Gilly Macmillan - The Perfect Girl

The secret way I had to film, before I dropped the camera and all it showed was the ceiling, means that the footage has a kind of Blair Witch / Paranormal Activity feel to it. It’s a kind of indie low-budget terror look, which might work. But I’d like it to be more stylised, so I’d do it like this:

First shot would follow me along the landing, a tracking shot probably, using a hand-held camera, and looking over my shoulder from behind me, so you could see that I was approaching my parents’ bedroom door and you could see it from my point of view.

As I walk down the corridor, the soundtrack would be a long, low note – low strings maybe – like a drone. The muffled sounds of an argument would be audible through the closed bedroom door.

As I stop outside the door, and listen, the camera would swing around, to show my face, so you could see how I’m trying to be brave.

Cut to a close-up of my hand opening the bedroom door. The door swings open.

The drone of the music is mounting, but not too much yet.

We see into the room. It’s lit up by a small bedside lamp only, so there are powerful long shadows reaching across the space, and they make my dad look terrifying, like the evil guy on the front of a comic book.

My dad is standing over Maria. He’s holding her by her hair and he’s pushed her head back against the wall so you can see the smooth stretch of her neck.

Then there would be close-up shots: the back of my dad’s hand, Maria’s hair poking out between his fingers, the skin stretched across his knuckles and then her face, her jaw tense with pain and fear.

The drone of the soundtrack builds, adding more strings, higher pitched and clashing, so that it sounds discordant now.

I would be happy with that opening, it would show everything exactly as it happened.

When he works out what he’s watching, as we all sit there in Tessa’s sitting room, my dad starts to make a lunge for the TV before all the people can hear what he’s going to say on film. But Zoe’s dad is sitting beside him, and so is the police lady, and Zoe’s dad grabs my dad by the arm and tells him to sit down in a voice that is deadly polite. Zoe’s dad has a wrecked face, but he’s big and strong and my dad is no match for him.

We’re reaching the bit in the film where everything happens very fast. All the people in the room are totally fixated on it.

The footage gets more wobbly here, because I was frightened, but again I imagine it in my reshoot:

Dad turns to me, sees me at the door. ‘Get out,’ he says, and I would be sure you could see the vein that’s bulged red and angry on his temple.

I might show my face on camera then, the way that I’m feeling even more fear, but I’m trying not to let it drive me out of the room as it’s done so many times before, so I stay where I am because I want him to stop what he’s doing.

A close-up of Maria’s face, as she tries to turn her head to see me, even though Dad’s still holding her hair. Her eyes are full of messages that I can’t read because I don’t know her as well as I knew my mum. They fall shut as Dad lets go of her hair and she drops to the floor like a rag doll.

Another tracking shot, still with a hand-held camera, to show Dad walking towards me. I stay where I am.

Maria says, ‘Don’t touch him!’

‘Shut up,’ Dad says.

‘It’s over if you hurt him,’ she says.

The music stops here too. A sudden silence would be effective, I think.

He stops, and then he turns to face Maria and laughs. We see her raise her chin defiantly, but she looks small and fragile in comparison to him, the same way my mum used to.

‘Are you trying to threaten me?’ he asks her. ‘Is that what you’re doing?’

I want her to keep staring him out, but she drops her gaze.

‘And if it’s over,’ he says, ‘where do you think you’re going to go? Another city? Another filthy little flat? Are you ready to be on your own with your daughter again? With not a penny to your name? Or will you crawl back to Devon and live amongst those people whose children she murdered? You’ll never cope, Maria. You’re not capable of doing it on your own.’

A close-up of her face would show that she’s realising something.

‘You wouldn’t,’ she says.

It’s then that I understand what she’s understood, which is that Dad is implying that he would take Grace from her.

‘What I wouldn’t do is let my daughter be raised in a home with just you and her,’ he says. He looks at Maria in the same way he used to look at my mum, as if she was worthless, and could never be anything else in his eyes.

Then he turns back to me, and this time his face is so full of rage that I step backwards on to the landing. One, two, three steps.

On the TV in front of us, we see how the phone camera wobbles, and it shows the back of my leg as I hide it, and then we see only scraps of action, but everybody watching who knows our house can easily tell that I’m walking backwards towards the top of the staircase.

I don’t want to be backing away from him, I want to be standing my ground, and to be shouting at him, shouting all the things that I see in my films. I want to tell him who he is and what he is and ask him why he is a monster and why did such a monster ever want a child? Two children? I want him to dance while I shoot bullets at his feet. I want him to sweat with fear when he understands that I’m not here to do a deal with him, I’m here to kill him, but he’s like Colonel Kurtz in all his glory, a towering maniac, a power-riddled Goliath. He haunts my dreams with his violence, and my days with his softly spoken words that are full of menace.

But I’m afraid, and my courage has trickled away. And he has me now; his hand’s on my chest, pushing me against the wall right at the top of the stairs.

Behind him, Maria begins to stand, though she has to drag herself up as if she feels mostly weariness, and there’s only the faintest spark of defiance left to propel her. Dad doesn’t notice. My eyes are on his eyes, and I can see that his other hand is balled up into a fist.

I don’t know which to look at, his eyes or his fist, because I’m not sure if he’s going to strike, because you see he never has struck me. Yet. He’s pinched, and pushed, but mostly he’s just used words to keep me subjugated.

What disgusts me most is that I’ve let him do it to me all my life, and I let him do it to my mum. He never left bruises visible on her though. Never. My dad was too clever for that. That’s why none of the doctors who treated my mum ever got suspicious.

The guilt and anger at myself that I never stopped him hurting her is the thing that fills my mind all day and every day, the thing I hear when I play piano, the thing that echoes in my head when I watch films, and when I’m in school, the thing that never leaves me. Nothing makes it go away, except maybe Zoe. Because she is like me: she has bad secrets too.

I saw a counsellor at school. Nobody knew that I did that. The problem was, when I got to the meeting, I couldn’t actually say what I wanted to, so I talked a load of crap about being stressed about exams. The counsellor gave me a ton of leaflets, which were useless, but she did say one good thing. She said, ‘Why don’t you write about what makes you anxious? As a diary maybe? It can help.’ I told her I didn’t want to write a diary, so she said, ‘What about a song?’ and I asked her, ‘What do I look like, a boy band wannabe or something?’ She said, ‘Well what do you like?’ and so I said, ‘Film.’

‘Well, why don’t you try writing a script then?’

The script is what I sent to Zoe, and Maria. I put my heart and soul into it, I pieced it together from things my mum remembered, I pictured the scenes in my head based on stuff my mum told me about when she and Dad got together, and old photos, and I sent it to them because I wanted Maria to know that I knew what he was like, so she didn’t feel alone.