing his reading glasses, but they were all steamed up so I couldn’t see his eyes. At least if he tried to land a punch it would miss its target.

‘You little shit,’ said Dad, heading in our direction. ‘If I discover that you forced her to do this, I will kill you.’

I glanced at Jay. His fringe manically bobbed up and down as he had an attack of nervous blinking. Wolf came over and put a protective arm around his shoulders. Jay shook him off and moved behind me.

‘Did you ask her to do this?’ Mum asked Jay. Her voice was ice-cold with menace. Jay’s gaze flicked from Dad to Mum. His blue eyes were wild with fear.

‘N-no,’ he stammered.

‘Did you threaten to stop going out with her if she
didn’t make this video for you? Because I’ve done some research and I know that’s the usual modus operandi in these situations, isn’t it?’ Mum continued.

Your pain doesn’t help
, I wanted to tell them; it just makes everything worse.

‘Ailsa. Please. We need to protect the children from our anger,’ said Loveday in a deliberately smooth tone that sounded as though she had dipped her vocal cords in honey. It was completely the wrong approach with Mum.

‘How can you talk about protecting Romy after what your son has done to her?’ asked Mum so coldly that even I shivered. I had forgotten how anger made her even more articulate. ‘This isn’t the kind of situation that you can remedy by lighting a couple of scented candles and dousing yourself in lavender oil.’

‘It’s all right, son,’ Wolf said several times over, more to steady himself than Jay.

‘Except it’s not, is it?’ interrupted Mum. ‘It’s not all right at all. It’s worse than not right. What your sick son has done is illegal and he needs to face up to the full consequences of his actions.’

‘You seem to be forgetting that your slut of a daughter created this problem by getting between my sons,’ Loveday sneered.

‘Stop, Mum,’ said Jay. His voice was a husky whisper. ‘Romy was trying to help me.’

‘How does getting with your brother help?’ Loveday spat out the words.

‘I have some problems,’ said Jay, clearing his throat. ‘Big problems.’

‘Don’t say anything, Jay,’ Loveday warned him.

That was when I realized that Loveday already knew. In my head everything went silent. Loveday and I shared a common idea: we both thought I could cure Jay. Our shared sense of purpose and her faith in me counted for nothing as I grappled with the fact that Loveday had permitted this to happen. She had used me to try and save her son from himself. I caught her eye. There was fear, desperation and anger all wrapped up in a single look, the Horsemen of the Apocalypse when it came to parents behaving irrationally. I realized that there was no love stronger than a parent’s love for their child and that every adult in the room was united by similar emotions. Fear for their children, for themselves, for their unborn grandchildren. There was nothing they wouldn’t do to protect their offspring. We are all animals.

‘Romy made the video to help me,’ said Jay, clearing his throat over and over again. ‘It was a selfless act.’

‘It was completely my idea,’ I said. ‘Jay didn’t ask me to do it.’

My parents and Wolf and Loveday closed around us in an arc like a lymphocyte about to gobble up bacteria. Jay moved closer to me until our shoulders were touching. He did all the talking. Once he had found the right words he couldn’t stop.

When he told them he thought he was addicted to Internet porn, Loveday used the hem of her purple dress
to wipe her eyes and didn’t stop crying until we left the house. Wolf stroked his beard and shook his head in disbelief. ‘Sex is about freedom, not being a prisoner,’ he said. ‘Men need to preserve their yang energy. Have you learned nothing from your mother and I?’

I waited for Mum to correct his grammar but she didn’t. Wolf took Jay’s problems personally. I wished they could all stop relating everything back to themselves and consider the crisis in isolation.

Jay explained how I had come up with the idea to make the video after researching addiction. He described how I had wanted to create new neural pathways in the pleasure-seeking region of the brain. Dad stared at the floor, recognizing the truth of what I was saying. At one point I think we were all crying.

‘She thought that I could replace the porn by watching the video of her and me instead.’

‘How could you be so reckless, Romy?’ Dad asked. I didn’t point out the hypocrisy of this comment.

‘I took a scientific approach.’

‘We don’t know exactly how pornography acts on the different neurotransmitter systems in the brain, Romy. It’s a pretty new pathology. But even with drug addiction it’s not that simple. Heroin acts on the opiate system, nicotine on the cholinergic system and cocaine on the noradrenergic and dopaminergic system. But I can tell you now, your plan wouldn’t have worked. If you overstimulate dopamine release there is a homeostatic response. The dopamine reward system is down-regulated and you develop drug
tolerance. This is probably what has happened to Jay. He would never have stuck with the one porn clip.’

