The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  The past had to be analysed in order to let it go, the counsellor insisted, otherwise they couldn’t build a new future together. Bollocks, Harry had said. Was she aware of research after 9/11 that showed that retelling a story in a detailed way was like re-experiencing the original trauma over and over again? Ultimately it deepened the distress. After five sessions they decided not to go back. It was the first time they had agreed on anything in ages. They would make it work. They owed it to their children.

  Ailsa applied for a job in Norfolk. The timing wasn’t great but the location quelled any doubts. She suddenly realized that more than anything she wanted to go home. Harry readily agreed. Then just as Ailsa couldn’t imagine going through anything more painful, her mother died.

  Ailsa felt the hand stroke the inside of her wrist. I have spent a lifetime imposing order on chaos and I am tired of it. She wondered if she had said it out loud.

  ‘Excuse me, can you hear me?’

  Ailsa glanced at the hand, taking in the chipped nail varnish and torn skin around the nails. Someone was searching for her pulse. She noticed her fork on the floor and a slice of tomato stuck on the end. Everything seemed very red.

  ‘Are you all right?’ a worried voice asked. ‘Because you look very grey. I was worried you might be having a stroke or something. Do you have any loss of sensation? Can you speak?’

  Ailsa looked up and knew instinctively it was her. She had imagined this moment many times, but now that she stood before her Ailsa could think of nothing to say. She looked ridiculously young. Prey rather than predator. Her red lipstick and gamine haircut reminded her of when Romy used to dress up in Ailsa’s clothes and make-up. She would have no understanding of the carnage she had left in her wake. Ailsa was reminded of herself at the same age. Hadn’t she been equally irresponsible? And hadn’t she got away with it? Ailsa realized with absolute clarity that she felt no bitterness towards the young woman standing beside her.

  ‘Migraine,’ said Ailsa, rubbing her temples.

  A young man came over and put a protective arm around the shoulder of his girlfriend. He was worried about her getting involved in a drama that had nothing to do with them. He picked up the fork from the floor and put it back on the table.

  The woman pulled away from him. Her kohl-rimmed eyes narrowed. ‘Do I know you from somewhere?’ she asked Ailsa. ‘Have we met before?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Ailsa. ‘A previous life perhaps.’

  ‘I’m a scientist, I don’t believe in that kind of thing.’ She smiled.

  ‘What are you studying?’ asked Ailsa.

  ‘Postgrad in Neuroscience.’ She pointed at the building opposite.

  ‘Any particular area?’

  ‘Adolescent brain development.’

  ‘I have two of those. Adolescents, I mean. Any tips?’

  She looked at Ailsa thoughtfully. ‘Actions have consequences,’ she said.

  ‘I’ll pass that on,’ said Ailsa, getting up to go and pay the bill. The couple sat down again, arms wrapped around each other. Ailsa left the restaurant without looking back. Harry was telling the truth. His relationship with the girl was over.

  Love at first sight is pure biology, Harry had told Ailsa the night after their first encounter. It was Glastonbury 1994, and they had met at a Johnny Cash concert the previous afternoon. Romy always joked that this was the first and last time that her parents had ever been cool. ‘Except it was Johnny Cash when it could have been Pulp,’ Luke always pointed out because Jarvis Cocker was playing at the same time.

  Serendipity played its part. They were both alone because none of their friends wanted to see Johnny Cash. And it was daylight, which meant that Harry noticed that Ailsa was one of the few people standing close to him who knew all the words to ‘Folsom Prison Blues’. He could describe to the children exactly what she was wearing: a pair of trousers with a strawberry motif and a white T-shirt knotted around her stomach. Definitely not thinking about how much flesh she was revealing.

  When Johnny Cash started playing ‘If I Were a Carpenter’ Harry noticed that Ailsa had intervened in an argument between a couple over who wrote the original version. Tim Hardin, Ailsa said with absolute conviction, adding that he had played it at Woodstock in 1969.

