Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

Once we’re both sitting perfectly, I place my hands over the keys. I have to work hard to control my breathing because my heart is hammering but my focus sharpens on to the music that’s ahead, all of me waiting to hear those first notes now, like a starting gun at the beginning of a race.

The audience is hushed. Just a cough from somebody, that echoes around the vaults and columns. Lucas waits for the sound to disappear and, in the absolute silence that follows, he first wipes his palms on his trouser legs and then he positions his hands over the keys.

Now, that smooth run of black and white stretching out beneath our hands is everything and I watch his hands as intently as an animal ready to pounce. I mustn’t miss his cue. There’s a beat or two more of perfect silence before he arches his palms and his hands bounce lightly: once, twice, three times.

Then we’re off, in perfect synchrony.

We dazzle when we do this; everybody says so. The energy two players produce can be electrifying when it’s right. It’s a tightrope act controlling the power, the tone and the dynamics, because all of it must be perfectly balanced, and it wasn’t so good this afternoon when we got tired and cross with each other while practising in the heat, but tonight, it’s brilliant. It’s seamless, beautiful, and we’re right in the music, both of us, and I’ll admit that doesn’t always happen. Mostly doesn’t happen.

In fact, I’m so into it that at first I don’t hear the shouting, and not hearing the shouting means that I don’t realise that what’s just begun is the end.

But I wish I had realised.

Why do I wish that?

Because, six hours later, my mother is dead.

At 8 a.m. Tessa still hasn’t stirred, but I’ve been awake since dawn.

I’m a criminal lawyer, with a heavy workload. I often work late and usually I sleep heavily until my alarm goes off, but today I have a hospital appointment that’s been burning a hole in the page of my diary for more than a week, and it’s on my mind the minute my eyes open.

The curtains are drawn at my bedroom window, darkening the room, and light filters round them in lazy, unpredictable curves as they move with the breeze from the river. If I opened them, I would see the wide expanse of the floating harbour outside, and the colourful mixture of modern apartments and old warehouses and boathouses that bundle together on the bank opposite.

But I don’t.

I stay where I am and I notice that the breeze is so soft that it barely disrupts the stillness of the room. They promised us a storm last night, but it never came. There was just a short, violent rain shower, followed by a dusting of drizzle, which offered a brief respite from the heat, but only brief, because now it’s thickening again.

Tessa arrived in the rain, in the middle of the night.

She apologised for disturbing me, as if she hadn’t just made my evening. She said she’d tried to phone. I hadn’t noticed because I’d passed out on the sofa in front of the TV, with the remains of a special chow mein on my lap, and the letter from the hospital on my chest.

When I opened the door to her, I noticed dark smudges of exhaustion on the damp skin underneath her eyes, and she stood very still when I embraced her, as if every muscle in her body was stretched too tight.

She said she didn’t want to talk, so I didn’t press her to. Ours is a quiet, respectful affair; we don’t ask for or expect a comprehensive emotional download from each other. We’re more in the business of providing refuge for one another, and by that I mean a strong, safe place to reside, a place where we are almost certainly what two less reserved adults would call ‘in love’, though we would never say that.

I’m a shy person. I moved from Devon to Bristol two years ago, because it’s what you do if you want to avoid spending your whole life and career amongst the same small circle of people, in the area you grew up in. Opportunities in Bristol are much greater, and I’d cut my teeth on Zoe Guerin’s case, so I felt ready for a change.

But it hasn’t worked out too well for me. My cases are more varied, and the workload is more intense, that’s true, but new friendships haven’t come easily because I have to work all hours, and you don’t meet too many potential partners when you’re doing prison visits and court attendances. So when Tess and I ran into each other, just in the street one day, it felt like a godsend. She was a familiar face, we had shared history, however difficult, and we slipped quickly into a pattern of snatching time with each other, just coffees and drinks at first, and then more. Tessa is married though, so that’s where things have sort of stalled. We can’t move on unless she leaves her husband.

Last night, after she arrived, she flopped on to my sofa as if the stuffing had been knocked out of her, and I brought her a cold beer and discreetly slipped the hospital letter into a drawer on my way to the kitchen, so she wouldn’t see it. I didn’t want it to mar things between us, not until I was sure. Not until I’d got through today’s appointment. It was fairly easy to disguise the numbness in my left hand. Nobody at work had noticed it either.

She sipped her beer and we watched a Hitchcock film, in the dark, and the black and white images on the screen made the room flicker as if it was animated. Beside me, Tessa remained still and quiet as she watched, once or twice rolling the cold drink across her forehead, and I snuck a glance or two at her when I could, wondering what was wrong.

Tessa doesn’t share the white blonde hair, pale skin and refined features of her sister, or her niece – her looks have none of their hauteur – though she does share their sharp blue eyes. Tess mostly wears her thick, silky strawberry-blonde hair tied back, and the open features on her heart-shaped face and her lightly freckled skin make her look approachable, and kind, and her eyes often dance with humour. Her figure is athletic, her attitude is practical and no-nonsense. For me, she is beautiful.

As I look at her now, in the warm darkness of my bedroom, she’s lying with her hands on the pillow beside her face, fingers curled in beside her lips. Only the sight of the tarnished gold wedding ring on her finger mars the picture for me.

After a while, I ease myself out of bed, because I want breakfast. So I’m riffling through a pile of laundry on the floor to locate something to wear when my phone vibrates.

I snatch it up quickly, because I don’t want it to disturb her.

The screen tells me that it’s Jeanette calling, my secretary. She’s always at her desk early, especially on a Monday.

I go through an internal fight with myself, wondering whether to answer it or not, but the truth is that I’m a conscientious chap so the battle was really lost as soon as the phone started buzzing. I answer the call.

‘Sam, I’m sorry, but there’s a client turned up for you here, at the office.’

‘Who?’ I ask, and I mentally shuffle through the deck of some of my more notable clients, trying to guess which of them might have pitched himself or herself off the good behaviour wagon and back into the mud this time.

‘She’s only a girl,’ Jeannette tells me this in a stage whisper.

‘What’s her name?’ As I ask I think, It can’t be, can it?, because I’ve only had one client who was a teenage girl.

‘She says she’s called Zoe Maisey, only you knew her as Zoe Guerin.’

I take myself out of the bedroom, into the en suite, shut the door and sit on the side of the bath. Here, the morning light streams in through the frosted window, yellowing the room, assaulting my dark-widened pupils.

‘You are joking?’