The Good Girl (3 page)

‘Tunnock’s.’

‘Exactly.’

‘But he didn’t.’

‘Didn’t what?’

‘Didn’t starve.’

‘What’s your point, Rach?’

Rachel unwound the scarf from her face and leaned forward until she was jammed in the gap between the two front seats so that she could see her sister more closely. ‘The trouble with you, Ailsa, is that you think you can control everything. You don’t have superpowers. You’re not omniscient. You can’t prevent disasters. Shit happens. It just does. And we all have to get on with it. You can’t inoculate us all against disaster.’

‘We need to work out a routine. So that one of us
checks on him every four or five days,’ Ailsa responded. ‘I can’t keep doing this on my own.’

‘You’re falling for his old tricks. Dad has always made everything about himself. That’s probably why Mum ended up having a heart attack.’

I could say the same thing about you
, thought Ailsa. ‘He’s one of those larger-than-life figures –’

‘Which is shorthand for a recovered alcoholic with an overinflated sense of self,’ Rachel interrupted.

‘He’s drinking again, Rach. It’s been a really difficult time and it’s worse when you see his grief close up. He’s much more vulnerable than he used to be.’ Still nothing. Ailsa turned towards her. ‘The question is, what are we going to do, because doing nothing isn’t an option, is it?’

Rachel’s wild eyebrows furrowed. Ailsa was gratified to know that finally she had got through. The great thing about having a difficult conversation in a car was that you had a captive audience. It was a tactic she had learned soon after having children. Ailsa affectionately patted her sister on the shoulder. They had been through so much together. They would get through this. Rachel remained silent.

‘Do you think I should be dating a man who is young enough to be my son?’ she suddenly asked. ‘I mean what are the real differences between my body and the body of a twenty-seven-year-old? Do you think people can tell if your internal organs are old?’

Ailsa
gripped the steering wheel as hard as she could so she wouldn’t say anything she regretted.

‘I read somewhere that a woman in her early forties and a man in his twenties represent perfect sexual compatibility,’ said Rachel dreamily. ‘I’m in great shape for someone who is almost forty, don’t you think? He’s been so lovely to me about Mum. And he’s not married. I know you have a problem with that. I’m not totally insensitive. So what’s the verdict?’

‘You’ll probably get hurt,’ said Ailsa, revving the engine again.

‘Why?’ asked Rachel.

‘You’ll meet his friends and they’ll talk about things that you know nothing about.’

‘Like what?’

‘Music, apps you’ve never heard of. I don’t know – that’s the point.’

‘Age doesn’t exist any more. It’s all about shared interests and experiences.’

‘He’ll want to have children,’ warned Ailsa.

‘We’ve already talked about freezing my eggs,’ said Rachel. Ailsa pressed the accelerator. ‘And he wants to get to know my family better.’ This was why Rachel always ended up getting her own way. She just kept going until eventually the opposition capitulated. That’s why she would be so good with their father, if only Ailsa could get her on board.

‘Better?’

‘You’ve met him already.’

‘God,
he’s not one of your builders, is he?’

Ailsa put the car into reverse and pressed the accelerator to persuade the wheels to get purchase on the slippery snow. For a moment the wheels spun, churning up the snow as high as the windows. She pushed the accelerator as far down as it would go. The car burst into life and shot into the car parked behind. The bronchial alarm of the people carrier belonging to Ailsa’s new next-door neighbours wheezed into action. Ailsa’s head thumped back against the headrest.

‘Shit,’ she said.

‘Shit indeed,’ said Rachel. ‘I’ve probably got whiplash. I might have the body of a thirty-year-old but I’ll develop the posture of an old lady.’

In spite of herself, Ailsa couldn’t help giggling. Rachel annoyed her more than anyone else she knew but she also made her laugh the most. Loveday came out of her front door straight away and Ailsa knew that it was she who had been looking out of the upstairs window. She berated herself for not making more effort with their new neighbours because it would have made everything easier now that she had crashed into the only car within a mile of the house.