  By the time he played ‘Ghost Riders in the Sky’ they were standing together. You need to feel really comfortable with someone to be able to sing ‘yippee ay aye’ at the top of your voice, Ailsa remembered thinking as she shot a glance at the blond curly-haired man standing beside her. His hair was so big that it moved with its own mysterious rhythms to the music. He was such a terrible dancer that it was almost endearing. Anyway, some time in the middle of ‘Ring of Fire’ she had put her hand out to touch his hair. She grasped a tangle of curls in her hand but they slipped through her fingers. After a few moments Harry had grabbed her wrist and pulled her towards him. They kissed for the first time during ‘Delia’. Harry always teased Ailsa that she had made the first move. Ailsa insisted that it depended on your definition of first move. The couple beside them asked how long they had been seeing each other and Harry said without hesitating, ‘Six months.’ He was so sure of himself.

  When the children pressed them for details of their first date Ailsa had to confess they’d never had one. She spent that night in his tent. They both agreed on that version of events. She was meant to be with a couple of university friends and Harry was meant to be sharing his tent with a girlfriend who had called off sick at the last minute, although he didn’t reveal this detail to Ailsa until they met again in London the following week.

  ‘We make beautiful science together,’ he said to her the next morning after they had sex for the third time. Ailsa giggled because it was such an offbeat comment. They were both euphoric.

  ‘I would love, love, love,’ Harry said, whispering into her ear, ‘to scan our brains to see what’s going on in our pleasure centres right now.’

  ‘What are you on?’ Ailsa asked, disappointed that this was going to be one of those drug-fuelled episodes that were quickly forgotten.

  He looked confused. ‘Nothing. I’m a scientist.’ He explained that he was doing a postgrad neuroscience degree at university in London. It turned out his faculty was five minutes’ walk from the Institute of Education.

  ‘I’m not meant to fall for a scientist,’ Ailsa groaned.

  ‘So you’ve fallen for me, have you?’ Harry teased as he kissed her.

  They were lying naked on top of his sleeping bag. When the sun rose, everything in the tent glowed orange.

  He started to tell her about his favourite experiment. A scientist in the 1950s had discovered the brain’s pleasure centres by implanting an electrode into the septal region of the limbic system.

  ‘When he turned it on, the patients experienced a euphoria so powerful that when he switched it off they begged him not to stop. The same region fires when you have an orgasm. And get this, Ailsa, because this could help you: animals learn more easily when their pleasure centres are activated.’

  ‘I’m not sure how I’m meant to apply that theory to my pupils,’ Ailsa giggled.

  When they met up the following week Harry asked Ailsa why she had gone to see Johnny Cash in concert instead of Jarvis Cocker.

  ‘I had a Johnny Cash childhood,’ Ailsa explained.

  ‘Did your fifteen-year-old brother die after his neck got stuck in a circular saw at the mill where he worked?’ Harry asked.

  ‘Not that part. Although my sister does have a bald patch in her eyebrow because when she was five she fell on a limpet bed on the marshes where we grew up. I put mud on it to stop it bleeding.’

  ‘You were alone?’

  ‘My mum was at home looking after my dad.’

  ‘What was wrong with your dad?’

  ‘He drank. Too much. This was the Johnny Cash bit. Mum used to try and calm him down by playing his music. He once put his fist through our piano during “Riders in the Sky”. He even accidentally set fire to
the rubbish bin during “Ring of Fire”.’

  Rachel used to accuse her of using humour to deflect from the seriousness of their father’s problem. Ailsa tried to explain that it was better to make people laugh than make them feel sorry for you. But she told Harry everything. He didn’t flinch from the details and nor did he patronize her with pity.

  Her father had defied the pathways in his brain by giving up alcohol. There was no judgement. Harry told Ailsa that Johnny Cash’s dogs were called Sin and Redemption. He wasn’t fazed by anything. And this was an important quality.

  ‘By the way. Did you know that limpets go back to the exact spot on the same rock for years?’ asked Ailsa. ‘That’s how I’ll be. I’ll always be trying to head home.’

  ‘Then I’ll follow you.’

  And he had.

  There was a long period after the affair when she couldn’t remember who Harry was or how their relationship used to be. Then gradually memories of the good times seeped back. She remembered going to stay with her parents after her last set of exams at the Institute of Education and opening the front door late one Saturday night to find Harry standing there, blown almost sideways by a vicious east wind.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ Ailsa shouted.

