The Good Girl

by Fiona Neill

  Harry said that people recovered from grief by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it and letting it go, so that new neural networks could be formed that allowed them to live without the one they loved. Going through her parents’ belongings would ultimately be therapeutic.

  Beside her, so close that Ailsa could reach out and touch her leg, sat Romy, listening to music and reading a research paper on teenagers and addiction for a Biology project. It struck Ailsa as slightly odd that Matt would have given such a big assignment the week before mock exams, but she knew better than to question Romy about schoolwork. Unlike Luke, she was entirely self-motivated.

  ‘Do you want this?’ Ailsa held out a large hexagonal paperweight with dead sea creatures inside that she had just found at the bottom of the drawer. There was a small starfish with arthritic-looking legs, a sea horse, a crab and a few decorative shells. Her parents had brought it home from a holiday in Mallorca in the 1960s. The holiday where Adam had fallen into a pool and broken his ribs.

  Romy didn’t respond. Ailsa looked across at her. Of course. She couldn’t hear. A few years ago when Romy was going through her kitsch phase she might have welcomed the hideous offering. Now she would hate it. Ailsa put the paperweight in the bin liner. Seconds later she took it out again. She couldn’t throw it away. Her mother had loved it. She would take it home and put it in Harry’s office.

  Romy was draped across the sofa where Adam and Georgia used to sit, one leg swinging gently across the arm. Her long blonde hair was in an elegant French plait and she was chewing a pink fluorescent pen. She had a new softer and more languid quality that Ailsa put down to the fact that she had finally grown into her awkward angles, although equally it could have something to do with the boy next door. It was difficult to tell. Romy was so difficult to read.

  She was born inscrutable. They hadn’t made her like this, Ailsa realized. Even when she had left her as an eight-month-old baby at the crèche at the school where Ailsa had just been promoted head of English, Romy had never showed any emotion, while Luke had clung to her so tightly that there were still little red imprints from his fingers on her hand when she got to the teachers’ common room.

  She opened another drawer, remembering Romy’s first summer and how she had sat Buddha-like on a rug in a shady part of the garden, happily staring at leaves fluttering in the breeze for hours at a time. By then the pigment in her eyes had darkened so much that they were like bottomless wells. Luke was terrified that if she stared at him too long he could die. Ailsa tried to convince him that it was simply that Romy’s pupils were indistinguishable from her irises, but Luke remained convinced of his sister’s secret powers for at least a couple more years. Around this time, in that way that parents assign roles to their children, Harry and Ailsa had decreed that Romy was their uncomplicated and meditative child. And Romy had spent most of her life proving them right. Even more so when Ben, the human curve ball, came along.

  Two vaguely unsettling thoughts occurred to Ailsa more or less simultaneously. The first was that they had defined Romy in relation to Luke and Ben rather than in relation to herself. And the second was that being uncomplicated and meditative was a euphemism for not knowing what was going on in someone’s head, which was where Ailsa now found herself with Romy.

  Feeling an overwhelming need for closeness with her daughter, she put out a hand and rested it on Romy’s knee, expecting her to pull away when she thought Ailsa wouldn’t find it hurtful. For years Ailsa had taken physical closeness with her children for granted. She had carried Ben around on her hip for so long that her shoulders were still uneven. Luke’s hand had practically been welded to her own for at least the first five years of his life. Now proximity was something that had to be achieved by stealth. To Ailsa’s surprise, Romy took the hand in her own. It was such a sweet, unexpected gesture that Ailsa didn’t trust herself to speak.

  ‘Are you all right, Mum?’

  Ailsa nodded.

  Romy didn’t let go. Her tenderness was almost unbearable.‘I was imagining if you died and I had to go through your things. It made me think how awful all this must be for you.’

  ‘Nothing is going to happen to me,’ said Ailsa. She used to say this to Luke all the time. He went through a phase when he was about to start primary school where he cried every time Ailsa left the house because he was so worried she might never come home. ‘Why doesn’t he worry about me dying?’ Harry used to wonder.

  ‘I’m not a child any more, Mum. You don’t have to protect me all the time. We can look after each other,’ said Romy. They hugged. Romy wouldn’t let go.

