The Good Girl (5 page)

‘I remember Mum eating fish,’ said Rachel.
Let it go
, thought Ailsa.
Don’t pick a fight
.

‘She ate it all the time,’ Rachel continued.

‘She never ate trout again,’ said Adam.

‘You said it was a salmon,’ said Rachel.

‘What else do you learn in Biology Club?’ Ailsa asked.

‘We’re about to do a big project on blood groups as part of genetics. Mr Harvey is big into extension topics –’

‘Wolf is really good at making things. He did the tiling in the kitchen on his own. And he’s been building the oven at the end of the garden,’ interrupted Ben, sensing he was losing their attention. He unzipped his coat, pulled out a notebook from his inside pocket and switched on his torch.

‘The parents lock themselves in their bedroom the same time every weekend. At exactly two o’clock Wolf
comes to the window. He opens it, even if it’s snowing, and breathes in and out really fast for fifteen counts. Then he holds his breath for around five seconds and puts his hands in the air and chants.’

‘What does he say?’ asked Harry.

Ben had regained their attention.

‘I can’t hear. I can only lip-read. And I think he says, “Messi is a god.” ’

Everyone laughed. Ben snapped shut his notebook in irritation. No one ever took him seriously.

‘Messi?’ questioned Adam. ‘As in the Barcelona footballer?’

‘Yes, Grandpa.’

‘Why would he know about Messi? Isn’t he American?’ questioned Adam.

‘Messi is Argentinian,’ said Luke.

‘I mean the neighbour,’ said Adam. ‘Isn’t the neighbour American?’

‘I would say from somewhere in the south, like Texas,’ said Harry. ‘But I only met him for five minutes.’

‘He would say it because it’s true,’ said Ben, starting to get frustrated. ‘Messi is a god. He’s one of the greatest footballers ever to have lived.’ He paused for a moment for maximum impact to deliver his killer piece of information. ‘And when he says it, he’s completely naked. Out of respect. I think.’

‘Then what?’ questioned Romy.

‘He gets down on all fours and sometimes Loveday joins him.’

‘Oh
my God,’ said Ailsa.

‘What are they doing?’ persisted Luke.

‘I don’t know, I can’t see any more,’ said Ben.

‘They do downward dog,’ said Romy triumphantly. ‘He’s saying downward dog, not Messi is a god. They’re doing yoga together. Simples.’

‘Aren’t you going to get angry with him, Mum?’ asked Luke, who was the most disappointed by this explanation. ‘You’re always going on about how the Facebook generation doesn’t value privacy. Ben’s been spying on our new neighbours. That’s worse than anything Mark Zuckerberg has done.’

‘It’s harmless,’ said Ailsa. ‘He’s bored.’ She ruffled Ben’s hair and pulled him towards her even though his jacket was soaking wet. ‘It’s good to have someone watching over us, making sure that everyone is safe.’

‘Did you see Mark Zuckerberg has bought all the houses surrounding his own to prevent anyone from taking pictures of him?’ said Harry. ‘I sense a double standard when it comes to his own privacy.’

‘I’ve only been a couple of times,’ said Ben, realizing he was losing their attention again. Ailsa looked at the trail between the two gardens. Unlike the rest of the flower bed there were no weeds or plucky daffodil stems poking up through the snow. This was a well-trodden route.

‘Let’s go to the front of the house so we don’t need to tell them about the fence,’ suggested Ailsa. They walked in silence. Ben rang the bell.

‘The most interesting thing about Wolf is that he
wears his wedding ring on his penis,’ he said suddenly. ‘Why would he do that?’

‘Because it’s less likely to get stolen?’ suggested Ailsa just as Loveday opened the front door. Everyone giggled helplessly. And so Loveday’s first impression of the Fields was that they were the perfect nuclear family.

The house was the mirror image of their own.
The floor plan must be identical down to the last square foot
, thought Ailsa as she stared from the huge window of Wolf and Loveday’s sitting room into her own. She had left a light on in the kitchen and could see that Lucifer was taking advantage of their absence to finish off a mug of milk that Ben had left on the table. Beside the mug was her Christmas present from Harry, a new iPhone, still in its packaging.

Whereas Ailsa had embraced the simple lines and stark 1960s design because it was so different from the unruly chaos of their Victorian London terrace, the Fairports had softened the hard-edged modernism with throws in geometric prints, brightly painted wooden furniture and ethnic rugs.

