The Good Girl (25 page)

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 Jay was already fully formed even before I found that phone. I knew exactly what I had to do.

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.

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.