  At that moment there was a sense of possibility about their relationship and optimism about the future. Ailsa dared to allow herself to imagine Romy at medical school, meeting someone who wasn’t Jay Fairport, having a baby and a job that she loved. There was nothing original in the happy endings that parents wrote for their children.

  ‘You know if this relationship between you and Jay turns into something more serious and you decide in the passage of time that you want to have sex, we can talk about it,’ said Ailsa mid-hug. ‘Don’t feel any pressure to do anything you don’t want to do.’

  ‘I know that, Mum,’ said Romy gently. ‘Don’t worry about me. I’m good at looking after myself. Since when has anyone made me do something I don’t want to do?’

  She was making a joke against herself and Ailsa appreciated it.

  ‘Mum. Really. Don’t worry. All that’s a way off. We’re taking it very slowly.’

  She disentangled herself from Ailsa and picked up the headphones, but there was nothing pointed in the gesture.

  ‘You know you were born with your eyes wide open,’ Ailsa suddenly said. She didn’t want to lose her to her music quite yet.

  ‘What made you think of that?

  ‘I found a packet of photos that Granny took when you were a baby. It’s a house full of memories,’ said Ailsa, turning her attention back to the drawer. She pulled out a knife. It was the one her mother had used to scrape vomit off her father’s trousers the day after the night before when he had drunk too much. She saw Romy looking at it and put it quickly in the bin liner before she could ask any questions.

  ‘Aren’t all babies born with their eyes open?’ asked Romy.

  ‘Most open them shortly after birth. You came down the birth canal with both beams switched on. It was extraordinary. You were like a meerkat. Even the midwife commented on it. She held you up and it was as though you were checking us all out.’

  ‘You mean I actually saw your cervix? That’s pretty gross. But also amazing. They showed us one in Biology. It looks like a sea anemone without the spines.’

  ‘Dad was the first person who saw you after you were born. He confirmed it.’

  ‘I wouldn’t believe everything he says.’ Now there was an edge to her tone. This was what happened when a daughter transferred her allegiance from her father to her first boyfriend, thought Ailsa. Harry was going to find this new stage difficult. It was easy to deliver a lecture on how falling in lust triggered one of the biggest neuro reprogramming events in the brain but it wasn’t easy to apply the theory when it came to your own children. Ailsa searched for answers in Romy’s inky eyes but saw only her own reflected back.

  ‘I don’t understand why they call it the birth canal either. It makes it sound wider than it is, as if the passage through it is smooth and calm like a boat going through the Panama Canal. Do you think it’s part of a conspiracy to make women keep breeding? Childbirth looks pretty violent to me. They showed us a video in Year 10.’

  Ailsa laughed. She pulled out a leather pouch from the back of the drawer and dusted it down. It was Rachel’s old cowboy and Indian kit. Inside there was a water bottle, a blade that you could rub to spark a fire and a peace pipe. She would give these to Ben.

  Harry came into the sitting room to tell them that, despite the challenging conditions in the kitchen for a chef of his calibre, dinner was now ready. Ailsa laughed again
. He kneeled down and hugged her from behind. Romy flinched and looked away.

  ‘Remember, they’re allergic to public displays of affection,’ said Ailsa.

  ‘What’s this?’ Harry asked, picking up the paperweight.

  ‘I thought it might look good in your office,’ said Ailsa hopefully.

  ‘Whenever I look at the dead crab I will think of you,’ he said, clasping it to his chest. Still Romy didn’t smile.

  Later Ailsa went over that mealtime many times because it turned out to be their final family supper together before the scandal broke. It was strange to reflect on, but at the time it was steeped in poignancy because, apart from her father, everyone around the table understood that this was their last meal in this house.

  It was a low-key event. Adam expressed gratitude to them all for their help in preparing everything for his temporary stay at the sheltered accommodation Ailsa had found for him in Cromer, but even Ben understood the clear-out was a first step towards selling the house. Harry, sensitive to the emotion of this unspoken milestone, prepared Georgia’s garlic chicken recipe with dauphinois potatoes and peas. ‘If they were good enough for the Count of Clermont-Tonnerre, they’re good enough for us,’ he joked to Ben, who was still young enough to appreciate obscure historical facts.

