Free The Perfect Girl by Gilly Macmillan Page A

with your emotions and you’ll hear it a lot while you’re in the Unit, but you have to be very, very careful, Zoe, about how you use it when you’re back in the outside world.’
    Mum went white as a Mini Milk lollipop when Lucas said that, and even whiter when I laughed ultra loudly. At the time, Grace was so tiny that she just spent most of her time draped over Mum’s shoulder with slimy bubbles popping out of her mouth.
    Chris went ballistic, which isn’t really a good description of him being cross. When my dad used to go ballistic he would shout, and his hands would fly everywhere, and once he threw a baked potato on the floor and it exploded everywhere, and him and Mum and me killed ourselves laughing.
    Chris isn’t like that, he’s far too polite. His version of ballistic is that he just went a bit rigid and said to Lucas, ‘Could we have a little chat?’ and they left the room and I heard the sound of them talking on and on in Chris’s study down the hallway. In the kitchen my mum put on Radio 3 and said, ‘You didn’t need to laugh like that,’ and I felt ashamed. When Lucas and Chris came back in, Lucas said, ‘Sorry, Maria, what I said was inappropriate,’ and Mum said, ‘I understand it was only a joke, Lucas, but I appreciate the apology. It’s fine,’ and Chris pointed out that if he wasn’t mistaken that was Barenboim playing Beethoven on the radio so we all listened to that.
    Mum has pulled a packet of small, plump tomatoes out of the fridge. They’re the size of big marbles. ‘Please can we talk about Mr Barlow?’ I say to her. She begins unwrapping the packet and pulling out the tomatoes; they’re blooming with redness and still attached to their stalk.
    ‘Yes! OK, yes!’ she says, but then, ‘I think these are small and sweet enough that we won’t have to skin them. Pass me some garlic will you, please? We’re going to need, let’s see, probably two large cloves or three small ones.’
    In the pantry, I find the garlic, a chunky plait of fat papery bulbs, hanging from a shiny metal hook. It’s cooler than the kitchen in the pantry and I feel like staying there, resting my head on the marble surface where there’s a chocolate fudge cake in a tin. Quietly, I open the tin and stick my finger into the icing in the middle of the cake, where I won’t leave a trace. I scoop deeply and it’s productive. I suck the chocolate off my finger and then smooth the icing over so nobody will notice. Easy.
    I try to think of ways to talk to Mum about Amelia Barlow’s dad.
    When I come out of the larder I push the garlic cloves (two big ones) across the granite island towards her. It’s a large island, and the granite is a dense, polished black. Chris and Mum spent three weeks choosing it. Chris brought loads of samples home and he said it was her choice, but I know she would have preferred something lighter, like the one where the pattern looks like grains of sand, in beiges and whites, with just a sprinkle of black in there. She went for the ebony granite to please him, for sure, because they always try to outdo each other to see who can please the other one the most. Lucas says they’re probably eternally trapped in a cycle of mutual congratulation now, that they’ll be doing it until death does them part. He says it’s because they’re both afraid of being alone.
    When I went to Gull’s grave it was black granite too, but it had silver shreds speckling it. I think Gull would have liked that; she loved a bit of bling, and definitely not in an ironic way. The churchyard had a view of the sea. Gull’s grave was black sparkling granite against the so-green fields and the freezing grey ocean, which, on the afternoon we went to visit, was churning out huge, violent waves like a warning, and the wind was so strong we had to turn our backs to it.
    The headstone would have cost a fortune my mum said. More than Gull’s family had, because she was a scholarship girl at Hartwood House School