Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

‘They’ll believe us; I know they will. This is the only way now,’ I tell him.

‘But what about the panop messages I sent you? The police will find them on your phone.’

‘They know about my past, Lucas, they won’t care if you know too. Think about it. That’s all the panop messages prove.’

The clarity I’m feeling is incredibly pure and I’m getting increasingly frustrated that he can’t feel it too. It’s like there’s mud in his brain, and he’s thinking about all the wrong things. ‘They won’t bother looking at our phones any more anyway,’ I say, ‘if we do this right.’

He says, ‘Maria didn’t deserve my dad. And nor did my mum. Nobody does.’

‘Grace doesn’t deserve him either.’

He moves the aeroplane around in his hands so that he’s holding it by its wing like I did, and then, just as I think he’s going to put it down and leave the shed and I’ll have failed in this as well as everything else, he starts to bend it. I hold my breath as the tension in the wood builds and it begins to split.

Lucas gasps, and I say, ‘Don’t give up now,’ and it’s like that comment is a sort of release for him, as if all his rage has suddenly boiled over.

He snaps off the wing of the plane, and then its tail, and I have to step backwards because he starts to bash the aeroplane against the walls of the shed until it splinters and shatters into smithereens and still he keeps on bashing it until I’m afraid that he’s going to break his hand and he’s saying, ‘I hate you. I fucking hate you,’ and we both know he’s not saying that to me, he’s saying it to his dad.

When he’s finally finished, he looks at the few shards that remain in his hand as if he’s not sure how they got there, and I say, ‘Will you do it?’ and he says, ‘OK,’ and my heart flips in relief.

Once Chris has decided to stay for a bit longer while he waits for Grace to finish her nap, he asks to borrow my computer. ‘I just need to tie one or two things up for work so they don’t bother us for the next few days,’ he says. His face is grim and stressed.

‘Be my guest,’ I tell him.

I take him upstairs and show him the set-up in my office.

Could he have done something? I wonder again as I leave him to it. I have to resist the temptation to peer over his shoulder. Tessa has her suspicions, clearly, but that could just be guilt talking, because she is somehow convinced that she could have saved Maria if she’d made more effort to remain close to her after the marriage.

I notice as I cross the landing that we all left the bathroom in a somewhat destroyed state in the wake of Grace’s bath, and I decide that I’ll tidy it up, to make it nice for Tessa. I mop up the spilled water with the already wet bedspread, and then put it out in the hallway with the idea of hanging it up to dry in the garden, and I wash the dried-out bubbles from the inside of the bath.

As I scrub, I begin to feel confused about something I thought I overheard when Grace was having her bath. I thought I heard Lucas say something about Maria’s death, but I’m sure I must be wrong, or Zoe would have reacted differently when I spoke to her immediately afterwards.

I wonder if I’ll be able to persuade Chris to let Grace stay here for her tea. He’ll struggle to organise that in a hotel. I wonder if she eats soup. I wonder when she’s going to start missing her mother.

It appears that Grace has played with every plastic bottle that was gathered neatly around the edges of our bath, and so I begin to retrieve them from all corners of the room and stand them up in their allotted places. We’re not used to things moving around, Tess and I. Ours is a quiet life.

I’m kneeling on the floor to reach a shampoo bottle that has somehow got stuck behind the stand that the basin sits on when the craving hits me. First, a wave of exhaustion, then a rush of all the emotions that I cannot bear.

Beside me, built into the cladding that surrounds the bath, is a small door. If I push it, it’ll open, and behind it there’s a hidden bottle of vodka. Cheap, nasty vodka. Beautiful, anaesthetising vodka. Just one push of my fingers and I can have it.

But I try to be good. I sit there, on my knees, in our nice little bathroom, and think of that beautiful baby, and Tessa’s broken family, and of our shambles of a marriage, and although it takes me every ounce of strength, I manage to leave the room without touching the bottle.

Walking away is so hard. There’s some pay-off though, I can’t deny it, because as I make my way slowly downstairs I force myself to acknowledge that resisting the bottle is also a triumph of sorts, however grim I feel.

I’m pacing downstairs. The detectives have vacated the dining room for now and I walk around it as if it can give me some clues, or help me to think.

I’m too restless to stay there for long though and, as I go back into the hallway, I almost collide with Zoe.

It shocks her, and she gives a little scream. She seems pent-up and extremely agitated, and she won’t meet my eye properly, which is unusual for her. She tells me in a nervous voice, as if she’s finding it hard to breathe properly, that she wants to gather everybody together in the sitting room.

She wakes up her dad, and she calls Richard in from outside, where he’s been checking on the baby. She gets Chris down from the upstairs bedroom, and she asks us all to sit down, though she saves a seat in the middle of the sofa, beside Chris, which she insists the Liaison Officer takes.

Lucas is there too, and he’s doing something with the TV. He’s turned it on and holds the two remote controls and he’s navigating through a series of screens that look unfamiliar to me.

Once Richard arrives in the room he of course asks Lucas what he’s trying to do, and to offer help and expertise, but the boy brushes him off a bit brusquely. It’s clear to me that he more than seems to know what he’s doing, though undeniably he’s giving off nerves in exactly the same way as Zoe is.

As everyone’s getting seated, Zoe stands beside my chair and I rub her slender wrist. ‘What’s happening, Butterfly?’ I ask her.

She doesn’t look at me, and she doesn’t reply; she’s fixated on what Lucas is doing.

It reminds me of how she used to be at the time of the trial. It broke my heart, because she always seemed to be somewhere else in her head, as if the core of her had curled up in fear, and, though perhaps it shouldn’t have, that did make her somehow untouchable to the rest of us.

‘Zoe?’ I ask again, because her behaviour is scaring me a little, but Lucas says, at the same time, ‘It’s ready,’ and then, as if she’s taking a cue from him, as if it’s something they’ve rehearsed, she turns to everybody, and delivers a short speech in a voice so laconic it sends a chill running through me.

‘Lucas and me were afraid. But now we’ve decided to tell you what we know. This is a film from last night.’

We all turn to face the TV.

Lucas seems to have got it to link to the internet, and it’s displaying a video site. I wonder if it’s the film from the concert that he’s about to play, but it doesn’t look as if it is.

The picture that suddenly appears on the screen looks just like the inside of Chris and Maria’s house.

I filmed this on my phone, in secret, last night. I held the phone down by my leg and my dad didn’t notice.

As we watch the footage in front of my dad, and all of the other people in Tessa’s sitting room, the only way I can force myself to stay there and watch it again, and go through with what me and Zoe agreed, is to think about how, if I was going to shoot this scene for an actual film, I would do it differently.