  Everyone tried to be gentle with one another. Luke did a good version of a slouchy teenager but it required too much effort and his phone ran out of juice so instead he opted to entertain everyone with impersonations of various teachers at school. He did Mrs Arnold as Miley Cyrus in her ‘Wrecking Ball’ video with a panicked Matt Harvey trying to persuade her to put her clothes back on. Even her father laughed before retreating into nostalgia.

  ‘Ailsa, do you remember how you and Rachel would burn the backs of your legs in the summer because you spent so much time on your tummies gazing into the creeks, waiting to catch shrimps and crabs?’ he said, staring out of the kitchen window towards the sea as though he was actually watching them play.

  ‘We kept them in saltwater aquariums in the house, didn’t we, because we were worried the creeks would dry up,’ said Ailsa. ‘And we released them just before we went back to school.’

  ‘They kept dying but I replaced them so you wouldn’t get upset,’ said Adam.

  ‘Did you?’ asked Ailsa. ‘Even Rachel’s one-legged crab?’

  ‘It was your mother’s idea but I was responsible for its execution,’ explained Adam. ‘I needed to impress her again after the incident with the salmon in America. Have you ever heard that story?’

  ‘We have,’ Luke quickly intervened.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been better to tell Mum and Rachel the truth?’ asked Romy.

  ‘Why would we have wanted to upset them?’ asked Adam, puzzled by the question.

  ‘Wouldn’t it have been better for them to know so that they didn’t have illusions about how happy they deserved to be when they grew up? Wouldn’t that have been a better life lesson?’

  ‘The rest of life is a life lesson,’ muttered Adam. ‘God knows, I’ve had a few in my time.’

  ‘What did you feed them?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Garlic chicken,’ said Ailsa and Adam simultaneously. Everyone laughed.

  ‘Did you find my passport, Ailsa?’ Adam asked. ‘Because I’ll need it when I go on my trip.’

  ‘I’ve got it in here, Dad,’ said Ailsa, patting her handbag. When she got home the first thing she would do was hide the passport. She remembered the cowboys and Indians kit. ‘Here, I thought you might like this, Ben.’ He whooped with joy as he tipped it on the table. ‘Now I’m a true Lakota,’ he said.

  Some time over pudding, Romy pulled out a scrunched-up newspaper article from the back pocket of her jeans. She tried to smooth out the wrinkles and ended up smearing black ink on the back of her hand.

  ‘I found something in the paper today that might interest you, Dad,’ she said.

  ‘I thought you were meant to be helping Mum, not reading the paper,’ Harry teased Romy in a mock-recriminatory tone, because of course he was delighted that she showed an interest in the news and flattered that she had thought of him as she read it.

  ‘It’s a science story,’ said Romy.

  ‘Geek alert,’ teased Luke.

  ‘It’s about the discovery of a new part of the brain called the lateral frontal pole.’

  ‘I think I read something about that in Neuron,’ said Harry.

  ‘What’s Neuron?’ asked Adam, who had drifted back into the conversation.

  ‘It’s some dodgy magazine,’ said Luke. ‘Read by people with a nerve-cell fetish. Kinky stuff. For the truly obsessed.’

  ‘That’s me,’ admitted Harry.

  ‘What’s it about?’ asked Ailsa.

  ‘It’s about how scientists have found the human conscience,’ said Romy, looking straight at Harry. ‘They say it’s the size and consistency of a Brussel sprout.’ She put out her hand and gently pressed a point just above Harry’s left eyebrow. ‘There’s one here and one behind your eyebrow.’

  ‘There are big hopes that it will help us study psychiatric disease,’ said Harry, closing his eyes in contentment as Romy pressed the tip of her finger into the fleshy cleft above his eyebrow.

  ‘So what does it do?’ asked Luke.

  ‘It makes you wonder if you’ve done something wrong and what choices you might have taken,’ said Romy. ‘How good the choices are that we don’t take.’