She remembered how six weeks earlier, just after she had moved in, Loveday had come to the front door and Ailsa had ignored her and ducked down beneath the picture window in the sitting room. Loveday wanted to invite them over for a drink. Ailsa knew this because she had told Harry over the garden fence. As the doorbell
rang more and more insistently, Ailsa had imagined a future where their lives were seamlessly integrated like honeycomb. A hole would be cut in the fence between the two gardens and a gate erected so that the children could go in and out of each other’s gardens as they pleased. The gate would never be shut. Crockery from one house would appear in the cupboard of the other. Books would be shared. Clothes would migrate. She instantly knew that this was not what she wanted. Eventually she would need new friends. But right now she didn’t want the burden of absorbing anyone else’s lives. They needed to rebuild their own. In the end Loveday had gone. But she had stayed long enough for Ailsa to know she was a woman who was used to getting her own way.

Loveday’s arms were folded, probably against the cold, decided Ailsa as she opened the electric window to speak to her.

‘I am so sorry,’ said Ailsa. ‘So sorry.’ She wanted to get out of the car to assess the damage but Loveday’s arms blocked her way.

‘Are you all right?’ asked Loveday. She smelled of patchouli oil and the musty aroma made Ailsa feel queasy.

‘We’re fine, aren’t we, Rachel?’

Rachel nodded. Loveday leaned over and rested her forearms on the edge of the window so that Ailsa could see two sets of surprisingly long painted nails. She was wearing a big chunky necklace that banged against the car’s paintwork. It was a silver eagle’s skull, and the
beak nestled between her breasts. Loveday noticed her looking.

‘My talisman is an eagle,’ she said.

‘Sorry?’

‘We all have an animal spirit that protects us. Mine is the eagle,’ Loveday explained. She touched the necklace and lifted it towards Ailsa. ‘The wings represent the balance between male and female. It denotes protection and survival.’ Ailsa stumbled for a response. ‘My husband is a bear,’ said Loveday, filling in the silence.

‘Polar or grizzly?’ asked Rachel.

‘How interesting,’ said Ailsa, trying not to giggle.

‘He’s curious, secretive and fierce. All at the same time. It’s a great combination. Bears and eagles are very compatible.’

‘Unfortunately I don’t have a talisman,’ said Ailsa, stumbling over the unfamiliar concept in an effort to sound interested.

‘Maybe if you did, this wouldn’t have happened. Maybe that’s what’s been missing from our life,’ said Rachel from the back of the car. ‘Hi, I’m Ailsa’s sister,’ she explained to Loveday when it became apparent that Ailsa wasn’t going to introduce her. ‘Not the most auspicious way to meet, is it?’

‘Really, it doesn’t matter as long as both of you are fine,’ said Loveday. ‘It’s your car that’s taken the hit.’

‘We were trying to get my father home. He’s desperate to visit my mother’s grave. She died earlier this year. But he’ll just have to stay here until the snow clears. None of
us will be going anywhere. The older children were meant to be going to a party. New Year’s Eve is going to be a bit of a damp squib.’ Ailsa listened to herself babble, trying to work out if she was in shock or trying to compensate for her previous indifference.

‘It’s settled,’ said Loveday firmly as Ailsa stopped. ‘You must come to us. Our friends can’t get here and I’ve cooked enough food for a whole ashram. The children can hang out together.’

‘What a lovely idea,’ said Rachel before Ailsa could answer.

‘It will be nice for everyone to meet properly,’ said Ailsa, trying to regain control of the situation.

‘There is always opportunity to be had in adversity,’ said Loveday with a smile. ‘That’s one of my mantras.’

Another face appeared at the car window. Loveday introduced her son, Jay. He was wearing a hastily pulled-on T-shirt and pair of jeans. His eyes were half closed as he wearily offered to help.

‘Jay?’ questioned Rachel. ‘Like the bird? Because your mother’s an eagle?’

