Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

‘I’m afraid I absolutely am not. Sam, she says her mum was found dead last night.’

‘Oh dear God.’

Those three words express in only a paltry way my utter disbelief, because of course Zoe is Tessa’s niece, and her mother, Maria, is Tessa’s sister.

‘Sam?’

‘Can you put her on the phone?’

‘She’s insisting she wants to see you.’

I calculate that because my appointment isn’t until late morning, I probably have time to deal with this, at least partly.

‘Tell her I’m on my way.’

I’m about to hang up the phone when Jeanette adds, ‘And she’s with her uncle,’ and my insides take a swan dive yet again, because Zoe’s uncle is Tessa’s husband.

The Concert

When you don’t have kids of your own, people have a tendency to give you things to look after. I think they assume that you’re lacking in outlets for any nurturing instincts that you might have.

On the night of Zoe’s concert, the child substitute that I’ve been given to be in charge of is the camera. I’m supposed to be looking after it throughout the duration of the performance, so that I can record it in its entirety. It is, I’m told by my sister in a pedantic way, as if I’m lacking in mental capacity, an important job.

Shall we deal with the reasons for my childlessness straight away? Let’s do it. In spite of the fact that I’m a successful professional and happy in my skin, it’s what people always seem to be most curious about.

So here goes: ‘Unexplained Fertility’ is a thing. It’s an official thing in spite of its unofficial-sounding title, and I have it. My husband Richard and I didn’t discover it until we were in our thirties, because we left having kids until after we’d gone travelling, and established our careers.

After we found out, we tried IVF and went three rounds before we gave up. Surrogacy: I didn’t fancy it; not brave enough. Adoption: same reason. They’d never pass us now anyway, not with Richard’s drinking.

As for being somebody who’s lacking in nurturing instincts, I could snort with laughter over that, because I’m a vet.

My practice is in the city centre, lodged where several of Bristol’s most contrasting neighbourhoods meet. On an average day, I probably see between twenty and twenty-five animals who I prod, probe, stroke, reassure and sometimes muzzle in order to treat their health and sometimes their psychological problems. Then I might reassure, or advise, and very occasionally stroke their owners too if there’s bad news.

In short, I nurture, all day, most days of the week.

But you know there’s a bit of irony here, which never escapes me when I’m with my little sister, especially when I’m roped in to help with her family, as I am tonight.

You see, when we were growing up, Maria was the naughty girl, compared to my Perfect Peter. She had lots of potential as a child, especially musical potential, which got my parents excited, but she never met their expectations.

From a very young age she was feisty, and funny, but when she hit fourteen she began to run wild. While I burrowed into my bedroom in the evenings, swotting away, my heart set on vet school, her desk, on the other side of our bedroom, would be covered only in make-up she’d discarded after getting ready for a night out. She stopped studying, she stopped playing classical music, and she had fun instead.

She didn’t see the point of the rest of it, she said, in spite of the fact that my dad’s eyes bulged when she spoke like that.

Boyfriend-less, much plainer and less socially adept than my beautiful little sister, I loved living vicariously through her and I think she liked that too. She whispered her secrets to me after she got home in the small hours: kisses, and drinks, and pills taken; jealousies and triumphs: adventures, all of them.

But then, to all of our surprise, aged just nineteen she met Philip Guerin at a music festival. He was twenty-seven, and had already inherited the family farm, and she just took off and went to live with him there, and shortly afterwards she married him. Just like that. ‘Living the dream,’ my mother said sarcastically, as she actually wrung her hands.

Zoe followed soon afterwards. Maria had her when she was just twenty-two, and I think it was after that that the reality of life on the farm with a small child began to rub the shiny edges off her a bit. But she didn’t quit, to give her credit. Instead, she began to put all her energies into Zoe, and when Zoe’s extraordinary musicality presented itself as plain to see when she was all of three years old and began to pick out tunes on the piano at the farm, Maria made it her mission to nurture that talent.

That was before the accident, of course, when things went very wrong for them. But my point is, that, in the meantime, having done everything right all my life, and studied hard, and followed the rules, I am married, sure, but I’ve ended up with no children. I’ve come to terms with it, but Richard isn’t coping so well, especially after a dramatic professional disappointment, which coincided with me refusing to go for IVF round number four.

So here we are tonight. I’m helping my sister and Zoe, which is something I love to do when Maria will let me; I’m looking forward to the performance, because Zoe’s playing has almost regained the standard it used to be, before she went to the Unit, and I’m sure she’s going to blow everybody away tonight, and I’m hoping I won’t mess up the job of recording everything.

I’ve had a meagre thirty-second tutorial from Lucas, the son of my sister’s newish husband, on how to operate the camera. Lucas is a film and camera buff, so I was in good hands, but the tutorial wasn’t really enough, because by instinct I’m a bit of a technophobe, and even as Lucas was saying them, I felt his words swimming uncontrolled around my head like a panicky shoal of fish.

I could do with my Richard being here to help me, but he’s let me down again.

Just an hour ago I went to find him when it was time to get ready for the concert. He was in the shed at the bottom of our garden, supposedly working on building a model aeroplane, but when I got there I found him squeezing out the dregs of his box of wine from the shiny bladder inside. He’d ripped the cardboard away and he was massaging and twisting that silvery bag as if it was a recalcitrant udder, holding it over his tea mug.

As I stood watching in the doorway, a few pale drops of liquid dribbled from the bag into the mug. Richard drank it immediately and then he noticed me. He made no apology and no effort to hide what he was doing. ‘Tess!’ he said. ‘Do we have another box?’

Even from the doorway I could tell that his breath stank and his speech was slurred, and although he was trying to behave like a civilised drinker, somebody just enjoying a glass of white on a Sunday afternoon, shame wandered across his features and exaggerated the tremor in his hands. The balsa wood model he was ostensibly there to make lay in its box, all the precision cut pieces still lying in perfect order underneath the unopened instruction manual.

‘In the garage,’ I said. And I left to go to the concert on my own.

So now I’m here with a camera that I’m not sure is working properly, a pounding head and a disappointed heart, and I’m telling myself that I mustn’t, I must not, give in to temptation and go and see Sam after the concert tonight, because that would be wrong.

The Concert

Lucas hears the shouting before me.

He stops playing first, but I don’t notice immediately because we’re in the middle of a complicated passage of music that always pulls me through it with the unstoppability of a freight train.