  ‘I was on my way to Russia,’ he had joked. Because she lived on the edge of the world. There was nowhere else to go once you reached Salthouse. Harry explained he couldn’t stand to be without her. He presented her with a book about the history of the marshes with pages of particular interest marked with Post-it notes. The next day she had told him that her old boyfriend swam in the sea all year round, and Harry valiantly stripped off and plunged beneath the slate-grey surface. His legs were blue when he came out, and when she told him she was joking about the ex-boyfriend, he lifted her across his shoulder and threw her into the sea fully clothed.

  She thought about all this on the way home on the train. It was almost midnight by the time she got back from the station. She parked the car outside the front gate so that she wouldn’t wake up Adam, who was sleeping in Ben’s room at the front of the house. Then she almost sabotaged her plan by slamming the passenger door. ‘Sorry, car,’ she whispered. When no bedroom light came on, Ailsa took a moment to stare up at the night sky. Unlike London, it was alive with stars. She searched for Polaris and found it straight away. Somehow, since Georgia’s death the North Star and her mother had become entwined. Most dependable guide, thought Ailsa.

  She looked up at the star and explained to her mother that she had thought she wanted to meet Harry’s student to tell her about the pain she had inflicted on all of them. She had imagined shouting at her about how Harry had had to leave his job and uproot his entire family to Norfolk. She reluctantly confessed that perhaps she wanted to frighten her a little. But as soon as she saw the girl with her boyfriend she realized that her new life was the one she wanted to be living and that the past no longer had a hold over her.

  She spotted twinkling Sirius and looked for lights moving across the sky because Ben had announced earlier that week that the International Space Station would pass over Norfolk this month. ‘How do you know this stuff?’ Harry had asked him. ‘Nasa website,’ he replied coolly. She would go up to Ben’s bedroom and plant a kiss on his hot little cheek. The idea filled her with joy. She had managed to keep her family together and it was beginning to feel like an achievement.

  Her neck ached. She rotated it a couple of times and breathed in deeply. She was pleased to be home. There was an unfamiliar smell in the air, not the sweet rot of damp leaves but something more medicinal. Ailsa sniffed the air like a dog, reminded of hunting games that she used to play with Rachel when they were children. She remembered an Indian headdress that Adam had found at an auction and how they used to fight over who was going to wear it. Rachel nearly always won. She was the free-spirited Indian; Ailsa was inevitably the law-enforcing cowboy. Rachel was wrong. Their childhood wasn’t all Heartbreak Hotel.

  She walked past the house, past the huge sitting-room window – inside, Lucifer was eating leftovers from plates that hadn’t made it to the dishwasher – and past the washing line. She glanced up at Romy’s bedroom and saw the curtains were open and the light was on.

  Ailsa continued deep into the back garden, ignoring the fact that water from the sodden lawn was soaking through her shoes. A trail of smoke led towards the wood at the end of the Fairports’ garden. Ailsa climbed through the hole in the fence and the smell finally came to her: it was eucalyptus. She followed the newly laid path into the wood from the garden until she reached the sweat lodge. Smoke billowed out of a chimney in the middle of the construction. The white plastic dome glowed orange like a spaceship. Although she didn’t want to admit it, the lodge looked quite inviting. There was music coming from inside. Nothing recognizable. Hippy shit, Harry would call it. Chanting rather than singing. Dolphins blowing pan pipes. She wished Harry were with her so that they could laugh together. That was something they used to be good at.

  She reached the outside of the sweat lodge, tentatively lifted the plastic flap and went inside. It was so warm that it hurt her lungs to breathe. Apart from candles placed in a semicircle on a ledge around the edge there was no light, and it took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The ceiling by the door was so low that she had to stoop to stop her head from rubbing against the plastic. Ailsa continued forward. Antlers and buffalo hides hung on the wall. At the centre was a brick-lined hearth dug into the ground where red-hot stones burned. Three figures lay on their backs on a wooden platform circling the stones. Their eyes were closed against the heat. They were all holding bottles of beer. One of them was Harry, wearing nothing more than boxer shorts. He lay next to Wolf and Loveday. The eucalyptus smell was now so strong that Ailsa’s eyes were watering. It was unbelievably hot.