He looked perplexed. ‘After my grandfather,’ he then said with a smile. ‘Shall we try giving it a push?’

Ailsa closed the window.

‘Lock up your daughters,’ Rachel laughed as Romy came out of the house to see what was going on. Jay looked across at her and their eyes met. Sometimes that was all it took.

‘Actually,
lock up your sister,’ said Rachel. ‘Did you see the definition in his arms? He’s hot.’

‘You’re too old to call people hot,’ says Ailsa. ‘You’re beginning to remind me of some old bottom pincher.’

Rachel leaned on Ailsa’s shoulder and they clung to each other, laughing like they used to when they were children. Ailsa waited for Romy to come over and tell her to stop being embarrassing, but when she looked up at her Romy was smiling too.

We moved to Luckmore at the end of the summer of 2013 but all of us agree life there didn’t really begin until the Fairports arrived next door a couple of months later. Until then we were just existing, hoping Mum’s mantra that life was about getting on with it was true. ‘If in doubt, create a routine,’ was her personal philosophy. Sounded more like slow death to me, but stranded in the middle of the countryside with crap Wi-Fi, what else could you do but get up, eat, sleep, repeat?

At first we protested. Luke the loudest. We formed a united front, refusing to unpack our stuff, bring home new friends or leave the house, unless it was to go to school, until they promised we could go back to London. Ben wrote a petition. He told Mum and Dad that he would for ever look back on his childhood with sadness. Dad said he was absolutely right because traumatic experiences are stored in our long-term memory more than happy ones, and studies show 80 per cent of our earliest memories have negative associations. Mum and Dad were totally unmoved. Ben created a fantasy world where he was a British spy captured in Syria, because he had a theory that if something really bad happened, it helped to imagine an even worse scenario.

I
couldn’t imagine anything worse than leaving London. Things I missed: the cafés, the pavements, the smell of Indian food, and even things I could never imagine missing like street lights and dodging dog shit on the pavement. I longed for the smell of the Underground. I missed the noise of Shepherd’s Bush Market. I was oppressed by the huge grey sky. Mum claimed it made her feel light and free, but I felt as if I was being buried alive, slowly suffocating beneath the weight of its constant scrutiny. She was from these parts. So she belonged to the landscape. I didn’t.

I hated the attention-seeking wood pigeons and the gangs of deer that woke me up before it was light. Most of all I missed my friends. Mum suggested I invite them up for a weekend but I said they would die of boredom. Then she got angrier with me than she had with Luke, even though he had been a lot ruder. She told me not to be so selfish and reminded me that Granny had just died and we needed to move to Norfolk to look after Grandpa, which totally contradicted their cover story about having to move because of Mum’s new job.

For the first month the only person we saw from our old life was Mum’s sister, my Aunt Rachel, who was between writing jobs and came every weekend to help organize our new home. Rachel kept telling Mum that death and moving house were the most stressful life events apart from divorce. I wondered how useful it was to keep going on about this but now of course I realize there was a hidden warning in what she said.

I
could have told her that going into the lower sixth of a new school where your mother is headmistress ranks pretty high on the stress gauge. Especially when Mum’s first new policy involved introducing a school uniform with skirts so long that they made the Amish look slutty. But no one asked me how I felt. This isn’t an excuse for what happened later, by the way. I’m only setting the scene.

At exactly five o’clock in the afternoon Rachel would start debating with Mum whether it was too early to open a bottle of wine.

‘Just open it,’ I wanted to tell them. ‘What difference does an hour make?’

Because six o’clock seemed to be some magic cut-off point when adults were allowed to consume alcohol. Was this about control or self-control? I wondered. Or were the two linked? Did having control mean that you had self-control? There were so many unanswered questions.

Mum used to say that I had good self-control. But really I was just better than Luke at doing what she wanted. Revision timetables. Science Club. Texting her. Luke was always wilder than me. Shortly after we moved here I overheard Mum telling someone that really it was for Luke that we had left London. And for a couple of days Ben and I blamed him for the Miseries. But then Luke told me that he had heard Mum telling Aunt Rachel that it was really for me because girls in London grew up too quickly. If I had been consulted I would have told
Mum that Kim Kardashian, legal highs, Internet porn and all the other stuff she obsessed about had seeped everywhere, like oestrogen in the water table.

