The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  ‘I wanted to. I really tried. I tried to get her to do exactly what turned me on, but all I could think about was how much easier it would be if I could see her in a good scene,’ he explained.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked.

  ‘I’d rather watch her on screen than be with her in real life. She just wasn’t like the girls online.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Went home. Watched porn. Had a bash.’

  ‘That’s sick,’ I said.

  ‘You know that sound a computer makes when you turn it on, Romy?’ I nodded. ‘As soon as I hear that sound I think about it.’

  ‘That’s dopamine kicking in,’ I said. ‘Anticipation of pleasure. You need to create some different reward systems.’

  ‘You’re the only person who can help me, Romy. Will you help me get out of this?’ he asked, blinking so fast that his fringe bounced up and down. Jay always did this when he was nervous.

  ‘I can try,’ I promised, trying not to show how elated I was that he had asked. ‘Have you told anyone else?’

  ‘I think Marley might realize. He looked at my Internet history once. My parents have no idea. They’d be horrified. They’re all about tantric sex and women having multiple orgasms. Just on those grounds they’d be appalled.’

  The anxiety in his face began to fade. We talked about what I had discovered about my dad. I told him that I had spent months feeling angry with the wrong parent. I said that I wanted to hate my dad, but every time I thought about what he had done to Mum it made me cry, which made me angry.

  ‘Don’t hate,’ said Jay. ‘It takes up too much energy.’

  I managed a weak smile. I tried to explain how I felt that if Mum and Dad had lied to us all about this they could lie about everything.

  ‘Parents lie for two reasons,’ he said wisely. ‘To protect their children or to protect themselves. There are good truths and bad truths and good lies and bad lies. Not telling you was a good lie in my opinion. Your mum was trying to protect you.’

  I started to feel guilty again so I asked him if his dad had ever cheated on his mum and he said he thought he hadn’t but only because it would be bad for business.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I asked, puzzled by this response.

  ‘They made a best-selling sexual healing DVD for couples,’ he said. ‘It wouldn’t look good.’

  His tone was deadpan. He could have been talking about Wolf and Loveday doing something completely mundane like discussing how many piri-piri chicken shops there were in Norwich.

  ‘Have you seen it?’ I asked.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ he laughed. ‘If you think watching porn has fucked me up then try watching your dad on screen giving your mother a vaginal massage. I’d need years of therapy.’

  ‘I guess it shows that you have some judgement,’ I said. I had a feeling that everything was in fast forward, as though I was on one of those really long escalators in Oxford Circus and someone had suddenly speeded it up. Everything was moving too fast for me to get a handle on it; everything was bigger than me and I understood nothing.

  I looked round Dad’s office. ‘Where’s your empirical evidence?’ I could hear his voice ringing in my ears as I tried to make sense of the books on the back wall. ‘Nothing can be proved or resolved unless you have evidence,’ he would tell us when we were doing homework. ‘Fantasy is for writers and English teachers. Facts are for scientists.’ And I was a scientist.

  I decided to start with a textbook. Less scientifically, I picked one out simply on the basis that it was the biggest. When I opened it up I realized it was a Neuroscience textbook for undergraduates doing the degree course that Dad used to run.

  I leafed through the first few chapters, looking at the pictures, stopping to admire the photographs of feathery-tailed nerve cells. I remembered how Dad had laughed the first time he showed me a photographic image of a neuron because I was convinced it was a fairy holding hands with another fairy.

  ‘They are magical in the way they’re always looking for connections, and they never rest,’ Dad had laughed. To me they were still mystical.

  Later he showed me images from the new scanner at work. The brain was like a futuristic super-highway where the traffic never stopped, Dad explained. It was built on a cognitive grid system of neurons. One of the great discoveries in his lifetime was the fact that these neurons didn’t stop firing until the day you died, he explained. Which meant there was always the possibility of change.

