Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

‘Where are you?’ I say. ‘Sam?’

Another voice in the background: ‘Mr Locke? They’re ready for you now.’

‘I have to go,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I’ll try to answer, I promise.’

‘Chris is going to take the baby away,’ I say, but I’m too late, because Sam has hung up.

I’ll admit I feel very stung by that. I’m not used to it. Usually, it’s me who has to end a call prematurely, or behave furtively. Sam has always just been there for me, waiting patiently for me to have time to visit him, picking up the phone whenever I have the chance to make contact.

I try to calm myself down, to rationalise the fact of his appointment, whatever it is, but in truth I’m upset. If it was that important, I tell myself, surely he would have mentioned it to me?

I can’t help feeling abandoned.

Lucas stares at me full on when I ask him if he thinks his dad killed my mum, and the way he does it makes me sure that he knows the answer, but before he says anything there’s a knock on the bathroom door.

‘Everything all right in there, my lovely girls?’

It’s Richard. I don’t think he knows that Lucas is with us, and I don’t want him to, because this is our chance to talk without the others.

‘Yes, we’re fine,’ I call.

‘Do you need a hand?’

‘No. We’ll be down in a minute.’

I look back at Lucas. His expression is sort of cracked now, and he’s holding the bedspread above Grace’s face, his hand frozen in the air, while underneath him she tries to reach for it. He starts to speak, but I put my finger on my lips because I want to make sure that Richard’s gone.

After a few seconds pass, I’m confident that he has, so I say, ‘Did your dad hurt you?’

He winces, and he starts to fight back tears, so I think I know the answer to that.

I ask again, ‘Do you think your dad killed my mum?’

‘No,’ he says, and he whispers it, and now his eyes are full up with a huge, tremendous sorrow. He looks down at Grace, who’s still trying to reach the bedspread, a tiny frown puckering her so smooth forehead. A tear falls from his cheekbone on to the fabric, and darkens it.

A strange expression crosses Lucas’s eyes as he gazes at our sister, and it triggers an impulse in me to snatch the bedspread away in case he plunges it on to her face and smothers her, but before I act he lowers it gently down so that it’s within her reach and Grace’s reaction is practically ecstatic.

Lucas says, ‘I was trying to protect her.’

‘Your mum?’

‘No. Your mum.’

‘What?’

‘I’m so sorry,’ he says. ‘I just need to tell you it was a mistake. I killed her Zoe, but it was by mistake.’

My eyes are brimming hotly now and I feel my lips and chin collapse hopelessly and the muscles in my body seem to dissolve, and I find that I have nothing in me, no words at all that I can give back to Lucas.

‘I’m sorry,’ he says again. ‘But it was an accident, I swear it was, and I’ve decided I’m going to tell them everything.’

I find myself choking with sobs, convulsed with them. I cover my hand with my mouth to mute them because they’re so violent.

Lucas picks Grace up and holds her close to him, and he sobs too. We sit there like that for what seems like for ever and then he hands Grace to me and says, ‘I’m going to miss her. She’s so perfect.’

His cheeks and upper lip and forehead are glistening with tears and snot and sweat from the heat of the day, and he stands up.

And, as he reaches for the door handle, the phrase that circulates around my mind, and makes me hold my sister to me as tightly as I possibly can, is this: ‘Lucas killed my mother.’

The consultant sits behind a desk that he’s clearly using just for the purposes of this clinic, because he’s opening and shutting drawers crossly, picking things up from the desk and slapping them back down. I’m afraid that his actions might dislodge the rimless reading glasses that are balanced precariously at the end of his nose.

‘They put things in a different place every time,’ he says. ‘Take a seat, please.’

‘Sam Locke,’ I say and we shake hands just before I sit.

I’m not used to being on this side of the desk in situations like this, and I feel as if I need to show him somehow that I consider myself his equal, even if it’s just with a handshake.

I chide myself immediately for the feeling though, because it’s not going to change anything he’s going to say to me; it’s no more than a futile attempt my pride is making to assert myself as a fellow professional, and, anyway, the doctor seems oblivious to it. He must see this twenty times a day. To him, I’m just a patient, somebody to keep at a safe professional distance, just as, I suppose, my clients are to me.

‘I only want a pen,’ he says, eyebrows raised. ‘Ridiculous, isn’t it?’

I hand him a pen from my own pocket, and he scribbles something on a fat, dog-eared set of notes, bursting out of their cardboard wrapping, before he puts it to one side.

‘Right! Sorry about that. They always show everybody in too quickly. Always rushing.’

He takes a slim brown folder from a neatly stacked pile. It’s pristine, and on the front of it is my name. When he opens it, I see a letter from my GP, a referral, and only one or two other sheets of paper.

‘Aha,’ he says. ‘Yes. You’ve just had a scan.’

I nod.

‘So we need to take a look at that.’

He begins to tap at the computer keyboard. He has to watch his fingers to find the right keys.

‘Let’s hope the system is going to be kind to us today,’ he tells me. ‘There are many hurdles we can fall at when we want to access scans.’

I’m silent, I just watch him. I must not dislike him, I think, because this man is going to be looking after me. On his head there’s just a shadow of hair around the back and sides, cropped extremely close, and petering out on the crown where there’s a shine that I suspect he wouldn’t like if he could see it. His suit is an expensive one, and his tie is extravagantly knotted, and certainly made of silk; there’s a thick gold wedding band on his ring finger and an expensive watch clamped ostentatiously around his wrist. I suspect he has a lucrative private practice.

He must be feeling the heat in all that finery, I think, because I am.

‘Ah yes! Here we are,’ he announces finally. ‘Got it.’

And I see his face collapse into a frown as he studies it and I feel as if I’m watching a piece of my world detaching itself and falling into a void.

I want to tear Lucas’s eyes out.

But I want to hold him too.

Grace is still in my arms and I have squeezed her so close to me that she has started to cry. Lucas is still standing over us, looking down at us, not moving, though his hand is on the bathroom door handle.

‘What were you trying to protect my mum from?’ I ask.

‘From Dad.’

‘Why?’

‘Because he was about to hurt her, and I tried to get her out of his way, because I could see him coming for her. I pushed her, because I didn’t have time to do anything else, but we were at the top of the stairs, and she fell down and hit her head. I didn’t mean it to happen, I was trying to help her. It was an accident; I swear it, Zoe. I’m sorry.’

And before I can say anything to that he unlocks the door, turns the handle and he’s gone, and the movement of the door sends a hot barrage of air into the room. I’m left sitting there in all the wet that Grace has made, just holding her while she grizzles. The force of what he’s just told me makes it feel difficult even to breathe, let alone to try to understand what’s happened, but I must.