Finally Mum and Dad settled on a single version of events: we had moved here because of Mum’s new job, and I think they grew to believe this. As Dad was so fond of saying, truth is subjective and the most important thing is to have a credible narrative. Then, just as we reached our lowest point, the Fairports came into our life and for a while everything made beautiful sense.

What can I tell you about Luckmore? You had to drive five miles to buy a pint of milk. Eight miles to find a cashpoint. There was no public transport. The average inhabitant was sixty-seven years old. It was a new village, built in the 1960s on either side of a quiet B road in the middle of nowhere by a local architect who saw himself as Norfolk’s answer to Le Corbusier. At least this was what Mum told visitors. Apart from our house and its twin next door, the other houses in the village were all different. We were out on a limb on the other side of a piece of common ground. ‘Less limb and more amputated leg,’ Dad joked.

On the ground floor there was a double garage, a utility room and another room also accessible from the garden where Dad was supposedly writing his book. On the floor above were the kitchen and an open-plan sitting room. The acoustics meant that even if you were in the loo on the half landing upstairs, you could hear
everything being said in the kitchen. We all slept on the second floor apart from Luke, who had been given the attic just because he was a year older than me. ‘Older and wiser,’ Luke said to me when this arrangement was revealed. Every morning I woke up to the thud, thud of him doing exercises. Mum didn’t stop him because she thought his exercise routine demonstrated willpower. I could have told her that it had nothing to do with willpower and everything to do with getting girls but I was loyal to Luke.

A week after we moved in Dad insisted the television should be moved down into the garage when it became apparent that open-plan living meant listening to us overdosing on
Breaking Bad
while he cooked dinner. We told him it was a cookery programme but not that it was about cooking crystal meth. He couldn’t concentrate on a recipe with another chef working in the background, he complained as we dragged furniture from the sitting room down into the garage. Cooking was a novelty to him. But then everything was new so we didn’t take much notice of any of Dad’s new habits. Besides, although I didn’t know it at the time, it was one of his old ones that had triggered the Miseries.

Mum said that it was good to have a house without a history because then we could make our own. But she often says things that she doesn’t really believe. Not because she’s a bad or dishonest person. It’s just she hopes that if you say something enough times it will become true. Dad says one of the most exciting discoveries
of his lifetime is that the human brain is not fixed and that Mum’s theory is therefore probably scientifically correct.

Hope is the most human of urges, it says in one of my A-level Biology textbooks. What Mum really meant was that we were at ground zero and that the narrative of family life had to be rewritten. But what is a family without history? I asked Luke. A boat without an engine, he said. What does that mean? I asked him. That we’ll all drown in the end, he laughed. ‘Stop overthinking stuff, Romeo. It’s a bad habit.’

Luke is much better than me at laughing things off or laughing off things, as Mum would point out. I used to read his school reports in case there was something about him that I had missed. The conclusions were always the same. ‘Luke’s relaxed manner and even temperament make him popular among his peers but put a brake on his ambition.’ Luke messed around in class, missed deadlines and lost essays. But unlike me he always had a party to go to and a girl to take with him.

It’s easy to blame the Fairports for everything that happened. For a while Mum and Dad did just that. But the truth is we were already screwed before their removal van showed up as the leaves started falling that autumn and they began unloading. Although we didn’t know it at the time, they had arrived just as our life was about to fall apart.

It must have been a warm day because they left their
boxes of books in the garden until all the furniture had been taken in. Ben looked through his binoculars and read out the titles. The only ones I recognized from our own house were a book of poetry by Allen Ginsberg and
The Hobbit
. The rest, Dad declared, was hippy shit. Then later denied he had ever said that. He was meant to be downstairs working on his book but even he was so bored in Norfolk that the arrival of the Fairports qualified as a major event. Poor Dad. He didn’t say it but I knew that he didn’t want to be here any more than the rest of us.