  This reminded me why I was supposed to be here. I flicked through to the chapter on brain disorders and tried not to be tempted to stop at schizophrenia. Manic depression, Huntingdon’s disease, multiple sclerosis and anorexia followed in quick succession. There was only one page on addiction. Dad is obsessive about people not touching his stuff so I was careful to put the book back exactly where it came from.

  I headed towards Dad’s desk and settled myself in the leather swivel chair that he had brought from his old office. On the wall in front of me, behind his computer, was a photo montage of all of us that Mum had put together when Ben was a toddler; in the middle was a photo of Ben’s name spelled out with the small wooden trains that he collected. He stood behind, grubby-faced and proud. There were Luke and me in our red and blue primary-school uniforms on my first day at school, a newspaper cutting of Luke after his football team had won a competition and another of him dressed up in a magician’s outfit. I had forgotten he was good at football and magic. Luke never did anything long enough for me to get a handle on it. In the bottom right-hand corner was a photo of Dad and me on the floor of our old sitting room in London, playing Operation. I was triumphantly holding a rib bone in the electric tweezers. Dad was beaming proudly at me. I noticed how our upper lips had the same slightly swollen quality and how our smile was identical.

  We played this game all the time for a couple of years. It was always Dad and me. Never Dad and Luke. Or Mum and me. I remembered Dad complimenting me on my steady hand, telling me that I could become a surgeon. My Christmas present that year had been a plastic replica of the human body that you could take apart. I remembered giving Mum the heart to show how much I loved her and Dad saying that we fell in love with our brain not our heart. Now I wondered how Dad felt working with the weight of family history upon him, and it occurred to me that Mum had probably hung this picture here for that very reason.

  Above his desk was a poster with a quote that Mum had found in The Winter’s Tale: ‘I wish there were no age between ten and three-and-twenty, or that youth would sleep out the rest; for there is nothing in the between but getting wenches with child, wronging the ancientry, stealing, fighting.’

  She was always providing him with titbits for his lectures. Poor Mum, I thought, feeling suddenly protective in a way I hadn’t felt before. Wary of these feelings I swung round on Dad’s chair using my legs and arms for momentum. Faster and faster I spun. I closed my eyes and felt the delirium of dizziness take over. I decided that I would focus my search on the place opposite where the chair stopped, which happened to be in front of his old leather briefcase. It was like playing Russian roulette.

  I gently pulled open the briefcase, wondering if Mum had ever done the same and knowing that because she was an ostrich she probably hadn’t. But at that moment I saw myself as an eagle. Loveday had urged me to find my animal spirit guide and I chose an eagle because, apart from the risk of being poisoned by human beings, it was never a victim. I wondered if Dad had some secret device so that he could tell if someone had been fiddling with his stuff in his briefcase. Like the alarm that went off if you went into Ben’s bedroom. Although of course if Dad didn’t want anyone to get into it he would have locked it.

  In the first compartment was a book, The Neuroscience of Risky Decision Making. Bit late for that, I thought. Beside it was a bunch of research papers. I caught sight of one: ‘DeltaFosB: a sustained molecular switch for addiction’. On top of it was a note in Dad’s handwriting underlined several times.
‘Nerve cells that fire together wire together,’ it read. It was the sort of line that he liked to use to start a lecture. For a scientist he really liked words. All very promising, I thought. Because in my head I was justifying my nosiness by searching for anything that might help Jay.

  At the bottom of the next compartment was a small wooden cigar box. As soon as I saw it I knew that this was what I had been looking for all along. Dad would blame my subconscious decision-making. And inside the box was a Nokia cardboard box and inside that was a cheap old-style mobile phone. It was like one of those Russian dolls. Some part of me was hoping that I wouldn’t know how to work the phone or that it wasn’t charged, but it flashed on instantly. There was no password. I held it in both hands for a moment, knowing this was the closest I would ever come to handling a hand grenade without a pin.