It looked as though they’d lived there for several generations. It was a good quality, decided Ailsa as she turned her back on the window to scrutinize the rest of the room while Wolf went to fetch drinks and Loveday installed Adam in a wooden rocking chair with a cosy sheepskin cushion.

A wooden floor-to-ceiling shelving system now created a wall between the open-plan hallway and the sitting
room. Hundreds of books were organized according to the colour of their covers. One shelf contained dozens of tiny glass eggs that Wolf said were hand-painted in the Ukraine. There was a collection of what looked like carved wooden magic wands, apparently used by Latin American shamans during ayahuasca ceremonies. An entire shelf was devoted to semi-precious stones gathered during their travels. A few minutes were spent discussing this collection, and it soon became clear that there was hardly a country in the world that the Fairports hadn’t visited. Lapiz lazuli from Afghanistan. Amethyst from Brazil. Blue topaz from Mexico.

‘Topaz is the symbol of love and fidelity,’ said Wolf as he offered Ailsa a margarita from a tray that he was carrying around the room. ‘I gave it to Loveday on our tenth anniversary.’ Ailsa hated tequila. But it seemed rude to refuse and instead of grappling for an adequate response to his topaz comment, she took the glass and admired the way he had successfully encrusted salt around the rim.

It would take longer to empty this one room than to pack up the entire contents of next door. Ailsa thought about Harry’s basement office, still full of sealed boxes piled as high as the ceiling, containing their entire family history: photo albums, Luke’s football medals, envelopes with locks of hair from first haircuts, Romy’s collection of Roman mystery books, Luke’s first paintings. The further you got from the past, the more it was diluted. At least that was Rachel’s advice. The key was to keep
moving forward and not look backwards. Rachel was good at moving forward, although the fact that she always went out with inappropriate men would suggest she hadn’t entirely left her past behind.

‘What’s that smell?’ Adam interrupted her thoughts. He spoke a little too forcefully so that the skin under his chin wobbled like a turkey’s wattle.

‘Incense,’ whispered Ailsa. She paused for a moment. ‘Try and take it easy, Dad.’ Since Georgia had died, Adam had resumed drinking red wine for the first time in years. Adam understood and saluted. She was assuming the role of enforcer.

‘Don’t honour Mum’s memory by turning into her,’ Rachel whispered and left the room before Ailsa could explain that if her sister shared the burden a bit more she might not feel so responsible.

Ailsa left Adam in the chair, walked across a huge faded Moroccan kilim that covered the whole floor, and stood at the fireplace in between the wooden giraffes, who haughtily eyed the guests as though protecting ancient territory.

Harry was talking to Loveday. She was as tall as him and stood erect, like a dancer. She must be younger than her husband. She had a feline face with slightly slanting eyes and wore her breasts like a woman who had received a compliment about them many years earlier and had never forgotten. A display cabinet couldn’t have shown them off any better.
Well-engineered bra or cosmetic surgery?
wondered Ailsa as Loveday threw back her head and
laughed at something Harry had said, her breasts pointing straight in the air. Harry carefully maintained eye contact. She wasn’t his type. You knew that kind of thing straight away.

‘Communication in a relationship is everything,’ said Loveday.

‘Marriages wouldn’t last more than a week if you always said how you felt,’ countered Harry. Loveday laughed. It was a version of what Ailsa thought but it still rankled.

She took a deep breath and braced herself for the evening ahead, holding on to the mantelpiece for ballast. A tiny clay figure fell on its side. She picked it up and held it between her fingers. She looked at it more closely: it was a seal playing a bassoon, part of a miniature orchestra of animals, each holding a tiny instrument. Her mother would have loved it.

She closed her eyes and pressed the onyx stone of her engagement ring hard into her right knuckle to put off the tears pricking at her eyelids. Death threw you off course. Each day something happened that she wanted to share with her mother. And every time Ailsa remembered that she couldn’t, she tumbled back into the black hole of grief. At least now, almost six months on, the route out was familiar.

‘I hope you’re not worrying about the car,’ said a voice beside her, removing the bassoon-playing seal from between her fingers and putting it back on the mantelpiece. ‘It’s really not important.’ Wolf saw the red mark
on her knuckles but didn’t say anything. He urged Ailsa towards the sofa next to the fireplace. It was an L-shaped modular unit on which you could find yourself stranded in a corner with your knees touching the person cramped up on the short end. Ailsa opted for the middle of the long side of the sofa. Wolf sat down in the space next to her.