‘
The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead
,
The Doors of Perception
,
We Are the People Our Parents Warned Us Against
,’ Ben continued. There were two boxes of self-help. ‘
The Way of the Peaceful Warrior
,
The Seat of the Soul
,
Near Death Experiences and Spiritual Growth
.’

Dad groaned again. This kind of stuff was actually painful to him.

We were in our sitting room, standing by the huge window overlooking the garden of our new neighbours. We’d spent months complaining about this window because it was always dripping with condensation. Throughout that first winter at Luckmore we had to keep it open for at least a couple of hours a day. When we were really bored, like so bored that we thought we might die, we played a game where Luke, Ben and I would place bets on which drip would reach the bottom of the window first. Now the window came into its own. Suddenly it gave us access to the Fairports’ world. This
was part of their magic. Bad turned to good. Boredom to fun. I swear even the sky got smaller.

Dad stood to the side so that he could see without being seen. I knelt down by the window seat and used Lucifer as cover. Ben pulled up an armchair, put its back facing the window to steady his binoculars and knelt on the cushion.

‘Freaks,’ Luke shouted at us. But it was half-hearted. He was wearing a pair of headphones, playing Candy Crush on his iPad, pretending not to be interested. But he had moved the sofa so that his feet faced the window and he had his own sight line. The window was wide enough to give us all an unrestricted view. This didn’t seem significant at the time but I now realize that rather than forming a unified view on the Fairports it meant we all formed our own separate impressions.

‘What’s in the other boxes, Romeo?’ Luke asked me. He had called me Romeo for most of my teenage years because I was a late developer. Until last year, when my breasts magically grew, I had looked more like a boy than a girl. Also I wore braces. When we had to give an example of inverse correlation in a science lesson, I used the example of the upturn in braces and the downturn in teenage pregnancy. There was no bigger turn-off for boys. A girl at my old school nearly severed an artery in her boyfriend’s penis while performing oral sex with a dodgy brace.

But before I could answer, a woman came into the
garden. She was wearing an ankle-length skirt and a jacket embroidered with Chinese dragons. Her hair, dyed a colour I recognized as poppy red, was pulled up into a shambolic bun held in place by pens. We knew this because she pulled one out of her hair to sign a piece of paper thrust into her hand by one of the removal men.

‘That must be Loveday,’ Luke exclaimed.

‘How do you know her name?’ asked Dad.

‘Mum told us,’ said Luke.

‘What kind of name is that?’ Ben asked.

‘Cornish,’ said Dad. ‘Although she doesn’t look Cornish.’

‘How do Cornish people look?’ I asked.

‘More run-of-the-mill,’ he said thoughtfully as Loveday sashayed down the garden path, occasionally stopping to stroke the leaf of a shrub or a piece of furniture.

‘She’s like a peacock,’ said Ben.

Wolf was tall and lanky and wore his thick grey hair a little longer than was normal for someone over the age of fifty. He had an impressive beard. His face was tanned for the time of year and wrinkled in the right places. He wore baggy jeans, a white T-shirt several sizes too big that hung off his shoulders and a pair of flat leather boots with pointed toes. There was something light and delicate about him, as if he was made of balsa wood. What I remember most was the black waistcoat because this is what really made him stand out from my parents’
friends. None of them would ever dream of wearing a waistcoat over a T-shirt.

‘Exotic creatures,’ said Ben, who had a habit of saying what everyone was thinking.

Wolf kneeled down on the ground beside a box and carefully started unloading musical instruments onto the front lawn.

‘African,’ said Luke coolly. Luke considered himself a music expert, but really his knowledge was limited to a genre that I called Fifty Shades of Nirvana. He knew for example that ‘Teen Spirit’ was named after a brand of deodorant but not that the larger bongo drum is called the female and the smaller one the male.