  ‘God, you think way too deeply about this stuff,’ said Luke. ‘You show me up in a shit light, Romy. Can’t you go out and do something bad for a change?’

  ‘What’s conscience?’ replied Ben.

  ‘It’s when you get that uncomfortable feeling that you’ve done something wrong,’ said Ailsa. ‘Like when you took down the fence to get into the Fairports’ garden.’

  ‘That was a good thing to do,’ said Ben. ‘It helped us to get to know them better, and I can reach the sweat lodge faster.’

  ‘It’s about the brain’s connection to morality,’ explained Harry, warming to the theme.

  ‘Where does that leave religion?’ mused Ailsa.

  ‘Where does that leave Dad?’ asked Romy.

  ‘Is there something I’m missing here?’ asked Luke. He was the only one to notice the hint of menace in Romy’s tone.

  ‘Probably with another idea for a chapter for his book,’ said Ailsa.

  ‘As the great H. L. Mencken once said, conscience is the inner voice that warns us someone may be looking. There’s a good lesson for you all. Never do anything that you wouldn’t want someone else to see you doing,’ said Harry.

  ‘Anything?’ asked Luke, raising an eyebrow.

  ‘I suspect it’s not something that is well formed in the teenage brain,’ said Harry. ‘But who needs a lateral frontal pole when you’ve got Mum looking out for you?’ he added, putting his arm around Ailsa.

  ‘If Mum looks out for us, then who looks out for Mum?’ asked Ben.

  ‘Me,’ said Romy, putting her arm protectively over Ailsa’s other shoulder. ‘I’ll always take care of you, Mum.’

  ‘That’s such a lovely thing to say, Romy,’ said Ailsa. ‘Remember to save the newspaper piece. It might be a good one to bring up during interviews.’

  School started again the following day with its familiar tension between surprise and routine. A few days later, Ailsa delivered an assembly on the amount of money that had been diverted from the sports fund to replace vandalized equipment and paint over graffiti. She even managed to raise a smile with a joke about how Banksy was unlikely to feel threatened by its quality. When she got back to her office she planned two more assemblies. One on the importance of timekeeping and the other on pupil behaviour in corridors. Then she wrote to a local company asking them to sponsor the newly formed girls’ netball club and drafted a letter about a curriculum information evening for Year 11 parents.

  Rachel emailed to say that shooting was about to begin on her zombie film and that she might be out of c
irculation for a while. Were you ever really in circulation? Ailsa teased. After a moment’s thought she added a couple of kisses because she had given up on her sister weeks ago and it was easier to feel benevolent when you had zero expectations.

  You always handled Dad better than me, Rachel emailed back. She asked when their father was moving into the flat in Cromer and offered to come up to help move him. She followed that up with a question about how Harry’s book was going, which was Rachel’s way of apologizing for her outburst when she was staying. Ailsa wrote back and said she was missing her.

  During a prickly staff meeting after school Ailsa was informed that Stuart Tovey was responsible for the hijacked Facebook page. Matt Harvey explained exactly how he had done it, using lots of acronyms that Ailsa didn’t understand. Stuart’s technical expertise was terrifying. After much discussion with Mrs Arnold, it was decided he should be suspended from school for a week. Ailsa wanted to postpone the punishment until after exams were finished. Mrs Arnold wanted to implement it with immediate effect, which meant that Stuart would miss his mocks.

  The parents of the boy who had been bullied were emailing every day, said Mrs Arnold. The school needed to show that it had reacted quickly and decisively to send a message out to other students that there was zero tolerance of cyber-bullying. He should be suspended with immediate effect. Ailsa overruled her. The best thing that could happen to Stuart would be to get the grades he needed to study Biochemistry at university. She proposed a new ruling on mobile phone use at school. Anyone caught using a phone outside break times would have it confiscated for twenty-four hours. There was unanimous agreement.

  ‘That includes teachers,’ she joked. Matt’s phone rang and they all laughed, apart from Mrs Arnold.

  Ailsa switched to the next point on the agenda. Without mentioning any names she informed staff that seven teachers had taken over three weeks to mark homework and that this would no longer be tolerated. Then she swiftly turned to a date and venue for the staff party.