  I remembered how in Year 7 we had done a class on proverbs. Each table had been given a subject to research. Mine was curiosity. These all came back to me now. He who asks a question is a fool for a minute, he who does not remains a fool for ever. Better to ask a question than remain ignorant. A man should live if only to satisfy his own curiosity.

  Better to see if your dad is lying than never know, I thought to myself.

  I quickly pressed the keys until I reached sent messages. The same number appeared over and over again. This should have been evidence enough. But it seemed cowardly not to look now that I had come this far. Hypothesis, evidence, conclusion, I thought to myself. Mum would have stopped herself at this point, which meant that I had to make myself look. I decided to look at the last sent message. You make my cock so hard. I dropped the phone as though it had given me an electric shock. Then I picked it up to check the in-box. I closed my eyes as I opened the message and half opened one eye so that I could only read one word at a time. I luv luv luv it when you cum in my face. I should have checked the dates but I didn’t. By then I was in free fall.

  I put the phone back in its box in the briefcase. I took down the photo frame from the wall, removed the back and, using a pair of scissors from the top drawer of his desk, I cut Dad out of the photo and put me back alone. I moved a picture of Mum down so that it looked as though I was smiling at her. After that I chopped up the picture of Dad until it looked like the shavings in the hamster cage and put it inside the cardboard box with the phone. I removed the SIM card and cut it in half. Mum was right. There are some things you should never know.

  I started spinning on the chair again. Round and round, eyes closed, until the words in the text messages started to fade. This time I didn’t slow down when I began to feel sick. When my stomach heaved I forced the chair round even faster. I only stopped when I realized that Dad had come into the room.

  ‘Hello, Romy.’ His eyes darted to the briefcase. You are so obvious, I wanted to tell him. But fortunately he couldn’t see the anger in my eyes because I felt so sick. I bent over his bin and retched and retched until there were tears pouring down my cheeks and my throat burned with acid.

  ‘Are you all right, darling?’ Dad asked, coming over to put his arm around me. ‘What a silly thing to do. Even Ben wouldn’t spin himself until he puked.’ He laughed.

  ‘Sorry,’ I said, still crying. ‘I’m so sorry.’ I was. Not for looking and finding the phone but for what the discovery represented and the impact it would have on Mum. Because surely I would have to tell her about his communication with this woman? Secrets make you lonely. Thoughts, half formed, raced by before I could examine them. I stared down at the bin full of yellow bile.

  ‘Were you looking for something?’ he asked. I nodded.

  ‘For an A-level Biology project on teenagers and addiction,’ I said in a hoarse voice, appalled at my ability to think on my feet like Dad. He looked relieved but perhaps he was just pleased that I was interested in a subject so close to his heart. He went to the bookshelf and removed the same textbook that I had been looking at earlier.

  ‘The main problem for teenagers is that you have Ferrari engines and crap brakes,’ said Dad, smiling. I’d heard that one before. He stood beside me and began leafing through the book. ‘Luke is a classic example of someone who can’t control his impulses. There’s a big im-balance between his thrill-seeking side and his ability to rationalize and make the right decisions. That makes teenagers more vulnerable to addiction. You’re all about immediate gratification rather than long-term goals.’

  Where were your brakes? I wanted to ask him. He stopped on a page with a couple of photographs. One showed an MRI scan of a normal brain. Beside it was a scan of a cocaine addict. There was more yellow in the centre of the addict’s brain. Beneath there was an explanation about how drugs damaged the reward circuitry of the brain.

  ‘The evidence would suggest it’s the same for all addictions,’ Dad explained. I stared at the page so that I didn’t have to meet his gaze again until the photos started to go fuzzy.

  He told me about an experiment carried out at the California Institute of Technology in the 1950s in which a rat had an electrode implanted in its brain. Each time it went to a particular corner of its box the brain was stimulated until soon it was spending all its time there waiting for the stimulation. I noticed how he always described experiments in the present tense and wondered if this was a measure of his own excitement or a way of keeping students engaged.