‘More haste, less speed. I spend my life trying to get my children to think of the repercussions of their actions and then I ignore my own advice,’ said Ailsa, putting the red-knuckled hand firmly in a pocket. He was being kind, and she should respond with something more than platitudes.

To her relief, Rachel came back into the sitting room. Ailsa smiled until she saw her sister was holding a large glass of whisky and water without ice for Adam.

‘Go and take a look at the kitchen,’ said Rachel enthusiastically. ‘It’s gorgeous. There’s an amazing old sink that they found in a skip and the tiles are from Mexico. It’s rare to meet a man these days who can grout, Wolf.’

‘How do you know I can grout?’ asked Wolf.

‘I know a grouter when I see one,’ said Rachel, realizing she had almost given Ben away.

Ailsa forced a half smile.
Please don’t flirt with him, Rach.
And yet she admired the way her sister could establish intimacy with men so quickly.

‘Did you always think about the repercussions of
your actions when you were younger?’ Wolf asked, turning back to Ailsa.

‘Sorry?’ said Ailsa.

‘You were talking about responsibility,’ Wolf reminded her.

‘Probably not,’ said Ailsa, trying to focus.

‘So what was the worst thing that you did and was it really so disastrous?’ he asked. He stared at her longer than was comfortable through his watery blue eyes, and she wondered what he would think if she really told him.

‘Ailsa didn’t do anything bad,’ interjected Rachel. ‘I was the one who caused all the trouble. Still do actually.’ She slumped down in the sofa and Wolf sat between them in the middle, closer to Rachel than was necessary. Ailsa was relieved to be the object of his attention no longer. He shifted position until he was sitting cross-legged, his knee touching Rachel’s thigh.

They were probably swingers. Ailsa looked around the room, searching for evidence, before concluding that swinging probably didn’t require accessories. Then she almost laughed out loud at her ridiculousness. She would tell Harry later. It would make him laugh. She used to be good at making him laugh.

She checked her watch. It was after six o’clock.

‘It’s safe …’ said Romy.

For a moment Ailsa worried that she had said something out loud.

‘To
drink,’ Romy said with a frown. ‘It’s after six.’ She was trying to make a joke, Ailsa realized too late. She had missed the beat. Another opportunity for closeness that she had failed to exploit. Perhaps if she hadn’t worked so hard through Romy’s childhood she would feel closer to her now. If she had taken her shopping more then she might have had more influence over what she wore. Even as the thought crossed her mind she smiled at its absurdity. Of course Luke was right. They all dressed the same way. If you couldn’t wear a skirt like that at her age when could you?

She watched Romy take her phone out of her pocket and scroll down through her messages. She had no idea whether she was on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram or some new service that Ailsa had never heard of. Teenagers were so digitally promiscuous, restlessly moving from one technology to another the moment their parents knew how to use it.

The Fairports’ younger son, Jay, who was the same age as Romy, came in the room, mumbled hello and then did the same thing with his phone. They stood beside each other, heads bowed, tapping keyboards, and then miraculously stopped at exactly the same time as though it were part of an elaborate introduction ritual dating back centuries.

Jay’s dark hair was so long and wild that you couldn’t see his eyes, and when he finally looked up to suggest they all go outside for a snowball fight, Ailsa had to stop herself from commenting on their blueness. It would
have betrayed the fact that even though Jay was a pupil at her school, she hadn’t addressed a word to him.

Ailsa resolved to tell his parents at an appropriate point in the evening how well he had settled. She had no evidence for this beyond the fact that none of his teachers had brought him to her attention. His older brother, Marley, was a different matter.

‘Let’s go,’ said Marley.

‘Sure.’ Luke shrugged. Romy followed them.

‘Did you know that the average teenager messages a hundred and fifty times a day?’ said Harry as they left the room. ‘It’s probably causing structural change to their brain.’

‘How so?’ asked Wolf.

‘The thumb area in their cerebral cortex gets bigger,’ he explained. ‘It’s like violinists. The part of the brain that directs the fingers of the left hand is five times bigger than in people who don’t play an instrument.’