‘It was meant to be something beautiful,’ I said.

Jay didn’t look up. He looked as though he might die from shame. I almost felt sorry for him.

‘What I don’t understand,’ said Mum, speaking to Jay for the first time, ‘or at least the part I understand least, is why you sent the video to your friends after everything Romy had done to try and help you. She laid herself on the line for you.’

‘It wasn’t me,’ said Jay simply.

‘The video was sent from your phone. Mr Harvey has the proof,’ said Mum.

‘It might have been sent from my phone but not by me. I would never want to hurt Romy. I love her. She’s the only person who has ever understood me or tried to help me. I lost my phone at the party. I found it on the floor in the sweat lodge the next day. Someone else must have sent it.’

‘Who would have done that?’ Mum asked. Her mistrust was obvious.

‘I don’t know,’ said Jay hopelessly.

Marley came into the room. He glanced from Jay to his parents and tried to work out what was going on. He didn’t look at me once. It was unbearable.

‘There’s something going on in the sweat lodge,’ he said.

‘What do you mean?’ asked Wolf.

‘It’s all lit up.’

It wasn’t a sixth sense, as some people said afterwards. It was a simple process of deduction.

‘Ben!’ I said. ‘It was Ben.’

I knew I was right as soon as I saw the sweat lodge shimmering and glowing on the edge of the wood. It loomed larger than ever, unnaturally swollen, like the sun setting at the end of a long hot summer’s day. Except it looked like the beginning of something rather than the end. It had never been more beautiful or enticing. We all left the house and ran towards it as if pulled by an invisible force.

‘What’s going on?’ Loveday shouted across to Wolf, as she slammed the back door behind her. I could hear the panic in her voice.

‘I don’t know,’ panted Wolf.

We must have looked like a ragtag army as we hurtled across the garden. The buttons on Dad’s shirt had come off during his tussle with Wolf and now it billowed open to reveal his chest hair and the beginnings of a belly peering over the edge of his jeans. It still astonished me that any woman could find him attractive. But as I knew very well by now, the pre-frontal cortex doesn’t engage at the start of a relationship. The thinking part comes later. At the beginning it’s all about the reward, and desire doesn’t make people discerning. It just makes them want to have sex.

Dad sprinted ahead, chin jutting out, arms pumping. Jay was at his shoulder, threatening but never quite managing to overtake, as though he was trying to beat him in
a race. Wolf lost a bit of ground, disadvantaged by the fact he was barefoot and had to hold up his sarong with one hand, while Loveday’s long purple dress restricted her movements even more, and she soon lagged way behind. Mum was beside me, utterly intent on the dome emerging from the wood. The closer we got the brighter it glowed. She didn’t look over at me once, which was a relief after the unrelenting focus of the past week, because one of the worst things about this whole awful disaster was the way I had become the centre of all her concern.

We ran silently in formation for what seemed like ages. At this point I wasn’t scared. I was just relieved to have escaped the interrogation in the sitting room and to be outside for the first time in a week. It felt so good to stretch my legs. As the lawn gave way to undergrowth, the terrain got more difficult. There were stinging nettles and hard crusts of mud underfoot, but Wolf didn’t seem to notice and quickly caught up with us.
Interesting how adrenaline blocks pain
, I thought, realizing for the first time how terrified he was. I assumed he was worrying about the threat to their livelihood if something happened to the sweat lodge. They were already losing money because of the delay caused by Mum’s complaint to the council. I wanted to tell him that Ben would never harm his stupid building and would never do anything to hurt anyone, but I was so out of breath from the running and dizzy from hardly having eaten for almost a week that I could hardly speak.

As we got closer, the sweat lodge became more and
more luminous. It occurred to me that maybe Ben had turned on the disco lights that we had used for Marley’s party. I think it was at this point that Mum started screaming Ben’s name over and over again: ‘Ben, Ben, Ben …’ Her voice cut through the still night air. I am still haunted by that sound. I remembered how the previous term in Biology Club Mr Harvey had run through examples of mother love in the animal kingdom: the distress of a whale at SeaWorld when her baby was taken away (even Stuart Tovey cried at that), the octopuses who starve rather than leave their babies unattended, ewes who run at dogs who get too close to their lambs. Mum understood that her youngest child was in danger long before the rest of us had grasped the situation.