  ‘Get this, Romy,’ he said excitedly. ‘This is the really interesting part. The researchers build a new box with a lever that the rat can control. Now it spends all its time pressing it over and over again. Won’t eat or drink and only stops when it collapses with exhaustion.’

  I tried to focus in case what he was saying could help Jay.

  ‘They discover that the rat is working to stimulate the release of dopamine in the brain. Dopamine is the neurotransmitter that drives most addictions. Its release in the brain reinforces the behaviour that causes it. That’s why it’s so difficult to overcome addiction.’

  I didn’t say anything but I let him continue because it meant he was less likely to look down at his half-open briefcase.

  ‘It stimulates feelings of pleasure and motivates behaviour. Addiction blunts the brain’s response to dopamine so that you need more and more of the same thing to feel the same high. Sometimes addicts want a drug that they don’t even like. Is this too complicated?’

  I shook my head. ‘I think I need to go and lie down for a while. I’m not feeling so good.’

  ‘I’ll pull out some research for you,’ said Dad.

  I got up and headed out of his office. I thought of the phone in the briefcase and wondered whether he would check to see if it had been disturbed. And what he might do. Just before I reached the door I stopped.

  ‘Do you think people can change their behaviour?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘If you get addicted to something is it possible to stop?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Dad. ‘The brain is plasticine, it’s not fixed. And if you stop doing something addictive the brain can recover. But once the pathways have formed it’s really difficult to get rid of them. They’re incredibly efficient. Even after an alcoholic has stopped drinking for years, a trigger can ignite the pathway all over again.’

  ‘Is it the same for all addictions?’ I asked.

  ‘It is,’ he said. ‘That’s why it’s more difficult for teenagers to stop. The pathways run deeper and the pre-frontal cortex, which controls judgement, isn’t fully formed. You ask good questions, Romy. You’d be a great researcher.’

  Much later professionals – head shrinkers, as Dad called them – read a lot into this moment. Their neurotransmitters went wild with the desire to make connections, to find reasons to blame my parents for what happened, especially Dad. Adults always want a single reason for why things happen, when the truth is things happen for many reasons. They talked around the subject, trying to lay traps for me to fall into, but they never caught me out. I guess my pre-frontal cortex was a match for theirs. And besides, my plan to save J
ay was already fully formed even before I found that phone. I knew exactly what I had to do.

  11

  Ailsa sat cross-legged in the sitting room of her parents’ home, in front of a chest of drawers that she was halfway through clearing out. She pulled out the bottom drawer, berated the irrationality of the contents and tried to ignore the billows of dust from the carpet every time the wind blew through the open window. On the other side of the pane the marsh marigolds were starting to push up through the bogs to create a brilliant yellow carpet over the marshland. Later in the year the carpet would turn deep purple as the sea lavender emerged from the same muddy depths. When Romy used to ask her grandmother whether she got bored living in Salthouse, Georgia would wordlessly point to the landscape outside this window.

  Ailsa returned to the drawer and pulled out a plastic bag stuffed with poker chips from at least ten different clubs, coins and notes from Europe before the euro and an envelope containing a one-line note from her mother to her father: ‘Your drinking saddens and frightens me.’ It was dated 28 June 1990. The month Ailsa sat her A levels. It was written in Georgia’s neat sloping script, six weeks before the whale carcass was washed up on the beach. There was so much desperation in this short sentence. Yet somehow her mother had managed to maintain the ebb and flow of daily life and protect her children from the ugly currents that threatened to pull her under. Only now did Ailsa appreciate the courage this must have taken. She stuffed the note in the back pocket of her jeans.

  Beneath the poker chips were bundles of catalogues from auctions that her father had attended forty years earlier. These she tossed straight into a black bin liner destined for the recycling centre before Adam came back into the room. Because although he had readily agreed to her suggestion to spend a day streamlining his belongings, now that he was back home he refused to throw anything away that reminded him of Georgia. He was filled with regret for the lost years, as he called the period when he was an alcoholic.