  A platoon of empty bottles stood on a makeshift table behind them. They were in the midst of one of those aimless conversations fuelled by too much wine and too little sleep in which no one can remember what the last person said.

  ‘You can recover from the truth … Change is a great pain in the arse … If you don’t mind, it doesn’t matter … If we are our brains, where does that leave free will?’ It reminded Ailsa of the kind of stoned conversation that she used to have when she was a student.

  ‘Hi,’ she said, feeling like an intruder.

  The three of them lazily lifted their heads and squinted at Ailsa. Harry made no attempt to get up.

  ‘Hey,’ he said. Harry never said hey.

  ‘Hey,’ said Ailsa pointedly.

  ‘Hey, hey,’ said Harry. He giggled, which made Wolf and Loveday giggle. He was stoned, realized Ailsa. They all were. It was so unlikely that it almost made sense. As far as she knew Harry hadn’t even inhaled at university.

  ‘Weren’t you meant to stay with Rachel?’ Harry asked, which made it sound as though he had been caught out.

  ‘I decided to come home. I wanted to be here more than I wanted to be in London.’

  ‘Cool,’ said Loveday. ‘We’re christening the sweat lodge. So far so good. You might want to take off your jacket.’

  ‘I’m being healed and cleansed,’ said Harry, attempting to placate her with irony. ‘Can you tell?’

  ‘How was work?’ Ailsa asked him. It sounded more pointed than she intended. He sat up. Now she was closer, Ailsa could see his face was bright red. There was a small pool of sweat in the pouch beneath each eye and in the creases in his stomach. His body was so shiny it looked as though he had been wrapped in cling film. She touched her face. It was already coated in a fine film of sweat.

  ‘I’ve finished a draft on the chapter about how teenagers process reward stimuli differently,’ he explained.

  ‘You’re going to have to sex that up if you want the book to be a best-seller, Harry,’ said Loveday in a throaty whisper. She was wearing a bikini top and a pair of patched denim shorts. Wolf was stroking the inside of her arm. A rivulet of sweat snaked down between her breasts, highlighting pu
ckered skin that had been prematurely aged by years in the sun.

  ‘Adolescent brains have a more intense reaction to new experiences that makes them want more of the same thing,’ said Harry, speaking so slowly that Ailsa found herself mouthing the words.

  ‘Better,’ said Loveday. ‘But still not convincing. Come and sit down, Ailsa.’

  Wolf offered her a beer. Ailsa moved towards them and sat down, her back leaning uncomfortably against the table.

  ‘But what can you do about it, Harry? How can you stop teenagers fucking up?’ asked Loveday.

  What about adults? thought Ailsa. But she could no longer summon any anger. Something had shifted inside her. She felt a loosening of the constraints that had bound her over the past twelve months since Harry’s fall from grace, and a sense of tranquillity that no amount of yoga stretches, self-help books and the occasional diazepam had managed to induce. She tried to view the feeling with suspicion, in case it proved ephemeral. But somehow seeing the girl had made Ailsa realize that Harry’s infidelity had everything to do with him and very little to do with her, no matter how awful it had made her feel. She felt a sense of elation at her liberation.

  ‘I only pose questions; I don’t have answers,’ said Harry, bowing his head slightly as though he were some kind of guru. ‘It’s not a self-help book.’

  ‘We should get Harry to speak at one of our retreats,’ said Loveday, moving onto her side so her back was to Wolf. ‘What do you think, Harry?’

  ‘I’d like that,’ said Harry.

  No, you wouldn’t, thought Ailsa; it would drive you crazy. All those repetitive old dope smokers with their messed-up neurons backfiring.

  ‘What retreats?’ asked Ailsa.

  ‘We’re going to be running week-long intensive live-in programmes. Offer a wraparound service – yoga, meditation, couples therapy – all culminating in a four-hour session in the sweat lodge at the end.’

  ‘You have got to be kidding,’ said Ailsa.

  ‘It’s ambitious, I know,’ said Loveday. ‘But we have a lot of experience in this area.’